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Big businesses conduct deep research and analysis, forecasting sales and measuring results against projections. For a company to be successful, sales managers must perform without being pulled in too many different directions, or overwhelmed with too much customer data.

One of the first things to focus on is getting a better understanding of what’s not working. Donal Daly, CEO of The TAS Group, says these sales management problems are generally not the result of a deficit of data, but a deficit of insight. Even though 81 percent of companies have analytics projects as one of their top priorities, 55 percent of analytics projects do not get completed.

One of the most common reasons for failure is lack of business context. Algorithms by themselves can provide reports and charts, but unless the data is complemented by sales management expertise, they provide little accuracy. You can only get the right answer if you know the right question. Therefore, essential questions are asked to frame the problem.

In his experience, Daly says there are five key sales performance questions to consider, and discusses each in a new ebook, Winning Sales Performance Management.

1. What is the best cadence for managing my sales business?

One key observation of effective sales managers is that they can balance short-term, current revenue activities with future business pursuits. Good sales managers manage the opportunities, focusing where they can win and applying resources accordingly, while at the same time securing future business by working on the pipeline.

Weekly meetings should focus on issues arising from what is changing in your team’s Must Win deals, managing risk to short-term revenue, and seeing what has impacted your forecast. You need to know where your team stands, real time, or else seeing the way forward is nearly impossible.

2. How can I understand the sales performance KPIs in my business?

To improve the operations of the sales business, managers first need to understand the key performance indicators (KPIs) that matter. What drives new business? Most often it’s things like number of deals, average deal size, win rate and sales cycle. A sales manager needs real-time access to historical KPIs and an understanding of how these have evolved over time. Such stats might not be used every day, but it’s necessary have them as a reference point as a sales manager interacts with his or her team, coaching them to improve.

3. Can I avoid surprises to make my sales forecast?

Any business practice is most effective when it is consistent. People get into a rhythm, know what to expect and what they need to do for results. A sales manager’s meetings should focus on issues arising from what is changing in his or her “must win” deals as well as management of risk to short-term revenue. We all know that a forecast is a moving target. A manager needs to know where he or she stands, real time, or else seeing the way forward is nearly impossible.

4. Are there enough real deals in my pipeline?

Without a healthy pipeline, your business is in trouble. Pipeline management is too rarely treated as urgent, even though the strength of the funnel is one of the most critical indicators of future sales. Many teams do a regular monthly pipeline review to ensure the health of the business going forward.

For example, Ruslan Fazlyev, Founder and CEO of Ecwid, discovered real business risks in his funnel. Signals indicated his business might not be viable in the long term. This caused Fazlyev to change focus and look more closely at the needs of small business owners, who wanted more of a mobile solution. This led him to develop Ecwid mobile for Android tablets and phones. That platform resonated more with customers and is now delivering a healthy pipeline of real deals and potential ecommerce customers.

5. What happened to my forecast last quarter?

The value in regular quarterly business reports (QBRs) is the insight they give into past performance. They help drive change in process or behavior as well as improve next quarter’s performance. Unless the sales team has an effective rear-view mirror, it won’t have the insights to learn from past experiences. A forward-looking view may be hazy at best.

Instead of swimming against the tide, start collecting and analyzing data that tells you which opportunities are most likely to close, when and how. Work smarter, not harder. Use this information to hone in on the best opportunities, boosting your success rate and accuracy, and proving your prowess in the process.

Perhaps the best way tackle this is to find a top-notch technological solution that integrates with a CRM. Ideally it would track which deals are being closed, what’s projected in the short term, and what possibilities are hovering on the horizon. A system that helps you prioritize low-hanging fruit without losing sight of bigger, high-impact deals is essential.

Want to learn more about how your business can close more deals in 2016? Download the free Salesforce e-book.

No two relationships or contacts can be treated in the same way. Whether you’re a real estate agent, a lawyer, or a small business owner, you need to regularly reach out to your contacts for your business’ sake. Staying top-of-mind with your relationships is key in maintaining them and creating a strong network. And in order to stay top-of-mind with your contacts in the most effective way you need to create the right message to send to these groups.

That being said, you’ll need to break out those relationships into groups or segments in a way that can make your following-up process a bit more manageable and organized. How can you segment these contacts to communicate with them in the right way? Most importantly, how can you break these contacts out accordingly to build a solid network that drives more business and referrals? Got your contacts ready?

Start the segmenting…

Break it down now

This first graph defines our 4 key segments for your relationships, broken out by how much effort you need to put into each group of contacts. Confused? Don’t worry, we’ll explain further…

1. Your Players

These are going to be a large portion of your contact list, probably the segment with the most amount of people categorized within it. That doesn’t mean they are any less important than your other contacts, they’re just the largest group that may require less effort in keeping in touch with them. Think about this group as peripheral friends and past co-workers and clients that you want to maintain a relationship with because of their network and how they could potentially help you in the future.

2. The Stars

Next up, the stars in your life. This is a slightly smaller group of your network than the Players and can offer up a little bit more in the value that they can give to you and your business. If you’re looking at it from a sales cycle perspective, these are the relationships that could be new leads or contacts that may not be quite ready for a purchase but who you need to keep on your radar.

3. Champions

Not quite at the top, but still an important sphere of people in your network, your champions require some more time and effort than your Stars and Players. These are the relationships that you can turn to on a regular basis for referrals. These could also be hot leads ready to buy! These contacts need a little more attention from you, simply because they’re more valuable when it comes to what they’re worth to your business.

4. The Legends

Last but not least, your legends. These are your most valuable contacts and relationships. You should only have a few legends on your list simply because it would be impossible to put legendary effort into all of your relationships. These are the clients making a purchase right now or a major influencer in your network that consistently brings in the best leads and referrals. This group of contacts are the people you regularly keep in contact with because of how great an impact they have on you and your business.

Prioritize

The reason we break it down like this is pretty simple; it all comes down to Dunbar’s Number. The British anthropologist Robin Dunbar suggested that there’s a very specific number of people with whom we can actually maintain meaningful social relationships with. The number? 150. Now to some of you, that may sound like a lot of people. But to those folks with over a thousand people in their contact list, this may seem like far too few relationships to cut your list down to.

So, we return to our two basic protocols…will every one of those 1000 contacts bring you referrals or money for your business?

You can only realistically do so much with your time, effort, and attention span. Segmenting your 150 (or so) contacts into these groups is necessary for your own sanity, otherwise you start to spread yourself too thin and become far less effective in gaining those client referrals and leads. Once you segment, you know how to expend your effort and who exactly you should be spending the most (or least) effort on. Simply put, it’s a value to effort ratio. The more value each contact can give you, the more effort you should be putting into the relationship.

The great thing about this breakdown is that it’s not set in stone. These segments are meant to work within your sales or business cycle in a way that makes sense for you. The couple getting ready to put an offer on a house you’re selling? They fit right into the Legends segment because they need the most time and attention from you at the moment. Once the papers are signed and they’re all moved in, you may move them to Champions or Stars. Not because they’re any less important, but because they need a little less attention, yet could still be a great source for gaining new client referrals — all the more reason to stay in touch and keep top-of-mind with them.

You’ll find the value

If you have 10 minutes to reach out to some of the contacts in your list, how many can you effectively reach based on their value to you? For your Players, this could mean taking the 10 minutes to put together and send out a relevant email newsletter to 20-40 of your past clients that may want a quick update from you and your business. On the other hand, if you have 10 minutes to contact some of your Legends, you may want to put in some more effort, leaving you with only enough time to reach out to 2 contacts with a hand written note or a quick phone call to check in with each contact.

You’re forced to take a closer look at your sales cycle and how your clients move through it and more importantly, how you spend your time throughout the cycle as well. Do you need to call every single one of your contacts on a weekly basis? Probably not, but that may be more impactful for a hot lead Champion looking to make a big purchase. Your time and effort is valuable, assess where it counts the most and work through your sales cycle accordingly.

Go forth and segment

Create actionable ways to impact each of these segments that will foster your relationship for future referrals, or for moving them through the sales cycle. Whether you’re sending a relevant article to a few of your Champions or introducing two of your Legends to each other to make a meaningful connection, you can make an impact simply by portioning out your time based on the value to you. Going above and beyond for the key contacts in your network has proven time and time again to help when it comes to gaining more referrals and in the end, bringing in new business.

Evan Solomon joins Ottawa bureau chief John Geddes for their latest attempt at rapid-fire politics. This week, the duo tackled a busy governing agenda for a Liberal front bench that fended off the opposition in 2016’s first week back to Parliament. Here’s what went down:

1. Pipeline politics. A national divide over natural resources threatens to overtake Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s governing agenda, pitting east against west—and potentially becoming a litmus test for Trudeau’s economic leadership. What political challenges does the PM face as his government introduces new rules for proposed pipeline projects?

2. Truth and reconciliation. Trudeau’s visit to La Loche, Sask., raises questions about how he will fulfill his ambitious goal to change or heal the relationship with the Indigenous peoples of Canada. Are expectations too high?

3. Reengagement with Iran. As Canada re-engages with Iran, what does this new approach tell us about Liberal foreign policy? Evan Solomon and John Geddes do their version of “rapid fire politics,” which means sort of, kinda, quick-ish answers to the most pressing issues on Ottawa’s radar.

In this post we’ll show you the indicators and metrics to include in your marketing dashboard. We’ll give you a tour of our marketing dashboard and the kinds of a decisions we make based on our leading indicators.

We recently showcased several marketing reports our customers use to guide their marketing decisions. Our marketing dashboards are based on the same reporting data, but the data is visualized to provides answers at a quick glance.

On this tour of the marketing dashboard you’ll see how we organize information and draw conclusions. Both of which are important skills in today’s data driven marketing environments.

Whether you’re a marketing operations professional, director of marketing, or online marketing manager, you’ll find a clear approach to developing and maintaining an actionable dashboard.

The Invisible Set Of Instructions: Why Marketing Dashboards Are So Important

Marketing dashboards are core to developing good workflows.

A workflow is a set of processes needed to accomplish a goal, and the resources and people needed to accomplish it.

While similar organizations accomplish similar goals, how they accomplish them can look very different. As cliché as it sounds, great companies do execute better than their competitors. And this is due to good workflows.

Marketing operations’ development and maintenance of a marketing dashboard is essential to developing good workflows for the marketing team.

A good workflows are directly linked to success. This is illustrated in settings like hospitals where workflows ensure high quality patient care, even under difficult circumstances such as emergencies or being short staffed.

Marketing dashboards are an invisible set of instructions that ensure, no matter what, marketers can do their jobs well.

A good marketing dashboard is like an auto-pilot program that can also take off and land.

Organize Your Marketing Dashboard(s)

When companies hire marketing operations managers, they do so in order to hold marketing accountable to goals and targets. Different job roles are accountable for different metrics, so different job roles require their own dashboards.

At Bizible we organize dashboards based on job roles. And our customers do so as well.

If you’re a marketing operations manager creating a dashboard, consider starting at the director level. Create dashboards that can be used on a weekly basis for the purpose of helping their team stay on track to hit their targets.

Make sure you enable the director to create a dashboard for the CMO. Helping a marketing director deliver accurate and actionable information to the CMO is highly valuable.

The dashboards you create for your paid search and content marketing managers will likely be used the most. As such, it requires a different set of indicators. Take a more granular approach, such as reporting keyword level performance or landing page performance.

If you’re just starting out, always remember to organize by job role.

What To Include In The CMO Dashboard

There are a few requirements for hitting quarterly or annual targets. One of those requirements is the ability to adapt to problems. You don’t set a target for the end of the year and assume everything will fall into place. So you create a workflow that can detect problems and help you adapt to the unexpected. One of those tools for creating a good workflow is a dashboard for the CMO.

High level reports like the Open Opportunity Pipeline By Channel Report can detect problem areas that stop you from hitting your goals.

The Open Opportunity Pipeline By Channel report tells you whether you need to generate new pipeline or assist sales in improving bottom-of-funnel (BOFU) conversion rates.

This chart helps CMOs detect problems in the pipeline and provides the ability to respond.

Here’s an example of ours below, you can click the image to enlarge.

For example, a high volume of leads from social are getting stuck at a TOFU stage shows either bad quality leads or a bad nurturing process in place for leads from social. If this is an internal process that needs to be improved, and not a case of low-quality leads, CMOs are letting these leads go to the competition if problems in the pipeline are not detected.

While there are factors at play such as sales cycles and product development that impact the “shape” of the pipeline, this report is an essential part of the CMO dashboard.

W-Shaped Current Quarter Revenue By Channel

Marketing leaders are skeptical when it comes to the accuracy of attribution models. Short of getting inside each of their customer’s minds and understanding the triggers that lead to action, marketers have to rely on building great reports to understand their target audience.

W-shaped attribution reporting should be included in your marketing dashboard because it’s one step closer to understanding your audience.

The Current Quarter Revenue By Channel W-Shaped Report shows your CMO how much the most important marketing touchpoints influenced your prospects’ decisions to click, convert and engage with sales.

This type of information influences budget and spending. So it should be as accurate as possible, avoiding biasing TOFU or BOFU touchpoints.

What To Include In the Paid Search and Content Marketing Dashboard.

Marketing dashboards should be 10X more logical and intuitive than Ikea furniture instructions.

Good dashboards stand on their own. When setting up a dashboard for paid search and content marketing teams the dashboard should be instructions that tell your team:

• The keywords, blog posts, and campaigns that generated revenue and they should continue focusing on
• The areas that are underperforming and worth investigating
• The channels you should focus on to generate high-quality leads
• How much they need to spend in order to hit their target numbers

Choosing the right indicators and metrics is essential to delivering these instructions in a way that requires little effort from your marketing team. This is the beauty of the a good marketing dashboard, it provides instructions on what to do in a variety of situations.

A bad workflow work, but only in limited situations. Imagine your paid search manager or content marketer starts off the week with a review of last week’s performance. They see data missing or they know data is inaccurate, skewed or miscounted. They have no problem investigating low performing campaigns and fixing inaccurate lead and opportunity data. They have no problem conducting an analysis to identify the keywords, segmentations, and blog posts that lead to sales qualified opportunities.

This organic workflow. Marketers can take the time to find optimizations and identify what’s working. But what happens when they don’t have time? When targets become tougher to reach? When you’re trying to grow quickly? When sales needs support?

When pressure mounts, bad workflows make themselves felt. When targets become tougher to meet, marketers no longer have the luxury of time to continue performing at a high level. They need actionable information quickly — they need a great dashboard.

To set up your team for success, the reports to include in the content marketer’s or media manager’s dashboard include the following:

• First-touch (FT) leads by social platform
• Last-click (lead conversion) click by social platform
• First-touch lead conversion rate by social platform
• Last-click (lead conversion) conversion rate by social platform
• FT and LC leads by channel
• W-Shaped Revenue By Channel, Top 10 Campaigns, and Top 10 Keywords

These reports serve as the “need-to-know” information for marketing managers at the beginning of the week. They help marketers detecting problems quickly and how well they are tracking towards their goals.

Single and multi-touch attribution are the backbone of these reports and help teams formulate a workflow based on accurate, on-demand information.

Conclusion

It’s the vector that connects two points. It’s the direct line-of-sight between marketing activities and business value. Without direct line of sight to business value, marketers can’t be held accountable to targets and goals, let alone enable learning and refinements for future performance.

Marketing dashboards are for organizations who believe marketing’s role is to generate value such as revenue, generate new customers and support the sale teams. To play this role well requires functional and well-designed tools for supporting the best workflow within marketing organizations.

Where would we be without our customers? Well, the obvious answer is: out of business. Why is it then that so many businesses take their customers for granted? Is it that their product or service is just so great that their customers can’t live without it? Is it a lack of other options?

Not likely. Today more than ever, customers have choices. A lot of them. Many of which are as good or even better than what you have to offer. So, how do we ensure we are not only maintaining, but growing our customer base of not only happy, but loyal customers?

In a perfect world, we would not lose a single customer. For many reasons this is far from realistic. Even the best companies see churn in an “acceptable” range of 5-10%. Given the high price of customer acquisition, it pays big time to focus on keeping the customers you have while you reach out to the marketplace to find new customers. I am a big believer that you can never sell your way past a churn problem. It’s best to do absolutely everything you can to ensure each and every customer becomes a raving fan and stays that way.

Some key principles that have helped us over the years are the following:

Focus on the overall customer experience.

Whether you are selling a product or a service or both, you have to make sure the customer receives value during each and every interaction. Don’t expect your solution to do it all for you. Provide the support and/or technology necessary to ensure your customer has a seamless experience as they utilize your offering to help them to achieve their business goals.

Enhance communication.

Listen, listen, and listen some more. Provide honest feedback and detailed next steps. You might be working to solve a problem or striving to improve an already solid working relationship. Either way, more open, honest communication with the goal of adding value never fails to impress.

Set proper expectations.

Nothing can send a relationship off track faster than misaligned expectations. With each and every interaction, be sure to set realistic and appropriate expectations with your customer. Revisit and confirm expectations regularly while also having a written procedure that ensures all parties on both sides are on the same page.

Measure the success of your interactions.

Use surveys, Net Promoter Score, and Zendesk – as well as direct conversation – to track adoption and continued usage of your offering with an ultimate goal of driving tremendous value.

Finally, remember the customer is actually always right. Bill Gates once said, “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”

How do you retain your existing customers and build lasting relationships?

To tackle the plethora of challenges in today’s business environment, organizations are constantly seeking new ways to gain a competitive edge — and most see innovation as essential for doing it. Dr. Arvind Malhotra, the lead professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at MBA@UNC, UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School’s online MBA program, says a focus on innovation is key: “Innovation … enables a company to gain a significant competitive advantage — thereby generating abnormal profits and stakeholder value over the long run.”

Putting innovation to work takes a focused approach — and here are six strategies that top leaders use to do it:

• Nurture collaboration. When nurtured toward its full potential, collaboration boosts effectiveness — which is essential for creating innovation that can have an impact. Build a mindset in your organization in which teamwork is not only supported, but also expected. In addition, it’s important to understand what individual needs team members have and provide the resources to help them work together.

• Question and discard as needed. Questioning everything sets a tone that will help others do the same. It’s only with ongoing evaluation that you’ll be able to identify the broken processes that need an overhaul — especially if the cultural norms in your organization hinder your ability to push for better results.

• Embrace what-if. Give your team the freedom to flex their creative muscles and step outside the box as needed. Surprise them with your willingness to explore untested possibilities with a mindset that’s open to new ideas. Taking such an approach will help you access the wide array of skills and expertise that team members bring to the table — typically across multiple generations.

• Encourage disruption. Doing the same-old-tired-thing will lead to the same-old-tired-results. Shake things up a bit by deviating from the status quo and encouraging your team to embrace a level of disruption that will lead to effective change. If everyone isn’t a little nervous about their efforts, they’re probably not pushing themselves — or you — enough to really tap into innovation at its best.

• Be steadfast with skeptics. These are typically the individuals who prefer to have their feet on solid ground and find great comfort in the status quo. Maintain a respectful but firm stance that’s grounded in the facts as you stick to the ideals that motivate you — and help your team to do the same.

• Make it meaningful. Too many are lured by the bright and shiny when it comes to innovation — but what really counts is the ability to create change that’s actually meaningful and creates value for customers. Make meaningful change the “why” that drives both you and your team — and help others in your organization see what real innovation should be about.

To help your organization gain a competitive edge, you’ll need to put innovation to work. By focusing on these six strategies that top leaders use, you’ll better support an innovative mindset within your organization that leads to success.

Business presentations always have some monetary value tied to them. Be it a presentation for your boss where you might require explaining about the progress of an ongoing project or a pitch deck designed to attract angel investors; your slides are likely to be tied to a monetary value. However, making effective presentations isn’t all that easy.

To help you get a head start in making a killer business deck, we have compiled a list of 6 Awesome Resources For Making Outstanding Business Presentations.

Office Sway

The latest member of the Microsoft Office family doesn’t require users to buy an expensive Office suite. You don’t even need an Office 365 subscription. Office Sway is a free presentation tool by Microsoft which can be accessed by simply logging in with a Microsoft account. What makes Sway a killer business presentation tool is the availability of rich features that ‘arguably’ make Sway more powerful than PowerPoint.

You can get started by creating a ‘Sway’ from scratch or import a Microsoft Word, PowerPoint or PDF file to create your presentation. That’s not all! You can even import content from OneDrive, OneNote, Facebook, YouTube, Bing, Twitter, Flickr, PicHit and via numerous other websites using embed code. You can also upload your own files, customize your slides using various handy design features and present your slides right from the cloud.

To Share a Sway, you can use social services, direct link, embed code or post it to Microsoft’s Docs.com service.

So, if you are looking to make an impact with your business presentation, Sway is a great option to Sway your audience.

Office Mix

Office Mix is another fine addition to the Microsoft Office family. This free PowerPoint add-in serves as an amazing plugin for making video tutorials and interactive presentations. Moreover, it serves as a free alternative to expensive tools like Camtasia Studio and Lectora.

Office Mix provides options for creating screencasts with a voice over and cam input. This means that you can create professional looking video presentations and tutorials by supercharging PowerPoint. Furthermore, you can also annotate your slides during live presentations using the Pen tools, as well as edit your recorded content, upload to the Office Mix website. Your ‘Mixes’ can also be saved as an MP4 video in HD format or exported to SCORM and published via Office 365.

With extensive video capture, editing and sharing features that can convert ordinary PowerPoint slides to interactive presentations and video tutorials, Office Mix can be rated as one of the most outstanding free business presentation tools.

Adobe Captivate

Among all the resources in this list, Adobe Captivate is probably the most expensive. While it has a hefty price tag of around $30 a month to a full license of over $1000, Adobe Captivate is only worth your money if you can use it effectively to captivate your audience! While it is primarily marketed as an e-learning tool which can be used for creating storyboards and responsive e-learning courses, there is no reason why you can’t use it for making business presentations.
The storyboarding features of Adobe Captivate make it ideal for making marketing demos, sales pitches and video presentations for your potential investors. Like most Adobe suits, Captivate has no shortage of elaborate features.

Once you launch Captivate it gives options for making a Responsive Project, Software Simulation, Video Demo, Adobe Captivate Draft, Blank Project or a project from a PowerPoint. You can pick and choose themes to get a head start with your design tasks, record voice over, create screencasts and generate audio from text using the automatic voice over functionality.

You can begin by making simple slides, just like you would in PowerPoint. Needless to say, you can insert all kinds of content like images, videos and text, moreover, you can even insert a quiz and email your content for review to your colleagues for collaboration. Other amazing features include; moth paths, support for making drafts using an iOS device, elearning templates and the option to publish content to Captivate Prime, which is basically the Adobe LMS.

Adobe Captivate supports many common file types like PPTX, PDF and Docx, as well as packages from SCORM and AICC. Furthermore, you can enhance productivity using gesture control. For instance, you can use a simple gesture (e.g. X) to images files from, say an iPad device.

While Adobe Captivate is a paid app, you can use it on a 30-day trial basis to see if it’s good enough to enable you to captivate your audience.

SlideModel

I once thought about making a presentation with a demand and supply diagram using a PowerPoint template that can help me edit readymade diagrams. The only problem was, I couldn’t find any! The problem with most PowerPoint templates is that they are too rigid to edit. Even if you find a template with a business diagram, it’s hard to customize it because each slide object isn’t usually editable.

I was pleasantly surprised with the editability of PowerPoint templates at SlideModel which are not only especially designed for business purposes but also enable editing slide elements down to the smallest objects. For example, say you want to edit the map of UK and wish to single out Northern Ireland or Wales. In a normal map template that would be hardly possible. However, the map templates at SlideModel enable dragging out small sub-maps from the main map slide. That’s not all, you can make use of highly editable business diagrams.

Just in case you are curious, there are also demand and supply diagrams to reveal your own custom trends. Moreover, there are business diagram templates for virtually any business concept that comes to mind, ranging from SWOT, Boston Matrix slides to flowchart, process, segmented, stacked and funnel diagram templates (among many more).

SlideModel offers a combination of both paid and free templates. But like all good things in life, the really good stuff requires a paid subscription.

SlideModel is just an example of the kind of PowerPoint templates that can help make killer business presentations. It is likely that there might be other template developer’s offering something similar which you can use. Having editable diagrams and high-quality backgrounds can enable making eye-catching content which is easier to follow and heavily customized for the audience, as this can help make all the difference when you are pitching your ideas.

Google Slides

Not too long ago, I would have never thought about presenting my presentation using Google Drive. PowerPoint files uploaded to Google Drive always ended up looking messy and out of place. All that changed once Google brought their new and improved Google Slides. Accessible via web, Android and iOS, Google Slides serves as a good PowerPoint and Keynote alternative to help end users create outstanding presentations.

Google Slides is not just your average presentation web app. Most users probably don’t even realize that you can even use Google Slides for creating photo albums, portfolios, academic projects, lesson plans, menus, printable certificates and a range of other types of decks. There are even basic templates for all of the aforementioned categories.

So why should you use Google Slides for your business presentation? The answer is simple. You can not only convert your offline PowerPoint files to powerful online presentations but also add content from across the web, collaborate real-time on your slides, share them using anything from direct link, social accounts, to embed code or email, as well as present your slides from all kinds of digital devices using the Internet. Of course, you can also save your presentations offline as a PowerPoint or PDF file or an image.

If the aforementioned is not enough reason for you to use Google Slides and you think the PowerPoint Online web app is a better option, think again! This is because unlike alternative web apps, Google Slides can also be used to convert your files to a plethora of formats on the fly. You can do this by using suggested conversion services via Google Drive such as CloudConvert. To convert your files, simply right-click a file via Google Drive and pick a conversion service. This also means that there are a plethora of third-party apps that you can connect to your Google Drive account to supercharge Google Slides.

Among all the well-known presentation platforms, Google Slides is probably one of the most underrated. One reason is probably because it can be a bit overwhelming to use, which probably deprives many uses from the true knowledge of most of its stellar features. By the way, did you know you can digitally sign documents using Google Slides? Probably not!

Prezi

If you don’t know how to keep your audience awake during a presentation, try a zooming UI! Prezi is so underutilized as a business presentation app that it’s heartbreaking. With a beautiful zooming UI, readymade templates, the option to import PowerPoint presentations and all kinds of awesome features like infinite canvas, image editing and privacy control, it’s hard to think why Prezi has been ignored by so many users. One explanation seems to be the associated price tag for acquiring options like privacy control and universal device access. The other reason can be elaborate interface options which many users might find intimidating.

You can also save and present your Prezis offline, as well as present them online, embed them to a website and even engage your audience to follow your slides via direct link, as you present remotely. If you don’t know much about Prezi, suffice to say it has most of the basic features you would expect in a feature rich presentation app, including the option to add online videos, online collaboration, as well as the utility to add a background score and voice over to your slides.

Prezi has some amazing features and a spectacular zooming UI which can make your slides more attractive and help you keep your audience awake as you zoom in to your ideas.

Did you find our suggested resources useful? Do you know of a tool, app or service that should be in this list? Join the discussion about useful business presentation tools by leaving your comment below.

There are thousands of posts, hundreds of books that examine every nuance of sales enablement and performance management. Billions are spent in advanced or specialized sales training programs or sales enablement tools.

Somehow, it’s not popular or fashionable to focus on the basics. There’s nothing sexy or exciting about them. Writing about the basics won’t sell books.

Sometimes we assume everyone is executing the basics, until we start examining what people are doing.

1. Are they prospecting the right opportunities, those in our sweet spot? Do they understand the problem/opportunity the customer wants to solve? Is it a problem/opportunity that we are the best in the world at solving?
2. Are they making sure the customer has a sense of urgency or commitment to change before qualifying an opportunity and investing time in working with the customer to solve the problem?
3. Are they using the sales process (Has management developed a sales process that enables sales people to align with the customer buying process?)?
4. Are they prepared for each meeting, having an agenda pre arranged with the customer? Are they making sure the customer is equally prepared?
5. Are they focused on helping the customer solve their problem rather than focusing on solving their (sales person) problem?
6. Do they understand what the customer value and are they creating value for the customer? Are they creating value in every engagement?
7. Do they own the responsibility of maintaining a healthy pipeline, not being dependent on marketing or another source to get them leads? This means they own the responsibility to prospect to keep their pipelines full?
8. Do they meet their commitments–to their customers, their peers, management, and to themselves? This means showing up to every meeting on time, prepared. This means fulfilling promises when committed or not making the promises if they can’t fulfill them. This means finding every excuse unacceptable.
9. Are they committed to constant learning and improvement, knowing if they don’t, they will be left behind?
10. Do they know they are accountable for everything that happens in their territory and for achieving the goals they accepted upon taking the job (and updated annually)?
11. Are they committed to doing the work?
12. Are they present and engaged in everything they are doing? This means eliminating distractions whether multitasking, social media, other distractions.

Likewise, there are a few basics with sales management, constantly and consistently executed create results.

1. Do managers know the only way to achieve their goals is through their people? As a result, do they know their job is to maximize the performance of each of their people?
2. Do they focus on building the capabilities and capacity of their teams? This means recruiting the right people, onboarding, and continually developing them?
3. Do they make sure each person understands their role and performance expectations? Do they make sure people own those expectations? Do they have clear metrics in place and do they and their people own their goals? Do they understand they are responsible for addressing every performance problem?
4. Do they make sure a sales process aligned with customers’ buying processes is in place, that people understand it and are using it in every deal?
5. Do they understand and remove barriers that impact their people’s ability to do the job? This includes fighting for and providing the processes, systems, tools and training needed to maximize performance? Are they doing everything possible to get their people the resources they need to do their jobs?
6. Do they understand the highest leverage in their time is to coach and develop their people? Are they investing in doing this with each person on their team?
7. Do they know the importance of the personal example they set and are they setting the right example, every day?
8. Are they present and engaged? This means not emailing/texting/distracted in meetings with their people. This means being “in the field” with their people. This means understanding the “realities” of being a sales person, empathizing, and supporting them.
9. Do they fight for their people and protect them and their time?
10. Do they know they are accountable for the performance of their people? If their people are failing, it means the manager has failed.
11. Do they meet their commitments–to their people, their peers, management, customer, and themselves. This means showing up to every meeting on time, prepared. This means fulfilling promises when committed or not making the promises if they can’t fulfill them. This makes finding every excuse unacceptable.
12. Are they committed to constant learning and improvement, knowing if they don’t, they will be left behind?
13. Are they committed to doing the work?

The basics are—–well basic. They are the foundations for driving consistent performance every day. Without these, all the fancy stuff we layer on top is not likely to produce the results they should be producing.

Have you mastered the basics? Do you focus on executing them every day?

To successfully do a demo, you need more than a great sales presentation.

Today’s savvy buyers have got tons of information at their fingertips. As a result, they’re usually more than half-way through the buying process before they’re ready to engage with a sales rep.

Problem is, by that time, it may be too late to help. Customer consensus has dissolved. They’ve made (often erroneous) decisions about what will or won’t work. In short, they’ve taken control of the sales process and aren’t open to your solution or your product.

In this post, we answer two important questions.

First, how do you control a sales cycle and your message when buyers have so much control and access to information?

Second, what is the ideal sales presentation strategy to tell the right story when considering the above-mentioned challenges?

Who’s Controlling the Sales Cycle?

“Emotional impact is about making absolutely sure that the customer sees themselves in the story you’re telling.” –The Challenger Sale 

Data from HBR shows that customers are, on average, 37% of the way through a purchase process by the time they reach the solution-definition stage, and 57% of the way through the process before they engage with supplier sales reps. 

To win the deal, you need to support the prospect both before and after that first touch. 

Before they reach out, your message must be available and complete, so the prospect can find the answers they need. But it should also encourage a buyer to seek more information — by scheduling an in-person meeting.

After contact has been initiated, there are 4 main stages you need to be aware of.

Initiate → Discovery → Educate → Validate → Decide

Now, here’s where the rubber meets the road.

To control the sales cycle and have an effective sales presentation, you must tailor your message to your customer AND to a specific stage in your evaluation process.

1. Self-Service Resources (Discovery)
2. Live Education (Educate)
3. The Custom Demo (Validate)
4. Leave Behinds (Decide)

Let’s break these down, from start to finish.

1. Self-Service

This is the stage where the buyer is doing research on you. They’re looking at your website, social media, reviews, etc., trying to determine if you’re someone they want to do business with.

This is the most challenging stage, because you don’t really have much control — but as mentioned above, this represents 50+% of the sales cycle. Depending on the product or service you’re selling, it could represent even more. 

Most companies think they can avoid misinformation by withholding information as much as possible.They prevent self-discovery with a “call for demo” button. This just frustrates your buyer, who will instead seek information off your website, or worse, from a competitor who is more upfront with their information.

However, simply dumping a lot of free information into the company website and forcing your customer to wade through it isn’t an effective strategy either.

“Research in psychology, decision theory, and most recently economics, has identified a number of other motives underlying the demand for information… the powerful force of curiosity.” (Loewenstein, 1994)

Loewenstein’s theory is essential to developing your self-service strategy. It suggests that bits of knowledge can pique curiosity and prime hunger for deeper understanding. 

The information on your site needs to be the perfect balance of quantity and quality to encourage further inquiry and quench the thirst for understanding. Provide a high-level value proposition — the top 3 or 4 problems you solve for your target buyer(s). 

You can drive engagement with:

• How-to articles
• Blog series that deconstruct tactics 
• Slide decks reviewing key points
• Graphics or visual aids
• Templates
• Trends
• Success stories

Tie relevant customer stories into each vertical, customers who have solved specific problems with your product and whose stories will resonate with future customers.

2. Education:  ‘We Don’t Know What We Don’t Know’ or ‘Discovery’

In this stage, you take the buyer’s education into your own hands. This is your discovery meeting where you learn about their individual and organizational objectives, so you can set up a custom demo. This is also where you show the buyer the gaps in their knowledge. 

Your ultimate goal here is to entice them to a custom sales presentation.

You do that by showing the buyer what they didn’t know that they didn’t know. 

You will be tempted to pack everything (including a full demo) into this meeting! Resist the temptation! This isn’t the place to actually fill in all the gaps in their knowledge. It’s to identify the gaps and establish the need for a demo.

This conversation should include heavy use of customer stories (related to prospect’s industry/vertical) to build alignment to your prospect’s personal and business initiatives. Social proof is absolute gold, but the wrong message can be deadly.

An easy rule of thumb for avoiding misalignment: Look for your prospect’s competitors, customers in the same vertical, or companies with a similar size and geography. A match on more than one of these dimensions is best. Mismatches should be discarded and/or vetted for relevancy. 

If you have no pre-existing social proof, be prescriptive. How do you solve problems for companies and people similar to your audience? If you don’t know their business initiatives or goals, use this opportunity to uncover those.

Time is the enemy of the sales process, but only if you lack momentum and context. Frame this conversation as a step towards the ultimate validation. 

Buyers want to be led, and it is your job to enable a decision. This step of discovery and education enables healthy decisions. 

The ideal outcome of Step 2 is an agreed-upon list of success criteria that, if met in the presentation, will lead you to enter a negotiation.

3. The Custom Demo or ‘The Sales Cycle Crescendo’

The custom demo is the ultimate proof-point. This is where a decision begins to be made. If the decision maker is not present, you are still at Stage 2. 

Your goal here is to tell a story about how they will succeed with your solution. The story should capture your prospect’s attention and relate to any doubts they have. 

Rules for any custom demo:

✦ First, it’s not about you, it’s about the audience.

✦ Create an agenda. Confirm that agenda before the demo (via email), and again before you    begin the demo. If you aren’t circulating an agenda, co-developed with your champions and decision makers, you are still at stage 2 (education/discovery).

✦ Stay on point. Revisit the agenda and ensure relevancy at any available breakpoints.

✦ Be sure to engage each person in the meeting by using their first name — the amount of engagement being broadly proportional to their decision-making authority. 

✦ Don’t waste your prep and key points if you don’t have your prospect’s full attention. There is no such thing as multitasking, only dilution of attention. Virtual audiences are especially challenging. If someone is checking their email, wait.

✦ Use customer stories effectively. Customer stories are absolute gold at any stage. But they must be relevant. The wrong story risks loss of attention and context.

✦ Leave time at the end of the session to confirm you have met expectations for every relevant participant. Lack of confirmation and/or next steps equals failure.

4. Post Sales Presentation (Connecting After a Demo)

This step can be just as (if not more) important than the previous steps. This is your opportunity to wrap the entire sales cycle into a beautiful package and make your deal impossible to resist.

After the sales presentation, send custom summaries of your demo to those who attended. Personalize these follow-ups with:

• A list of attendees
• The agenda
• The topics covered
• Any additional questions that surfaced 

Then include the solution(s) in a proposal with pricing, and tie it directly to business impact. 

The goal is to remind the prospect of what you went over, and guide them through the next steps.

This is also where you support your champions to carry you across the finish line internally. 

Send them your “unexplodable bomb(s)” — content for your customer to circulate — where the impact cannot be “unexploded.” 

• Demo recordings
• PowerPoint overview and/or key slides
• Case studies you may have mentioned
• Screenshots with solutions
• Anything else that may help your new internal champs communicate your message

Final Thoughts

You can’t control all the information about your company. You can’t completely control the journey the buyer takes to reach you, or what information and misinformation they’ve learned. 

However, by using psychology to your advantage, you can steer them towards your custom demo — where you can take control of the narrative.

Emotional decision-making is a universal constant in sales. A custom sales presentation should be a demonstration of your ability to empathize, and it should be a chance for both parties to see the potential of a long-term and successful relationship.

The post Selling to Savvy Buyers: How to Control the Conversation from Start to Finish appeared first on Sales Hacker.

Washington (AFP) - Under new owner Jeff Bezos, The Washington Post is no longer just a newspaper. It's reinventing itself as a "media and technology company" that hopes to blaze a trail for newsrooms struggling to transition to a digital era.

The transformation may not be apparent on the surface, but the Internet billionaire has ripped up and revamped the technology underpinnings at the Post since buying the storied daily in 2013, while investing in the newsroom with more journalists, video offerings and tools for digital storytelling.

In a symbolic step, Bezos was present at Thursday's dedication of the new tech-rich Post headquarters, a few blocks from the musty 1970s building that is being razed.

"I am a huge fan of leaning into the future," said Bezos, the founder of online giant Amazon who snapped up the struggling newspaper for $250 million in personal funds.

Some of his efforts appear to be paying off.

The Post last year overtook The New York Times in digital visitors, claiming 76 million unique users in December, according to research firm comScore.

That appeared to put it on track toward Bezos's goal of becoming a new "newspaper of record," an open challenge to its New York rival.

The growth comes from upgrading all facets of the Post's digital offerings -- with a revamped website and mobile apps, Post content on applications from Facebook and Google, and a Post app pre-loaded onto Amazon Fire and Kindle tablets and offered at a discounted price.

The Post is also offering its content for free through websites of smaller newspapers around the United States, in a step toward fulfilling its ambition as a national rival to The New York Times and Wall Street Journal.

The Bezos experiment is being closely watched in the industry as newspapers struggle with declining print readership and advertising that pressures the business model of once-lucrative metropolitan dailies.

"The most important thing he has done is give the Post runway -- giving the organization a chance to actually take some risks that may not immediately pay off financially," said Nikki Usher, a George Washington University professor specializing in new media and the future of journalism.

"This has allowed them the freedom to experiment. You see them hiring some of the most talented people in product and business areas, and also doubling down on reporting."

- Know thy customer -

Ken Doctor, a media consultant and analyst who writes a blog called Newsonomics, said Bezos is borrowing some of the techniques he used to build Amazon into an online powerhouse.

"Amazon is world class in the customer experience," Doctor told AFP.

"It has figured out what people want and made that as seamless as possible. And it is Jeff Bezos's quest to bring that same level of understanding to The Washington Post."

Doctor said a big part of that strategy is creating a technology "platform" -- one that not only performs fast but delivers analytics on how readers are interacting with the website and apps, and also integrates with marketing to deliver targeted advertising and other messages.

The Post platform dubbed "Arc" made its debut in August, and is also being offered to other newspapers to improve their performance and analytics -- a move that could according to Doctor help the Washington daily collect useful reader data.

"That's the roadmap -- to learn rapidly about news readers in the same way that Amazon has learned about buyers of goods," Doctor said.

Bezos upgraded the Post technology team which he said rivals "any team in Silicon Valley." At the same time, he said he hopes to maintain the strong journalistic tradition at the Post.

He has hired dozens of journalists to bring the newsroom staff up to 700, second only to The New York Times, with more than 1,200.

"We now have a real newspaper fight on," GWU's Usher said. 

"Bezos has decided he wants to make the Post a national paper and you are starting to see the results of that."

- '22nd century newsroom' -

Post publisher Frederick Ryan, hired by Bezos in 2014, told the dedication event that the Post is "a media and technology company" where "journalists work side by side with rock-star engineers" to produce compelling content.

"Our teams are looking ahead to devices and platforms that have not yet been invented," Ryan said. "We are looking ahead to the newsroom for the 22nd century."

While Bezos appears to be making strides at the Post, it remains to be seen whether the strategy can be duplicated at other news organizations, many of which lack the same brand recognition and may not have a billionaire owner willing to invest for the long term.

Most US newspapers face a conundrum on digital initiatives that are hard to monetize, while revenues still come largely from print. 

Dailies that are part of publicly traded firms, meanwhile, face shareholder pressure for short-term results, often resulting in staff cuts.

"To make it work, you first have to have the commitment to truly changing the business," said Alan Mutter, a former Chicago newspaper editor who now consults on digital media.

"You have to have confidence and the competence, and then the cash."

At the Post, Mutter said, Bezos has shifted the focus.

"It's a work in progress but all of the signs I've seen suggest they know what they are doing in how to take an old and respected print brand and adapt it to the new world," he said.

Join the conversation about this story »

Recently, my agency got a great shout-out from a client that we’ve been assisting with blog content creation for the last few months. “Keep those blog posts coming,” he said. “They’re electronic gold!”

Surprisingly, it didn’t come from the marketing team, who we typically work with—but from someone on the sales team.

Often, content marketing is seen as a strategy to boost brand image and raise visibility, but isn’t linked directly to sales. In fact, sales teams often struggle with identifying the right content to send to their prospects, and waste valuable time searching for content, or even creating their own content when they can’t identify a good fit. According to BrainShark’s 2013 “State of the Sales Rep” report, more than half of reps had trouble finding the right materials, 41% felt the materials they did find were out of date, and 28% felt the content wasn’t relevant to their prospects. Clearly, many businesses are failing to properly align sales and marketing, and they’re wasting resources and losing sales as a result.

But, when developed with a sound strategy and used wisely, your content, too, can become “electronic gold” for your sales team. Here are some guidelines for integrating content marketing into your sales process successfully.

Use gated content marketing assets to generate new leads.

While developing a blog is a great way to boost your site’s visibility through organic SEO and both paid and organic social media promotion, it’s also important to plan some “gated” content assets that prospects will be willing to enter their contact information to acquire. A well-designed white paper or ebook is an ideal piece of collateral to lure in new prospects, using a pop-up box when visitors land on your website to encourage sign ups. You can then follow up with these prospects with email marketing newsletters, or even reach out personally to offer your services.

Arm your sales team with customer case studies to help boost business in targeted verticals.

Often, prospects have trouble jumping on board with a new product or solution if they can’t see how it makes sense for their specific business. Focus on developing detailed customer case studies that showcase how the product or service was used, and demonstrate the positive ROI it had for the customer. If your customer is willing, include his name, company name, and genuine quotes that spotlight the benefits of your solution.

When a new prospect is on the fence about working with your company, your sales rep can send relevant case studies from that prospect’s industry to them for review, and discuss the specifics with her over the phone. Case studies provide more than mere platitudes; they showcase actual, genuine results. That’s a powerful potion that will go a long way towards convincing a prospect that you’re the real deal.

Case studies provide more than mere platitudes; they showcase actual, genuine results.

Prep your prospects with relevant content before an initial meeting.

You’ve got a prospect who’s ready to get on the phone. But do you really want to spend the whole meeting educating him on why you’re the best solution, and fighting back on his initial impressions? Now that you’ve got a meeting scheduled, it’s the perfect time to prime your prospect with content that showcases why you’re the best fit. For instance, if your pricing is higher than your competitors’, avoid a snap judgement by clearly laying out the reasons for why you charge a premium in your sales materials.

If you know that your prospect is considering several different strategies for accomplishing a goal, provide a guide that lays out the pros and cons of each, and lets them come to their own decision. For example, Marcus Sheridan of Sales Lion uses a free guide all about what to consider when purchasing a pool to inform prospects during the course of the sale. By offering educational, non-biased information, your prospect will gain more trust in your company, and become more eager to invest in your solution.

Answer prospects’ questions (and overcome objections) with content resources.

When you talk with a prospect, he’s likely to have a lot of questions, and you might not have the chance to dig into all the answers in a 30-minute product demo. That’s where your content marketing assets can come in—if you’ve already built a detailed library of content assets, you can send your prospect a personalized follow-up message that includes links and PDFs for materials that answer his questions more thoroughly than you could on the phone.

Use your content to start an industry-related conversation with a current prospect or client.

You have a prospect who’s on the fence about committing to your solution, or maybe they’re already on board, but they haven’t communicated with you in a while and you’re feeling uneasy about things. A generic sales pitch isn’t going to win you any favors—instead, stay top of mind by sending your client or prospect a personalized message that includes a link to a recent blog post about an industry-related topic, and ask for their thoughts. If your content’s good and relevant, your prospect will find it valuable and want to keep the conversation going. (That’s how our “electronic gold” client successfully used our collateral.)

Content marketing’s main goal is to elevate a brand—it’s not necessary in all cases to tie it back directly to meeting sales goals. But when your sales team has access to an up-to-date library of relevant, educational, and engaging content, they’ll be able to build stronger relationships with their prospects—and find their way to “yes” more often.

Want to learn more tips on mastering content marketing? Get the brand-new, 19-page guide for content marketing for B2B tech companies.

Strapped for time? Feeling frazzled? Wondering if you’ll even have time make it to the end of this blog post? (It’s ok if you don’t, you won’t hurt my feelings.)

If you answered yes to any of these questions, you’re the perfect candidate for email marketing. Email helps you make meaningful connections with your tribe using very little time.

It sounds like a catch-22, doesn’t it? It’s not – as long as you’re spending your time wisely. But that doesn’t always happen.

Try these time-saving email marketing tips the next time you find yourself wondering, “Where the heck did my day go?!”

Spending too much time creating content? Try…

Email automation

According to this survey, email marketers spend the bulk of their time on content. It makes sense, right? Great content helps you grow and connect with your audience.

But many marketers are spending too much time creating content. I get it. It’s hard to come up with original content on a regular basis, never mind finding the time to sit down and compose an email or *shudder* an entire series of them.

That’s why email automation exists. With email automation, you can take content you already have and turn it into a welcome series or email course. You can even link multiple email campaigns together. That way, you’re not creating a ton of new content. You’re simply organizing your existing content into shorter, digestible emails that keep your subscribers engaged over time.

Try these email automation ideas:

• Welcome campaign
• Email course
• Linked campaigns

Curated content

Curating content positions you as a thought-leader and saves you time. Here’s how to create a curated email newsletter:

• Bookmark articles with your subscribers in mind. What kind of news will keep them in-the-know?
• Make a short list of the most interesting and relevant articles in your newsfeed (three to five is a good number to aim for).
• Add those articles to a newsletter and add a short description about why people should read them.

Check out this post to learn more about curated content.

Spending too much time trying to grow your list? Try…

Wishpond

Growing your subscriber list is one of the biggest challenges an email marketer can have. It’s also a huge time-suck, especially when it comes to researching all the tools you need to create pop-up forms, landing pages and more.

Lucky for you, Wishpond has all of those tools in one place. It’s a platform where you can create Facebook contests, pop-up forms, landing pages and easily track your campaigns within the app. If you’re an AWeber customer, you can connect Wishpond to your AWeber account. Check it out!

A mobile sign up form app

You never know when you’ll meet a potential subscriber. Why not be prepared with an easy way to add people to your list, right in your pocket? A mobile app, like AWeber’s Atom app, lets you add new subscribers anytime, anywhere.

Facebook

There are lots of little ways Facebook can help grow your list fast. Try linking Facebook’s call-to-action button to your hosted sign up form or landing page. Add a sign up form to your Facebook page. Once you have those in place, promote your premium content on Facebook and let people know that if they want to see more, they can sign up for your list.

A hosted sign up form

Does the thought of creating a sign up form and adding it to your website make you break into a cold sweat? It shouldn’t – and it’s super easy to do, I promise. But there is another way: the hosted sign up form. You can create one in five minutes or less, then share it everywhere.

Spending too much time managing your subscribers? Try…

Kickbox

A massive subscriber list can only help you when those subscribers are engaged. Unfortunately, a lot of people avoid purging their list of inactive subscribers simply because list clean-up can be time-consuming.

Enter Kickbox, a tool that lets you easily check up on your list’s health and clean it up in minutes. As a result, you get better deliverability and a more active list. Check it out.

Salesforce

Want to know which of your Salesforce contacts are subscribed to your email lists? The Salesforce app integration will tell you! Learn more about keeping tabs on your contacts with the Salesforce app.

Segmenting

If you have multiple email campaigns (for customers and prospects, for example), sending the right content to the right people can get tricky. Plus, you always want to make sure you’re sending relevant content to your subscribers.

Segmenting your list based on specific subscriber interests lets you quickly and easily send relevant content to your audience. That means you can send an email only to your prospects who didn’t click through to buy your ebook in your last email. Or message those who did with another ebook they might like.

Take back your time today!

Email marketing is designed to make your life easier. Use these solutions any time you feel like time isn’t on your side.

Want to get an even better handle on managing your time? Check out these five time-tracking tools.

How do you save time with email marketing? Tell us in the comments!

The post Time-Saving Email Marketing Tips to Take Back Your Day appeared first on Email Marketing Tips.

Silicon Valley may be the highest-paying area for tech professionals — but it certainly isn't the only place where these workers are raking in more than $100,000 a year.

There are now a total of eight cities where tech workers are earning six figures, on average, according to the Dice Tech Salary Survey.

"The competition for tech talent today is undeniable," said Dice president Bob Melk in the report. "Employers realize offering competitive pay is a necessity. What's promising is the tech industry recognizes the need to fill open seats as well as to reward tech talent for their hard work."

Here are the 32 highest-paying areas for people who work in tech:

SEE ALSO: Here's how much tech workers are paid in all 50 states — see where yours ranks

DON'T MISS: The 27 jobs that are most damaging to your health

32. San Antonio, Texas

Average pay in 2015: $79,668

Change from 2014: -3.9%

31. Cleveland, Ohio

Average pay in 2015: $82,303

Change from 2014: 11.8%

30. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Average pay in 2015: $82,788

Change from 2014: 4.0%

When you reach a certain level of success, it’s easy to get comfortable. If you want to stay there, though, be ready to act hungry. Even if you’re not.

Read more...

Ever since the massive success of the Intel Inside initiative, the power and potential of ingredient branding has been well understood. As the name implies, ingredient branding means giving a component of a product its own brand identity. It can be a tantalizing proposition for those looking for new ways to differentiate.

But ingredient branding is full of hidden dangers and often doesn’t deliver the expected results. To understand some of these dangers, let’s take a look at the animal kingdom and see what we can learn there. Nemo, the clown fish star of his own movie, represents the best case for ingredient branding, living as he does in symbiotic harmony in an anemone for the mutual benefit of both.

But for every clown fish, there are many more animals that are predators or parasites. Take, for example, the cuckoo. The cuckoo lays its eggs in other birds’ nests and its demanding chicks often push out the host birds’ eggs to get more attention and space. What’s true of the animal kingdom turns out to be true in the world of ingredient branding. Many ingredient branding partnerships don’t turn out well for both parties–there’s usually a winner and a loser. The question for those determined to take the ingredient branding path is: Are there any clown fish out there and, if so, how do you find them?

Ingredient Brands: The Temptation

Why step into the world of ingredient branding in the first place? It’s the allure, the whiff of opportunity. If your brand is weak, bland, or undifferentiated, ingredient brands can add strength, color, and distinctiveness. If your brand is commoditized, ingredient brands can add value, and if your brand is average, ingredient brands can add quality. If the ingredient brand is already well known and built by someone else, it can deliver these benefits very quickly.

The Pros: Ingredient Brand Success Stories

Westin’s Heavenly Bed is one of the greatest ingredient brand success stories. Back in the late 1990s hotels were battling one another over amenities and in-room entertainment. Westin chose another path–it went back to basics developing and branding a better bed. Instant differentiation!

The Heavenly Bed had all the elements for a perfect ingredient brand initiative:
 It gave Westin ownership of something critically important to guests (a good night’s sleep).

Westin was the first mover in this type of amenity, and competitors could not easily follow (they could match the quality of the bed but they could not use the brand name). The impression of Westin’s hotel rooms was altered by the bed. Because of their perception of the bed, guests gave higher ratings to the rooms in terms of other criteria (such as cleanliness), and these better scores translated into better occupancy rates. All this has equaled great success. To date, 60,000 Heavenly Beds have been sold. And 100,000 pillows.

Hemi: Although the hemispherical combustion chamber design had been around since the earliest days of the auto industry, Chrysler was the company that trademarked the name and then used it extensively in advertising its Dodge Ram and other trucks and cars with Hemi engines.

Techron: In a category where consumers often choose a gas station based on how easy it is to get to the pump, Chevron has been able to differentiate its product by using its Techron additive. Consumers may not know what Techron is exactly, but they know enough to associate Chevron with a better, cleaner gas.

Geek Squad: Faced with increasing competition and pricing pressure from Walmart, Best Buy reinforced its service credentials by acquiring Geek Squad and its in-store, in-home, and online customer service and support, and its more than 18,000 “agents.”

The Cons: Ingredient Brands Eat Their Hosts

If ingredient branding brings this kind of success, what’s there to worry about? Let’s take a look at some sinister examples where ingredient brands, if not eating up their hosts entirely, then at least took a large bite out of them. The Intel Inside initiative, the most famous of all ingredient brand programs, is a cautionary tale worth examining. Launched in 1991, Intel Inside followed a model that chemical companies had successfully used to promote their patented products further along the value chain. DuPont was a pioneer of this idea and had used it to establish the Lycra, Kevlar, Teflon, and rayon ingredient brands. These brands provided enhanced credibility for the host company and proof of specific and important benefits (for example, Teflon equates with nonstick).

But Intel took this approach to a whole new galactic level. The company negotiated deals with all the leading original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and supported the Intel Inside launch with significant marketing dollars both directly to the consumer and indirectly through advertising subsidies to its OEM partners.

As the program gathered momentum, Intel was transformed from a component supplier to a marketing and branding powerhouse. Recognizing what they had unleashed, some leading OEMs (IBM and Compaq) tried to pull out of the program. But it was too late. The OEMs were addicted to the money, and consumers had been trained to look for the Intel mark as the most important seal of quality.

The Intel Inside ingredient brand initiative worked out extremely well for Intel but not so well for the OEMs. Intel’s brand value went into orbit (it consistently ranks as a top 10 global brand) while the OEMs gave up important ground on differentiation because they were all using the same Intel chips.

Other Ingredient Brands That Appropriated Their Host Brands’ Equity

Kevlar: Just one product from DuPont’s stable of ingredient brands, Kevlar was developed in 1965 and originally used as a replacement for steel in racing tires. It’s been used for body armor since the 1980s. Do you know who makes a Kevlar vest? No? Whoever the manufacturer is, these vests are always known as Kevlar vests.

Gore-Tex, Juan Valdez, and NutraSweet: There are so many more examples. The Gore-Tex website lists 85 brand partners from Adidas to Spyder that use Gore-Tex fabric technology. For years, Juan Valdez, the icon for Columbian coffee, has been helping promote this coffee’s quality on all the cans of the major brands. As for NutraSweet, even Coca-Cola put the ingredient label on its Diet Coke cans (at least until Monsanto’s patent expired). Getting access to quality credentials, technology, or innovation has driven many host brands to consider ingredient branding solutions. But, as Marlin, Nemo’s dad, would say: “With fronds like these, who needs anemones?”

Are There Any Clown Fish Out There?

After reading these examples, you may conclude that (1) as a host brand, you need to develop ingredient brands yourself, otherwise you will get locked into a partnership that sucks the equity right out of you; (2) as a component manufacturer, you must find a way to bamboozle a host brand just so you can, in fact, hook it into such an equity-sucking program.

The chances for a mutually beneficial partnership seem remote. After all, both the host company and the component manufacturer want the same thing: to build up their brands and business. What the host company wants out of an ingredient partnership is exclusivity and supplier choice, whereas the component manufacturer wants the exact opposite: multiple partnerships with exclusive (that is, no other supplier) arrangements. Can opportunities for win-win partnerships exist? Here are some clown fish contenders:

Starbucks/Barnes & Noble: Barnes & Noble has an exclusive partnership with Starbucks to run its in-store coffee shops.

Why this partnership works: Even though coffee shops are a vital part of the business model in terms of competing against Amazon, these in-store coffee shops are still a complementary service for Barnes & Noble. The bookstore does not need to prove its own credentials by selling coffee and can safely outsource to Starbucks, which has the proven expertise.

Tetra Pak/juice and other beverage manufacturers: With a long history of packaging innovation, Tetra Pak supplies complete solutions for processing, packaging, and distributing food and beverages. Manufacturers, rather than try to develop packaging solutions for themselves, typically prefer to partner with Tetra Pak.

Why this partnership works: Tetra Pak does the packaging and the manufacturers do the product–they are complementary activities (just like the Starbucks/Barnes & Noble partnership). However, the sameness of beverage packaging structures presents a differentiation opportunity. In a sea of Tetra packages, anyone who chooses a different supplier will stand out from the crowd.

Oreo McFlurry/McDonald’s: The McFlurry is McDonald’s vanilla ice cream dessert with pieces of candy or cookies mixed in. Oreo is one of the varieties. (There’s an M&M’s version as well).

Why this partnership works: This is not an exclusive partnership (Dairy Queen has its own version of this product-the Dairy Queen Oreo Blizzard), but the few times that McDonald’s allows other companies to brand their products in its restaurants aren’t going to undermine its brand. This is one area where McDonald’s can afford to be generous. Don’t expect to see anything like this with McDonald’s hamburgers, though.

Woolmark/clothing manufacturers: Australian Wool Innovation established the Woolmark logo in 1964 to help promote the Australian wool industry. Its label has become one of the most widely recognized quality seals throughout the world and is seen on over 50 million new products a year.

Why this partnership works: Unlike the Intel example, this is a case where the use of an ingredient brand as a seal of quality is less risky. The Woolmark logo gives all of those who use it a quality assurance benefit. But there’s plenty of room left for differentiation in clothing type and styles.

Tide with a Touch of Downy is a mutually beneficial partnership between two powerhouse P&G laundry brands.

Five Key Questions To Help Determine If Ingredient Branding Is Right For You:

1. Do you need it? In a study to determine the benefits of ingredient branding, Research International found that the use of a premium brand of chocolate chips added value to a middle-of-the-road cookie brand (Nabisco) but actually detracted from the value of the category leader, Pepperidge Farm. Consumers already expected Pepperidge Farm to have the best ingredients, so branding these ingredients generated consumer skepticism. If you are already perceived by consumers to be differentiated, ingredient branding may be unnecessary and even counterproductive.

2. Can you do it yourself? The examples of Intel Inside, Kevlar, and others should warn you that ingredient deal partnerships are risky. Sure, a partnership gives you access to the equity of brands that already have some strength. But when a host brand and an ingredient brand partner are both trying to build their business and brand, it’s often a zero-sum game and only one will come out ahead.

3. When should you stop? Even the introduction of a single ingredient brand will take attention from the host brand. Sometimes (for example, Westin’s Heavenly Bed), branding an ingredient can help you establish ownership of an important and differentiating benefit. But often it’s one more piece of unnecessary information. Have you ever read a sales brochure from a technology company that presents a blizzard of trademarked features that fight each other for your attention? In branding, less is often more.

4. What should you brand? By branding an ingredient, you are drawing attention to it, over and above all the other features that are not branded. You are telling consumers that this particular thing is particularly important. Pick carefully. It’s risky to brand something that’s core to your main brand (think of the risk McDonald’s would have if it ingredient-branded its hamburgers), and irrelevant to brand things that consumers don’t care about. Important but not critical seems about right.

5. Can you find your Nemo? There are times when ingredient brands can lead to harmonious and mutually beneficial relationships if you look and evaluate carefully. But it’s definitely a challenge to find a partner that can make a real and impactful difference to your business and won’t eat away at your brand.

The Blake Project Can Help: The Brand Positioning Workshop

Build A Stronger Brand. Join us for The Un-Conference: 360 Degrees of Brand Strategy for a Changing World, May 2-4, 2016 in San Diego, California. A fun, competitive-learning experience reserved for 50 marketing oriented leaders and professionals.

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

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers

The New Year is here and marketers are scrambling to build their marketing presentation for Sales Kickoff. During the first quarter of each new year, almost all B2B companies that sell via a direct model with kick off the new year by meeting with their teams for two or three days in a hotel or conference space. Usually marketing organizations present for 30 to 60 minutes, with some presentations going well and some not so well. Below is some insight on the content to include in one’s marketing presentation.

It’s a given that there will be too much content, time slots will be shifted or eliminated, something will get added to the agenda, the food will be bad and 80% of what is presented will not be remembered. Specifically, here’s the typical Sales Kickoff Agenda:

• Welcome & Introductions
• CEO Company Update or State of the Union – the vision and direction for the company
• Year in Review – highlights and lessons learned from the prior year
• Financials – revenue expectations for the current year, expenses, profitability, budgets, compensation plans
• Key Note or Motivational Speaker
• Technology – vision, strategy, use cases
• Customer Showcases
• Product Roadmap – insights into new solutions and additional functionality
• Win Highlights – walking through the top 1 – 3 big deals for the year
• Pricing
• Sales Cycle Management – territory management, the selling process, discovery
• Sales Tools – Demo and Presentation
• Competitive Update
• Sales Skills Training
• Role Playing
• Sales Automation
• Marketing Update
• Close
• Dinner and Team Building

Here are a few key points for marketers to remember. First, it’s a sales meeting and the vast majority of topics are sales-specific. Next, a lot of topics will be packed into a schedule that will run over as presentations will be moved when presenters are not available. Last, the marketing group will have 30 – 60 minutes of what is typically a two-day event.

The focal point for marketing’s Sales Kickoff presentation should be to communicate how marketing helps sales generate revenue. Building the sales pipeline, converting opportunity and providing sales tools to increase sales cycle velocity are what sales teams value most. Resist the temptation to use the presentation time to communicate abstract, qualitative initiatives that will not impact revenue in the next four quarters.

How to Guide

Create a How to Guide for sales reps to leverage marketing resources. The How to Guide should show the direct sales organization how to leverage account-based marketing fundamentals. The guide should focus the direct sales team on how to leverage the existing data sources to develop a one-page account intelligence brief, how to bridge the account intelligence insights into relevant messaging, the appropriate discovery questions and a 3-5 step nurture process including emails and phone scripts.

Sales & Marketing Quick Reference Card

A Sales & Marketing Quick Reference Card (QRC) is a one-pager that summarizes the company’s unique selling proposition, the solution’s positioning, the target opportunity areas, discovery questions and objection handling.

The QRC is a one-pager to be leveraged by direct sales, business development, inside sales reps (ISRs) and the sales development reps (SDRs) that make outbound calls and receive inbound calls. The primary purpose of the QRC is to assist in lead generation and lead follow-up activities.

The QRC is not designed as an all-encompassing document with every response to every permutation of every possible question. To do that requires a messaging framework and the documentation of some fundamental go-to-market building blocks.

The QRC is not a complete call script but it helps get everyone on the same page by providing consistent messaging that supports the brand, the value proposition, target titles, ideal project scenarios, discovery questions and the key objections and how to handle them.

Emails and Scripts

When contact is made with a prospect, the persona and the stage of the buying process should be identified. Then the best assets (and formats) should be used to engage in a meaningful and relevant conversation with the prospect — in an automated way.

A minimum sequence of 10 touches (emails and scripts) should be created to follow-up with each lead through marketing and sales automation tools. This should include meaningful and relevant messaging, call to actions and digital assets.

Account Intelligence

Background information on each targeted prospect should be available to each sales person before they attempt any communication (email, phone or face-to-face communication). The goal is to make a connection based on information, insights and value.

Information should be gathered to populate a “dossier” for each targeted prospect within a company. Information will be summarized from available resources, organized in a sales-ready format and include:

• Current and past positions
• What the prospect indicates as their area of responsibility
• Education
• Groups
• Hobbies and interests
• Recommendations
• Summary of the last earnings call
• Key initiative in the organization
• Hardware installed at their company
• Software installed at their company

Easy as 1,2,3,4

Again, there is always too much information communicated at Sales Kickoff and even if a sales person was interested in all the material it is impossible for them to retain it. When a sales person goes back to work on Monday, what are they supposed to do? Make it easy for salespeople:

• Provide them with the presentation and audio
• Create a hard copy so they can physically reference the content
• Create a nurture path and replay each key step with graphics, texts and links

Step One: develop account intelligence profiles using Salesforce.com, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Crush Reports, Hoovers, and Leadspace to gather the right information before approaching an account.

Step Two: Access and send the prebuilt nurture emails to contacts one creates

Step Three: Have the Quick Reference Card in hand when making calls

Step Four: Refer to the call scripts that have been created to support each email. Become familiar with the digital assets used in the emails that were sent.

Follow these guidelines and the marketing presentation at Sales Kickoff will be very well accepted by the sales team. More importantly, the marketing resources will be adopted by the sales team and make a tangible difference in acquiring new customers.

VB INSIGHT:

In 2015, marketing tech swelled in deal sizes, frequency, and valuations like never before. 2016 is off to a similar start. In a new MoneyTree Report from PWC and the National Venture Capital Associate, VCs cooled on later-stage growth investments, particularly in tech, at the end of last year. Whether that’s due to fluctuating financial markets, markdowns from institutional investors, global conflicts, or other factors, investors are shifting the model to value revenue over growth in the later stages.

But it’s the exact opposite for new funding. VCs are still stepping on the gas for early and seed stage companies, particularly in marketing tech. We’ve tracked every one of those investments, and they’re starting to paint a clear picture of what it means for marketers, CMOs, CIOs, and even sales teams.

Namely, you better step up your data analytics game, stat.

In a new VB Insight report on Q4 venture capital funding, we tracked $7.4 billion in moving money (new funding and exits) for marketing tech in Q4 of 2015 alone. The volume of deals, in amounts, frequency, and categories of software are all trackable and trending a few very specific ways.

Data management, if it isn’t already, will be a priority for CMOs in 2016:

There’s customer data, inventory data, log data, search data, reporting, analytics, CRM, session data, et. al – with different vendors supporting each one, often in its own data silo.

This rise in customer data invariably means a rise in the sheer volume of enterprise data. Evolving customer expectations and real-time marketing trends necessitate a need for faster data processing and simplified data access. Companies are generating more data than ever, while the window to batch and process it (and deliver it with context) is shrinking to real-time.

Queue the seemingly limitless ascent of data analytics platforms. By some accounts, even specialized areas of analytics like predictive marketing will be a $30 billion (or $100+ billion, depending who you’re asking) industry in five years. We’re hard pressed to disagree. Take a look at the funding data for 2015:

That’s nearly $1.5 billion funneled into pure play analytics startups — these are dashboard companies, journey-mappers, audience-measurers — nearly all with super sophisticated data-mining pulling from proprietary databases. It’s a dart throw for who’s going to win right now, since the use-cases for big data for marketers are still coming to life and the models are still being created (i.e., tell Teradata you invented predictive analytics, and you’ll get laughed out of the room).

The full report includes an in-depth analysis on Q4 activity, as well as the full data from 2015 — and is available on VB Insight.

While the early part of the year saw huge dollar amounts given to customer-facing tech like programmatic advertising, it appears VCs have cooled on that opportunity as the state of delivering ads continues to be too convoluted for marketers to safely spend money on (but they’re spending it anyway, in record figures).

Backbone/infrastructure players should come last, given recent developments in database technology and firmly entrenched players in major categories like CRM. However it’s a rapidly growing category led by a handful of big dollar deals (AppDirect for $140 million, AppDynamics for $241 million, Twilio for $130 million, CloudFlare for $110 million, GitHub for $250 million, Unisys for $350 million — to name a handful).

In the meantime, join me for a live webinar on the topic today (or listen later) with some excellent speakers, including:

Lisa Calhoun, Partner, Valor Ventures

Sloan Gaon, CEO, PulsePoint

Ravi Belani, Managing Partner, Alchemist Accelerator, Stanford University

Register here for free. 

The world is changing … again!

In the natural world there are, periodically, significant “tectonic” shifts—earthquakes, meteors, climate changes—that alter the entire atmosphere and redefine what is needed for survival in the surrounding environment. In response, organisms must find ways to evolve and be successful again. This Darwinism of the natural world has parallels in modern business as well, what we might call “Digital Darwinism.”

Digital Darwinism has created a convergence of tectonic shifts, evolutionary forces and trends. Businesses today are rapidly adapting to disruptive changes, such as the introduction of:

• Big data analytics
• Cloud-delivered apps and infrastructure
• The Internet of Things (IoT)

These forces are influencing everything about our business environment right now. But what’s even more interesting is how companies are responding to these forces. In other words, how companies are adapting in order to not only survive, but thrive.

Leading businesses are embracing new evolutionary adaptation trends, such as:

• The empowered customer
• Industry integration
• Subscription-based business models

These trends have reinvigorated the focus on the customer experience and customer success. Organizations are adopting a vigilant approach to delivering customer value and business outcomes. In an outcome-driven world, one size definitely does not fit all; however, there are ways to accelerate your customer success evolution, which we’ll cover in our customer success evolution webinar, but here are five:

1. Track your Evolution
   Utilize a Revenue Lifecycle Management framework and maturity model to benchmark where you are today. It is important to first assess your current capability maturity in managing the entire revenue lifecycle. This will help you understand the biggest gaps in your current processes, as well as the greatest opportunities for improvement and help you prioritize innovations.
2. Outline Business Outcomes
   Create a customer-facing success roadmap that clearly outlines business outcomes for each of your solutions. This roadmap should detail the actions your customer must complete in order to reach value milestones and achieve an optimal return on their investment.
3. Map the Customer Journey
   Create a customer journey map that covers the entire revenue lifecycle. A customer journey map (CJM) will help you become even more customer-focused and eliminate functional silos. A CJM provides a visual view of the entire customer lifecycle—from both your customer’s perspective and your internal touchpoints.
4. Capitalize on Big Data
   Create a data-driven Revenue Lifecycle by reevaluating your customer data and how it can be used to trigger customer engagement. Take advantage of usage data or things like usage data to get a better understanding of how your customers are utilizing your products and services. Equip your employees, customers and channel partners with self-serve access to information that will help them achieve business outcomes faster.
5. Continuously Innovate
   Continuously innovate to improve processes and lower the cost to serve while growing revenue faster. Evolution is only possible if you create a culture of innovation that embraces change. This requires adopting the right key performance indicators (KPIs) and process mapping. That which gets measured, gets managed!

Adapting to subscription business model trends requires more than creating a customer success team. Keep all of your customer-facing teams focused on delivering business outcomes and you will retain more customers and ultimately increase customer lifetime value.

Are you ticking things off your to-do list or are you having a deeper impact at work?

In this video, I reveal my top three books (and the lessons I’ve gleaned from them.) Listen in as I cover:

• Why bad is stronger than good, and what to do about it
• The potent power of imagining by 10x
• Scaling up and rapid skill acquisition

Watch the video, or download it as a free podcast on iTunes and see below for extended notes.

You can also listen to it as a podcast here.

Don’t forget to rate this podcast on iTunes.

Full Transcript

So for years at Box of Crayons, we’ve talked about our company as a way of saying we help people and organizations do less good work and more great work, and people tend to kind of nod and go, “Yeah, that sounds intriguing.” But honestly, recently I’ve tweaked that language a little bit and I say this: “I help people work less hard but have more impact,” and that makes people go absolutely, “Now you’re talking! Now this is something that I want more of.”

And of course, I want people to work less hard because actually people are overwhelmed at the moment. There’s just so much going on in our hyper-connected world where email never stops pinging and you’re always available by text and you can take your laptop anywhere. There are no boundaries, so you have to be really thoughtful about how you spend your time and how much you let your work life leak into your life outside work. And the choice is yours, and some people like a little, some people like a lot, some like none at all.

But I think for all of us, that benefit of saying, “How do I work less hard?” can be beneficial, but many of us are also really driven by the work that we do. We get fulfillment, we get meaning, we get engagement out of it. We want to leave our little dent in the universe. So working less hard isn’t about having less impact, it’s about going, “How can you work less hard but have more impact? How can you scale up the work that you do?”

And actually, I don’t know about you, but when I think about it, I often don’t do a great job at measuring impact. I measure tasks done. You know, I tick off all my things on my To Do list. I get a sense of, “Am I busy or am I not busy?” I have a sense of, “Did I fulfill all my obligations to the world? Did I answer my emails? Did I attend my meetings? Did I be nice to my manager and my leader?” And there’s these different ways that you kind of measure how you’re showing up in the world.

But we often step away from that conversation, is, “Well, what does success look like for me? How do I define the impact that I want to have in this world and how do I know if I’m getting close to it or not to it?” So, big questions to wrestle with. I’m still struggling with that myself. I mean, I do have a personal mission, which is this: I want to infect a billion people with the possibility virus. And that, to me, is a very compelling kind of call forward into the future because it makes me think, “How do I really scale the work that I do? How do I get myself out of the way so I’m not the bottleneck to the impact that I have? How do I find a way of making as much of my work available to as many people as possible so that I can try and have the impact that I want in the world?” But the truth is I don’t always keep that mission statement close and centre for me, so I sometimes lose track of that.

What I find is that sometimes it’s useful to have other people’s insights about how to increase impact, and I want to share with you three books that I think are actually pretty good in terms of sharing new insights for you to think about how you can increase the impact that you want to have in the work you do and in the life that you lead.

The first book to talk about is Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less. It’s by Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao. They’re based out on the West Coast in Silicon Valley. Bob Sutton’s a lovely man. I’ve met him a few times. He’s written a number of great books. I really like this book. It really took a lot of lessons, many of them from Silicon Valley, but actually from organizations across the U.S., and went, “How do you take that little bit of good that’s sort of thriving in some small part of an organization and get it to grow?” Because many of us will have seen a situation where a little bit of good seems to be working but for some reason it just doesn’t spread the way that you hope. It doesn’t scale up. And scale can be everything; it’s a very Silicon Valley mindset, but it’s useful for all of us.

So lots of good stuff in this book. One of the things that I point to is this key insight that bad is stronger than good. And he unpacks what he means in one of the chapters here where he says, “Look, if you’re trying to make good stuff happen, you need to understand that the impact of bad is actually far more destabilizing than good is motivating.” And I suspect this is neurological. You know, we have a bias in our brains, just built from years of—I mean, thousands and thousands of years of survival, to go, “On balance, I’m going to treat things as dangerous and unsafe rather than rewarding and safe, because if I’m a little cautious then I’m actually going to survive if it’s actually bad. If I’m a bit gung-ho and assume it’s going to be good, then I’m at risk of being eaten by a saber-toothed tiger.” So I suspect there’s some sort of deeply primitive neurology reason why this is so.

But his insight in the book is bad is stronger than good, and actually he quantifies it. He says a bad comment, a bad person, is five times more influential than a good comment or a good person. So for the two authors here, they’re very much about how do you nip bad in the bud? Or as they say, how do we break bad? Breaking bad. It’s a bad pun, but it’s not a—it’s literally a bad pun, I guess. So they talk about different ways to actually tackle the badness, and here’s a few of them.

One is about—and the metaphor they use is put plumbing before pictures, and they talk about actually a situation in a hospital which was struggling. It was falling apart. And the leadership that turned this hospital around and scaled it up to a success started off by focusing on the infrastructure, the foundation, rather than trying to paint the walls a pretty colour and make it feel nicer. So I think the starting point is to go, “What do we need to fix that’s fundamental in the infrastructure to eliminate bad?” That’s the first thing.

The second thing is about understanding that you get to adequate before you get to excellence. If you’re trying to go from bad to excellence, that’s a huge leap and you often fail. More successful is to find and then strive for, “How do we become adequate?” Because from the foundation of adequate, you can then step towards a foundation of excellence. So I think that’s the second thing they talk about in terms of breaking bad.

And the third thing I think is really interesting here is you get the cool kids to help stamp out the bad. And this is about getting political about, savvy about going, “Who are the key influencers around here and how do I get them on the side of the light rather than on the side of the dark?” And if you can engage those cool people, be them kids, be them adults, whoever it might be, the key influencers, you’re far more likely to be able to tackle the bad because you have the right people on your side. So that’s the first book I wanted to talk about, Scaling Up Excellence. Fantastic read.

The second book I want to talk about is Smartcuts by Shane Snow. Now, he’s an entrepreneur based in New York, but he took time off. He’s trained as a journalist originally, so this is a lovely, well-written book. And he actually says, “Why do some people really seem to become masters, really seem to elevate their game?”

So he examined people who had reached the top of their game, be them DJs or be them surfers or be them entrepreneurs and went, “What are they doing differently that really makes such an impact?” And there’s a lot of good in this book, everything from studying with masters to building a platform for success, so actually not just a single route for success but a broader platform.

But the chapter that I would point to here and I wanted to talk about with you is this idea of imagining 10x. So if you’re trying to increase your impact, his insight is this. Rather than going, “I’m going to double it, or, “I’m going to do 50% more than I did last time,” set yourself the super ambitious target of 10x-ing the impact you’re currently having. And here’s what’s powerful about that. Once you strive to set yourself a 10x goal, you don’t get to 10x by doing what you’re doing now. You can’t just work harder, work smarter to get to 10x, you have to reinvent the way that you’re currently working.

So part of what’s powerful about the 10x goal is it forces you back to fundamentals to say, “Wow, do I need to reimagine the way I work, the way my team works, for us to get to that next level of impact.” So that’s the key takeaway for me from Shane Snow’s book, the 10x approach. What’s your goal now? What’s that goal 10x? And now, how does that change things in terms of how you approach your next steps forward?

The third book, The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything Fast, by Josh Kaufman. Now, he’s the author of The Personal MBA. This is a multi-, multi-thousand-selling book, and very smart because he went, “Okay, if you’re a self-educator, if you want to get an MBA education without paying MBA prices, here are the 40 or so books that I thoroughly recommend that will ground you in the same level of education that an MBA will give you.” So he had a lot of success with that first book.

And then he published The First 20 Hours and, really, it’s called The First 20 Hours because it’s a direct riposte to Malcolm Gladwell, and you will have heard of the Malcolm Gladwell 10,000 Hour Rule. You know, the whole thing around you have to do something for 10,000 hours before you become really good at it. And of course, if you’re already a dedicated maniac, you go, “Fantastic. I’m going to put in my 10,000 hours.” If you’re a normal person like you and me, you go, “I don’t have 10,000 hours to become good at X.” And what Kaufman found, I think is very useful, is to say, “Look, yeah, 10,000 hours is required if you want to become a grandmaster in chess or a world-class athlete or a world-class musician, but most of us don’t need to be world class. We just need to be good enough. We need to be adequate.”

So part of what Kaufman says is, “How do you think about rapid skill acquisition? Because that’s the way that takes you from nothing to something fast. And I think this can be really powerful. There are four steps to rapid skill acquisition.

The first step is deconstructing the key things that make the most difference. This is the Pareto Rule, the 80/20 Rule. A few things, the 20%, make most of the difference. So how do you figure out what makes most of the difference in terms of the new skill that you’re going to learn? And this takes some thinking. It takes some research, but it’s well worth doing it. For instance, if you’re learning a musical instrument, you might discover that learning three simple chords, C, G, and A, will actually give you access to 80% of the world’s music because of the way 80% of the world’s music is basically structured through those three chords alone. So that could be the deconstruction piece with a musical instrument.

The second piece is figuring out exactly what you need to learn so that you get that Pareto effect, you get to focus on the things that make the most difference.  The third principle is about how do you remove the barriers so that you get to practice the new skill that you want to practice? Because when we’re in that first stage of practicing, what they call conscious incompetence, it’s awkward. It’s difficult. You realize just how bad you are. You’ll find any excuse to not practice. So how do you make it really easy for you to actually pick up the thing or do the thing and practice what you want to practice? You know, if you’re learning a musical instrument, again, how do you leave your ukulele by your desk chair so every time you have a break, you pick up the ukulele and you practice those three essential chords?

And then the fourth and final step is, just as the title of the book would have you believe, it’s to practice those critical factors for at least 20 hours. And Josh’s point of view here is to say if you find the core things to practice, you figure a way how to practice, and you practice them for 20 hours, you’ll get that rapid skill acquisition. And there’s something very powerful about that, about scaling up from nothing to something very quickly.

And look, I know I said three books, but I’m going to sneak in a fourth book and I’m sneaking it in because it’s my book. It’s actually the first book I published. It’s called Get Unstuck and Get Going. And what this is is it’s an idea-generating book. I actually wrote the book because I went to myself, “Look, I love coaching, but I want coaching to be available to everybody.” And sometimes I see official life coaches or executive coaches doing coaching when I went, “You’re not adding that much value. This person could figure this stuff out themselves if they had the right tool.”

And Get Unstuck and Get Going is that tool. It’s a self-coaching tool. And you bring a challenge to the book, you open up the flip sections; it’s like one of those kids’ books that has a ballerina’s head and a soccer player’s body and a moonwalker’s legs, and they all generate up to 50,000 different combinations of questions to provoke you to think differently about the challenge you have. And you know that I’m a champion for better options because better options lead to better choices and better choices lead to better outcomes.

So the fourth and final book, which I’m sneaking in undercover, is to say Get Unstuck and Get Going is a way of quickly and rapidly generating bolder, more courageous, more interesting choices so that when you move ahead with whatever your challenge happens to be, you’ll actually have a better strategy for moving forward on that. Impact really matters, and to do that you got to bring in some real expertise about how can you scale up and how can you increase your impact. And I think those three books plus my own book that I mentioned at the end there are some critical ways forward to helping you increase your impact, and in doing so do less good work and more great work.

“Workflow” is the buzzword of the day – maybe even the year. Even if you’re not one to jump on the latest corporate-speak bandwagon, it’s not hard to see how a lead-nurturing workflow is a great asset for your inbound marketing and sales operations to have. A workflow produces real, tangible results that anyone who looks at your company’s bottom line can immediately understand.

The secret of an effective lead-nurturing workflow is shockingly simple. Lead-nurturing workflows “work” by widening your sales funnel and setting up automated emails and processes that allow you to stay in front of a prospect without continual manual effort.

Architecting a lead-nurturing workflow takes time, but putting the components in place just takes a little thought and planning. If you’re wondering how to nurture leads without being untrue to your brand, start with these seven sales funnel tips.

1. Identify the Current Customers in Your Database

Unless you incorporated yesterday, your company probably has a robust lead database. Why not put it to good use?

The best place to begin your lead-nurturing workflow is with your current customers. Match your database with prior sales data and other helpful information to determine who has purchased from your company in the past and who has yet to close the deal.

Since current customers have an ongoing relationship with your business, they’re more likely to be receptive or at least not actively opposed to marketing overtures. While you certainly shouldn’t neglect first-time prospects, you’ll likely achieve a higher marketing ROI by concentrating your early lead-nurturing efforts on these “proven” leads.

2. Determine Whether You’re Upselling or Cross-Selling

Once you’ve identified your pool of promising leads, determine whether you’ll be upselling or cross-selling to each. This helps you focus your marketing firepower most efficiently to maintain a consistent message throughout the entire lead-nurturing process.

The difference between upselling and cross-selling is clear. Upselling involves selling prospects or current customers – in this case, the latter – on higher-priced versions of the products or services they’re already using, or entirely new, also higher-priced products or services. In other words, upselling means convincing customers that they need to pay more for a better product range or mix.

Cross-selling involves selling customers on products or services related to the ones they’re already using. In other words, cross-selling means convincing customers to increase the total value they derive from your company by expanding and deepening their ties with it.

In both cases, you’re asking for a new sale. If you’re successful, your company stands to earn more revenue than before.

3. Work Out an Effective Communication Plan by Email or Phone

Once you’ve identified your prospects and figured out how you’re going to sell to them, work out an effective communication plan. You’ll need to use data from past sales processes to determine how best to approach each prospect.

The two best ways to nurture existing-customer leads through the sales pipeline and on a repeat basis are email marketing and direct phone contact. To some extent, your options will turn on the nature of your product mix and the proclivities of your customers. If you’re a B2B company that sells durable goods directly to professional decision-makers, you’ll likely take a different approach than a B2C company that sells recurring services or disposable goods.

4. Outline Content Offers to Market Additional Sales Offerings to Your Customers

Although your prospect-identification efforts and communication work are critical to your lead-nurturing workflow, it’s important not to neglect the other aspects of your content marketing strategy. In particular, regular content offers provide a powerful boost to your efforts to close “adjacent” sales and drive adoption of new products or services. Make sure to put new pieces of high-value content in front of your prospects early and often.

5. Set Up Your Lead-Nurturing Architecture

Your lead-nurturing architecture needs to go beyond the strategies outlined above. It should include:

• A call to action at the end of all conversion-centric pieces of content
• Landing pages to funnel interested customers into your pipeline using data-gathering forms
• Follow-up emails with conversion-centric pieces of content available for download to track lead generation

6. Draft Upsell Emails to Drive Customers to Click on the CTA

Upselling shouldn’t be a pushy affair. Whenever you identify a promising upselling target, draft compelling “upsell” emails that underscore your company’s value and nudge prospects toward conversion or “re-conversion.” Make sure each email includes a clear call to action that unambiguously asks prospects to click. Remember, you won’t close the deal if you don’t ask.

7. Schedule and Automate Cross-Sell and Upsell Emails

A well-oiled, lead-nurturing workflow doesn’t have to monopolize your time. Schedule and automate cross-selling and upselling emails days or even weeks in advance. Use an email marketing suite to keep your presentation consistent and maintain a regular delivery schedule that your customers will come to anticipate.

Want More Tips on How to Nurture Leads?

These seven sales funnel tips are sure to put you on the path to a powerful lead-nurturing workflow that produces verifiable results. However, there’s plenty more to learn about optimizing your sales pipeline and turning interested prospects into committed customers.

For more Inbound Marketing insights, download “The State of Inbound 2015” report for free.

In The Stack Fallacy: Why Big Companies Keep Failing Anshu Sharma writes about how difficult it is for a [big] company to move up the stack to adjacent businesses/product categories by building on their successful base. If you are competing against one or more incumbents, even if you believe they will ultimately fail because of this fallacy, it is still an incredibly challenging competitive situation. Using some typical weaknesses as your competitive strengths can increase your potential for success when being the next part of the stack a big company takes on.

Its been shown time and again that B2B marketers who have a documented content strategy will be more successful than those that do not. In spite of this, a recent report from the Content Marketing Institute shows that fewer marketers are documenting their strategies this year than did in 2015 (32 percent vs. 35 percent).

Image Source: Content Marketing Institute

The challenge is figuring out how to document your content strategy. In today’s post, we’re going to dive into just that and look at seven ways that you can document your strategy to ensure that your campaigns will have the greatest chance to succeed.

Six crucial ways you need to document your content strategy

1. Buyer personas

Having an in-depth understanding of your audience is the first step in creating a successful content strategy. There are key pieces of information you’ll need to collect to ensure that your content will resonate and build trust. At New Breed, we like to begin by creating a profile that includes an overview of the personality and ambitions of the persona, their pain points, key marketing messages and how we’ll identify them. That often looks something like this:

If you’re looking for more information on how to create buyer personas, I highly recommend checking out this quant-based article from Price Intelligently, The Crucial Steps to Quantifying Your Customer Personas.

2. Map content to the buyer’s journey

With your personas in place, it’s important that you understand what the decision-making process is like for each of them. The type of content that you’ll need to create for someone in the awareness phase is very different than the content a prospect about to make a final decision will need. To ensure that you have a detailed understanding of this, research and document exactly what this looks like for your customers:

3. Use persona Mad Libs

Another way that you can look at this process is by using persona Mad Libs. They are a great way to ideate on the specific topics that you can address in your various campaigns. Here’s an example of what this might look like:

You may have noticed that at this step specific keywords ideas are now being included, make sure to refer back to this as you are conducting your keyword research and creating your editorial calendar.

4. Campaign funnel

Next, it’s time to address your marketing goals and show how your campaign strategy will help your company be successful in reaching these. At New Breed, we look to track this through each stage of the funnel. Working backward from your revenue goals, you can divide by your conversion rate at each stage to see exactly how many opportunities, SQLs, etc. that you’ll need to generate with your efforts.

With that in place, then document the goal you need to hit at each stage of the funnel and the activities that will contribute to that goal.

5. Content program drill-down

With these goals and activities documented at a very high level, now move into the next level of granularity and define the key messages included in each campaign, and how they fit into any important product launches or broader trends in your space that you can capitalize. It’s also a great time to look at any influencer marketing targets that may be able to support these efforts, as well as how this fits into your SEO program.

The final piece that’s great to include in this are some simple productivity KPIs. For example, the number of blog posts and webinars that you’ll need to complete on a monthly or quarterly basis.

6. Editorial calendar

Finally, tie these disparate pieces together into the blogging editorial calendar that your team will be executing on. A thorough and accurate editorial calendar is a crucial content production management tool. Here’s an example of what this might look like in Excel, many companies will also manage this process in Trello or a specific software program, such as GatherContent.

Of course this careful planning is only the first stage of your inbound marketing process, but it has been proven one of the most important to ensure success so take the time to move through this process and document your plan at every stage. I know it can be exciting to jump right into keyword research or copywriting but you wouldn’t put shingles on your roof before you’ve finished the foundation of the house. The same goes for your content strategy.

Is your business documenting its’ content strategy? If so, what ways have you found to be most effective? Let us know in the comments below!

Every year, a brand promotes itself as a marketing game-changer that’s expected to revolutionize the industry and your business. For 2016, it’s been everything from virtual reality to updated mobile platforms. While these are great new trends, the biggest marketing game-changer for 2016 really is relationship marketing.

With more consumers relying on technology for information, relationship marketing presents new ways to connect with customers to build brand awareness. But what exactly is relationship marketing and how can it help your business?

Basics of Relationship Marketing

Back in the days before the internet and social media, businesses used marketing strategies for one reason: making sales. But things are changing in 2016.

While every business wants to optimize sales and lead generation, customers no longer want to be sold to. Instead, consumers are more interested in learning and getting to know your brand better.

On paper, it doesn’t seem like you can give the customers what they want and meet sales goals. However, you can with relationship marketing.

Relationship marketing is based on developing better customer experiences. Rather than a one-time engagement, it works to build a deeper, more meaningful connection with potential buyers to boost your business’ reputation as well as sales and lead generation.

How It’s Changing the Game

Relationship marketing is revolutionizing the industry in a way you wouldn’t expect.

According to Ambassador, customers are showing increased interest in a brand’s reputation. They want to know that your products are reliable. Most importantly, they want know if you’re going to do what it takes to satisfy them and that you’re willing to listen to their concerns. Relationship marketing lets consumers know that do you, in fact, care.

So how does this help your business succeed?

Rather than pushing hard selling to make goals, relationship marketing focuses on ensuring an exceptional experience on your website, social media, and blogs. By better engaging consumers on all accounts, you can build more favorable brand reputation. Satisfied customers are more willing to shop again as well as promote your business to others, which means higher organic traffic, lead generations, and sales

How to Implement Relationship Marketing

There tons of ways to use relationship marketing to promote your brand online. Here are a few to consider for your digital strategies in 2016.

Attract an Audience with Shareable Content

Creating shareable content for your target audience is the first step to building that emotional connection that comes with relationship marketing. It can be anything from videos to blog posts, but what you post has to be something consumers want to read and share with others.

To help you understand just how beneficial this can be, take a look at the marketing done for Star Wars: The Force Awakens. In the months leading to the movie’s release, social media posts, videos, and articles went viral regarding the movie all went viral. Design changes in mobile applications such as Google also gathered some buzz.

When the movie was released, it broke box office records. It had the biggest opening weekend with $529 million in box office sales, and it became the fastest film to gross $1 billion dollars.

Now I’m not saying its success all stemmed from its more personable marketing tactics, but they definitely helped. Digital Dealer states that their promotional success is because Disney’s marketing team simply posted what they knew the masses would like and want to share.

Let Consumers Know You’re Listening

As stated, customers want to know you’re listening. So if they comment on your social media accounts or company review sites, respond to them politely.

Addressing their concerns or just giving thanks for a great comment opens a two-way conversation and personal connection every customer wants. This builds your overall brand reputation, which makes it easier for consumers to become returning buyers and attract more potential leads.

Make It Personal and Follow Up

Relationship marketing doesn’t end once you generate a lead or complete a sale. Consumers want to know that you consider them more than a transaction, so you want to keep that connection open for as long as possible. Sending a personalized follow-up email is a great way to do just that.

You can send your customer an email asking them how they liked the product or service a week or so after the purchase. You can also give them a personalized list of some recommended goods you offer that can enhance what they initially bought.

Just keep in mind that you want the suggestions to coincide with what they purchased. For example, if they got a new car at your dealership, you can suggest some of the top accessories for that particular vehicle.

Hard selling is a thing of the past for business marketing. For 2016, relationship marketing is where you’ll find success. So incorporate ways to better engage with consumers into your digital marketing strategy.

Content marketers like to think we are important. We’ve changed the face of modern marketing, haven’t we? We create the content that drives awareness, builds relationships with prospects, and helps move them along their path to purchase.

Well, according to a study of marketing technology buyers by Walker Sands, we have a lot less influence than we might think. Let’s start at the top.

What’s New in Marketing Technology?

Where do buyers learn about new marketing technology? The top answers in the study are peers and colleagues (30%), news publications and blogs (20%), and search engines (13%). In a study like this, marketers should be looking for the term “vendor” in the answers. That’s how their marketing shows up. Not only is it not at the top of this list, but it’s not anywhere on the list.

Way at the bottom of the list are sales reps. Wait, you mean buyers are still finding out about new solutions from sales reps, and not marketers? Maybe there’s something to this whole relationship building thing after all.

Nothing created by us content marketers is credited with helping buyers discover new technology. But if you look closely at the top answers, there may be more to it than you think.

All three of the top answers are influenced by content created, published, and shared by content marketers to varying degrees. This means your content is not connecting directly with buyers above the level of awareness. Remember, though, that content marketing is not about your products or solutions, but about providing value to prospects in solving their business problems. If your content is truly serving that function, you would not expect it to show up as a source for new marketing technology.

Research Equals Awareness

The next phase of the buyer’s path is the research phase. This is when they know that they need a marketing technology solution, and they are actively looking for information. According to the survey, 29% of marketing technology buyers say that all vendor content (including the website, blog, reports, and white papers) are very influential in their research. An additional 60% say that this same content is somewhat influential in this phase. (By the way, peer recommendations led this list too, with 63% of buyers saying they were very influential.)

From a content marketing perspective, let’s focus on a few points. First, don’t get hung up on the fact that both the company website and the company blog were lumped into the same category. Use that to your advantage, and make sure there are clear connections between appropriate sections of the blog and the website.

This phase really is the heart of content marketing. This is when you are driving awareness and earning trust by providing educational content. The research phase is where awareness happens. (highlight to tweet) While the buyers may have heard of your company, this is when they start to understand your approach not just to marketing, but to prospects and customers in general.

Since all the sources of vendor content have the same influence at this stage, why not look at them as equal partners? The products details—what are often called feeds and speeds—are still important as buyers look to understand what your are offering. But the more general content on your blog and in ebooks and white papers are the things that form the bonds of the relationship.

Time to Buy

Finally, the study looked at what sources were most influential in making a purchase decision. It is no surprise that your content does not provide much at this point in the process. Only 5% of MarTech buyers choose blogs in this stage. Again, if you are doing your job as a content marketer, this is not surprising. Corporate blog posts are not about products. They should not be influencing the final purchase decision.

But note that 36% cite the website as most influential. This is another indication that strong connections should exist between your content marketing efforts and your product pages on the website.

As an example, we have three different connection points to link our blog posts, product pages, and resources about marketing automation. In addition to having a call to action to a single relevant resource guide, like our lead scoring guide, our blog posts also have a link to our marketing automation resource page that offers a huge variety of content.

The educational resources also appear on our product pages, so prospects can learn about the topic as they explore our offerings. We are able to track all of their activity in this process. This is one way that we support multi-step paths directed by customers, rather than pre-defined journeys.

And what was the most influential in the buying stage? Product demos. No matter how much trust you build and how strong of a relationship you create with the buyer through a variety of content, the product still has to serve their needs.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

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

It can be tempting around this time of year – just days into January, with another quarter ahead – to look back at the programs of months past and wipe the slate clean: to start campaigns afresh, if it means charting a newer, bolder course. Burning things down to rebuild; we’ve felt the impulse many a time ourselves. But while we empathize, we think there’s just as much to gain in revisiting and expanding on the mainstays – the basics, the fundamentals, the essentials.

Below are five of our evergreen tips for email, along with the assets necessary to put them into action. Give them a look, and put your best foot forward in 2016.

1. Show your subject lines love.

This may seem a straightforward enough suggestion, but it’s one that bears repeating, for the vital part subject lines play in the success of an email. Subject lines are there to entice, to encourage their reader to proceed further, and they deserve your utmost care and attention accordingly.

The best subject lines are short, to the point, benefit-focused, and honest about their email’s contents. Make them provocative with a clever turn of phrase or emphatic statement. Offer numbers, as these can bring shape and urgency to your message – a countdown of tips to try, a list of things to look for, etc.

Get to know subject lines like never before with our 12 Tips for Amazingly Effective Email Subject Lines.

2. Tailor your content to the individual.

Ours is a noisier world than most, and if marketers have any hope of getting themselves across to the prospects and customers they court, it’s incumbent on them to personalize their offers. They should think long and hard about their customers’ unique needs and expectations, and make every effort to draw on the data they’ve gathered on their buyers’ habits and preferences – extending surveys to those who’ve completed surveys previously, videos to those who share videos widely, and so on and so forth.

Learn to speak your buyers’ language with either one of these handy how-tos: 10 Ways to Nurture the Buyer’s Journey and Turn Your Website into a Lead Generation Machine.

3. Make mobile a priority.

The modern buyer accesses email across a wide array of devices – their mobile phones, their tablets, their desktops – and it’s crucial that you accommodate this multi-channel reality. After all: as of 2014, 53 percent of all opens occur on a mobile phone or tablet, in a 48 percent increase between quarters (Experian).

Look to make your emails responsive in their design (accessible on mobile phones and all other devices, with less overall effort). Keep your calls to action pithy. Invest in video where and when possible.

See firsthand How to Use Mobile Marketing to Generate Leads.

4. Segment your subscriber lists for greater variety and engagement.

As you set about personalizing your messaging, it’s crucial you make an equal effort to segment your lists – group like prospects with like, and leverage the behavioral data you’ve gathered (demographic and firmographic details) in your outreach, for a more tailored, intimate approach.

For a start, you’ll want to identify parameters for your ideal buyers: their job titles, education levels, departments, that kind of thing. From there, you might try tracing their online footprints, for a clearer picture of where they’ve been and where they’re headed – the pages they’ve visited, the webinars they’ve attended, the emails they’ve responded to.

Get more Best Practices in Segmentation today, and find out how to streamline your parameters further with Frictionless Forms and Better Landing Pages.

5. Be realistic about your goals and objectives.

As with any marketing program you oversee, your emails should keep to a concrete plan – one that accounts for your budget for the quarter, your overarching business objectives, your company’s bottom line. See to it in the new year that this plan more or less aligns with past efforts: consistent in its KPIs, realistic in its goals. It should be a strategy that won’t drastically change from month to month and that you easily can replicate as you forge ahead.

…and, measure what matters.

Start off your planning efforts strong in 2016 with these New Marketing Metrics for B2B, and dive even deeper into today’s world of data-driven marketing with our High Performance Marketing Guide (covering everything from staffing and team structures to budgets and analytics).

Over the last 7 years, I’ve worked with hundreds of marketers, startup founders, growth and sales hackers, and corporate digital executives.

And from big conferences and hands-on workshops, to webinars and intimate cocktail mixers, I’ve noticed they’re all starting to talk about the same thing – growth marketing.

Which is why this year, I promised myself something. I made a resolution. I reached out to all the industry movers and shakers I could and asked for their growth marketing secrets – the tactics that just worked.

Because whether you’re a startup building a foundation to attract (more) funding, or an enterprise creating a platform for innovation, you really need to learn how to grow. From Silicon Valley dorms to New York City boardrooms, digital marketing teams are becoming growth marketing teams.

And it’s no surprise.

Growth marketing isn’t just a start-up thing. Growth marketing is a marketing thing.

And like with most business sea changes, you’re either onboard or you’re overboard. It’s just a matter of time.

That said, even though we’re still in the (relatively) early stages of the growth marketing revolution, we can still make sense of it.

First, sales plays a large role in growth. Marketing, like any business unit, shouldn’t exist in a silo. If you don’t connect your marketing and sales teams, you’re not going to move the needle as far – or as fast – as you could be. Sales, data science, and technical tools will be a critical part of your growth strategy.

Second, most of the information out there on growth marketing is surprisingly easy to organize. The top strategies, tactics, and tips fit nicely into 3 categories: brand, process, and customer.

And today, I’m going to talk about those categories and the growth marketing secrets in them.
Let’s get started.

I. Brand

Whether it’s your personal brand, your company’s reputation, or your product’s image, it all starts with how people see you – including whether or not they can trust you.

Simply put, most startups focus too much on building a great product and too little on building a great brand. They might have the best product out there – they might even invent a new product category altogether – but they’ll never cash in if they can’t get people to take their cash out.

Unsurprisingly, many of the growth marketing lessons I learned revolved around branding. Some of the best ones are:

#1 Brand is Product

“Branding is something that starts when your first product launches. Your brand and product don’t compete. Your brand is your product.”

• Laura Busche, Brand Content Strategist, Autodesk

#2 Protect Your Brand’s Reputation

“You can have the best campaign idea, fabulous content, and great timing, but it won’t matter if you’re not protecting your clients’ data. It’s 2016. It’s time to take cyber security seriously and realize that data breaches negatively impact your brand’s reputation; they are the opposite of “growth.” Secure passwords and two factor authentication are no longer enough; you need a brand reputation management tool or service.”

• Natascha Thomson, CEO, MarketingXLerator

#3 Amplify Your Brand Awareness with Social Advertising

“Are you systematically tracking all the good things people say about you and your brand? You can amplify those words to your target audiences on Facebook, Google, and other networks for only a dollar a day. Nothing has more credibility than what others say about you. So shift your content marketing towards generating rave reviews instead of creating “advertising” content. Let your community of fans and customers do the work for you.”

• Dennis Yu, CTO, Blitz Metrics

#4 The Foundation for Growth is Excellence

“Quality service, quality product, and fair prices. That combination will always attract people. But more than that, it will inspire them to pass your name along to their friends, too. On Facebook, in person – everywhere. People love to tell their friends about great deals from quality businesses. And in today’s world of instant reviews and “search-about-you-first” consumer behavior, it’s critical that your entire footprint says quality. No one marketing tactic will build your business. no one product will solve your revenue issues. In the long run – and business is always a long game – quality wins.”

• Duane Forrester VP, Organic Search Operations, Bruce Clay, Inc.

#5 Build Relationships that Build Your Business

“Identify an area where developing new skills will make a significant impact on your business. Then identify a small group of accomplished people with these skills and build relationships with them. For instance, I finally became a book author and now believe I need to master promotional strategies to get it sold and read, so I’m working on connecting with non-fiction authors and book marketers who know the turf. When they’re carefully chosen and cultivated, new relationships are rewarding beyond measure.”

• Barry Feldman, Feldman Creative

#6 Invest in Your Social Capital, Not Your Social Media

“We often misinterpret the true value of social media. It is not about “likes,” comments, or money. It is all about relationships and people. It is not about business-to-consumer; it is not about business-to-business. It is people-to-people and how you make them feel.“

• Brian Solis, Principal Analyst, Altimeter Group

#7 Promote Others

“Promoting others is one of the fastest paths for growth for a startup. By promoting others, you’re giving them a reason to promote you – making the growth rate exponential. One way is to show how others have used your product to their benefit, which teaches people how to use your product and markets it at the same time.”

• Shira Abel, CEO, Hunter & Bard

#8 Find Your Story

“Find your story. Studies show that 63% of people remember stories and only 5% of people remember facts. When you want to educate or inspire your customer, give them a story – a pointed story that evokes an emotion (joy, fear, inspiration, etc.) that supports your call to action.”

• Olivia June, Co-Founder, VINA

#9 Leverage Your Passions

“You cannot avoid the social interaction of networking – especially in the Bay Area. Whether it’s going out to dinner with friends, running into an old acquaintance from college, seeing a co-worker outside of the office, or being introduced to a new connection, this city is an open arena for social networking, which makes it great. My advice is to not only attend networking events, but find some fun, exciting and interesting things to do – join clubs, groups, teams, or whatever it may be – and get involved with others who share similar interests. In essence, leverage your passions. In doing so, you directly leverage your networking.”

• Braydan Young, Account Executive, Gild

#10 Don’t Sell to Reporters; Share Relevant Information Instead

“Good PR isn’t about selling a reporter to write about you. It’s about relationships and being a part of the conversation. Load all the keywords about your industry and company into Google Alerts, then respond directly to the reporters when it’s relevant to them. Share your knowledge with them – when the time is right.”

• Julia Wells, Founder and Managing Director, CoveredCo

#11 Get Featured Everywhere You Can

“You’re an expert on your product, so tell everyone about it. Ask to be featured in publications and at conferences. You’ll be surprised at how many people say yes. The key is to get in front of as many interested eyes as possible, and optimize the buyer funnel to a conversion. Special attention should be paid to audience, non scalable activities and big picture analysis.”

• Clayton Wood, Founder & CEO, Identity Labs

#12 Leverage the Passion of Existing Users

“The source of organic growth is always the passion of existing users. Passion can be measured – it may be they actively promote you, it may mean they act as a case study, it may mean they get a tattoo of your logo on their arm. If you can rapidly learn which metrics tell you why your customers become passionate about you, you’ll have a great shot at rapid growth.”

• Jeremiah Gardner, Author of The Lean Brand, Principal, Moves The Needle

II. Process

Even a strong brand – along with a great product – isn’t enough. We’ve seen more than a few big brands and promising startups vanish because they couldn’t scale, manage their growth, or innovate when the time came.

And as most growth veterans would tell you – tactics and strategies are great, but they don’t lead to sustainable growth alone. They provide quick bursts of traffic – that’s what they’re for.

What you want is retention. Retention is king. And that’s why you should focus on building sustainable processes to attract, convert, and retain customers.

Some ideas for doing that are:

#13 Market to Influencers

“Group your potential customers around the problem you’re solving and determine the depth of problem. Next, figure out who influences the members of that group – within the problem’s context – and where they “hang out” together. Whether you’re doing customer development or trying to scale, leverage the relevant influencers and focus your marketing on where they are.”

• Brant Cooper, NYT Bestselling Author, Keynote Speaker; Founder, Moves the Needle

#14 Think Global, Act Local

“When you consider opening your service or product to international markets, think locally. Marketing is different from one culture to another. Google is far from being the top search engine in Russia, and Facebook isn’t even available in China. Your search, social, and content marketing strategies need to be unique for every new market you enter. Thinking locally is the first step to becoming a global brand.”

• Anji Ismail, CEO & Co-Founder, DOZ.com

#15 Measure Engagement and Influence

“When you go after bigger accounts, you can’t measure your marketing’s impact with just leads and opportunities. The larger the deal, the less you should think about measuring “marketing sourced pipeline” and the more you need to look at metrics like account engagement, revenue influence, and improved sales effectiveness.”

• Jon Miller, CEO and Co-Founder, Engagio

#16 Try. Fail. Learn.

“Don’t be afraid to fail. The only true failure for a lean startup is not trying new things. Nobody gets it right the first time – even if they say they did. Try. Fail. Learn. Repeat. But do it fast! That’s the lean approach.”

• Martyn Crew, Founder and CEO, Bootstrap Marketing

#17 Don’t Write Big Sales Playbooks.

“You absolutely need aggressive sales development – do multiple touches by email and phone for both inbound and outbound leads. But don’t write up big sales playbooks, because no one reads them. Sales development solutions are affordable for small teams and you’ll get more touches per representative (and thus more conversions) per week with them. And best of all, you won’t waste your time writing something nobody will read!”

• Nilay Patel, Co-Founder & CEO, Selligy

#18 Focus On How We Sell

“In this time of abundant, immediately available information, about every product and technology imaginable, how we sell is much more important than what we sell. The days of salesperson as purveyor of production information, features, and benefits is long gone.”

• Frank Slovenec, Partner, Jack B. Keenan

#19 Embrace Social Selling

“Use social networks like LinkedIn and Twitter to find and be found. The modern buyer is digitally driven, socially connected, mobile, and empowered. Social media is an additional channel for building relationships that drive revenue. Furthermore, you can use social media to shine the spotlight on your best salespeople – your customer advocates. Your employees need to look as good online as they do offline, so have them optimize their social profiles to attract customers. If you suck offline; you’ll suck more online. #Don’tSuck.”

• Jill Rowley, Keynote Speaker, Social Selling Evangelist, Startup Advisor, Investor

#20 Drill Smarter

“Selling a startup’s product is like prospecting for oil. And it is tempting, when you see oil seep into the first well you dig, to just keep drilling. But that’s dangerous. To scale, you need to tap a gusher. That first taste of oil – like a great customer call, for example – can keep you from moving on to where you should really be drilling.”

• Ryan Nichols, CEO, Tylr Mobile (ex-Appirio)

#21 Create Your Moment of Truth and Make It Count

“Create a reason for why a customer just has to hear you out, something so compelling, that stokes their curiosity so much, they can’t help themselves but meet with you. Then you have a single moment of truth to convince your prospective buyer you can really improve the way they do something. The key to this moment of truth is to have a well-honed and repeatable way of showcasing the value of your product or solution – including product demos, ROI stories, passionate quotes, and statistics. The more you deliver this personalized story consistently, the better you will get at it – and the more business you will close. Focus on making these moments of truth count.”

• Jim Benton, Co-Founder & Chief Business Officer, ClearSlide, Inc.

#22 Find Compatible Sales Talent

“Engineers do a great job of creating startups with strong initial traction. But too often they don’t understand that a “one-sized-fits-all” approach to sales just doesn’t work. They make the mistake of hiring “seasoned and experienced sales veterans” from traditional and established tech companies, which is usually too much too soon and results in bad outcomes and lost time. Founders should consult with sales veterans that understand the startup landscape and can recommend near, middle, and long-term sales plans and strategies for a fixed fee or company stock tied to specific deliverables and milestones. Just because a sales strategy worked at Oracle or Salesforce doesn’t mean it will work at your startup.”

• Dwight Foster, Vice President of Channel Sales and Business Development, Insightly

#23 Go Niche

“Startups need to master niche media. There are thousands of journalists and bloggers covering every aspect of technology, but only a handful matter to your audience and to your business. Use hashtags on social media to identify the keywords your audience users to share their hopes and frustrations. Then look for publications and journalists who use these industry-specific words in their stories. These are the niche media outlets you have to target, because they’re the ones your customers and prospects go to for relevant, actionable information.”

• Chikodi Chima, Growth Expert and Founder, Moonshot

#24 Align Your Paid Search and Social Advertising Campaigns

“Organize your strategy into 4 components to help analyze and optimize everything. Paid search and social media advertising can be extremely competitive. And don’t forget to monitor competitive keywords, ads, and landing pages.”

• Jamie Smith, CEO, Strategy Analyzer | VP of Growth, iSpionage

#25 Develop a Video Marketing Strategy

“Leverage video marketing to promote your startup company or product. YouTube is the second most popular search engine in the world and videos can even rank on Google’s first page. If you’re not sure what to make your video about, try a video business card, client testimonial, or “how-to” instructions on the best uses of your product or service. Then promote your video on all of your social media accounts – from Facebook to Instagram – to share your video with the word.”

• James Hickey, President, JMH Marketing Group

#26 Focus and Clarity

“When thinking about business opportunities, cultivate an objective, impartial mindset that takes everything – from business factors to personal ones – into consideration. We’ll call this mindset “clarity.” From there, you can figure out what the right opportunity for you is and push toward it, adjusting and optimizing as necessary to realize it. We’ll call that push “focus.” First clarity, then focus. Because without clarity, you’ll likely to go a long way in the wrong direction.”

• Aaron Kahlow, Founder and CEO, Mindful Living Institute

#27 Sales is the Art of the Next Steps

“The best way to keep your sales moving forward is to always have a clear action for your prospect to take next. When there’s no clear next step, the sale stalls or falls apart. But when they know exactly what to do next, you’ll get to a decision quickly and count the win or move on to find the next opportunity.”

• Liston Witherill, Chief Builder, Good Funnel

#28 Growth is All About Retention and Engagement

“Growth is meaningless without retention and engagement. If you don’t nail the reason why users would continue to use your product habitually, your product is just another leaky bucket.”

• Nir Eyal, author of “Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products”

#29 Before Growth Focus on Fundamentals

“Like conversion rate optimization before it, growth hacking case studies can sometimes blind practitioners to the fundamentals of growth by focusing too much attention on tricks and shortcuts. Airbnb’s famous Craigslist hack would never have worked if Airbnb was not fundamentally a novel service that offered a real advantage over traditional lodging. Undifferentiated Product + Growth Hack = slow growth. Innovative Product + Growth Hack = viral growth. Don’t skip step one.”

• Forrest Dombrow, President, Solve Sales

#30 Leverage Other People’s Newsletters

“Every industry has a few luminaries and many more popular bloggers and other influencers, all of whom have regular newsletters that reach many thousands of readers. Leveraging their newsletter’s reach gets the word out about your product to a very engaged audience. Offering an something special for the newsletter is incentive to both the sender and reader and can drive some serious growth.”

• Dean Levitt, Chief Of Culture, Mad Mimi, LLC

#31 Apply Keyword Research Fundamentals

“Apply keyword research fundamentals (SEO and paid search) to your content marketing calendar, but don’t forget to consider your sitemap, hierarchy, and navigation elements (what your site looks like), and make sure you have the right words represented on your pages where people are likely to click, with a mix of high volume + high affinity to your qualified audience.”

• Chris Boggs, Founder, Web Traffic Advisors

#32 Keep Track of Your “First Major Win-State”

“In designing your campaigns, you must keep track of your “First Major Win-State” – the first point where users say, “This is awesome!” Once you identify that point, count how many minutes it takes for a user to reach it, because every second before that is a drop-out. And don’t forget to ask your users to tell their friends about you and rate their experience – right after your “First Major Win-State” victory.”

• Yu-Kai Chou, Pioneer and International Keynote Speaker on Gamification

#33 Grow the Right Audience

“Growth is about more than just acquiring users. It’s about acquiring the right users – the ones who will engage and convert and generate revenue for years to come. If you want to find more of the right kind of users, try talking to your best customers right now. Ask them where they heard about your product, what they expected from it when they started, and what they’re getting out of it. Then use that information to find better channels and the right messaging to attract more people like them.”

• Laura Klein, Principal, Users Know & Author of UX for Lean Startups

#34 Act on Your Analytics

“In the pursuit of growth, one of the most important analytical capabilities you must have in your startup is the power to segment users by the actions they have or have not performed in the product. The ability to act on user behavior data can have an absolutely transformational impact on your growth trajectory.”

• Jack Mardack, Head of Growth, Chartcube

III. Customer

And finally, we come to the customer. The person you’re selling to. The one who’s going to use your product – and love it or hate it. The one who ultimately determines whether your business makes it or doesn’t.

It’s not hard to see that we should take the customer into consideration. But sometimes we could use a little help on how to get it right.
Here are a few tips:

#35 Focus on Solving Your Customer’s Problems

“Stop thinking about your business. The absolute focus must be on problems that your potential already customers have, and how you might help them solve them. The are not looking for your features or “solution” – they are trying to avoid or minimize a specific pain.”

• Tim Ash, CEO, SiteTuners, bestselling author of “Landing Page Optimization, Chair of Conversion Conference”

#36 Know Your Customer – Intimately

“Before you think about funnel optimization, A/B testing or distribution, take the time to know your customer – intimately. Find them, talk to them, be where they are. By truly understanding their feelings, behaviors and attitudes, you can build better products and tell a story that will resonate with them.”

• Hana Abaza, VP Marketing, Uberflip

#37 Find Early Adopters and Turn Them Into Brand Evangelists

“When building out your initial user base, find people who are interested in your product or service and connect with them. How do you do that? Find people who commented on related articles, tweeted or retweeted about the topic, shared a post on Facebook or Instagram, etc. Then follow up with them on their platform of choice and engage them. These people have demonstrated interest in your product/service and can become your first adopters, evangelists, or VIPs (if they are press or influencers).”

• Adelyn Zhou, Founder and CEO, Alight Labs

#38 Become a Tribe Leader

“Turning your audience, or email list, into a tribe – a community united around a central topic – will build your brand better than any marketing strategy you could set forth. Let people join together to talk about a problem or solution, and you will learn their biggest challenges, their objections, how they speak about the solution, and, most importantly, how to better serve them. ROI, NPS, referral rates, LTV will all go up, while CAC drops. There’s nothing more powerful to your business than leading your community.”

• Derric Haynie, CEO, SplashOPM

#39 Know Your Buyer

“The company that understands their buyers best will earn their business and their loyalty. Growing your business in 2016 isn’t about being the loudest brand on every channel possible, but about using sales and marketing to demonstrate that you know your buyer better than the competition (and that you’ve got the product and experience to match).”

• Katie Martell, Co-Founder and CMO, Cintell

#40 Ask Your Users How They Learned About You

“At Bunny Inc., we directly ask every user how they learned about us and we leave the answer field open-ended (no bullet points). This helps us discover new channels for customer acquisition and to understand which acquisition channels are performing the best.”

• Jun Loayza, Chief Growth Officer, Bunny Inc.

#41 Viral Growth

“When thinking of viral growth, don’t fall for the trap of thinking that this simply means getting lots of shares on social media. This is simply one of 12 types of viral marketing that you can build deep into the bones of your product to help recruit your loyal users to recruit even more loyal users for you. Things like making your product embeddable, inviting friends or colleagues to collaborate on a project using your product, or anything else that adds value to the user for inviting others can skyrocket your growth.“

• Travis Steffen, Head of Growth, AutoLotto, Inc

#42 Lower Friction to Increase Growth

“It doesn’t matter how much money you spend on marketing; the secret weapon people don’t think about is how long it takes to sign up for a service. The less take it takes, the higher the growth.”

• Michelle Zatlyn, Co-Founder and CEO, Cloudflare

#43 Address Users’ Objections

“Ask users who say they would not buy your product what their objections are during moderated user testing. Dispel, or at least address, those objections explicitly in your home page or landing page copy. Watch conversions increase dramatically.”

• George Revutsky, Founder, ROIworks Digital / Chief Merketing Officer, Soothe

#44 Learn What Your Customers Love and Hate

“Building a demand for your product can take time. To speed this up, start right now to build thought leadership content (blog posts, white papers, etc.) and network with experts in your industry to learn what customers love and hate in your business niche. Most importantly, make sure everyone knows who you are.”

• Michelle Regner, CEO and Co-Founder, Near-Me.com

#45 Keep it Simple

“At the core, marketing is not that complicated. We are the bridge between the audience and the brand. What makes it complicated is that we get in our own way and we want to talk about ourselves. Marketing gets really simple when you understand what you can bring that your audience really wants. If you live through that lens, 50% of your problems go away right then and there.”

• Todd Wilms, VP Corporate Marketing, VERISIGN

#46 Build Organic Growth First

“There will always be dozens of email marketing and other software vendors trying to get your business as you grow. Before you go and burn $12k or $24k signing up for a 1-year contract with them, be sure that you know how to grow your SaaS company by 5-7% week-over-week organically. Until you reach that point, it could be detrimental to your company to spend this budget..”

• Adam Metz, VP, TerrAvion

#47 Measure the Product Fit First, Then Focus on Growth

“Ask your users a question: “How would you feel, if you could no longer use product or service?” If you get to 40% percent of “very disappointed” responses, you have a marketable product. After this is done, you have to understand why it is a must-have product for your customers to be able to create a machine to deliver that value”

• Sean Ellis, Founder and CEO, GrowthHackers.com / Product and Growth Advisor, KISSmetrics

#48 Growth Is All About Word of Mouth

“At the end of the day, growth is all about word of mouth. People tell their friends about your product after they have a great experience using it. Before you invest in testing your viral funnels, digging into your SEO strategy and spending precious dollars on marketing campaigns, make sure that you have a product that delights your user.”

• Zack Onisko, VP, Hired, Inc.

IV. Wrapping Up

Though all these strategies and tactics will do great things for your growth – and don’t forget who told you about them! – it won’t be enough. Nothing will, sadly.

Unless you want your company to reach a certain point and then stop. Just stand still. Stagnate. Lose out to a hungry young competitor.

No, you have to keep growing. Keep moving. Growth marketing – like regular marketing, or sales, or accounting – is never really over. It’s a way of life.

But then again, that’s a good thing. It gives you something to keep working on. It gives you a job, too. One that can’t be automated.

However, it does require you to stay current on what’s happening in the industry, because growth hacks that work now may not work tomorrow, and new opportunities pop up all the time.

Be sure to follow marketing blogs, attend conferences, and catch cocktail mixers and webinars when you can. In fact, there’s a Get Traction: The Virtual Growth Event coming up soon you might like to look into.

But whatever you do, whatever resources you use, you have to keep learning. And don’t worry – you won’t be alone. I’ll be there right with you.

And all your competitors will be too.

Ever have a resolution to start going to the gym, eat healthy, spend more time with your family, or begin a home renovation project? If you have, chances are those resolutions remained resolutions; that is, things you considered doing, intended on doing, or perhaps even committed to do, but didn’t. But why? As it turns out, science may have the answer!

On July 5th 1687, English physicist and mathematician, Sir Isaac Newton, first published his Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, describing his now famous three laws of motion. Newton’s first law of motion is related to a physical property of all matter known as Inertia. The concept of inertia explains why an object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction, unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.

While Newton missed witnessing the mechanics of modern day corporations by a couple hundred years, applying his first law to the business world may sound something like this: In managing their operations, companies will tend to employ the same practices, policies, and technologies they’ve always used, unless a large enough disruptive force causes them to change. In essence, inertia (or status quo bias) is the enemy of the modern day sales and marketing machine.

So what does inertia sound like? Salespeople are all too familiar with customer refrains like “that’s not a priority for us now,” or “I don’t think we have the money for that,” or “what we’re doing now isn’t perfect, but it’s working for now;” all manifestations of the inertia with which businesses operate. “Software? Technology? Process change? Don’t need ‘em! We can more or less get by on what we’re doing.” But there are signs of hope! Every now and then, our sales and marketing efforts are compelling enough to break through the armor and minimally disrupt the inertia of our target customer.

The ever-growing and sophisticated online marketplace of social advertising, retargeting, and multi-screen engagement provides ample opportunity for potential buyers to raise their virtual hand. If one of your audience members visited your website, downloaded a white paper, or clicked on your Facebook ad, chances are they were injected into the top of your sales funnel as a Marketing Qualified Lead (or MQL — a lead which is more likely to become a customer compared to other leads). MQL’s can be defined on the basis of key demographics, online behaviors, or other related activities. In general, a lead must meet a minimum threshold for one or many of these criteria in order to be considered bona fide. The problem with MQL’s is that all too often, that minimum threshold is simply too low.

Consider the journey of a buyer for your products as being analogous to the mercury rising in a thermometer. The zero mark would represent a buyer with no level of interest. Ten would describe a raving advocate, and eight would be the level of interest required for the buyer to make a purchase. Now suppose that buyer gets injected into your sales funnel as an MQL with an interest level of two. That means your sales and marketing efforts need to ratchet that buyer up six levels of interest in order to convert them into a customer. Certainly not impossible, but that large inertial gap may result a longer sales cycle and high calorie conversion exercise. But what if you were able to inject that buyer into the funnel as a six? The smaller internal gap would provide a much more favorable starting point and gateway to higher conversion rates. So how can higher levels of engagement be achieved?

In the spirit of fighting science with science, some of the best sales and marketing organizations in the world use tactics rooted in basic psychology and human behavior to overcome buyer inertia and generate higher levels of lead interest. Invoking reciprocity, establishing credibility, leading with values instead of products, adopting a customer-centric approach, and even refining your pitch are all things companies can do to reduce the status quo bias of prospective buyers.

The key is, whichever tactic you use, be conscious that inertia — the true enemy of sales — is a powerful force that must be met with a thoughtful, customer-centric approach.

Want more tips for how you can close more deals in 2016? Download the free Salesforce e-book.

In 1997, Billy Beane became the General Manager of the Oakland A’s. The A’s had the lowest payroll in Major League Baseball and in the four full seasons before Beane became GM, the A’s averaged less than 70 wins a season. Beane knew if he was going to build a contending team, he would not be able to do it the traditional way.

Beane’s strategy -- as depicted in the 2011 film, “Moneyball” -- has traversed beyond the world of baseball to nearly all sectors of business and has become synonymous with making data-driven decisions.

The tenet Beane and the A’s followed enabling them to average more than 93 wins per year for the following eight years had two components:

• Discard highly valued “vanity” metrics that did not have a significant impact on winning baseball games.
• Identify different metrics -- preferably those no one else was paying attention to but which had a significant impact on winning baseball games.

If Billy Beane were to take over a sales organization today, he would feel like he’d traveled back by about 20 years.

Sales organizations today are dominated by metrics, but they’re rarely data-driven and even take actions counterproductive to the outcomes they desire. This results in higher costs, burnt out reps, high turnover, and frustrated customers.

When noted economist Steven Levitt published the book “Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything,” he shared the disproportionate impact structural incentives have on the behavior of individuals and their output.

Structural incentives are those created by the structure of what’s being done. They are often referred to as the law of unexpected consequences and are generally more powerful than explicitly stated incentives.

Structural incentives are also one of the primary causes of difficulty in change management. In sales, the most common structural incentives are the metrics used to assess performance -- whether tied to compensation or not.

The following five metrics are among the most common and destructive to building a high-performance sales organization.

1. Call activity

The activity metric has been a bad metric from the beginning. Born from the belief “sales is a numbers game,” the idea behind tracking this metric is that “more activity is better.”

The only statistical relevance call activity has on sales success is there’s an activity level that’s too low and one that’s too high. The difference between too little and too much is often quite wide -- so, this isn’t a particularly actionable metric.

There’s only one valuable use for call activity. Over time, reps demonstrate a pattern of activity levels that tend to correlate to their success. So, it can be a useful, personal coaching data point to note if a rep’s results diminish.

2. Appointments booked

For years, I said call activity was the worst metric used in sales. It’s been overtaken by appointments booked. This metric was initially designed to address the problem of measuring just activity -- then, structural incentives kicked in.

Made worse by the massive growth of the sales development function, the world became dominated by "Can I have 15 minutes of your time?"

Here's the problem with appointments: they are really expensive. There's the direct cost, the opportunity cost, the downstream cost, and the bottleneck.

Today, sales reps sell appointments creating tremendous waste for sellers and buyers alike.

3. Revenue potential in pipeline to quota ratio

Most sales organizations operate on a 3x out 4x model, meaning the total potential value of all of the opportunities in the sales pipeline should be three to four times quota.

This creates two problems:

• It endorses inaccurate pipeline estimations
• It encourages reps to keep deals in the pipeline that should be eliminated

It also creates the structural incentives that favor reps sticking with low-quality opportunities, instead of weeding them out in order to free capacity for higher-value opportunities.

4. Closing rate/win rate

Closing and win rates are useful for organizational planning and resource allocation. They are not particularly effective for assessing salespeople.

When closing/win rates are used as key performance metrics, they incentivize two destructive behaviors:

• Reps often filter out reject leads that aren’t ready to buy -- even if they have greater potential.
• Once a deal is added to the pipeline, the metric creates an incentive to keep working the deal because that means they don't have to record it as closed/lost.

5. Sales cycle time

This metric is cited often as a key metric for the effectiveness of the overall sales process. Sales blogs and research announcements regularly proclaim sales organizations are becoming less effective because sales cycle times are getting longer.

Unfortunately, the pressure to reduce sales cycle times is a major cause of the biggest challenge they face: the increased independence of the buyer’s journey.

The easiest way to shorten the sales cycle is to start it as closely as possible to a purchase. For several decades, observers have discussed the need for sellers to stop pushing so hard for the sale and align with the buyer.

Little progress has been made here and the focus on sales cycle time is a major reason why. What’s sad is that despite this focus, sales cycles are still getting longer.

How to Determine Effective Key Metrics for Growth

So, what would “Moneyball” look like if we were to apply it to the sales process? What are the right metrics to track?

Unfortunately, there’s no one answer to that question. There’s a paradox surrounding key metrics that boils down to this: the easier it is to identify and/or track a metric, the less valuable that metric typically is.

This means you must be purposeful in determining the metrics you track and designing the dashboards you use to monitor them.

To do so effectively, follow these three rules:

1. Conduct an analysis of what causes sales

There’s a famous saying in business circles that goes, “What you measure gets done.” For the most part, this statement is true. What’s missing is an additional clause warning, “So, be careful what you measure.”

I’ll spare you the lesson on statistics, but the key to creating metrics that lead to predictable results is to make sure what you track is a cause of the outcome you desire and that it doesn’t merely correlate or coincide with it.

While this lesson is certainly not new, very few organizations actually stop to figure out or even think about what causes sales for them.

If you’re new to this type of analysis, start with a simple one-step process. Answer the question, “What is the number one item that increases the probability a sale occurs?”

For example, I ran this analysis several years ago and we discovered a company fitting our ideal client profile that involved us in an assessment of their growth strategy was our primary causal driver.

As you become more advanced, you’ll be able to build up what I call a “causal chain” that’s typically three to five steps. Here are ours:

• A meaningful conversation with a primary or secondary persona
• A high probability indicator (HPI) aligning with our value proposition
• Sponsorship from an authoritative primary persona
• Completion of our assessment process
• The cost of the problem is a multiple of the investment (varies by offering)

2. Don’t confuse measurement with management

I’ve studied thousands of sales and marketing organizations, and I’m convinced the reason many bad metrics exist is because managers regularly try to use metrics to replace the role of process and management.

It would be easy for us to give our reps a target/quota for each part of the chain, reward them for hitting targets, and manage by the numbers. It would be easy -- but not very effective.

This strategy might work for a short period of time, but reps would likely forget the “why” behind the metrics.

To build an effective, data-driven approach to sales, build your key metrics on those components the rep has the ability to strongly influence and manage the ones that don’t.

To finish this example, our reps have quotas on the number of meaningful conversations, sponsorship, and assessments they conduct.

Reps don’t control what problems exist or the costs of those problems. But they can execute a process allowing answers to those questions to be uncovered.

3. Realize key metrics change over time

A business is a living organism. As the business changes, so does the market it’s focused on. This means what you measured yesterday might not be what matters today.

If you’re in high-growth mode, update this analysis every three to six months. If you’re in a more mature growth phase, update it at least annually.

The single most important thing salespeople do that effects sales productivity is the quality – or the lack thereof – of the conversations they have with customers and prospects.

CSO Insights’ 2015 Sales Performance survey showed that only 54.6% of the B2B salespeople achieved their quota last year. Don’t tell that to all the millennials coming into the workforce. They grew up with everyone getting a trophy, just for participating! They’re going to be pretty disappointed to find out that 45% of the salespeople didn’t get a trophy last year. What’s worse is that the number of reps achieving quota fell for the 4^th year in a row from 63% in 2012 to 55% in 2015, a drop of 14.5% in 4 years.

Two of the most respected analysts in the sales community, CSO Insights and SiriusDecisions, provide us with these insights concerning the decline in sales productivity:

• The #1 inhibitor to achieving quota is the inability of the sales rep to articulate value (SiriusDecisions)
• The leading factor is poor value communications (CSO Insights)
• 71% of sales reps say they don’t have the knowledge to sell better (CSO Insights)

The sales productivity problem is not “new news” to sales leaders. In 2014, they invested over $56B in training and technology to turn it around ($23.9B on CRM software, $20B on sales training, $12.8B in sales acceleration software). But as mentioned above, this $56B investment did little to stop the decline – sales productivity dropped in the following year (2015) with only 54.6% of salespeople making quota.

Buyers perform a great deal of research online. Because the buyer is so well educated through their research, many surveys state that 60% or more of the buying process has been completed prior to meeting with salespeople. When the salesperson does get involved, they need to be very well prepared to facilitate the completion of the last 40% of the buying process.

It’s that last 40% where the conversation, the dialogue, between the prospect and the salesperson is so critical. The best way to turn off a prospect is to talk about your company, your product, your features, your prices. Remember, the prospect already knows all about your company and product from the website. The prospect wants an entirely different type of conversation. They want a value-add conversation.

Here are some of the conversational elements that salespeople need to understand and be prepared to speak about in order to have a value-add conversation.

Buyer’s Goals, Persona, and Industry – Salespeople need to understand with whom they’re having a conversation. The buyer’s goals and objectives will largely vary by industry and role the buyer plays in the decision process. It’s very difficult for you to be proficient given when you’re calling on multiple personas/roles in multiple industries, often selling different products or solutions each time. As the surveys state, 71% of salespeople claim they don’t have the knowledge to have these conversations and therefore “fall back” on what they know: product, features, price.

Messages – Yes, the prospect has done the online research, but does everyone involved fully understand your key solution messages? Don’t assume this is the case – discuss and verify.

Insights – Insights represent information the salesperson can provide that the customer wasn’t aware of and wouldn’t normally find in their online research. Providing the “story behind the story” concerning a customer’s success using your product is a good example of insights that the well-prepared salesperson could bring to the table.

Questions – All value-add conversations have questions going back and forth between the buyer and the seller. Salespeople need to know the questions they need to ask as well as the questions that will be asked by the buyer. And it’s not enough to simply know which questions will be asked, but you must understand why a particular question is being asked. Truly understanding the meaning behind the question can bring valuable insights to both the buyer and seller as they conduct their value-add conversation.

Competitive Positioning – The buyer has options. The salesperson needs the knowledge and skills to position their solution strengths in contrast to the competitors being evaluated. They need to listen to the buyer’s statements to see if they’ve been “incorrectly” influenced by a competitor and, specifically, which competitor. Salespeople need the proper skills training to ensure they’re effective with their competitive positioning and never directly disparage the competition.

Objections – To support a good value-add conversation and advance the sale, you need to understand the objections that might be asked and the best options for addressing them. Objections will vary based on buyer role, industry, and product, and not surprisingly, objections with vary depending on where the buyer is in their decision cycle. As an example, objections about risk and ways to mitigate risk will come up at the end of the buying process versus the beginning of the process. The ability to handle objections will invariably speed up or slow down the process, as well as win or lose the sale. Objection handling is always a strong characteristic of top salespeople.

Surveys of B2B sales organizations consistently show that out of 5 opportunities you will typically see: 1 win, 1 loss to a direct competitor, and 3 losses to “no decision.” Similarly, CSO Insights sales performance surveys state that 60% of all opportunities are lost to “no decision.” Surveys of executives who decided to make a “no decision” – or, said differently, opted to stay with the “status quo” – state that it was because the salespeople couldn’t explain the value associated with their products or services.

Changing the conversation

People like to buy; they don’t like to be sold to. It’s the same thing with conversations. People like to have valuable, two-way conversations. They don’t want to sit in presentations where all they will hear is about your company, your product, your features. They already know all that and they’re OK with it. That’s why they decided to meet with you in the first place.

I think it’s fair to say that sales leaders will spend upwards of $50B this year on products and services to improve their productivity problems. Whatever you decide to do in your company in 2016, I implore you to ask the question, “What are we doing to support our salespeople in having value-add conversations with their prospects and customers?” Are you investing more this year to generate more leads to give to the salespeople…and then more in technology to speed-dial those leads…hoping, just hoping, that your sales team can convert them to opportunities and then on to closed-won sales? Perhaps your organization would benefit more by equipping the sales team with the knowledge, content and tools to have valuable and effective sales conversations.