• Building wealth often takes smart saving strategies, but there are creative ways to achieve millionaire status more quickly, too.
• Some people get there by going viral, while others get there by selling uncommon things in new ways.
• We took a look at 11 different ways people creatively made $1 million.

Getting rich is a long-term game ... for the most part.

While your best bet to accumulate wealth is to curb your spending, start investing, and develop "rich habits," there are some less conventional ways to make millions relatively quickly. 

Consider those who took advantage of social media and launched their own YouTube channel, like PewDiePie, or created a viral meme, such as the founder behind "I can has a cheezburger." Some also got creative when starting their own retail business — one kindergarten teacher sold lesson plans online, one woman sold secondhand clothes on an app, and one college student sold pixels for advertising space online.

Read more: 11 outrageous ideas that made people ridiculously rich

There are plenty of means by which you can grow your bank account if you think outside of the box. No guarantees these strategies will work for you, but here are 11 creative ways people achieved millionaire status.

Alyson Shontell and Kathleen Elkins contributed to a previous version of this article.

SEE ALSO: 10 teenagers who are probably making more money than you

DON'T MISS: Meet the world's richest millennials, who have a collective net worth of more than $235 billion

Scott DeLong launched a personal blog that was generating major income within eight months.

In mid-2013, Scott DeLong launched a one-person blog, ViralNova, and put a few Google ads on each page. Eight months later, he was generating six figures a month and millions of dollars annually, without a full-time staff or raising any money from outside investors.

ViralNova capitalized on social-friendly stories with catchy headlines that would explode on Facebook, and within a year, the site had grown to about 100 million monthly readers.

In 2015, DeLong sold his website to digital-media company Zealot Networks in a cash-and-stock deal that could be worth as much as $100 million if Zealot appreciates in value.

Dong Nguyen created a viral app in three days.

It only took Dong Nguyen three days to create the most popular game of 2014, "Flappy Bird."

Nguyen said he was making as much as $50,000 a day on his free app by running a tiny mobile ad banner at the top of the game, meaning he only needed to keep it in the App Store for 20 days to make $1 million.

That's just what he did. After about a month, Nguyen infamously pulled "Flappy Bird" from the App Store at the height of its popularity because he felt his game was "too addicting."

Amanda Hocking became a best-selling author by publishing books on Amazon Kindle — without a publishing deal.

Amanda Hocking was the best-selling "indie" writer on the Kindle store a few years ago, meaning she didn't have a publishing deal and got to keep 70% of her book sales. She was selling about 100,000 copies a month at $1 to $3 a pop, which set her on track to pocket a few million dollars.

She's not the only one making millions publishing Kindle books. Bob Mayer and Jen Talty built a seven-figure indie publishing house in just two years, which they detail in their book, "How We Made Our First Million on Kindle."

This post also appears on Wearable.ai, which interviews the innovators in wearable computing, IoT and AR. For inquiries, please email publisher Mark Brooks.

The market is flooded with the latest apps, the newest wearables, and spectacular innovations in the Internet of Things. There is no end in sight for this explosion of technology designed to make our lives easier, healthier, and more fulfilled.

The biggest problem, however, is that there are so many particular instances of innovation, differing by platform, operating system, or API design, that it is all but impossible to use them together in a seamless way.

We reached out to Linden Tibbets, CEO and cofounder of IFTTT, to find out how the automation service hopes to bridge the gap between all these new connected devices. IFTTT (which stands for "if this, then that" and rhymes with "gift") allows users of connected devices and digital services to easily integrate them across platforms—for example, sharing your Jawbone Up's sleep record with your Twitter followers, or saving YouTube videos to your Pocket app to watch later. Each of these combinations is called a "recipe"—a set of instructions others can pick up if they want to make the same connection between app or device.

In this interview, he explains his motivation for creating IFTTT, how the platform is altering the way we view the world of IoT, and how IFTTT hopes to ease us into the future.

Mark Brooks: How did IFTTT come about?

Linden Tibbets: My background is both in computer science and design. I was working as an interaction designer and was really struck by the amount of what I call "creative control" people exercise in their physical world every day. We are constantly modifying objects in our environment, using them in small ways outside the range by which the original designers of those objects intended.

For example, putting a pencil behind your ear, putting your jacket on the back of your chair, or using your hip to open the door instead of your hand. We do this stuff thousands of times per day and totally take it for granted. Really, what we are doing is effectively programming our environment, making it better suited to meet our needs. 

In that same level of creative control, this ability to adapt your environment to you needs, was really missing as things went digital and crossed over into the realm of Facebook and Salesforce and connected light bulbs.

That was the sort of insight that drove everything we've done since then. How do we make this digital world just as malleable and fluid to allow individuals and developers to be extremely creative with how objects and digital services work together in the digital world?

MB: How many users do you have currently?

LT: We don't share current numbers, but to give you a sense of scale, folks on IFTTT have created over 31 million recipes to date. We run about 35 million recipes per day, so think of that as combinations of saving files to Dropbox, turning off your lights at night, letting you know when it's going to rain tomorrow, etc.

We have over a million unique individuals that have a recipe do something for them each day. So, we've hit a pretty large scale considering how many connected devices and services are out there today.

MB: Who is your typical user?

LT: Right now, it's typically someone who's looking to get something more out of the services they currently have. Folks that have some deep experience with one or two or three individual services, these could be services like Gmail or Google Calendar, Facebook, or perhaps someone who is big into sports and ESPN, or wearables, like someone who has been wearing their Fitbit everyday for a year, or someone who just got a new Nest thermostat and has some really neat ideas about what they want to do above and beyond what you can do with just that individual item or service.

So, typically they are folks that have deep expertise within each one of those service areas, and you'd actually be surprised, that is just about everybody. Anyone who is using the internet today has a set of things that they understand at a really nuanced level and is capable of taking that further.

MB: Are there any particularly large communities that you would consider "power users"?

LT: We've seen that those that are early adopters in the connected home really love IFTTT. The people that are going out there buying $200–$300 items and connecting them to the internet, even though that is still quite a struggle to get something connected and keep it connected to the internet. These are the people who are using IFTTT to get a tremendous amount of value out of objects that without IFTTT really just talks to its app and does its thing, but with IFTTT, can connect to a much broader set of services and other devices.

The Maker community is incredibly passionate about IFTTT, we have seen it used for a lot of very interesting Maker projects. Other large communities around IFTTT include people doing marketing and managing social media.

IFTTT's Next Lift

MB: Your company has exploded from a few dozen, to almost 250 channels. These include not only social media  and news feeds as in the beginning, but now you've integrated home connected devices, productivity services and wearables, as well as many others including iPhone apps and your new Android channels. Are there any up-and-coming integrations we can expect in the near future?

LT: Of course, the home is incredibly popular and we're going to see a ton of connected home channels. We now have over 70 connected-home channels, but we are going to see that number explode past 100 after the holiday season, as people gear up to try to get their device under the Christmas tree.

The home is just a small piece of the general excitement around the Internet of Things, there are so many things connecting to the internet that we will see over the course of the next year, and I think one of those big categories will be the automobile. There will be all kinds of devices around the car, like garage-door openers, different car accessories, and with car manufacturers themselves getting online and getting connected they will be looking to see what else their audience or other developers can do with this new connected endpoint.

Alongside that, we are incredibly excited about other enterprise [software-as-a-service]  type tools, we are starting to look at a lot of tools that other developers are using to compliment the set of consumer IoT, wearable, and other services that IFTTT has today.

MB: What's the most remarkable recipe for a wearable or other device you've encountered?

LT: We've seen some really neat recipes for wearables, specifically around some of the fitness trackers, people using IFTTT as a way to unlock some other real world reward. For example, [if] you hit your step goal, then it unlocks a cookie jar or a certain cabinet in your house.

We've seen that people really love to control their lights, to change the color of their lights as sort of a social party trick, but there's no end to the different things that people want to connect to lights—for example, using the ESPN Sports integration we have to change the lights to match their sports team's colors for the game.

One of our fellow engineers here named Jim Heising actually built an internal private channel that controls eight TV monitors in the office, and we can post all kinds of interesting things on them. Those TV's have really turned into a shared community message board, and that has been really really fun.

That is getting into the idea of what developers can do with our platform once they really have access to it.

MB: Who do you view as your biggest competitors, and what advantages do your services have over the rest?

LT: I don't think there is another major technology company out there that doesn't yet have some sort of IoT platform, or is at least starting to talk about their IoT platform. We view each one of them not as competitive, but complimentary.

On the surface, a lot of people may say IFTTT is just another IoT platform, but we think about the world very differently. We're not just about devices, you can elicit a lot of those connections that we have that have nothing to do with IoT, we are about services.

To take that even further, we're about enabling seamless experiences for consumers. I think a big problem for developers today is their ability to develop for multiple platforms at the same time. What we are aiming to do it not be an IoT platform, but to be a seamless computing platform and enable developers to build those seamless computing experiences of the future.

Photo by Kevin Krejci

For more, including new opportunities IFTTT has in store for developers, check out part 2 on ReadWrite next week.

For interviews with the innovators in wearable computing, IoT, and augmented reality, subscribe to the Wearable.ai newsletter.

At five-year-old social media company Buffer, the salaries of its 65 global employees — from the person who writes its tweets to its CEO — are posted online for anyone to see. They are determined by a strict formula and aren't open to negotiation.

Cofounders Joel Gascoigne, CEO, and Leo Widrich, COO, took this unique approach after deciding early on to make "default to transparency" a top company value. It not only feels natural, Gascoigne told Business Insider, but it helps unite a disparate workforce that lacks a central office.

The salary formula gives employees one less thing to worry about and establishes a level of fairness, Gascoigne said. He and Widrich developed the first iteration of the formula alongside Buffer software developer Colin Ross, who has a Ph.D. in computational mathematics, in late 2013.

They implemented a new version of the formula last November, which we've broken down below.

Role

To calculate the value of a role, a base is first determined. The value of the base is essentially two weighted parts: 35% overall base and 65% location base.

To find the overall base, US data on the national market value of jobs is taken from Payscale and Glassdoor and then multiplied by 0.35 (the percentage mentioned above). To find the location base, data on cost of living for an employee's place of residence is taken from Numbeo and used as a possible correction for average salary by location from data pulled from Payscale and Glassdoor, which is then multiplied by 0.65 (the second percentage mentioned above).

The cost of living correction is a value of up to $8,000 based on the "Good Life Curve," which is intended to lessen wage disparities across the company, a factor Gascoigne considers important due to Buffer's lack of a central office and distribution around the world. The curve takes into account the market rate for a certain job by city. For example, San Francisco and London have a similar cost of living but the market rate for an engineer is higher in San Fran; in order to avoid a large wage disparity between engineers of equal value to the company, the engineer in London would receive a cost of living bonus.

The role value multiplier is entirely based on Gascoigne and Widrich's judgment, as guided by Ross' calculations. It's an adjustment value that corrects for any discrepancies that may exist between a job description as listed on Payscale or Glassdoor and what that role entails specifically at Buffer.

Gascoigne said that he expects to update the four elements of the "role" value in the equation either every quarter or every six months going forward.

Experience

The four experience levels — beginner, intermediate, advanced, and master — have remained in place since 2013, but Gascoigne thinks they could use some refining, since determining which level an employee falls into is entirely subjective.

The "no negotiation" policy at Buffer for both new hires and existing employees is meant to keep the formula incorruptible, but Gascoigne says that the experience section is flexible. If employees feel they have advanced from beginner to intermediate but have yet to be recognized, they can contact the appropriate person and schedule a discussion around reaching the next level.

Dependents

Buffer creates a level of camaraderie among its scattered employees by holding annual retreats, and last year they were opened up to employees' families as well. In this spirit of inclusion, Gascoigne said, he decided that employees should be given an extra $3,000 a year for each of the people they are responsible for, be it a spouse and/or children. He explained that it made sense to his team, but that a number of blog readers criticized him for the choice, saying that equating an employee's dependents with that person's value to the company looked awkward and felt unfair.

Gascoigne is weighing these critiques and said that the next iteration of the formula will probably leave it out, but that the same $3,000 per dependent will be allotted as a separate annual benefit.

Choice

This one is straightforward. An employee can opt either for more cash or more stock.

Loyalty

Employees get a guaranteed 5% pay raise for every year they spend at Buffer.

While some might scoff at the idea of a non-negotiable salary offer, Gascoigne said it hasn't been a problem, since the company attracts the type of person who is fully onboard with Buffer's values and has already estimated their salary using the formula and numbers available online.

Gascoigne sees the formula as a constant work in progress. For future iterations, he's considering whether or not a country's tax rate can be factored in, and to see if there is a fair solution for the few employees who lack a fixed location. But so far, he said he and his employees are happy with their public, formula-based compensation system.

"It really helps with having great teamwork and less politics," he said.

SEE ALSO: Why this tech startup CEO listed all of his employees' salaries online for anyone to see

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: 'Shark Tank' investor reveals the biggest mistake you can make in the office

The current business climate makes SEO all but a necessity. According to a survey by Yelp, 85% of people searching for the product or service that you offer, will begin their hunt online.

If your website isn’t coming up when someone types in those keywords, you better believe those customers are going to go somewhere else.

However, one of the biggest obstacles to getting involved is understanding what you’ll have to pay. How much does SEO cost anyways?

Truth be told, the price-tag can vary so greatly that it’s actually quite difficult to get a grasp of what constitutes a reasonable price.

In this article, we’ll cover the following:

• The average cost of each type of SEO
• The various SEO pricing models available
• The pros and cons of each pricing model
• An overview of pay for performance SEO

Ready to dig in?

Average Cost Of SEO Services

If you’re in the market for SEO, I’m quite sure you’ve come to the following realization: there are way too many choices.

Too many pricing models, too many agencies and too many price points. To the average consumer, this can quickly lead to a sense of overwhelm.

Side note: if you are experiencing overwhelm, check out Tim Ferriss’s “Not To Do List” to get some tips on how to get past it on a daily basis.

But I digress. Truth be told and long-story short, there isn’t actually an average cost that can be accurately discerned when it comes to SEO services.

In fact, according to research done by the wonderful fellows at Moz.com, you could end up paying…

Less than $25 an hour

or upwards of $20,000/month!

Moz polled over 600 SEO companies and aggregated all of the data in an insightful (if not a bit inscrutable) article. As you can see, we can reasonably guess that an average hourly SEO costs something between $80 and $130 per hour. Further, the average monthly retainer lies somewhere between $750 and $1500 per month.

There’s a problem with the article though. After reading through it, you most likely won’t feel any the wiser as to which type of SEO would be best for your own business.

So how do we fix this problem?

I think the best and only answer is to break down the different types of SEO services various firms offer, and to establish a standard price point for each.

How Much Does Hourly SEO Cost?

At face value hourly SEO services may seem like a worthwhile investment.

After all, you know exactly what you’re going to pay for.

Whatever hourly rate you negotiated or accepted before work commenced, is what you’ll pay. Depending on how many hours were worked, you can accurately estimate what your bill will look like.

The peace of mind associated with this system isn’t without merit. But like all things that sound too good to be true, there’s a bit of a catch.

The catch is that often SEO projects can take longer than expected. Further, if you’re buying the services of a respectable SEO expert, the rates can get pretty high.

Expect to pay somewhere between $75 and $150 per hour if you want to avoid hucksters and wannabes. Pro tip: Avoid anyone super cheap on the assumption that they might employ black-hat techniques that ca land you a Google penalty.

Pros:

Accountability and transparency. The time worked will always be logged, so you’ll be able to easily track where your SEO expert or firm is devoting the most energy.

Easier to predict costs. Having a set hourly rate allows you to budget accordingly and control how much you are spending.

Cons:

Rankings will come slower. It often takes up to 6 months to see noticeable improvements in rankings. While it might be easier to control how much you spend, you’ll still often end up getting less value and paying more per hour than if you had gone with a different pricing model.

Nothing is tied to results. Paying a company by the hour is much like having an employee. They get paid for showing up. Would you rather have your SEO company focused on results or punching the clock?

Best for…

If you are trying to run your SEO campaign yourself, I would recommend hiring an SEO consultant to validate your work and assist on a touch-and-go basis. They can help ensure you’re making the right decisions from the beginning. The insight and peace of mind will trump the financial investment of paying a consultant for a few hours of their time.

How Much Do Project-based SEO Services Cost?

According to the Moz study we referenced above, project-based SEO services are the most popular pricing model you’ll find amongst SEO companies. Nearly half of respondents fell into four price ranges:

• $1,001 – $1,500
• $1,501 – $2,500
• $2,501 – $5,000
• $5,001 – $7,500

The wide range of prices is a bit surprising given this being the most popular pricing model.

Pros:

All it takes is one lump sum. No need to worry about hourly costs racking up or getting stuck in the hole for more than you budgeted on any given month. This is clearly a better choice than hourly services if you have a very strict budget or need help in one specific area.

Know exactly what you’re getting. With project-based pricing you should expect to have a contract that describes in simple black and white what you will get and how long it will take to deliver.

Cons:

You might be paying too much. If you don’t have prior knowledge regarding SEO, you won’t be able to understand how much time actually goes into your SEO campaign. This of course means you could easily end up being overcharged.

No flexibility. Project-based pricing normally comes with a contract that outlines all deliverables and due dates. If your needs change or you need to pivot your campaign, chances are you won’t be able to without spending more money.

Best for…

This type of SEO service is ideal for companies who need help developing their SEO campaign or want to outsource specific tasks. SEO audits, on-page optimization and link building campaigns often fall under this category.

How Much Do Monthly SEO Retainers Cost?

Monthly SEO services favor long-term partnerships over one-off projects. Most companies choose this option when they need to outsource SEO completely. While this tends to be a common decision for many companies, the need to quantify ROI is moving more and more people towards results-based SEO.

Pros:

Set it and forget it. A monthly retainer for SEO services usually means you have someone managing your campaign end to end. This allows you to gain results without having to worry about doing the work yourself.

Better client-agency relationship. Working together in an ongoing relationship often leads to better communication and a strong partnership built on trust.

Cons:

You might be wasting time and money. SEO takes time. As mentioned before, results can often take up to six months. If the company you’re working with doesn’t produce results you can end up with thousands of dollars down the drain and nothing to show for it.

Long-term commitment. Most SEO companies want clients to commit to six months of service. You could get stuck in a contract even if you’re not happy with results.

Best for…

Choose this type of SEO service if you trust the company you will be working with and you can verify they have a strong track record. This type of SEO service is ideal if you want to completely outsource all aspects of your SEO campaign.

How Much Do Performance-based SEO Services Cost?

The Moz study neglected to mention pay for performance SEO, but to be fair this type of pricing is still rather new. While results-based SEO removes the risk to customers, it places a heavy burden on the agency to produce results.

Pros:

Pay for results, nothing else. If you don’t rank, you don’t pay. This type of pricing virtually eliminates the risk of investing in an SEO company.

Know exactly what your investment will be. Reputable pay for performance SEO companies will give you upfront pricing on what you will pay after results are delivered.

Cons:

Your search terms may be too competitive. Extremely competitive search terms are not a good fit for most pay for performance SEO companies as they will have to invest tons of hours and rack up costs before being able to bill.

Poor keyword selection. If you choose a keyword that has low search volume or does not convert into business you can be stuck paying for a search term that adds no tangible value to your business.

Best for…

If you are a small business owner you should look to this pricing model first. Most business owners lack the time and resources to spend on marketing. Partnering with a company that can give you results before you have to pay can make it easier to start investing in SEO (and seeing real results).

This article was originally published at RankPay.

Despite a plethora of articles recommending methods to determine content ROI, this continues to be a hot and confusing topic for many B2B marketers. Why is this? There are different purposes and uses for ROI. Content performance, at an asset or campaign level, is typically the way marketers think of content ROI. While difficult to measure, marketers need performance measures to tweak execution. But don’t confuse performance with ROI. Asset and campaign performance measures are not useful for an executive level business case. It’s too granular. It doesn’t align with executive business parameters, or inform the kinds of decisions they make. It also doesn’t convey the magnitude, importance and urgency of the matter. It doesn’t show what’s possible. Marketers think with a traditional expense justification mindset rather than an investment mindset. We’ve written here about the misunderstanding between investment and expense. A Content ROI Investment Model An investment mindset for B2B content speaks to three categories: investment that impacts business strategy, business operations, and content operations. Business Strategy Background and context for this conversation are the new realities associated with self-educating, B2B buyers, and their preferred buying decision process. Belief in this, and the role of content, is the foundational premise for what follows. Are you assuming everyone “gets it”? These new realities have made content a strategic imperative of the business. Content is a primary driver of top business objectives and outcomes: New customer acquisition and organic revenue growth Sales and marketing productivity and efficiency, and lower selling costs Acquire data on customers, buyers […]

The post Reframing Content ROI and the Case for B2B Content appeared first on Avitage.

One of the things I hear most often as we work with clients or when I speak to marketing professionals is, “We cannot change the sales process.” The thinking behind this is that sales has an established process in place and to disrupt that process would be detrimental to the organization and its ability to make it’s number. The idea that marketing should make changes but stop at a demarcation line and let sales run per the established process is not a going to work.

While I can understand the hesitancy to upset the “sales apple cart,” the reality is that for all the changes marketing needs to make to develop a strategic approach to demand generation, sales also needs to change. Demand generation is a marketing AND sales activity, sales doesn’t work in a silo.

Here are a few changes that B2B sales professionals need to make to be more successful:

1. There is No Longer a “Sales Process”

Don’t get me wrong, I do believe that sales needs to define a process whereby they receive, manage and close opportunities. So in that respect, there is a defined sales process. However, many sales people I speak to are still in the dark (or unwilling) when it comes to acknowledging the new world of the B2B buyer.

The whole of purchasing has shifted to a buying process and buyers do not care about the sales process. The new normal is that they care about their own process and will run it as they choose and sales has little choice in the matter. The sooner sales understands this and becomes part of the demand generation equation, the better success they will have.

2. Truly Understand the Buyers from Their Perspective

Not long ago my team and I were presenting insights into their buyers to a client. My team had conducted numerous customer interviews, interviewed a good number of the sales team, combed through piles of data, conducted primary and secondary research into their market to understand buying triggers and had even spoken to our client’s prospects. When the insight brief was completed, the head of sales responded with, “that is not who are buyers are.” He continued to give a much different picture of their buyers and when asked where he received his information he replied, “I’ve been selling for a long time, I think I know what our buyers need.”

While there is no doubt this gentleman knew some about his customers, he had an inside-out view, rather than an outside-in view of his buyers. He had been so insulated by his own company that he was failing to see that his view  of his buyer was just a small part of their profile. It wasn’t incorrect, however, had he expanded his view to be more holisitic he would have been much more successful.

3. Become an Expert in Your Field

I do not know of any sales rep who cannot speak about their company, their products and why you should trust them with you business. However, I find few that can speak to the market, challenges and issues as a subject matter expert.

As buyers consume more content, become more sophisticated and continue to wait longer to interact with vendors, sales reps need to be able to participate in the conversation early on without “selling” to their buyers. This requires reps to be subject matter experts and engage in meaningful dialogue through relevant content, social media, face-to-face conversations, and other channels. This is a new core competency of the new B2B sales rep and those that adapt will win much more than they will lose.

4. Accept the Reality

I once worked for a company where the CEO would continually remind marketing that “sales was our customer.” This was not an all to uncommon refrain in many companies and unfortunately, there are still some who believe this. One could argue that at no time should this have ever been the case, however, it most certainly is not the case today. The buyer is both a marketing and a sales customer and this is a reality that needs to take hold for sales (and also for many in marketing). Who owns the buyer isn’t the point.

This issue underscores why sales needs to work with marketing in the development of strategic demand generation programs. When the buyers become the focal point for marketing and sales teams, the alignment issues go away and increased success abounds.

There is clearly more work ahead for B2B organizations who are trying to keep pace with the ever-changing B2B buying environment. However, this change cannot be the sole responsibility of marketing if programs are going to be successful. Sales must change and adapt to the needs of the modern buyer or change may happen the hard way, without them.

Author: Carlos Hidalgo @cahidalgo CEO/Principal for ANNUITAS

We know that two-thirds of large scale transformation efforts fail. But that’s not a terribly helpful piece of information―unless we’re looking for confirmation that this is hard, really hard. What is useful is to understand what leaders can do to substantially increase the odds that their companies won’t be among the two-thirds of those that fail. From my research and work with companies around the world leading large-scale transformation initiatives, here are the four things I’ve found that virtually all successful change leaders do really well:

Recognize embedded tensions and paradoxes

Smart, capable, solid professionals most often perform well in their roles until they reach a level in their organizations at which they are confronted with a series of embedded tensions and paradoxes that make leading effectively much more complicated. The most common paradoxes leaders face when driving a transformation effort are:

1. Revitalization vs. Normalization. At the core of every change initiative is the desire to breathe new life into the organization―to revitalize ways of thinking, behaving and working. But one change initiative often morphs into many, and before long employees become “change weary.” Thus, we find ourselves in the conflicted situation of needing revitalization but desiring normalization.
2. Globalization vs. Simplification. Doing business today means doing business globally, but the complexities brought on by globalization are often in conflict with the need for organizations to make it simple for customers to do business with them. Leaders struggle with creating organizational responses that address the need to master globalization while offering customers and employees optimal simplification.
3. Innovation vs. Regulation. Many organizations, particularly in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, are saddled with trying to do business, let along innovate, under increasingly crushing regulatory environments. This is a stifling tax on a company’s capacity to find creative approaches to solving unmet customers’ needs. As such we struggle with the tension between the desire to boost innovation and the need to operate under increasing regulation.
4. Optimization vs. Rationalization. Customers not only have more power today―in some industries, they seem to have all of the power. Organizations are struggling to provide solutions that are better, faster, cheaper and increasingly customized. Leaders are caught in a seemingly endless struggle to reconcile the tension between optimizing benefits to customers while rationalizing their costs of doing business.
5. Digitization vs. Humanization. Advanced technology is at the core of virtually every company’s business model today. Entire value chains are being digitized. Yet, the onset of ubiquitous digitization is occurring at the same time that individuals are yearning for a sense of meaning in their organizations. Leaders are struggling with how to reconcile the increasing need for the digitization of their business models while trying to create organizational climates that have an authentic sense of humanization―creating an overarching sense of purpose and collective ambition.

Successful transformation leaders embrace these tensions even though they make the challenge more complex. There are no easy answers; however, the leader’s bedrock commitment to helping to reconcile these tensions is paramount. That means above all committing to an on-going communications and listening campaign so people know what’s going on and know how they might contribute to the transformation effort―and know that they are invited to do so. This process starts by the CEO and top team telling powerful and compelling stories of where the company has been, where it is now and where it needs to go―and why. But it doesn’t end there. Senior leaders must be ready to open up the flood gates so managers and employees closest to the client interface can surface these tensions and discuss them openly. While this might not resolve the tensions and paradoxes, it enables people to at least acknowledge that they exist, have their concerns heard, and discuss proactive ways forward together.

Hold everyone accountable

The leadership of the change effort can’t end with the top team, the top 100 managers, or the top 1,000 managers. It has to be an all-hands-on-deck engagement. The change leader must signal that enterprise-wide transformation will be a collective effort, with accountability distributed throughout the organization.

But it is far easier to say this than to do this, so change leaders must be ready to back up their statements with real world initiatives that will strengthen engagement. For example, when Hess Corporation launched its 2020 Change Initiative, CEO John Hess challenged his entire leadership team to come up with solutions that would make the company more agile, cost conscience, and faster at decision making. And to minimize change weariness brought on by needless duplication of effort, he created a champions team responsible for coordinating the variety of efforts underway.

Invest in new organizational capabilities

Change leaders must go beyond storytelling, motivation, and mobilization efforts―they need to provide resources so that the organization has what it needs to win in the new environment. This might include capital improvements, process improvements, and building new talent capabilities.

For example, for three decades leading up to 2010, HSBC had successfully pursued a growth strategy and organizational capability that was founded upon acquisitions. However, with acquisition upon acquisition, the leaders within HSBC failed to develop a one-company culture, which made it difficult to integrate its offerings to an increasingly demanding customer base. As such, Stephen Green, HSBC’s Chairman at the time, set the company on a course that called for a dramatic slowdown of acquisitions, at least until the current portfolio of companies was integrated and a culture of what Green referred to as Collective Management was cemented. This meant nothing short of building new organizational capabilities based upon collaboration and client-first thinking, which not only meant developing new systems and processes but building a collective mindset that would make aspiring to being a one-company culture a reality.

Emphasize continuous learning

It’s far easier to talk about revitalization and renewal than to actually do it. The companies that pull it off have transformation leaders that commit to a relentless learning process.

Perhaps the best example I know of a remarkably successful transformation leader is Alan Mulally, who not only led the transformation effort for Boeing Commercial Airlines, but also the stunning turnaround of Ford Motor Company. Mulally would be the first to insist that Ford’s transformation was not his achievement but rather the collective achievement of thousands of stakeholders, including employees, suppliers, dealers, unions, financial institutions, Board members and others. Mulally believed deeply in his “leading together” philosophy from his Boeing experience, but this became even more critical at Ford, due to the multitude of stakeholders and a political infighting culture that had become toxic. Mulally would have none of that. He brought his top managers together weekly to assess problems and progress, through his implementation process called the Creating Value Roadmap. Met with heavy resistance at first due to fear of admitting problems, Mulally pursued this course and built trust that those who were brave enough to acknowledge that they needed help were actually showcased as exactly the kind of leader that Mulally was looking for in Ford’s future. At every meeting, managers were asked: what have we learned by airing concerns, making course corrections, and especially, fixing problems together? By combining his relentless focus on implementation and making tough calls with an equally important focus on continuous learning, Mulally transformed Ford from a moribund company on the verge of bankruptcy to one of today’s most successful automobile companies in the world.

Leveraging these four activities, while framing the transformation effort as a collective challenge to be embraced together, fuels positive change over the long haul—which is important since the transformation journey is a never-ending one for most companies today. Ultimately, these practices create a culture of agility and resiliency that will pay dividends out into the future, as large-scale change becomes an organizational capability and not a recipe for management failure.

Repeating yourself can feel draining. However, if you want to be persuasive with your pitches, be prepared to say them over and over again. That repetition can be exactly what someone needs to internalize your ideas.

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One of the best parts of taking a road trip is the beautiful scenery, and these scenic drives are destinations in themselves if you love to drive. If you’ve been itching to hit the road, Travel+Leisure has a list of road trips you where you can take in the views.

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Amazon is preparing a "Spotify-killer," according to The New York Post. 

The plan is still in its early stages as Amazon is in talks with music executives about licensing a larger selection of music. Amazon is looking to release the service in the fall. 

Prime, the $99-a-year (£79) subscription service that gives users access to free shipping and video, currently has a music library of around one million songs. 

However, the service would be available outside of Prime, according to the report, and would come with its own subscription price. Apple and Spotify both currently charge $9.99 (£9.99) a month for the streaming service, with the latter offering a free — but ad-supported — option. 

According to The Post, Amazon is looking at a similar pricing structure as Spotify and Apple, with a discount if the service is bundled with Echo, the virtual assistant. 

Amazon has been looking to expand the media offerings of Prime by adding more video content, especially exclusives. The company paid around $250 million (£175 million) for Jeremy Clarkson's new motoring show, which will air exclusively on Prime, and has been working on numerous Prime-only TV shows. 

Spotify currently has around 20 million paid-for subscribers, according to the company, while Apple has around 10 million. 

Business Insider has reached out to Amazon for comment. 

Join the conversation about this story »

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What’s your company’s most distinctive trait?

What’s the most important thing your company does?

What’s the main reason people should do business with your company?

Do you know? Does everyone in your company know? Do your organization’s blog posts, podcasts, videos, emails, and other communications convey the answers to these questions in one way or another day after day?

Consistency like that, believe it or not, is achievable. Maybe you think that your company is too big, too loosely structured, or too [fill in the blank]. Don’t throw up your hands. Tools exist that can help you bring your organization’s messaging into alignment. One such tool favored by many content strategists – a surprisingly simple but powerful tool – is the message architecture.

Why should you read on?

If you don’t have a message architecture in place, you’re missing out on something of value. Creating content without a message architecture is like building a house without a floor plan. Katie Del Angel shared with me other metaphors:

A clearly articulated message architecture is my best friend. It’s a North Star that everyone on a project (internal and external) can work toward.

Margot Bloomstein says, “Content strategy is what makes content marketing effective,” and “driving that strategy is the message architecture.”

#Contentmarketing relies on #contentstrategy, which relies on message architecture via @mbloomstein
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Kristina Halvorson puts it this way: Message architecture “ is where your content really begins.”

Where does content begin? With a message architecture says @Halvorson via @MarciaRJohnston
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What is a message architecture?

A message architecture, sometimes called a messaging architecture or messaging framework, is a small set of words – terms, phrases, or statements – arranged hierarchically to convey an organization’s messaging priorities, its communication goals. It helps people in all departments deliver consistent messages in all types of content.

It’s called an architecture because it acts “as scaffolding for your content, supporting and shaping the content you actually produce,” Erin Kissane says in her book, The Elements of Content Strategy. When marketers say “messages” or “messaging,” they aren’t talking about customer-facing content; they’re talking about the general impression they want customers to take away from the content.

Messaging is not copy; it’s subtext.

So, while a message architecture consists of words, it doesn’t tell content creators what words to use. It tells them what messages their words (and images, etc.) should convey and the order of importance of those messages.

While a message architecture should align with the corporate vision, mission, and brand values, it’s not the same as any of those things. It has three distinguishing qualities (as noted in Margot’s book, Content Strategy at Work):

• It conveys levels of priority.
• It’s actionable (in that it directly informs content decisions).
• It’s specific to communication.

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 What does a message architecture look like?

Message architectures can take various forms. Margot’s takes the form of a set of “prioritized brand attributes that stem from a shared vocabulary.” Her typical message architecture is “a concise outline of … attributes, each with sub-bullets that clarify meaning and add color.”

For example, her interpretation of Apple’s message architecture looks something like this:

Adapted from Margot Bloomstein’s presentation Be a Greedy Bastard: Use Content Strategy to Get What You Want, Slide 26

This example resembles a description of a corporate voice. Unlike most voice descriptions, though, this list is hierarchical – the elements appear in order of importance. Here, the top item in the hierarchy – “confident but approachable” – takes priority. This type of list tells content creators which attributes to emphasize when brainstorming blog topics, choosing words, sketching images, creating videos, crafting emails … you name it.

Margot gives a similarly structured example for a “stately financial institution”:

Adapted from Margot Bloomstein, Term of the Week: Message Architecture

This example does more than the previous one. It conveys not only characteristics but also purpose. It’s a hybrid, telling us not just what this institution is like (respected, relevant, trusted – elements of voice, essentially) but also what it does: It focuses on large-cap funds and serves an exclusive class of investors.

Message architectures can go all the way in this direction, becoming architectures not of attributes but of statements – of messages, in fact. This approach to message architecture would complement a definition of voice rather than double as one. Kristina Halvorson gives one such example:

Adapted from Kristina Halvorson, Message and Medium: Better Content by Design

If you used a two-tier architecture like this, you might want to further prioritize by putting secondary messages in order of importance. As Margot suggested to me in an email, prioritizing the secondary messages would make the architecture even more useful for resolving “conflicts of vision.”

Who wouldn’t love a tool that does that?

Margot and Kristina’s approaches aren’t the only ones out there. For example, in her book, The Content Strategy Toolkit, Meghan Casey describes what she calls a messaging framework, which builds on a core content strategy statement. Her messaging framework has three parts:

• First impression: What you want people to feel when they first encounter any piece of your content

• Value statement: What you want people to feel after spending a few minutes with any piece of your content because of what they now understand about your company

• Proof: How any piece of your content demonstrates that your company provides just what people need

Which form of message architecture should you choose? Here’s how Meghan answers that question in her book:

“It really doesn’t matter, as long as you adhere to the following:

• Make sure everyone who needs it has it.
• Actually use it to make decisions about content.
• Keep in mind that the messages are for you and the people in your organization who work on content.”

I especially like that middle bullet: Whichever form of message architecture you pick, it has to be one that your team will use.

What’s the value of a message architecture?

A message architecture’s value lies in its ability to clarify, for every content creator, the organization’s most important messages.

A message architecture scales beautifully, too, coming in as handy for a team of three as for a team of 3,000. As shown in the following two illustrations, a single message architecture can apply across all departments and all audiences.

Adapted from Hilary Marsh, Managing the Politics of Content, Slides 37 and 38.

When an organization has no message architecture, its content teams working in departmental silos may create “a semi-schizophrenic brand experience” (to borrow a phrase from an email from Intel’s K. Scott Rosenberg). With a message architecture, organizations have a better chance of communicating consistently.

How can my organization create a message architecture?

There’s no right process for creating a message architecture. Since I’ve heard Margot talk through the card-sorting exercise she uses with her clients, I’ll describe that exercise here to give you one idea to try. I trust that you’ll find it worthwhile. Take it from Elizabeth McGuane, who says,

All in all, it was an incredibly useful exercise. It really gives clarity to something which can often be … fuzzy and subjective, and it gets [participants] involved – they loved it!

Here’s how the folks at Asana describe their experience with this type of exercise:

We were convinced. There was energy around our brand like never before.

Join the fun. Follow these seven steps.

1. Pick a leader.

Someone needs to lead the exercise. You may want to hire a consultant to facilitate. Alternatively, someone in-house could take the role. The leader must be capable of keeping participants aligned on the exercise’s purpose, which is not to select a handful of words but to reach agreement on the brand’s most important messages.

2. Prepare a set of adjective cards.

If your organization already settled on a set of adjectives that describe its corporate voice, you may want to simply write those adjectives on cards, have your stakeholders prioritize them, and skip to Step 5.

If your organization hasn’t defined its voice, or if you want to update your voice definition, follow all these steps. You’ll end up defining your corporate voice and prioritizing its elements to boot.

Create a set of cards, each with one adjective on it (a descriptive word or phrase) that might describe a brand – any brand: “innovative,” “traditional,” “edgy,” etc. The cards can be as simple as handwritten slips of paper. Margot’s card deck includes about 100 adjectives. Her set of adjectives – which you can also find on Page 30 of Content Strategy at Work – comprises terms she has heard across a range of companies and industries, including these types:

• Paired terms (“strategic” and “tactical”)
• Relative opposites (“traditional” and “modern”)
• Terms on a continuum (“assertive” and “aggressive”)

Photo courtesy of Margot Bloomstein

Here are some tips on selecting your adjectives. Unless otherwise noted, these tips come from this conversation and this conversation in the Content Strategy Google group.

• “Start with what you hear a lot, and a thesaurus. In general, I include a lot of terms that could be opposites (e.g., traditional and modern, strategic and tactical) as well as terms that represent shades of nuance on the same continuum (e.g., leading edge, cutting edge, bleeding edge). See Krista Stevens’ blog post for more details.” (Margot)

• Include words that the stakeholders have “already used in the past to describe their brand.” Also “cannibalize” your tone of voice and writing guidelines, and throw in “terms that have come up in user testing, design concepts, anything at all.” (Elizabeth McGuane)

• “We’ve been taking commonly used words like ‘funny,’ and trying to break them down further into more specific terms, like ‘cheeky,’ ‘witty,’ ‘tongue-in-cheek,’ for example.” (Aimee Cornell)

• If you use Margot’s terms, “pre-cull” those you think are most relevant and conducive to discussion in your group. (Sadia Latifi)

• Exclude terms that might be “distracting” or “potentially inflammatory” for that group. (Margot, Content Strategy at Work)

• Include terms that are “intentionally ambiguous to invite discourse.” (Margot, Content Strategy at Work)

3. Gather stakeholders in a room.

An effective message architecture depends on a shared vocabulary grounded in conversation; no one can go off and create message architecture alone. Invite everyone who needs to be involved in the decisions and everyone whose support will be needed.

4. Sort the cards.  

Spread your cards on a table big enough that everyone can stand on the same side. Spend 45 to 60 minutes sorting the cards.

Separate the cards into three groups:

• Who we are
• Who we’re not
• Who we’d like to be

Photo courtesy of Margot Bloomstein

As you sort, encourage conversation, even friendly arguing. People need to “unpack their communication goals and dig into the buzzwords.” Explore why certain adjectives apply or don’t. Dig deep and “debate the nuances of each word.” Discuss what the adjectives mean in your corporate culture. (This is where the “shared vocabulary” comes in.)

Let me say all that in a different way: Treat the adjectives as springboards for conversation. The value of the terms on the cards doesn’t come from their inherent meaning; it comes from what the participants say about them. Write down what people say as they move the cards around. “The pauses, hesitation, and snap decisions are all worth noting,” Margot writes in Content Strategy at Work. Eventually, your message architecture must do more than transcribe the cards; it must capture the spirit of the conversation.

Say the group chooses “hip.” That choice in itself doesn’t tell you much. But say you overhear someone saying this about the term: “Everyone thinks we’re old and can’t react as quickly as the competition” (Content Strategy at Work). Now there’s an insight that could give content creators some guidance! You may eventually want to capture the gist of that comment – not just the adjective – in your message architecture.

When the cards are sorted into the three groups, turn your focus to the future group (who we’d like to be).

If you need multiple message architectures – maybe one for customer-facing content and another for internal communication – sort the future cards into natural groupings. For example, one group of terms might describe the way participants want potential customers to think about the company; another group of terms might describe the ideal corporate culture.

Finally, place the future cards –within their groups if you have more than one group– in priority order. (This is where the “architecture” comes in.) Why? Companies can’t communicate everything at once. Content creators need to know where to focus.

5. Document your message architecture.  

Draft your message architecture. Keep it tight. (The three examples above use fewer than 60 words each.) Capture not just the adjectives people chose during the exercise but also the spirit of the ongoing conversation. As Margot says, “Words are valuable, but meaningless without context and priority.”

As you shape your message architecture, keep your mind open. A bulleted list may suffice, but you may want to go further. Experiment. Turn your words into a picture. Carve them in clay. Let the message architecture itself be your guide. Is “whimsical” your company’s top attribute? Stencil your message architecture’s elements on helium balloons, letting the most important one literally float to the top.

Send your message architecture to stakeholders for review. Revise it until people agree that you have your North Star. (Star-shaped balloons, anyone?)

6. Distribute your message architecture.  

Share the message architecture with all who create and maintain your company’s content.

7. Keep communicating.

Creating a message architecture doesn’t ensure that people will use it. Follow up to keep the team in sync – a task that Carrie Hane Dennison calls strategic nagging. Even the most gung-ho professionals need reminders of what they’re doing and why.

For more on this card-sorting exercise, see these two books:

• Margot Bloomstein, Content Strategy at Work (Chapter 2)
• Meghan Casey, The Content Strategy Toolkit (pp. 195–197)

Conclusion

“I start nearly every engagement by helping my clients develop a message architecture,” Margot shared with me. “It’s a simple deliverable that serves as the foundation for all our subsequent tactical decisions and activities.”

Message architecture. Simple. Foundational. Useful. And – if approached with an open spirit – fun. What more can we ask of any tool? Give this one a try. Let us know how it works for you.

Ready to build or enhance your content strategy structure? Register today for the Intelligent Content Conference March 7-9 in Las Vegas.

Visit our Teams and Process hub to get more insights and tools that will help you work more effectively as a team.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post Align All Your Messaging With This Simple (& Fun) Tool appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

Discovery calls aren’t always easy.

In fact, they can be awkward, tedious, and sometimes downright disastrous.

But the calls play a major role in the success of a sales rep and the health of their pipeline. And if the discovery call goes well, reps can identify highly qualified prospects to pursue and become that much closer to hitting quota.

This, however, begs a question: what does a great discovery call look like in today’s world? Below are five things a sales rep can do en route to determining whether or not the buyer they’re on the phone with is a good fit prospect.

1) Validate research.

Sales reps must delve into their prospects' businesses as best they can to try to determine pain points, decision makers, and how their product can spur growth. During the discovery call, reps should ask questions to validate the research they’ve done and get a better understanding of the organization. With validated research, the rep can build on what they already know to tailor their message from the start and dive deeper into the buyer’s business.

2) Identify goals. 

How does the rep’s product fit into where the company wants to be going forward? By delving into goals, reps can highlight the specific benefits of their product that will help this prospect immediately. Alternatively, if the prospect’s goals are totally different from the product or service’s benefits, the salesperson can disqualify with confidence.

3) Clarify pain points.

In addition to talking about goals, reps should use the discovery call to clarify the prospect’s pain points and explain how their offering could potentially turn the prospect’s struggles into strengths. With a clear understanding of the company’s struggles, reps can hone in on how they are attempting to overcome these setbacks, and what seems to be working (or not).

4) Provide a tactical suggestion.

Armed with goals and pain points, the sales rep can now begin providing tactical suggestions and showcasing how their product can play a major role in the prospect reaching their goals. A tactical suggestion also builds credibility with the prospect and shows the value of working with the rep every day. 

5) Offer next steps.

At the end of the call, reps should provide the prospect with clear next steps so they can determine which route they would like to take. Instead of hanging up the phone and simply hoping to hear back from the prospect, reps should begin building out their schedule for whatever next step the prospect chooses on the call itself. For example, if the prospect would like to see a demo of the product, the rep should open their calendar and nail down a time then and there.

The discovery call plays a major role in the success of a sales rep, and should receive just as much focus as a closing call. The five components listed above can help ensure a great discovery call each and every time.

Since Peak Sales continuously recruits top performing sales professionals, we thought it might be interesting to put together a list of the 10 best sales movies we’ve seen. If you have any other favorites or have any thoughts on our list, comment them below!

In no particular order, here are Peak’s top 10 sales movies of all-time:

1. The Big Kahuna (1999)

Characters Larry (Kevin Spacey), Phil (Danny DeVito), and Bob Walker (Peter Fancinelli) are novice sales representatives at a struggling industrial lubricant manufacturer. The three spend time at a major convention waiting to make their sales pitch to The Big Kahuna, a prospective customer with the ability to save the company from financial troubles. Devito’s character schools the up and coming sales rep, Bob Walker, on the facts of life.

2. Glengarry Glen Ross (1992)

This epic movie, starring Alec Baldwin, Jack Lemon, and Al Pacino, follows the story of regional sales reps fighting to save their jobs when their boss announces he will be firing everyone except for the top two salespeople at their New York City real estate firm.

3. Death of a Salesman (1985)

This movie, based on the Pulitzer Prize play, tells the sad story of a salesman at the end of his career. There are many versions including one in 1985 with Dustin Hofman, but this play with Brian Dennehy does a good job of capturing an important scene.

4. Jerry Maquire (1996)

This box office hit (earning over $270 million), starring Tom Cruise, Cuba Gooding, and Renée Zellweger, can be quoted by salespeople around the globe with phrases like “Show me the money!” and “Help me, help you”. The movie focuses on a player agent fighting to make money and save his career.

5. The Goods – Live Hard, Sell Hard (2009)

This hilarious movie stars Jeremy Piven, as a hired gun, brought in to save a used car dealership from going under. There are many tongue in cheek sales situations and behind the scenes views on sales life.

6. Cadillac Man (1990)

Here is yet another car sales movie. This one stars Robin Williams, whose character is under a lot of pressure to sell twelve cars or lose his job. In addition, he is facing pressure to pay off his debt to the mafia or face their consequences. This comedy nearly doubled its budget at the box office.

7. Tin Men (1987)

Another Danny Devito film. This time, he and Richard Dreyfus are competing salespeople selling aluminum siding. There are many dirty sales tricks and funny sales room scenes. It’s hard to find scenes from the movie online, but this one shows the top two salespeople obsessing over their fancy cars.

8. Boiler Room (2000)

This star-studded American crime drama about fast talking rip-off artists, conning prospects into buying junk bonds meets our top list of sales movies due to its many great sales scenes, especially those in which sales managers push inside sales reps to sell. The film is inspired by the firm Stratton Oakmont and the life of Jordan Belfort who’s autobiography was later adapted to the big screen in another top sales movie below.

9. The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) 

This blockbuster hit, directed by Matin Scorsese and starring Leonardo Dicaprio and Jonah hill, earned nearly $400 million in the box office. This movie, as mentioned earlier, is based on real life salesperson Jordan Belfort’s rise to riches through scamming people into purchasing junk stock. The film, which emphasizes Belfort’s sales skills, earned 5 nominations at the 86th Academy Awards.

10. The Pursuit of Happyness (2006) 

Finally, we have another sales movie based on a true story. This one focuses on the story of salesperson, Chris Gardner, played by Will Smith. The movie follows Gardner’s struggles with being homeless while raising his son and competing for a position as a salesperson at a brokerage firm. The film, which earned over $300 million at the box office, earned Will Smith nominations for an Academy Award and Golden Globe for best actor.

Obviously great B2B salespeople are a unique breed, but what exactly makes them go above and beyond like some of the characters in the movies above? Check out our article, The Traits of Top Sales Performers, to find out.

We have listed our top sales flicks, what are yours? Comment below!

The post Top 10 Sales Movies of All-Time appeared first on Peak Sales Recruiting.

Caterpillar is not expecting improvement in the global economy or commodity prices this year.

The giant maker of industrial equipment reported fourth-quarter results on Thursday morning, and lowered its outlook for 2016 sales and revenues.

From the statement:

"The outlook for 2016 sales and revenues does not anticipate improvement in world economic growth or commodity prices.  Sales and revenues are expected to be in a range of $40 to $44 billion – a mid-point of $42 billion.  The mid-point of the range reflects a decline of about $3.5 billion from last October's preliminary outlook for 2016 sales and revenues and a year-over-year decline of about 10 percent.

The decrease from last October's preliminary outlook is largely a result of continued declines in commodity prices and economic weakness in developing countries."

For the fourth quarter, Caterpillar topped forecasts for profits, with sales of $11 billion, and earnings per share of $0.74 excluding restructuring costs. According to Bloomberg, analysts had estimated earnings per share of $0.69 and revenues of $11.45 billion. 

The stock rose by as much as 4% in pre-market trading. 

"Cost management, restructuring actions and operational execution are helping the company while sales and revenues remain under pressure from weak commodity prices and slowing economic growth in developing countries," said CEO Doug Oberhelman. "We took tough but necessary restructuring actions in 2015 – and they were significant."

On Monday, analysts at Goldman Sachs downgraded the stock to "Sell" and lowered their price target because of concern that a global industrial slowdown would slam machinery demand. 

SEE ALSO: Goldman Sachs thinks a new 'commodity deflation cycle' is just beginning and Caterpillar is going to get crushed

Join the conversation about this story »

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The Power of the Personal

David Spark began his career as a touring stand up comedian. He eventually made the switch from writing comedy to writing content after tiring of the always-on-the-road stand-up lifestyle, and founded Spark Media Solutions shortly thereafter.

One of the goals of his brand journalism firm is to help clients be seen as leading voices in their field.

David offers his valuable insight into how comedy experience can improve your content creation and why sometimes getting a beer thrown in your face can make you a better marketer. He cites a powerful example from his own blog as to how personal stories can reach people in more powerful ways.

David also shares some of the wisdom gleaned from his new book, “Three Feet from Seven Figures,” which focuses solely on creating the most leads from trade shows. He discusses everything from how to set up for a trade show and who to send to your booth, to how to most effectively grab the attention of your audience at a trade show.

David’s sense of humor and advice make this week’s episode of Content Pros well worth tuning in for.

In This Episode:

• The power of sharing personal experience
• The best employees to send to trade shows
• How to make trade shows worth the investment
• How your behavior reads to others at trade shows
• Trade show tricks to get your audience interested and create content for your brand
• The value of influencer relationships

Quotes From This Episode:

“I have found anytime I tell real word experiences on my blog, it does very, very well as opposed to when I write—and I write these a lot—’Five Tips to This,’ ‘Ten Tips to That,’ ‘Here’s My Generic Advice on Doing X.’ When I tie it into real world stuff, it just does a lot better. You can reflect that in the headline. That’s key.” —@dspark

“The common sense things tend to come back in marketing. It’s really weird. We kind of jump the shark for a while. Everyone is trying to figure out the next big thing and the next social network and the next place to be. Life experiences, it works. There’s no other formula.” —@cnmoody

“I would go so far as to say don’t ever put salespeople in your booth, and here’s my main reason: Salespeople are disincentivized to work a trade show booth. It is not their job to get leads. It’s their job to follow up on leads.” —@dspark

“We use content as a means to form relationships with people. It’s far easier for me to say to you, ‘Chris, Can I interview you?’ rather than, ‘Chris, come back to my booth for a 10-minute demo,’ or, ‘Chris, come meet my CEO and listen to our big announcement.'” —@dspark

 Resources:

• David’s Book
• David’s Blog
• David’s Podcast
• David’s Twitter
• Spark Media Solutions
• David’s Successful Blog Post: What My Wife and I Lost and Gained Running a Business Together

What did you want to be when you grew up?

David vividly remembers feeling a calling to an unexpected profession at a very young age. “I wanted to be a rabbi. But I don’t know why. I guess I liked my rabbi at the time. He was a great guy. I still like him very much. I just kind of liked the idea that there was a guy in control, presiding over a group of people. Maybe that was my interest in going into stand-up instead of being of rabbi. He was kind of a funny guy, my rabbi.”

Reflecting on David’s faithful following, it seems that, in his own way, he may have followed through on that childhood instinct.

       

A few days into the new year, 50 employees quit their jobs at Zappos. That was OK with CEO Tony Hsieh.

It was the deadline for the 150 employees working on an intensive tech project to decide if they wanted to take a severance package or begin working under the self-management system known as Holacracy. Under it, there are no traditional bosses or job titles, and the standard hierarchy is eliminated.

Hsieh made the offer last March to this team and the greater body of 1,500 Zappos employees with separate deadlines, and ultimately 260 employees — 18% of the company — took some form of it.

It's a big year for Hsieh. His e-commerce site, known for its wide variety of shoes and headache-free customer service, is rebounding from this radical shakeup and now moving toward becoming a mobile-first company with significant profit growth.

Additionally, 2016 is the year that Hsieh's other focus, the four-year-old Downtown Project movement to revitalize Zappos' Las Vegas neighborhood, is supposed to finally bring back a return on the $350 million that Hsieh personally invested into it.

We recently sat down with Hsieh in Zappos' Vegas headquarters to discuss his ambitions for the year, why he decided to reinvent the way his company operates, and why he thinks it will ultimately prove to be worth the struggle.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Richard Feloni: So here we are, January 2016. Looking back at 2015, what do you think? How did the year go?

Tony Hsieh: It was definitely an eventful year. There were a lot of changes both internally and externally here at Zappos. We went all in with Holacracy, which is really about self-organization, self-management, having employees really think about how to self-direct their work, rather than managers telling them what to do.

And then externally, on the customer side, we really made a strategy change and decided to focus on what we're internally referring to as our "best customers" — really focusing on the brands they want, elevating the level of service, the amount of personal contact. So it's been a pretty interesting and exciting transition on both of those ends.

Feloni: Let's talk about Holacracy. You first heard about it at the 2012 Conscious Capitalism CEO Summit, and you then approached its creator, Brian Robertson, after his presentation on Holacracy. How did you decide the system was right for Zappos?

Hsieh: Holacracy happens to be the tool we're using today, but the bigger theme is about self-organization and self-management.

Many years prior to meeting Brian, I had a nagging sensation that as we kept getting bigger, we kept getting more bureaucracy built into the corporate structure. Because I wanted to stop this trend, I was spending a lot of time thinking about how we could avoid losing a startup edge and how we could empower every employee to act like an entrepreneur.

I was looking at the weaknesses of the typical corporate structure and how it's not been resilient. If you look at the Fortune 500 companies from 1955, 88% of them didn't make it to 2014. Then you look at what structures do work in nature, like the human body, and they're all structures that are self-organized. Frederic Laloux captures this best in his book "Reinventing Organizations," where he refers to these as "Teal" organizations.

Feloni: Another book that has influenced you in this area is Harvard professor Edward Glaeser's "Triumph of the City."

Hsieh: The easiest example of self-organization for people to wrap their minds around is a city. The mayor of a city doesn't tell its residents what to do or where to live, and when people and businesses act in their own self-interests, that creates opportunities for growth.

An interesting thing about cities is that Glaeser's research has shown every time the population of a city doubles, innovation or productivity per resident increases by 15%, but the opposite happens when companies double in size.

Over the years at Zappos, I've done a lot of research into how we can prevent the default future for most companies: death. And not only how do we avoid that, but how do we become more innovative as we grow, in the same way that cities do? That's why we pursued self-management.

Feloni: What do you think is the biggest misconception people have of Holacracy in particular, or self-management in general?

Hsieh: The biggest misconception is that it's just total chaos and there's no structure. It's interesting, because there actually is more structure in some cases and more explicit documentation on what people's different roles are, what their account abilities are. It's easy, though, to just read the headline of "No managers" and assume that that means no hierarchy. It's actually a hierarchy of purpose.

Instead of a pyramid, power is distributed across different circles dedicated to specific functions — we have about 500 circles at Zappos, and they fit in a hierarchy relative to one another.

A problem with Holacracy is that it's hard to explain very succinctly. Our training process takes awhile, and then even after you've gone through that, it still takes several months to really understand how to operate inside of it.

Another thing to remember whenever you hear someone explain how they either love or hate Holacracy at Zappos is that we're in the super early days of it. It's like this: If you got handed the latest iPhone running on the latest iOS, but there were no apps on it, then you would think that it was probably useless. Part of what we're going through right now at Zappos is that we're creating those apps for the Holacracy operating system. Since it's the first time we're doing it, some of those apps turn out to be great and some may be false starts, but it's all an evolutionary discovery process and we share our findings with the world.

Hopefully, there are other companies out there that can borrow or modify our apps and then over time, there can be a whole ecosystem of companies that are thinking about "How can we move beyond the traditional command and control type of structure?" It makes the difficulties worth it.

Feloni: What were you seeing at Zappos that prompted you to offer a severance package to employees last March if they didn't want to go all-in with Holacracy?

Hsieh: At that time, only 85% of the company had made the transition to the system. And what we found was that it was really hard for people to be half in one world and half in the other because, if under Holacracy they had certain authority to do something but their manager still functioned as if it were the old world, then conflict could arise. The default became falling back on habits, and so it hindered the whole adoption process. That's why I set a hard deadline of moving to full implementation on May 1, so that we could just "rip the Band-Aid off."

Feloni: About 14% of your employees left by May 1, and then by January 4, 50 more employees working on the Super Cloud outsourcing of the website's basic functions to Amazon's servers took an offer, for a total of 18% of the company. Did that hurt at all, to see that reaction?

Hsieh: So we put out a super generous offer, which we've done in the past anytime there were big transitions, like when we moved from San Francisco to Las Vegas in 2004. The offer then and the offer last year was they could either stay or take three months' pay or one month's pay for every year they worked, whichever was greater.

There were some employees that had been with us for over 12 years and basically they had the option to take a year's severance.

This new environment isn't right for everyone, because some employees just want to know what steps one to 10 are and be told by a manager that they've done a good job when they finish. In this new self-managed world, employees sign up for a role or a circle, and each of those has a purpose associated with it that employees have to figure out how to make come alive. And so it gives them a lot of freedom, but I understand at the same time that amount of freedom can be super scary for some people.

What we found, though, was, at least anecdotally, that about half of those who took the offer did so not because of Holacracy, but because they really had wanted to actually go out and do something else they were passionate about, like start their own business. Because now, with a year's severance, for example, they had the funds to try it out and they also knew that they could, 12 months later, come back to Zappos, which we allowed them to do.

I heard a story about someone who took the offer because she considered it a good opportunity to take care of a sick family member in Texas.

Feloni: So do you feel like giving this offer was a necessary decision that you had to make?

Hsieh: It's just more in line with how we've always done things at Zappos. We could have just as easily not given any offer and then just said, "This is what we're doing." But we've always prioritized company culture and how we treat employees. We actually still do this for all our new hires: They go through a five-week training program and at the end of the five weeks, they can take $2,000 and quit.

We want to make sure that employees aren't here just for paychecks and truly believe this is the right place for them.

Feloni: And if your vision is realized, what will success look like under this new self-managed Zappos?

Hsieh: I want employees to operate in the intersection between what they're passionate about and what's going to help move the company forward. I want them to be able to come up with an idea and then, rather than having to go through a bureaucratic approval process, they can run with the idea and find people who'd like to join them.

And from the overall company's perspective, I want to add more innovation and productivity as we add more employees. It goes back to the city analogy.

Another layer to that is that different mayors of different quality can come and go through the city, but the city stands throughout the change. In the same way the city isn't dependent on a mayor, I'd ultimately like for Zappos' future to not be dependent on me as its CEO.

I'd ultimately like for Zappos' future to not be dependent on me as its CEO.

Feloni: Last year I spoke to John Bunch, head of the Holacracy implementation, and he essentially said that even if the company had to abandon Holacracy because it wasn't working, the transitions that already were put in place would have been worth it. Is that something that you agree with?

Hsieh: Yeah, although I wouldn't really think of trying something instead of Holacracy as abandoning it. I would think of it as we're learning that there are some things about Holacracy that are great and then some things that maybe aren't the best fit for our culture.

It would be like if I asked you, "Did Apple abandon the first iPhone?" You can either say they abandoned it or you can say they improved upon it over time.

Feloni: You told me last year that fewer decisions require your approval now at the company. Now that Zappos is fully functioning as a self-managed organization with distributed power, how has your role as CEO changed?

Click here to learn more about how Holacracy works >>

Hsieh: I would say in general, both historically and with Holacracy, I've always viewed my role as just kind of jumping around to wherever the organization needed me the most. And so over the past year and probably this year, as well, a lot of that is really focused on either Holacracy education or helping come up with systems or processes in this new world.

Feloni: You invested $350 million of your own money into Downtown Project in 2012, with the goal of revitalizing 50 acres of downtown Vegas. How was that an outgrowth of the ideas that you were exploring for Zappos?

Hsieh: When we first moved to downtown Vegas, we took over the former City Hall, which we're sitting in right now, about two and a half years ago. And at the time this whole area was a lot more dangerous than it is today, and we wanted employees to be able to live, work, and play within walking distance of work. So the Downtown Project team and I wanted to help fund small businesses, tech startups, and a school and health clinic.

Though Zappos and Downtown Project are entirely separate, I wanted to encourage Zappos employees to go out into the community and to encourage people in the community to come onto Zappos' campus, to have more of those innovation-driving "collisions" with other people, businesses, and industries.

Feloni: How do you feel about where Downtown Project is today?

Hsieh: When we started, the goal was that by the end of year five, which is the end of this year, was to make a profit. Right now, we're pretty close to being on track for that goal.

The more interesting thing for me outside of the numbers is really, "Are small businesses and people not affiliated with us moving on their own to the area?" And the answer is, "Yes." One of our intentions was to get to the tipping point where they came here because they like the vibe we created.

Feloni: You tried implementing Holacracy with the Downtown Project managing team, but they abandoned it in the fall of 2014. Were there lessons that you learned about implementing Holacracy and how it functioned that you were able to bring over to Zappos after trying it at Downtown Project?

Hsieh: In that case the timing wasn't right for Downtown Project. The team was trying to build something significant from the ground up while also trying to learn Holacracy.

Whereas at Zappos, we have an existing business that, while we're always trying to improve and so on, we're not trying to figure out the entire business from scratch. We have more resources to figure out Holacracy.

Feloni: What do you think it is about your personality or your experience that drives this constant need for experimentation and trying new things?

Hsieh: There's the creativity aspect of it, but it's also rewarding for me to remove roadblocks to someone's idea so that it can become reality.

Feloni: Do you ever doubt yourself as you're going through the ambitious projects you take on?

Hsieh: I always doubt individual ideas, but I know that if you just do more of them, then statistically some of them are going to work. The ones that do work are the ones that you double down on.

In some ways it's analogous to playing poker, where if you only play hands that you're absolutely sure you're going to win, you're not going to be the best poker player or win the most money at the table. On the flip side, that doesn't mean you play every hand, because you're not going to make money.

I've always played, in poker and in business, for the highest expected value, and so even if there's a 20% chance that something might work out, if the payoff's going to be 10 times as much as you put in, then you should make that bet every single time.

If the payoff's going to be 10 times as much as you put in, then you should make that bet every single time.

A lot of companies, especially bigger corporations, instead think, "Oh, 20% chance of success means 80% chance of failure — we should kill that project." I'd rather say we should do 10 similar projects and then two of those will work out. Those could be the two that completely change the company.

Feloni: Was your decision to move from a spacious apartment into an Airstream trailer in the fall of 2014 one of those instances where you wanted to push yourself creatively?

Hsieh: I did it because I wanted to maximize serendipity and randomness in my life. If you lived in a house in the suburbs, your neighbors and friends don't randomly walk into your house, in the same way that everyone in the Airstream park interacts with each other.

For example, two nights ago we had a bunch of musicians stop by, and Dan Reynolds, the lead singer of Imagine Dragons, starts a rap battle with another performer. That's the type of situation you can't plan for, but it happens all the time at the Airstream Park and generally happens a lot more in downtown Vegas than any other city I've been in.

Feloni: At this point, you've been a public figure long enough for people to either consider you a genius or crazy. How do you see yourself?

Hsieh: Probably neither. I don't know. I just enjoy learning new things and then forming my own perspective of the world. By definition, because something I pursue is new or different, then it's going to resonate with some people and not with others.

Feloni: You've said in other interviews that Zappos was never to you just about selling shoes or clothes, but that it's been about building a culture internally and with customers. What do you want Zappos to become?

Hsieh: I would like it to be a whole new way of working and living that infects other companies. We like being at the forefront of newer things.

There are so many people working at bureaucratic, big corporations who are unhappy. Hopefully, we can help change that.

SEE ALSO: Jim Cramer tells us about balancing multiple jobs, his bar in Brooklyn, and coming back from the Jon Stewart interview

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: The CEO of this billion-dollar company explains why employees aren't allowed to ask for a raise

(Ezra Bailey/Getty)

The chief executives of Canadian companies aren’t yet in panic mode, but the stresses of a terrible dollar, tanking oil and a tepid economy are making them more pessimistic than normal. According to a recent survey of 49 Canadian CEOs by professional services firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, 31% believe the global economy will become weaker in 2016. When asked the same question last year, only 9% of respondents agreed.

Canada’s Top 100 highest-paid CEOs

Their growing pessimism squares with the experience of CEOs everywhere; only 27% of the 1,409 chief executives around the world interviewed by PwC said they were confident that global economic conditions would improve. The survey—officially titled the 19th Annual Global CEO Survey—was completed during the fourth quarter of 2015.

While the sample of Canadian CEOs surveyed by PwC is small, their responses shed some light on what else is on the mind of our country’s top executives. Among the findings:

•  76% of Canadian respondents say they will implement “cost-cutting measures” this year; that’s 68% higher than their international peers.
• 80% are concerned about their tax burden, up from 68% in the 2015 survey. Many are also concerned about Canada’s looming debt burden, and the implications of a sluggish economy paired with falling tax revenues.
• A whopping 92% of Canadian respondents agree that “business success in the 21st century will be defined by more than financial profit.” They’ve observed that more of their clients expect them to be good corporate citizens and do more to tackle important issues—yet those clients are reticent to absorb extra costs for it.
• Perhaps in response to the above point, 80% of respondents are using new, non-financial metrics to report the value they’ve generated to their stakeholders.
• The overwhelming majority of respondents (90%) said they made significant changes to their branding and marketing strategies in 2015.
• Recruitment and talent retention are becoming more dynamic. Some 65% of respondents understand that top talent prefers to work for organizations with social values which are aligned to their own. (A related challenge they’re met with is accommodating “a new generation of digital natives” who are getting ready to move into positions of power.)
• 61% of respondents say that cyber security is the biggest potential business threat to their organization’s growth prospects, topping availability of key skills (cited by 49% of respondents), volatile commodity prices (43%) and consumer spending behaviours (43%).

MORE ABOUT MANAGEMENT & LEADERSHIP:

• The strongest leaders aren’t afraid to change their minds
• How to make the most of your millennial workers
• How playing with Lego can help your team communicate better
• Why you should praise employees even when they’re doing badly
• Best Employers 2016: The top companies people love working for
• The smart CEO’s most undervalued skill
• Keep your star employees by doing regular “stay interviews”

The post What Canadian CEOs are most worried about right now appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

I continue to be amazed at the staying power of my 2005 book, Baseline Selling - How to Become a Sales Superstar by Using What You Already Know about the Game of Baseball.  3 publishers have contacted me this year about writing a 10th Anniversary Edition, a revised and updated edition, or a follow-up.  Yesterday, Pete Caputa, VP at Hubspot, wrote a really great article about the 3 sales books that are must-reads for salespeople, why, and Baseline Selling was one of the three.

I was speaking to a group of CEO's in NYC yesterday and when they wanted to know about Sales Process, Solution Selling, Value Selling and The Challenger Sale, the easiest way to explain both was to show the visual of the Baseline Selling sales process and show them how it all fit together.  So it got me thinking.  While other books come and quickly go, why has Baseline Selling continued to sell, resonate, help, fit and make sense, even as selling as a profession continues to experience dramatic changes?

Everyone agrees that impact investing is on the rise. According to the Global Impact Investing Network, the market for impact capital, currently sized at $60 billion, could grow over the next decade to $2 trillion, or 1% of global invested assets. But despite this growing interest, impact investing still faces a significant stumbling block that limits the flow of new capital into the field: not everyone agrees on what “impact investing” actually means.

Currently, impact can mean anything from venture investments in new health technologies to microfinance loans in Peru; from affordable housing in the US to renewable energy in India; from social impact bonds to private equity funds that create jobs.  That’s just the beginning of the confusion—even if you accepted that such diverse investments should all be grouped into one category, how do you even measure and compare impact anyway?

Faced with this uncertainty, most investors have chosen one of three options.  First, they search for examples of impact within their existing portfolios, bringing no incremental capital into the field.  Second, they deploy a small amount out of an experimental or mission-motivated pocket, which still holds back enormous amounts of capital.  Or third, and more common, is that they sit on the impact-investing sidelines. None of these are ideal outcomes.

In order to free up all the dry powder waiting for the right impact opportunity, the investment industry needs to help investors clearly articulate three guiding principles behind their investments: what kind of impact they want to have, how deep or broad their intended impact is, and the level of risk they are willing to accept.

Type of impact

Each investor will have their own conception of the social good they are trying to achieve. Investors might have a geographic focus: they may care more about developed or developing economies, or a particular country or community. They may have a thematic lens: improved healthcare, educational reform, financial inclusion, climate change and so on.   The investor might want to fund the invention of new solutions or she might simply want to improve the practices of existing businesses. There is no right or wrong impact class—what matters is identifying preferences. We think a good start is to assess investors’ preferences across five catagories:

Place: Investments in companies or projects that are located in a particular place (or benefit a particular group of people).

For example, the Hoxton Hotel, located in one of the poorest neighborhoods in London, created about 40 entry-level jobs with 73% of the wages going to those living in low-income neighborhoods.  Another example would be the Calvert Foundation’s Women Investing in Women Initiative, which allows individual investors to make loans to women in developing markets to access clean energy.

Process: Investments that pay careful attention to business practices, such as “fair trade” coffee, equitable labor practices in a supply chain, or buy-one-give-one models that provide access to goods and services to those in need.

For instance, Triodos Sustainable Trade Fund provides finance to farmers whose cultivation practices are more sustainable in places like the Palestine Territories, Thailand, and the Dominican Republic, avoiding traditional chemically-intensive fertilizer in delicate ecosystems. Or take Warby-Parker, which provides a pair of reading glasses in developing countries every time it sells a pair of its own glasses.

Planet: Investments that have a clear and measurable environmental benefit, either through the preservation and restoration of critical natural habitat, or the measurable reduction of carbon dioxide through new energy efficient products.

The Lyme Timber Company is a private timberland investment management organization that acquires and sustainably manages land with unique conservation value in the United States and Canada.  BrightPower provides comprehensive energy efficiency audits and heating and lighting retrofits for multi-tenant affordable housing in the New York metropolitan area.

Product: Investments in products or services that have positive social benefits.

Springboard Education provides after-school educational enrichment programs to 3,000 students at 50 public and charter schools in 11 states in the United States.  Ziqitza Health Care Limited took a largely patchwork network of local ambulance companies in India and created a national ambulance and emergency medical services company with world-class medical standards.

Paradigms: Investments that attempt to change an entire system for the better.

Revolution Foods intends to alter the system of childhood nutrition in the United States by providing healthy, nutritious school lunches in public and charter schools.  The Gates Foundation’s investments in Zyomyx and Alere both seek to transform the cost and accessibility of point-of-care diagnostics in emerging markets.

Intensity and immediacy of impact

Having identified what kind of impact the investor seeks, the second question is to understand the intensity and scope of the desired impact, for which category of beneficiaries the impact is targeted, and over what timeframe. Some investors might want to support strategies that generate critical long-term change, such as essential preventative healthcare for hard-to-serve populations, as primary-care provider Iora Health seeks to do.  Others might seek smaller incremental changes that benefit a broader set of beneficiaries with more immediately noticeable change, such as the introduction of a new educational technology like Kinvolved that improves attendance in public schools. Depth, breadth, and the time horizon of impact can help further guide where investors would like to place their money.

Impact risk profile

With every impact investment there is not only financial risk, but also impact risk: will the desired impact be delivered?  Investors should ask what existing evidence they need to see before they make the investment, or what metrics they will expect to see after the investment has been made that can demonstrate progress.  For example: there is reasonable evidence that providing healthy school lunches can make a difference in the childhood obesity epidemic in the United States, while there remains a debate whether access to toilets in slums in emerging markets will reduce incidence of diarrheal disease, which is why Sanergy is such a high risk investment from an impact perspective.

By identifying where to invest, the desired intensity of impact, and an investment’s risk profile, investors can start to identify “impact asset classes,” and then look within their financial portfolio, asset class by asset class, to find impact opportunities that map onto their financial risk and return objectives.  Ultimately, asset managers can develop a matrix with financial asset classes (e.g., cash, fixed income, private equity, etc.) down one side and impact classes (e.g., place, process, planet) across the top.

A foundation president with a strong risk orientation who cares about transforming the education system could, for example, use the matrix to find an equity investment in a fund that seeds “paradigm” ventures in education.  Or the CIO of large hospital’s pension plan could use the matrix to identify a debt fund that lends to locally-based companies (the “place” category) with strong socially responsible business practices serving the hospital, with cascading impact on the entire hospital ecosystem, from the sustainability and nutrition of the food served to patients, to the employment and environmental practices of the outsourced laundry services.

But defining clear investor impact preferences and how they fit into their financial portfolios alone will not be sufficient; for this ecosystem to be successful, advisors, fund managers, and the underlying companies will need to find ways to remain faithful to the investor’s intent around impact.  As it stands now, absent meaningful measures of social impact and incentives to achieve them, there is little to require anyone to comply with an investor’s impact objectives beyond achieving the minimum.  This is not to say that all impact investments need to deliver the impact promised; all investments carry a risk of poor return.  But without a mechanism to align all players in the impact value chain around an investor’s expectations, the field risks an impact “race to the bottom” where funds or companies do as little as possible to comply with an investor’s objectives.  A comparable concept to “fiduciary duty” — call it “impact fidelity” — is needed to bind different actors to attempt to achieve the impact preferences that an investor articulates.

As impact investing gains traction with mainstream investors, the field needs to develop tools that can help investment professionals categorize and understand the potentially limitless combinations and permutations of impact-investment options.  Asking a few straightforward questions and thinking about a well-defined set of impact classes–combined with the concept of impact fidelity–should get more investors off the sidelines and into the impact investing game, with enormous consequences for human progress.

Take aim: what’s the goal of your content marketing efforts?

Different marketers focus on a variety of metrics, including:

• Site traffic
• Social media interactions
• New leads

Ultimately, though, however you’re measuring the success of your marketing campaign, there’s one main goal that you should always be striving towards:

Sales.

If you’re going to go to all the trouble of investing in content creation, you want your marketing efforts to lead to conversions – to money spent and to new lifetime customers.

While other can metrics help you towards this goal, focusing too closely on a particular set of numbers can leave you unable to see the wood for all the trees.

Sometimes it’s necessary to take a step back to appreciate the whole picture.

Focusing too closely on a single element of your conversion funnel can mean failing to spot big problems that are causing you to lose potential customers.

• One common example is focusing too much on initial site traffic but failing to engage with users once they’re on the site.
• Another problem can be providing lots of support through the conversion funnel to the customer’s initial purchase, but dropping the ball when it comes to making repeat sales and creating a lifelong customer.

The specifics of content conversion rates may be slightly different for any website, but the general idea is basically the same. You want customers to:

1. Gain awareness of your brand
2. Develop interest in your services
3. Feel a desire for your products
4. Take action

So what does this look like in real life?

1. Someone finds your website through a well-written blog post.
2. They read through other content and materials on your site.
3. They decide that your product will make their life easier.
4. They purchase your product.

This is a simplified concept: in reality, you generally need to do a lot more handholding to help site visitors to continue to progress.

Throughout your conversion funnel, different pieces of content will be helpful in pushing potential customers along.

• Blogs and web pages draw in initial traffic.
• How-to videos, newsletters and webinars help develop visitors’ interest and desire.
• Brochures, demos and consultations lead to action and sales.

Note the shape of the conversion funnel pictured above: it’s a lot wider at the top.

A lot of people who will visit your site won’t progress further through the funnel, and you’re always going to have more traffic on your the site than you’ll have customers.

The wider you cast your initial net, however, the more conversions you’re likely to see.

That said, a wide funnel doesn’t necessarily mean a wide customer base if there’s something stopping customers from progressing from the top of the funnel to the bottom.

For this reason, it’s crucial to keep a close eye on your conversion funnel, how customers are engaging with it, and what can be streamlined.

Seeing the Big Picture

The first thing you need to do to get a clear picture of how well your conversion funnel is working is to zoom out.

You need to see not just how a single metric for your site is doing, but also how well your content is doing at leading site visitors through the whole conversion funnel.

Looking at your conversion funnel as a whole is best done through the use of analytics tools.

The simplest to use is Google Analytics. With Analytics, you can:

• Monitor specific goals within your conversion funnel.
• Spot trends that show where along the conversion funnel people are getting lost.
• Figure out what’s causing confusion to root out potential problems.

Using Analytics to monitor your conversion funnel is very straightforward.

First, log into Analytics and click on Admin, then navigate to Goals.

Next, clicking on ‘new goal’ on the Goals screen will let you enter the details for your conversion funnel test.

You’re then able to set the details of your funnel analysis.

Depending on what you want to measure, you can choose to monitor:

• The destination URL that site visitors click through to
• The length of time they spend on the site
• How many pages they look at before leaving
• Whether they engage with content, such as watching a video.

When it comes to measuring conversion funnels, choosing destination will work best, as this will let us see what pages site visitors click through before leaving, as well as help us spot where visitors are getting lost or stuck.

On the next screen, you get a few options for customizing your conversion funnel.

You can choose to set a value for conversions, which becomes useful in working out how much each site visitor and conversion is worth and helping measure to measure your overall return on investment.

After turning the funnel ‘on’, you’ll be able to enter a few different web addresses, which will help you track how far down the funnel users progress as they move from each step of the funnel to the next.

Making the first step ‘required’ means that Analytics will only keep track of site visitors who start at the appropriate place at the top of the conversion funnel, helping you to see exactly where site visitors are getting stuck.

After running the funnel analytics for a while, you’ll be able to generate a ‘Funnel Visualization Report’ which shows you clearly how well each stage of your conversion funnel is doing at encouraging users to move to the next stage.

On this report:

• Green is good – the more green there is in each bar, the better each page of your website is doing at leading visitors to the next stage.
• From this, you can see exactly which pages of your site are helping the conversion funnel, and which ones may be causing users concerns.
• You can use this information to find ways to streamline your website’s conversion process, as well as rooting out parts of the site that are holding you back.

Web Traffic Alone is Not the Big Picture

It’s important to note, however, that these analytics tools aren’t perfect.

• They only reflect site visitors who go on to make immediate purchases.
• Many of your customers will take time and a little gentle persuasion to move through every step of the conversion process.
• That said, Google Analytics can help give you an idea of which parts of your website’s interface, design and content are getting in the way of a seamless conversion funnel.

In reality, in order to get the best possible idea of how your conversion funnel holds up, it’s important to take website metrics into account alongside other key indicators of performance.

Beyond keeping track of how your site performs, there are a variety of other metrics that can be used to help analyze your conversion funnel.

In order to help the maximum number of site visitors to convert, you need to offer support at every level of the funnel.

Top of Funnel (TOFU) support is given through site content that draws in visitors. It’s often blanket content that appeals to a broad audience to make the top of the funnel as wide as possible

Bottom of Funnel (BOFU) support is generally more personalized, dealing with the specific concerns that an individual potential customer may have. This means taking more time per potential customer, but it balances out as far fewer leads make it to the bottom of the funnel.

BOFU interactions and assistance can be a little more difficult to track, as they’re a bit more personal than one-size-fits-all web design or content creation.

So what can you track?

It’s not always possible to get a sense of how invested a lead is in your product, and how far along the conversion funnel they are.

Instead, the easiest things to track throughout your conversion funnel are moments of engagement and action.

These can include:

• Download resources
• Signing up for a mailing list
• Social media engagement
• Click-throughs from emails
• Asking questions directly through contact channels

As such, it’s important to include a variety of calls to action for leads and potential customers, for several reasons:

• These actions naturally lead potential customers through the conversion funnel.
• They give you something practical to measure so that you can see what’s working well and what needs reworking.
• You’ll also be able to see which forms of engagement are the most popular for potential customers, and how you can provide a more streamlined process for them.

The double bonus of tracking calls to action are that, as well as helping to gauge how well your conversion funnel is doing, they’ll also help to further drive progression.

The more actions you convince your potential customers to undertake, the faster they’ll progress.

This is why measuring actions taken by your leads is more effective than passive indicators of progression, such as website visits or quiet interaction with content that doesn’t require any commitment.

While the bottom of your funnel may be narrow, encouraging BOFU engagement will help naturally sift out disinterested users so that you can focus directly on the leads that may actually convert.

In this way, the process of measuring your conversion funnel’s success dovetails nicely with actually developing leads as they move through it. This makes for efficient and effective marketing that’s backed by consistent, numerical goals.

Optimizing Your Conversion Funnel

Once you’ve established where your conversion funnel is lacking, and what parts of the process are slowing down or damaging progress, you can start experimenting to fix holes, fill in cracks and reduce wasted efforts.

This can involve:

• Reworking your calls to action to focus on more beneficial behaviors.
• Streamlining web pages to remove unnecessary roadblocks.
• Finding ways to engage with solid leads and move them forward.
• Weeding out disinterested parties so that your focus is on potential customers who will actually convert.

There are many different ways to streamline your conversion funnel, each of which focuses on making the conversion process as simple, quick and easy as possible.

Getting the Right Focus

One of the big ways that a conversion funnel can go wrong is to focus on the wrong target demographic.

Often, marketers focus on extending the top of their conversion funnel to reach the widest possible audience.

• The logic here is that the wider the top of the funnel is, the wider the top of the funnel, the wider the bottom of the funnel will be, and the more leads will convert.
• This often means working to make content as accessible as possible, targeting a wide spectrum of demographics.

While it’s important to ensure that your content is reaching out as widely as possible, it’s a fallacy that a wide top of your funnel automatically means a wider bottom.

The problem, often, is that in appealing to the widest possible audience, marketers drum up huge site traffic, but a relatively small proportion of these visitors will actually be interested in taking action, engaging and converting.

• A site’s conversion funnel tracking will have a narrower bottom, as the site is drawing in an audience that won’t lead to sales.
• This can lead to a lot of frustration as marketers are unable to work out why their leads aren’t going anywhere.

Thankfully, there’s a simple fix for this: make sure your conversion funnel is focused on the right demographics.

The easiest way to do this is to focus on producing quality content that appeals to the type of customers who make it to the bottom of the funnel.

This means:

• Researching your core customer demographic to find out the kind of content they’d like to see more of.
• Creating demographic profiles, thinking about the needs of your core customers and what might hurt their chances of converting.
• Developing content which addresses concerns at all levels of the conversion funnel.
• Ensuring that TOFU content leads users naturally to BOFU content without a shift in tone or target audience that would confuse or distract leads.

This isn’t to say that all of your content should only focus on the small demographic of sure-fire customers. For one thing, that market doesn’t exist (or, at least, it rarely does in my experience).

But your content, while accessible, should be designed to appeal to those who’ll make purchases and convert, as well as leading site visitors naturally towards conversion.

Essentially, you want to remove as many roadblocks as possible from the conversion funnel. And one of the biggest roadblocks is often simply a lack of interest.

Prioritizing people who will convert will make your conversion funnel more effective – even if it means putting less emphasis on site traffic and a greater emphasis on the more difficult job of providing a unique, tailored user experience.

Removing Roadblocks

One of the most important elements of your conversion funnel planning involves removing areas or elements that might distract, confuse, or otherwise put off potential leads.

Having used analytics tools to pinpoint weaknesses in your site’s design – and using other metrics to see where leads are failing to progress – it’s possible to spot elements of your campaign that might be tripping up users.

Among other things, you need to make sure:

• Your website design naturally leads users from TOFU content to BOFU content.
• Your BOFU content is not overlooked or underdeveloped
• You provide adequate support for leads who have questions or concerns.

There’s only one good way to make sure your funnel is as streamlined as possible: experimentation.

Explore, Rework and Test Again

The key to removing awkward or distracting elements from your site – and, thereby, speeding up and simplifying the conversion process – is experimentation and variation.

• What works for one site might not necessarily fit your conversion funnel.
• Even if your conversion rate is high, small tweaks could further improve your conversion process.

If you’re not running tests regularly, your conversion funnel is going to suffer as a result, as it’s through regular testing that you can identify and develop the best possible approach to leading site visitors towards conversion.

So what kind of tests should you run?

Heat Maps

It’s critically important that you spot the design elements on your website that are costing you conversions.

Similarly, it’s useful to know what design ideas are working well so that you can reuse them in other areas.

Heat maps provide a detailed visual understanding of what design ideas and content site visitors are engaging with.

Heat maps are helpful for your conversion funnel because:

• You can see exactly what site visitors are engaging with.
• You can spot when an element on the site is distracting from your intended user behavior.

By using heatmaps, one marketer found that users were often distracted by a navigation bar in the top left hand corner of the screen that linked to the blog, jobs and help pages for the site.

These small links were preventing many site visitors from taking the intended action. Removing them led to a 12% increase in conversions.

Overall, heat maps can help you streamline your site design to remove a lot of the negative, distracting or simply unnecessary site elements, helping you to lead site visitors on a straightforward path to conversion.

A/B Testing

You can also improve problem pages on your website, and improve the effectiveness of sluggish content, through A/B testing.

• Often, a small change can make a big difference to the conversion funnel’s effectiveness.
• A/B testing gives quantitative data that shows the most effective way to arrange your content, which works well alongside your existing metrics and goals.

Good A/B testing will also help indicate what support your leads may need before they’re willing to commit.

Ez Texting, for example, used A/B testing to identify that site visitors desperately wanted easier communication methods. The inclusion of a live chat function led to a 31% increase in conversions.

This just goes to show how paying attention to little design features that can improve the user experience can help to streamline the conversion funnel and increase sales.

It also shows how regular and consistent experimentation and testing can help to highlight the little tweaks that can be made to improve the presentation and delivery of content.

Facilitating a Natural Progression

The trick to getting the most out of each and every potential lead is helping them to make their way through the conversion funnel as quickly and simply as possible.

• You want the experience to be hassle-free so that users don’t get frustrated with finding relevant information.
• Content should preempt users’ needs and help them to progress naturally down the conversion funnel.

No funnel is perfect, but the savvy content marketer will make use of the tools at their disposal to fill in potholes and smooth over any speed-bumps that exist on the road to conversion.

Are you struggling to get your content funnels converting? If so, share how you’ll apply the techniques described here by leaving a comment below:

Images:

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Companies spend an immense amount of time and money on recruiting, and often don’t get the results they were looking for.

We put together 12 statistics that are sure to change the way you approach recruiting.

Free Bonus: Download our eBook about how to improve your recruiting with your talent brand.

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Interactions With Employees Are The Best Way To Get Insights

In the past, companies could advertise whatever image they wanted to potential candidates, but you can find out the truth from speaking with employees directly. Websites like Glassdoor and social media have changed the way companies recruit, because there is so much more transparency in the process.

No longer can companies hide behind marketing gimmicks and buzzwords, companies need to be much more authentic, and potentially change the way they do things.

2x As Likely To Accept Cold Emails If They’ve Interacted With Your Brand

No one likes getting cold emails, unless they’re really well-written or timely.

When people “interact” with a brand, it’s very likely on social media. Your company should allow employees to promote your brand on social media and be ambassadors for your company.

Again, it all comes down to transparency. Show potential candidates what it’s like to work at your company and make them know who you are.

As a simple example, if you were to get a cold email from Google offering you a job, it’s likely that you’d open it.

It Takes Around 27 Days To Make A New Hire

The good thing about this is that companies are starting to treat the hiring process much more seriously.

They realize the value in taking the time to get to know someone and make them go through multiple steps in the interview process before making a decision.

The bad thing about this is that top talent is off the market very quickly. So while I agree that you need to have a good hiring process, make sure it’s not too complex.

Often, companies will overdo the process and make it longer than it needs to be.

You should be constantly be looking for ways to optimize the process, and use technology to help. Our company recently started using Workable to manage our candidates, and we love it so far!

The Best Candidates Are Off The Market In 10 Days

The best candidates have so many offers coming their way, that they really have their choice of whatever job they want.

If you find a top talent candidate, you should try to move quickly.

You want all-star players on your team, and you need to do whatever it takes to get them.

Like I wrote before, you need to have a strong interview process that takes time and qualifies candidates, but at the same time, you need to be able to move quickly if a good opportunity presents itself.

The Average Cost Per Hire Has Risen To $4000

This is a pretty alarming statistic.

Hiring is becoming more important than ever and companies are starting to take note.

Also, what it takes to recruit an employee has changed, from more advanced tests, to bringing other managers into the process, to more expensive and diverse job listings, it’s expensive to hire a new employee.

All the more reason to go the extra mile to make sure that you’re hiring the right person for your team.

Hiring for culture fit is easier said than done, because sometimes you desperately need employees, but in the end it’s worth it.

Chances are, you’ll need to let them go in the near future because they won’t fit in with the team, making it an even more awkward (and more expensive) process.

60% Of Employers Are Concerned With The Cost Of Unfilled Positions

Employers are naturally very concerned with the cost of unfilled positions, it’s a ton of money being left on the table.

The opportunities are almost endless. Think about the lost revenue from missed business, the lost money from employees who have to do more with less, the money from mistakes made when employees are doing too much to handle, etc.

This is a constant, arguably unnecessary stress for employers.

There’s not much that can be done, because building your employer brand takes time and effort, but if you make the right decisions, long term it will pay off, that’s for sure.

64% Of Applicants Share Negative Application Experiences. 27% Actively Discourage Others From Applying

The candidate experience is so important, and companies can’t ignore this process.

Things like calling or at least emailing every single applicant to give them a response whether it’s yes or no, treating candidates with respect when they come for an interview, etc.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve been told by a hiring manager that they’d get back to me regardless of their decision to let me know where I stand in the application process only to never receive anything.

It’s a bit tedious, but it’s so worth it.

Like I mentioned earlier, especially now with social media, the word can spread very quickly.

You don’t want negative comments spreading about your company.

60% Of Candidates Quit An Application Process That Takes Too Long

This is a big opportunity wasted.

Lots of good potential employees not getting a chance to work for your company because your process isn’t well optimized.

A good example of this is Google that after working hard to optimize the hiring process, using data of course, they realized they had too many steps on the interview process and brought the number down to 4.

Now it runs much smoother, and they are able to get candidates through the door much faster.

15% Of Candidates Who Have A Positive Hiring Experience Put More Effort Into The Job

This is an incredibly interesting statistic.

It’s so important to make an employee feel good starting from when you first interact with them, every part of the experience has to be amazing.

If it is, the employee will already be in love with your company, and go the extra mile to make your company successful.

Over 75% Of Professionals Are Passive Candidates

Many companies make the huge mistake of ignoring passive candidates. Most people are passive candidates, meaning you’re missing out on a giant pool of talent that would potentially be willing to work with you if the offer was right.

People are naturally complacent, so sometimes all it takes is a little push to get them to switch over to your company.

Don’t view hiring as a one-time thing when you need to fill a position. Building and maintaining your employer brand is an ongoing thing that takes input from many different people in different departments.

46% Of Recruiters See Recruiting Becoming More Like Marketing

I wish this number was higher.

This is something I have been saying for a while now, recruiting is becoming exactly like marketing,.

Candidates, both passive and active should be treated like leads in a funnel, the same way that marketing treats their leads.

The best way to attract passive candidates is by messaging them with relevant content (blog posts, company news, etc.) at the right moment. The same principles from marketing of figuring out what the “right moment” is, is coming to recruiting.

Employee Turnover Can Be Reduced By Investing In Your Employer Brand

Employee turnover costs a ton of money.

Doing whatever you can to reduce it is obviously important for the company. The entire experience from A-Z needs to be great so that employees love working for your company.

A great example is Hubspot, a company famous for their culture, makes each new employee responsible for improving the onboarding experience after they go through it.

It ensures that their process continues to get better over time.

What Are Some Things You Do To Ensure A Strong Employer Brand?

Let us know your thoughts in the comments!

By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca 

Most see selling and prospecting as two different things, as evidenced by the fact that while apply themselves to the former, but save their real creativity to avoiding the latter. But the fact remains that you can’t sell without prospecting, but sadder still, you can prospect a lot without selling. Mastering the skill-and-art of proactively prospect, especially buyers who don’t know them, is the ticket to continuous sales success. But people avoid prospecting because of the rejection factor; that nagging reminder that sellers are mere mortals after all.

Successful professional prospectors also know that sales and prospecting are different, and it is how they view that, and what they do that helps them deal and succeed.

Being that sales and prospecting are two of revenue process, each has its own set of objectives, and related activities, and desired outcomes. For prospecting, the singular and only objective is engagement with a buyer, plainly speaking, as many of you would express, “getting in”. To do that they avoid doing two common things, this in turn contributes to their prospecting and by extension sales success.

Thing 1 – “Gatekeeper”

People focused on leveraging clients’ objective for prospecting success, detest this term. It puts you and someone important to your success in adversarial posture. Conjures up the image of the bridge keeper from The Bridge of Death, keepers of the gate to sales Nirvana. To be clear, this is not about a receptionist in the lobby, (sometimes lock away from her colleagues), but an executive assistant or personal admin who work with the executives you want to sell to. They are not the enemy, nor do you want them to be, as they have a lot knowledge you’d love to tap into, and influence with the very individual whose influence you seek.

By now you are probably hip to the new number in town, 5.4, wonderfully unpacked by our friends at the CEB in the #ChallengerCustomer. No one knows those players better than what many mistakenly call the ‘Gatekeeper’. If you start treating them in the same way you would any of the 5.4. Furthermore, they are a unique source of insight as to who your Mobilizer may be. Rather than following the advice to isolate and exclude, you should think and do inclusion, tell them what you would tell the person he/she assists. Engage around who the executive may delegate the kind of projects or products your offering has improved or moved towards their objectives. Yes, Virginia, we are talking on the first call, I want to get in, not play coy.

Thing 2 – Decision Maker

It’s not about the maker, it’s about the decision. Hard for many Judeo-Christian sellers to just let go of the Maker.

Whenever I ask a group of sellers, who they want to reach out to when prospecting an organization. The answer is overwhelmingly “the decision maker”. Now I have used a range of directories and lists, and many had some on-depth information, but rarely did they have the title Decision Maker. And given that the studies show that there usually more people involved in the decision, looking for one maker may not be the best approach.

The thought process for prospecting should be about the decision, not the maker; about mapping the decision to objectives you can contribute to, who you impact internally and in their customer base, and most of all what your specific impact is. Looking at getting a decision and what is involved in that, and then building your track around that for all involved, will help you uncover anticipated advantages in creating and extending conversation, especially to where you can converge them around you. Looking for a Decision Maker, will narrow your focus and cause you to miss things you could leverage even if you found Salomon.

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As a marketing leader, it’s your job to fill the pipeline with leads. To do this, you must design campaigns that attract buyers to your products. Sounds simple right? But it’s not. Recently we interviewed Laura Goldberg, CMO at LegalZoom on this very subject. You can watch here. LegalZoom provides an easy-to-use, online service that helps people and businesses create their own legal documents.

You’ve just created the Mona Lisa of content. It’s beautiful, it’s one of a kind, it has metaphors, it has puns, and you’ve proofread it 14 times.

Now, where is everybody?

Unfortunately, great content is worthless if nobody ever sees it. And posting your Mona Lisa to some random blog won’t automatically bring hoards of awestruck readers to your website who are dying to peruse your products and services.

Companies should be thinking just as creatively about their distribution strategies as they are about their content strategies. They need to be savvy enough to target the right audiences who crave their material. If they don’t do that, they’ve failed.

Ninety percent of marketers say they currently utilize content marketing in their strategies, but only 26 percent actually invest in their distribution plans. You need to beat this sorry crowd.

Where Are the Right Eyes?

In many cases, your content will introduce readers to your brand. You have to make this first impression count and lead those consumers to your salespeople. The best way to achieve this is by offering custom content—something that’s favored by up to 68 percent of consumers.

Start out by determining which ages, locations, demographics, and industries care most about your product. Then, identify how and where this audience prefers to consume content. Are your ideal buyers watching TV, looking for professional advice on LinkedIn, or browsing around Facebook? Are they on mobile phones or desktops?

Create meaningful relationships with your target audience by reaching them with messages that are individualized and tailored to their tastes and channels. This will optimize your inbound website traffic, create informed buyers, and give you a whole lot of bang for your content-marketing buck.

Hone Your Distributions Strategy

Now that you know how to identify and locate your ideal audience, here’s how to make sure your content catches their eye.

Become Your Audience

In The Art of War, Sun Tzu wrote, “To know your enemy, you must become your enemy.” Just substitute the word “audience” for “enemy,” and you’ve got yourself a winning strategy. Ask your clients about the hot-button issues plaguing their day-to-day lives, and browse social media to see what your target audience is talking (and complaining) about. What’s keeping them up at night? Your top priority is to produce pieces they’ll care about.

By constantly looking at your content through the lens of your ideal audience, you’ll keep finding ways to improve your creation and distribution strategies.

Don’t Go a Day Without Testing

Do people learn how to cook by sitting back and thinking about recipes, or do they fire up the oven and try different techniques until something tastes delicious? The best way to figure out if your content is resonating is by trying out different methods. Experiment with various voices, formats, and channels. Then assess, reassess, re-strategize, and keep experimenting until you find the ultimate combination of the right words hitting the right eyes.

Make decisions based off of data, not just a hunch of what you think looks good or think should work. Any decent publishing or creation platform will provide you with the numbers that prove what your audience is (and what your audience isn’t) responding positively to.

Keep Your Finger on the Competitive Pulse

This isn’t high school anymore; I encourage you to peek over at your peers’ work to see what they’re doing and how it’s performing. If you see that the infographics they tweet out every month are getting shared like crazy, you ought to consider making some as well. And if your biggest competitor is writing 2,000-word opuses that no one is engaging with, don’t waste your time on verbose, long-form content. Constantly check in on the places your ideal eyes hang out, see what’s performing well there, and craft your content accordingly.

To start off, consider using Google Alerts. This allows you to receive notifications of new content your competitors have published. Use listening platforms to track their activity on social media. Consider using tools like Meltwater to track PR and news mentions.

Don’t Overlook Those Closest to You

When it comes to getting your content seen, your employees and their thousands of connections on social media can be incredibly helpful. According to Nielsen, peer recommendations are the most trusted form of marketing today, so encourage your employees to share and discuss content on their social accounts. Building and nurturing an employee advocacy program within your company will expose your pieces to countless more eyes in a trustworthy way.

Fostering a culture of more informed employees will not only ensure that your company is more engaged, but it will also allow for feedback on the content you’re creating. Employees will provide honest opinions (or what they’re passionate about), and those sentiments don’t deviate much from the way you’re customers and prospects will feel.

Smart brands are getting savvy with their distribution strategies. SAP is one of those brands; so are Cathay Pacific and Humana. Regardless of the industry, the value in these strategies is evident. Rely on data, get familiar with trial and error, know your competition, and integrate your employees from the start.

You might as well spend your time writing knock-knock jokes if you’re not also investing in your distribution strategy. You have to get yourself into your users’ worlds, understand what will resonate with them, and create content that will have them saying, “Wow, this company really gets me.”

Now let that Mona Lisa content do her thing.

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The best leaders are those that read a lot and on a diverse set of subjects.

Reading is one of the most powerful things you can do to improve yourself, from developing emotional intelligence to having a larger vocabulary.

Research has shown¹ that reading makes you smarter through “a larger vocabulary and more world knowledge in addition to the abstract reasoning skills.”

The benefits of reading are absolutely incredible. Here are a few of the ways research has shown that it helps you.

• Reading increases verbal intelligence², making you a better communicator.
• Reading can improve empathy³ and emotional intelligence, enabling you to be a more compassionate leader.
• Reading for six minutes can reduce stress by 68%⁴, which is great for any stressed out leader.
• Some studies have even found that because reading is such good exercise for the mind, it might even ward off Alzheimer’s⁴

As busy as leaders are, you should try to find the time to read. Block off time in your schedule for reading, the benefits are amazing, and reading is fun!

Here is a list of 10 books that every business leader should read.

1. High Output Management By Andy Grove

This is one of the most referenced leadership books ever. This book is likely on any list of leadership books you’ve seen before and for good reason.

Andy Grove, regarded as one of the best leaders ever, reflects on his time as CEO of Intel in the 1970’s.

One of the most important things that Grove understood is that as a leader, your job is to enable others to do great work. The collective results of your team is how you’ll be judged, not on your own output.

Grove shares five key things that you should be focusing your time on:

1. Decision making
2. Information gathering
3. Information sharing
4. Nudging
5. Role modeling

Here is the link to buy it on Amazon

2. Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? Inside IBM’s Historic Turnaround By Lou Gerstner

This is one of those books that you’ll have a hard time putting down. It’s the amazing story of Lou Gerstner’s turnaround of IBM. It’s such an incredible story, and the reading is so engaging.

In 1990, IBM had its most profitable year ever. By 1993, IBM was on its way to losing $16 billion and everyone thought the company would go bust.

Then Lou Gerstner was brought in to run the company.

Gerstner’s story touches on points that many people can relate to – the challenges that come with working in a large company. The communication challenges, the speed at which you move (especially during a turnaround), and lots of people not working very hard, which is common in large companies.

The book is a personal account of how he was able to rebuild leadership, change the culture, and give everyone there a sense of purpose.

Here is the link to buy it on Amazon

3. The Amazon Way: 14 Leadership Principles Behind the World’s Most Disruptive Company By John Rossman

In the world of eCommerce, Amazon.com was one of the first in the game back in 1994. Amazon is arguably one of the most disruptive companies of all time.

John Russman, who was a senior executive at Amazon and was responsible for building out their Merchants platform, shares 14 leadership principles from Amazon, useful tips, and stories from his time there.

Some of the principles discussed in the book are:

• Customer obsession
• Hiring and developing top talent
• Being accountable for results
• Ownership
• Being lean
• And more

The most important one though, is ownership. Leaders are expected to take action, take ownership, and make sure projects are well-executed and complete.

Here is the link to buy it on Amazon

4. Marcus Aurelius, The Emperor’s Handbook

Marcus Aurelius was the Emperor of Rome from 161 to 180 A.D., and is considered one of history’s greatest thinkers.

What makes this book so interesting is that these writings were originally never meant to be published. These were just his personal notes he would keep as he tried to understand life.

These are his thoughts on Stoicism, life, leadership, and the world around him. The book is filled with leadership lessons and practical advice for everyday life.

It’s an incredible insight into the mind of someone who ruled history’s greatest empire.

Here is the link to buy it on Amazon

5. Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…and Others Don’t By Jim Collins

One of the most popular leadership books, author Jim Collins asked himself the question, “Can a good company become a great company and if so, how?”

Jim Collins and his team looked at successful companies and tried to find common traits that led to their success.

The secret? A company culture with a relentless focus. Everyone needs to be working together towards the same mission.

He also talks about level 5 leadership being one of the keys to success. Leaders need to have a perfect balance of being humble, but hungry enough to work hard for success.

These leaders had common characteristics: humility, will, ferocious resolve, and the tendency to give credit to others and taking the blame for themselves.

Here is the link to buy it on Amazon

6. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People By Stephen R. Covey

Stephen Covey is regarded as one of the most influential management gurus.

Covey’s most famous book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, became the defacto book for personal development.

The principles may be used for life in general and are not limited to workplaces or management. His concepts help people grow and become more effective in their daily lives.

His seven habits are:

1. Be proactive
2. Begin with the end in mind
3. Put first things first (discover which goals will get you where you need based on habit #2)
4. Think win-win (collaborate with others)
5. Seek first to understand and then to be understood (empathize and listen)
6. Synergize
7. Sharpen the saw (self-renewal)

Here is the link to buy it on Amazon

7. Reinventing Organizations

If there was one book on this list that I would suggest to read, it’s for sure this one.

Frédéric Laloux describes in detail how “Teal organizations” work and how they can be created. He studied many organizations and discovered what makes them work.

He uses a colour scheme to describe the historical development of human organizations: Red > Orange > Green > Teal.

He says that we need more Teal organizations so we can evolve as a society and a civilization.

He lists three features of Teal organizations:

1. Self-management: driven by peer relationships
2. Wholeness: involving the whole person at work
3. Evolutionary purpose: let the organization adapt and grow, not be driven

It explains in detail the framework needed for better organizations that can adapt to work in complex situations.

• No job titles
• Radical transparency
• No promotions, but fluidly changing roles based on skills
• Focus on team performance

Here is the link to buy it on Amazon

8. Creativity, Inc By Ed Catmull

Creativity, Inc looks at how Pixar became one of the world’s most loved filmmakers.

Written by Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull, he details the company’s rise as well as his own, from his childhood dream of becoming a Disney animator to becoming the president of Pixar Animation Studios.

What’s amazing about this story is Pixar’s drive for perfection. The entire culture knew that “good enough” was not good enough.

An amazing quote from the book:

Originality is fragile. There is no Occam’s razor, nor do great works somehow pre-exist, waiting to be discovered. Instead, we must cultivate relationships with people smarter than ourselves, insist they provide constant, candid feedback, and uncouple fear and failure, for failure is an investment in the future.

Here is the link to buy it on Amazon

9. To Sell is Human By Dan Pink

Dan Pink is of course best known for his book Drive about intrinsic motivation, and his TED talk The puzzle of motivation.

The concept of the book is that everyone is a seller. The image many of us have of a used-car salesman is no longer valid, as everyone is in one way or another selling/persuading/pitching something.

In a study that Pink commissioned, he found that people spend 40% of their time at work selling something.

It’s a great book because he shows that the world of selling is changing. In the old days, sales was all about deception, and had a really bad reputation as a result.

That deception was only possible because buyers lacked information. Now, with social media, review sites, ratings, etc. sellers have to be more honest.

He gives great examples and traits of successful sellers and helps us understand how to do it better.

Here is the link to buy it on Amazon

10. Work Rules By Laszlo Bock

This is a must-read for anyone involved at any stage of the recruiting process.

The book goes into detail on how Google got to be so good at recruiting. Even though they receive around 50,000 resumes a month, they spend insane amounts of money on recruiting – optimizing and refining their process to make sure the best talent gets through the door.

The main takeaway from this book is that the traditional way of recruiting – posting a job, collecting resumes and interviewing, won’t attract the best talent.

The reason is because what your resume says and what you say during an interview don’t predict how well you’ll perform on the job.

The biggest predictor, is how you do in a sample work test, because you need to see a candidate in action.

While some companies do this, they often only require the test after the initial filtering and interview round is complete, meaning that there is potentially a huge pool of people that aren’t being considered because they never made it past the first round.

One of the biggest lessons Laszlo shares in the book is how much Google focuses on passive candidates.

He makes the smart point that the best and the brightest are often not looking for jobs, they have good ones, but they need to be groomed over time with lots of outbound marketing.

Here is the link to buy it on Amazon

What Books Do You Enjoy Reading?

Have any good recommendations for us? Let us know in the comments!

You Built Personas, Now What?

Creating buyer personas is only half the battle. If your personas are wasting away at the bottom of a desk drawer, gathering dust up on the wall of your office, or sitting ignored on the company intranet, it’s time to reimagine their potential.

In a recent B2B marketing benchmark study we conducted, the majority of high-performing organizations used personas to guide messaging and tone of voice. Additionally, they leveraged them for sales training and demand generation to inform campaign decisions. Surprisingly, only 8.2% of those surveyed felt that at least 75% of their organization could confidently name their personas and key attributes.

Here are 29 fresh ideas for putting your personas to work.

For Demand Generation Marketers

1. Tag contacts to persona and segment your database to improve targeting and lead gen campaign results.

2. Leverage personas to understand the appropriate buying committee at target accounts for account based marketing.

3. Measure the performance of marketing campaigns by persona to understand what’s working for a given segment – and what needs to be adjusted.

4. Leverage insights to inform customer personas for specific post-sale activities designed to retain and upsell existing customers.

5. Create brand advocate personas to understand how to turn customers into evangelists.

6. Guide media buyers and demand generation teams towards only the most preferred channels for each audience segment.

7. Use personas to form qualifying criteria for your lead scoring model.

For Content Marketers

8. Use words and phrases from persona research to ensure your content marketing echoes the voice of your customer.

9. Audit and tag your marketing content by persona to understand where it fits into the buyer’s journey for your various segments.

10. Inspire blog authors to craft compelling content based on specific topics of content related to priorities as defined by the persona.

11. Use buying committee insights to craft your content so that it builds consensus among the group by speaking to distinct, various perspectives.

For Sales Enablement

12. Make personas available within relevant leads/contacts in your CRM to empower sales enablement and give your sales team critical buyer insights for more relevant conversations and cross/up-sell opportunities.

13. Help sales executives understand the various members of the buying committee, what they each distinctly care about and how to build consensus to close the deal.

14. Include personas in your sales training materials to equip the team with what they need from day one to have relevant, empathetic conversations.

For Marketing Leadership

15. Give personas to your entire marketing team to unify marketing efforts around one common understanding of your target audience.

16. Train new employees on persona segments just as much as you train them on your products and services.

17. Satisfy customer experience professionals’ desire for one cohesive story across the customer lifecycle by unifying various departments and functional areas of the business

18. Help external agencies understand your specific buying segments so they can contribute to this cohesive, unified strategy

19. Enable programmatic marketing by using persona insights to help determine the right content for the right channel at the right stage of the buying process.

20. Distribute persona insights across the whole organization to increase your visibility as the resident expert on the customer, and enable all functions to work with empathy for your target market

For Communications Professionals

21. Equip media relations teams with persona insights to help them understand which media outlets and targets are relied on by your key audiences

22. Arm social media managers with the relevant tone of voice, channels, and top-of-mind topics of interest for your given personas to satisfy their unique and distinct preferences

For Webmasters and Website Content Managers

23. Develop website workflows that are designed for a specific persona segment, complete with the right tone of voice, word choice, problem statements, and other related material.

24. Use behavioral tracking to better refine personas based on visitor behavior and activity

For Customer Service / Customer Experience Teams

25. Train client-facing teams in distinct personas to help them understand more about their day-to-day lives and distinct responsibilities. Empathy is perhaps never as important as in the support function.

26. Collect feedback from your customer service teams to refresh profiles, and keep them up-to-date.

For Product Marketing

27. Create and share personas with product marketing and product development to ensure the product lifecycle begins (and ends) with the customer in mind (and include their feedback!)

28. Unify your three related business functions (sales, marketing, and product) around one common view of buyers and users.

29. Ensure user personas align with product development and engineering to help them understand what’s needed to achieve greater usage and traction with your products (and to understand who they’re building for in the first place!)

Customer-centric marketing begins with a solid understanding of your target market, but customer-centric business relies on an organization’s ability to turn these insights into action across multiple functions.

Laura Ramos of Forrester says it best, “To win in the age of the customer, B2B marketers need to drive customer intelligence into all areas of the business.”

As you’ve probably heard, The X-Files were re-opened on Sunday night. And right as “The Truth Is Out There” flashed across my TV screen, it got me thinking about the misconceptions (and fabrications) we content marketers have to face. Fortunately, I don’t need Mulder and Scully to refute people’s claims. All that’s required is some data and practical experience.

MYTH: Content marketing is expensive
Great content marketing can be labor intensive. Generally, there’s a high cost associated with it — from writing to design to videography. And if you only invest in something you’ll use once, then, yes, things get pricey. That’s why you should look for opportunities to repurpose whenever possible. Create a magazine using top-performing blog posts or re-edit videos to make them Instagram, Vine and Snapchat-friendly. I wouldn’t stop there though. If you’re sitting on a large video library, try using the audio tracks to assemble some podcasts. Let’s face it, getting creative with your recycling will only improve your ROI.

29% of leading marketers systematically reused and repurposed content in 2015.

Curata

44% of marketers said finding better ways to repurpose content is a 2016 goal.

Content Marketing Institute

MYTH: Content marketing delivers quick wins
Creating exceptional content takes time and seeing results from it can take even longer. This is why it’s important to educate stakeholders. Prior to launching a blog that published 20 times a month, I crafted a presentation that set the appropriate expectations with my exec team. I even wrote case studies conveying what other companies had seen in terms of time-to-impact. I got lucky — we started seeing traction in about 90 days — but a little C.Y.A. is never a bad idea.

Content marketing is measurable, but it takes time to get real data…at least 6 months.

Michael Weiss, Content Marketing Institute lead consultant

MYTH: Content marketing is just an SEO play
While content marketing does wonders for SEO — Google loves fresh, high-quality content — zealously incorporating keywords can have two negative outcomes: 1) you have a jargon-filled mess no one will want to read and 2) Google will slap you with a Panda penalty for trying to game the system. That’s why I always write for my audience and not web-crawling bots. Not surprisingly, my best performing posts for OneSpot have been ones where I was least focused on my SEO score and most concerned with solving a problem myself and others were struggling with.

Identify issues with [your] site…starting with a single page and asking: “Is this the best page on the Internet for this topic?”

Google

MYTH: Creating viral content is easy
All you need is a good idea, right? Wrong. There are tons of good ideas executed every day and yet few ever “break the Internet.” When I was at Razorfish, I always hated it when a client they said they wanted something “viral.” Viral is not something you make, it’s something that happens. It’s often the result of not chasing page or video views. Your best shot of having something blow up is to perfectly align your content with the interests of your audience. Get to know them, get to know what they want and then give them exactly that. There’s no sure-fire formula for success, but having a keen understanding of your customer’s needs is a good place to start.

The chances of content going truly viral…is one in a million.

Professor Sharad Goel, Stanford University

More than half [of 100,000 analyzed posts] had two or fewer Facebook interactions and Twitter shares, one or zero Google+ shares, and no LinkedIn shares

Moz and BuzzSumo joint study

MYTH: Lots of traffic or shares = success
So let’s say you’re one of the fortunate ones that has something catch fire. Does that make it a victory? It all depends on your KPIs. A couple of years ago, I worked for a WPP-owned mobile solutions company that wanted to get in on the “Harlem Shake” craze. The CEO filmed the entire office losing their collective minds and his video racked up over 100,000 views (along with several media mentions). He liked to proclaim it was more successful than anything the marketing team produced, but we were obviously tasked to drive sales. An editorial vehicle we produced for the auto industry put us on Bill Ford’s radar, but I don’t believe the “Harlem Shake” ever brought us any leads. My point: make sure you have benchmarks in place at the beginning of any endeavor or success will be subjective.

% of marketers who have clarity around content marketing success
Yes – 43%
No – 31%
Unsure – 27%

Content Marketing Institute

Most important success metrics for organizations
Sales – 30%
Sales Lead Quality – 13%
Higher Conversion Rates – 11%
Brand Lift – 12%
Website Traffic – 8%
Data Capture – 5%
Other – 21%

Content Marketing Institute

Hopefully, with a little persuasion and the stats above, you’ll be able to bring the confused and contrarian in your company around to this way of thinking:

How important is the customer experience?

If your answer is anything besides “extremely”, then you may be losing customers even as you read this. Customers are the lifeblood of any business, and their experience with your product, brand, employees and message all build a relationship they can trust and rely on. Or the experience can result in a dismal partnership they can’t wait to ditch at the first chance they get. Your choice.

Companies that focus energy on extending a unique customer support experience to retain and satisfy their client base are off to a good start, but that’s not the only way to promote favorable customer interactions. Sales and marketing alignment can also serve up aces for the customer experience.

Here are six ways that marketing and sales alignment can elevate the customer experience:

1. Empowered communication

“Make the customer the hero of your story.”
– Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer, Marketing Profs

What does your product or service do for your customer? A uniform message and consistent branding demonstrate your company’s voice, expressing the benefits the customer can expect to receive from a partnership with your company. A muddied message results when sales doesn’t follow branding guidelines. Unreal expectations are created when marketing isn’t in touch with the sales process. Both set the customer up for disappointment.

In contrast, tightly aligned departments communicate a cohesive message that clearly defines what the customer experience is and isn’t, maximizing the opportunity to meet and exceed expectations.

2. Superior service

The good news is that your biggest competitors probably deal with ridiculously unaligned marketing and sales teams. And this my friend, is an enormous opportunity to rescue their clients from inferior service, and to prevent your current customer base from leaving you for them.

By creating a focused sales and marketing unit, your company offers a unique experience that is most likely unmatched in your industry. The customer can receive proper nurturing (marketing) as well as solution-based meetings, negotiations, and helpful follow up (sales). Each interaction forms a positive, memorable experience for the customer. One that your competition hasn’t created with them, which gives you a distinct edge.

Speaking of positive interactions; sales and marketing alignment…

3. Establish multi-channel touch points

The new marketplace environment demands relevant content that clients can digest on their own on the front end, and continue to educate themselves with long after the sale. Marketing and sales alignment provides a variety of touch points, from prominent search engine placement, to social media engagement, to emails, phone calls, and in-person meetings. All of these touches should line up with the overall focus of expanding and elevating the customer experience.

Without alignment, marketing will struggle to provide qualified leads to sales, and sales will be forced into unproductive situations in an attempt to generate business. Both of these waste customer time and increase frustration, tainting the overall experience.

4. Upsell and referral opportunities

A happy customer is one who will share recommendations and testimonials. After sales delivers a closed deal, it’s up to everyone to forge a strong, helpful relationship. Proper alignment between teams helps the customer feel important and cared for.

In return, that customer is more confident and likely to offer up a referral, assisting your company in expanding its client base and revenue. Besides, a customer who remembers a positive experience is more than happy to do business with you for other products or services in the future.

5. Quick response

Nothing irritates a decision maker more than feeling like they can’t get the answers that they need in a timely manner, or walking away from the experience with a product or service that doesn’t function as promised. As mentioned above, it’s crucial to present an accurate message to your customer, to “sing the same tune”, and to do it quickly. Marketing and sales teams that work together are able to craft strategies that target the prospect, close the sale, and provide the expected results without wasting anyone’s time.

6. A consistent experience that can be replicated

“The best companies win with inbound marketing by deeply engaging and aligning with their sales departments so both parts of the business are more measurable, scalable, and effective.”
– Mark Roberge, CRO, Hubspot

If your company presents an aligned sales and marketing unit and knocks the customer experience out of the park, do you know how you did it? The answer should be “YES!” Otherwise, teams that are not aligned with their initiatives are basically treasure hunters who stumble over bounty by accident, on occasion, with no knowledge of how they found it, or how to find it again.

Outlining a strategy allows both teams the ability to analyze the performance on the back end and see which actions met or exceeded expectations, and which ones failed. Through constant refinement, this plan can be used as a roadmap to ensure successful customer experiences in the future.

Business leaders must give the customer experience the attention and commitment it deserves. Without positive interactions, customers are less likely to remain loyal and more easily enticed by low price bidding wars, and that’s not where you want to compete.

The post Using Marketing and Sales Alignment to Improve the Customer Experience appeared first on OpenView Labs.