Rnordman

It was a big year of marketing for General Electric. In addition to sending the message that it's a good place for coders, GE launched an innovative podcast and a series with National Geographic Channel. Linda Boff is GE's chief marketing officer, and she sat down with Business Insider's Jay Yarrow at IGNITION 2015. 

This is an edited excerpt from a panel conversation featuring Linda Boff. 

Jay Yarrow: Native advertising, to me, is ads that fit within the platform and content. Google search ads - native ads. Twitter ads that are in there - native ads. TV ads - native ads. But for other big platforms on the web, we've had a lot of banner ads and that just doesn't seem to want to work right now if you look at what's going on with mobile.

When you're looking to do advertising and marketing — what are you looking for? What's important?

Linda Boff: At GE, I feel like we've kind of honed what's important around a few things. One, for us is impact. So we're looking to drive impact over shared numbers over impressions. And the way we think about impact is a story, an experience, that is going to make you stop and pay attention. Certainly, I think native — I think we're all going to agree — is the way to go. Like you — I kind of cast that definition widely. And for us, it can be as diverse as putting on a pair of cardboard glasses, which we did with The New York Times. And watching VR for the first time. It can be listening to a podcast. We did one recently. And I'm so proud to say it did really, really well — a podcast called "The Message". Or it can be a great experience on television or on the web. So impact matters a lot to us.

And something for us that's been a bit of a hallmark is — we like to be first. We like to be early. We like that because we feel like it's consistent with GE. We're a company that's been about innovation, been about experimentation. So we sort of rush at things that are new. And don't mind getting our feet wet and sometimes scraping a knee or two. But we feel like doing that, and kind of amping it, is a big part of how we go to market. 

Yarrow: When you say "scraping your knees" — had there been instances where you said "yeah we want to work together" and then it came back and you were like: "what have you done to GE?! Are you crazy? This is not us!" 

Boff: I don't know that we've ever gotten to the point where we've greenlit something that isn't about us. We've had many conversations where we're sort of handing over the road map, right? Here's what we like, here's who we are, and sometimes you just don't get that back in terms of somebody coming back with a really thoughtful, creative plan. Most of the time, I will say that it has worked in our favor, and we found like-minded folks. We partnered with BuzzFeed. I guess 5 of 6 years ago. So whether it's BuzzFeed or mic.com or Vox or maybe one day Refinery29 — you find these things and you build on to them. But I think it starts with brands — I imagine there are quite a few in the audience — just knowing who you are and what you want. And if you start from there and you're very clear about it, I think most of the time it does work out. 

Yarrow: So just to underscore that — when we talked before, I think you said one of the core competencies you bring is understanding social. Understanding how to create content, and then getting that distribution. That's what you can bring to an advertiser. Because an advertiser can go to Facebook and just buy the ads themselves directly, right? What's the difference? Why would I work with Refinery29 when I can go and do that directly in the feed? 

Boff: The place I start — the place we start — is with the user and then we go backwards. So I have just as much interest in talking to somebody who has a passion about Refinery29 or mic.com, as someone who is deeply engaged in their feed on Facebook, as somebody who's willing to listen to an interesting podcast they never have before.

So I think as a brand, it's really one versus the other. For us, it's a psychographic we are trying to reach. People who love science as much as we do — love technology, love engineering – and we look for that in a lot of different places. Facebook and the video comments not withstanding — over the last year for us — has been a great performance marketing vehicle. There is no place I can reach people as inexpensively, to try to target and re-target, as I can on Facebook. Never thought I would have said that a year ago. So I look more for premium content with publishers or by doing it with interesting kinds of partners.

Yarrow: So for Facebook, for you, even if there are mainstream ads — not the same kind of impact or experience? Not the same kind of brand building? Is that right to say? 

Boff: These days it hasn't been. It's been a combination of brand building with a real target and focus around it. We did a campaign to reach CIOs using Facebook data. I mean that, to me, is performance.

Yarrow: That's interesting because I think the conversation around Facebook was that it was really good for brands, whereas Google was more targeted and direct. So I'm curious. I think you've done a lot of stuff that you guys created for media. Like you talk about building your own websites — how do you think about that? Do you think "I can make a website, it's not that hard"?

Boff: It is really hard. I have a lot of respect for what publishers do. It's hard to get it right. I think in a funny way — we're after in some ways — similar things: great stories that people want to consume, that people sort of get addicted to. And ones that they want to share. A brand knows itself better than anybody else will — better than a publisher will. But we don't have the distribution capabilities.

So a lot of the time, we do want a partner that has that distribution that comes with it. But we also want experiments. So I'll give you one or two examples: So just recently we partnered with a production company in Hollywood — Imagine Entertainment and Asylum productions and Nat Geo — and we co-produced a series called "Breakthrough" — 6 hours of programming. Could GE have done that alone? Absolutely not. But in this case, we were a development partner. We weren't a sponsor. So together we did this. Together we went out and found Nat Geo as a distributor. And that felt pretty good. It was a new way to approach it.

I mentioned podcasting before — that was an effort. Again, you don't wake up in the morning and know how to do podcast. So we partnered with Slate, partnered with Panoply, partnered with one of our agencies BBDO, and out of that came a podcast. I have tremendous respect for what it takes to do these things. And we don't kid ourselves — we are a global marketing department. We're not a publisher; we're not a media company. But we are experimenting with forms of, what I guess I would call "renting" media. And that's buying an ad on Sunday night football. And our version of owning media, somewhat owning media, maybe co-opting media. And that's things like "Breakthrough" and podcasting. And we kind of want to play and see where the world is going. 

Yarrow: When you think about going to Nat Geo — what's the appeal to going to Nat Geo  when there'a a million other channels and options out there?

Boff: So likemindedness for sure, in terms of science, exploration. In the case of Nat Geo - its distribution in 140 countries simultaneously. Hands down a winner for us. We operate in 170 countries as GE. That was a clear win for us. But could it have been somebody else? Sure it could have. It just happened to be them and it worked out well. 

Before coming up here and we talked about where GE does its television advertising and I guess I made a couple waves by saying that it's only live — not traditional primetime. And I went back and looked — just to be sure I was accurate — and about 92% of the ads we put on television are what we call "live" so think Sunday Night Football, late night comedy, SNL. And then I looked at the other 8% so where are those? And they are high impact moments for our audience — it's the premier of 'Better Call Saul' or the last episode of 'Doctor Who'. It's moments that are impactful.

Yarrow: A lot of web publishing has been about scale and getting really big and trying to do it. Are you saying that that doesn't matter? It's about building a great audience at a decent size?

Boff: It's building the right audience. I have known, for GE as big as we are, it's not about reaching everybody; it's about reaching the right people. 

I think as brands and the publishers, and tech partners who take the brand's money — you corrupt the experience really quickly if you sort of fish at the bottom. Then nobody benefits in the end.

 

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NOW WATCH: Comcast CEO responds to the biggest complaint about internet service providers

Memorizing your presentation will help make it go smoothly (and you feel less nervous), right? Probably not, according to Toastmasters International experts on public speaking.

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DETROIT — So a university has decided, without holding a presser, that about a dozen words and phrases are problematic and should be banned from everyday use — and there are no plans to walk it back even if the announcement breaks the Internet.

Still, everyone can be a stakeholder and join the conversation.

Northern Michigan’s Lake Superior State University on Thursday released its 41st annual List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English for Misuse, Overuse and General Uselessness.

The tongue-in-cheek wish-list of sorts includes starting an answer with the word “So,” ”presser” instead of press conference, ”problematic,” ”walk it back” and ”break the Internet.” Others are ”stakeholder,” ”join the conversation,” ”physicality,” ”price point,” ”manspreading,” ”giving me life” and ”vape,” describing the act of ”smoking” e-cigarettes.

There’s no “secret sauce” — that rounds out this year’s list — for inclusion: It’s based on nominations submitted by stakeholders, er, members of the public to the Sault Ste. Marie school.

“(It’s) usually used in a sentence explaining the ‘secret’ in excruciating public detail,” John Beckett of Ann Arbor, Michigan, wrote in his nomination to ban “secret sauce.” ”Is this a metaphor for business based on the fast-food industry?“

As for “So,” it has the distinction of getting the most nominations and making the Banished Words list twice _ but for different reasons. This year, people find starting a reply with it to be overused, meaningless and affected. In 1999, those nominating it griped about its incessant use as a modifier, as in, “I am so down with this list.”

Some linguists and word watchers say starting an answer with “So” flowered in academia, particularly among those in the fields of science, technology and engineering. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has used it, giving it pop culture currency.

“Currently, it is being overused as the first word in the answer to ANY question,” wrote Bob Forrest of Tempe, Arizona. “For instance, ‘How did you learn to play the piano?’ Answer: ‘So my dad was in a classical music club.”’

The post The 41st annual List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Many people, including myself, use email subscriptions to stay in touch with our favorite companies and bloggers. We sign up for blog articles, newsletters and other email content. When we subscribe, it is our expectation that the emails we receive and the steps that follow are ethical. So when there’s a problem in this process, it can cause a seriously negative impact on your email marketing and image as a whole.

In this article, I share five email marketing practices that you need to adjust or stop doing immediately and the best practices to follow in order to fix current or prevent future issues.

1) Subscription Process Flaws

Opt-in Process

I’ve subscribed to several blogs. I sign up on their blog or article page because I want to be notified of future articles. However, with larger websites, they don’t give me the option to choose what type of content I wish to receive. As a result, I’m bombarded by emails advertising future webinars and conference discounted pricing deals.

Email marketing best practices:

When you offer multiple types of content from your website, make sure you give subscribers the option to choose which content we want to receive. Otherwise, you are taking a huge risk with unsubscribe rates.

Sign-up Fields

When I see a subscription sign-up process that requires more than 3-5 fields and even takes more than one page to finish, I don’t complete the process. I’m not a company. Many subscribers are individuals. Why would you ask all these questions about our company and not questions about us?

Email marketing best practices:

Follow the “less is more” approach to your sign-up form. Instead of asking about company type, size and revenue, focus on the individual who is subscribing so that you can customize your emails to us as people.

Welcome/Thank You Email

With every subscription I’ve signed-up for, I’d say less than half sent out a welcome or thank you email. While I don’t really want to be bombarded by excess emails, an email welcoming me or thanking me for signing up would be a great way to confirm my subscription. Even offering something of value for free to show gratitude would work wonders. I sometimes receive a secondary email that asks for me to confirm my subscription, and I like that approach, too.

Email marketing best practices:

When you get a new subscriber, do you send them a welcome or confirmation email? You can greatly benefit from a confirmation email because it tells you if the subscriber is serious about the subscription. This means your emails are less likely to be marked as spam and more likely to be opened. Let your readers know you’re grateful for their interest with a welcome email, and consider offering some form of freebie along with it.

2) Follow-Through Flaws

Email frequency

As a dedicated blogger myself, I’ve chosen to post only once a week, meaning my subscribers only receive one email from me a week. Other bloggers and companies have chosen to send emails as often as once or twice a day. This bothers me and likely many others who are trying to control the flow of emails coming into our inbox.

Email marketing best practices:

While several other bloggers and companies might publish more than one article a week, I think it’s best to create a collection of posts from the whole week and share them with subscribers on only one designated day. That way, you aren’t overwhelming subscribers’ inbox with emails.

On the other hand, giving people the ability to choose a preferred email frequency would be ideal. Let us choose if we want daily or weekly emails.

Email formatting

I’m still getting emails that are not formatted to fit a mobile screen or even any screen for that matter. I have one blogger who has emails that cut off on the right side, and I’m even using a computer browser. This looks very sloppy to me, and it makes it hard to click on the links.

Email marketing best practices:

When you’re setting up your emails, send test versions to yourself and check them on mobile devices as well as different browsers. If the email doesn’t appear correctly, fix it before sending the final version out. You should also subscribe to your own blog to get the final versions yourself. You’ll see what your other subscribers see, which can help you fix any issues that may arise.

Checking satisfaction level

This hasn’t really happened for me with my subscriptions, but it is a great way to measure what you can do better and what you’re doing right.

Email marketing best practices:

Send out a survey that is quick and easily accessible from your email. Make sure that you stick to mostly multiple choice or equivalent, but also have at least one question that gives participants the ability to write their opinions freely. I suggest using Google Forms for this if you have the time to analyze results manually, but if you have the funds, use Survey Monkey for easier analysis.

3) Database Management Flaws

Clean up and maintain database

The more bounced emails, inactives and unsubscribers you have, the harder it will be for your emails to reach recipients’ inbox. Many email providers frown upon emails with these sorts of lists.

Email marketing best practices:

Many email marketing services will help you with cleaning up your subscriber lists. It’s best to use these services to go through your subscribers and email history, clean it all up, and update your different lists.

If you only have one list that you send every email to, that’s a risky approach. Depending on what you’re sending and how often, you might want to consider creating different lists for different purposes. You also want to make sure your list subscribers are in the right place. Check on this regularly to ensure your database is up-to-date and ready to go.

Check-in with inactive subscribers

There’s no avoiding it. You’re going to have unresponsive, inactive subscribers who don’t click on your emails or don’t click the link(s) in your email. The question is: what can you do about it?

Email marketing best practices:

Customizing a check-in email for your inactive subscribers is a great way to get their attention. Make a list with just those people, and send them an email asking them for feedback as to why they’re not clicking. Get them to open the email by offering them something and mentioning it in the subject line. There’s no guarantee this will work every time, but it is still a great approach to try.

Don’t trust software to manage your database 100% of the time

Email marketing software has developed into quite a powerful force. However, there’s no denying that a human touch is still needed. Sure, the software makes email marketing much easier, but we still need to put a little of our own effort into ensuring its accuracy and success.

Email marketing best practices:

When it comes to database management, existing software doesn’t do enough in one way in particular: organizing your subscribers into custom lists. This is almost completely left to a human to do. To ensure that your emails go out to the right people at the right time, you need to finalize these custom lists, and software isn’t completely ready to do it for you.

4) Not Connecting the Dots

Social media

You have an email marketing strategy in place, but have you connected it to your social media activity?

Email marketing best practices:

Your social media audience could become subscribers if you take the time to connect the two. Add a sign-up tab to your Facebook page. Make your Instagram URL a landing page for email sign-up. Same with Twitter. There are many ways to sync social media and email marketing, and it’s a great way to improve both areas.

Events (online & in-person)

Along with social media, events both online and in-person are great places to increase your subscribers list. Many companies and bloggers don’t take advantage of this opportunity.

Email marketing best practices:

You can provide the option to sign up at your event table or in a post-webinar thank you email. If people were interested enough in you to go to your table or attend your webinar, they could very likely be interested in subscribing too, when approached effectively.

Sales/customer service

Marketing and sales don’t always work together well, but that doesn’t have to be the case here.

Email marketing practices:

Ask your sales and customer service staff to give customers the option to sign up for your emails. They already buy your product, so they are likely willing to receive your emails, too. Just make sure they opt-in before you add them to your database.

5) Ethics Issues

Buying lists

I’ve seen on Twitter that some users are buying followers. Most other users agree that this is a very bad, unethical approach. The same goes with buying email subscriber lists. It breaches ethical behavior and can get you in a lot of trouble.

Email marketing practices:

Don’t purchase subscriber lists. Instead, put in the effort yourself and have patience. All good things come with time.

Selling your database

Similar to buying lists, selling your contacts database is very very sketchy and unethical.

I used to donate to a specific nonprofit. They had my email and mailing address. They were the only organization that knew this information at the time. Soon after donating, I was bombarded by spam emails and other nonprofit junk mail. I received a ton of postal mail from other nonprofits that I never knew existed. It was clear the original nonprofit sold my information. Let’s just say I never donated to them again.

Email marketing best practices:

Don’t sell your subscriber database. If you’re low enough on funds to consider this as an option, there are so many other, ethical alternatives.

Sending content not requested (spamming)

I want blog articles. I don’t want webinar invites or conference discount emails. When you send content your subscribers don’t want, you’re essentially spamming them.

Email marketing best practices:

Just like I said before, give subscribers the option to choose what content they receive. Then, stick to that preference. Otherwise, your contacts are going to unsubscribe at a quick and alarming rate.

Well, there you have it. The 5 email marketing practices to avoid and the best practices to follow. If you’re currently participating in any of these controversial behaviors, I hope I’ve convinced you to at least consider stopping. Trust me, a dedicated multi-blog subscriber, that it is in your best interest to go the ethical route and ensure you’re following the right steps with your email marketing.

How to find contact details when you can't get them from a list broker? Today I'm going to review 5 blogs with really practical tips, and then I'll trump the lot of them with a way better approach. This is how to find contact details. It's great.   For B2B, we often begin with a list you can buy from a list broker. Frankly, this is almost always a good idea if it's complete enough, up to date enough, and narrow enough. The problem is that we often want a pretty niche list like people who used to work at Oracle and now work for a networking vendor like Cisco. Upgrade your LinkedIn account to Sales Navigator Filter on LinkedIn's Lead Builder using industry or company name Narrow to the role and geography you want Learn to construct Boolean searches ("IBM" OR "SAP" OR "Oracle") Enrich then import the names to Google Docs and Salesforce.com using LeadIQ Make sure your first contact with them delivers more value to them than to you Let me review those sites, and then go a bit wild on powerful searching. I've tapped my inner geek for this one.

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TOKYO (AP) — A team of Japanese scientists have met the criteria for naming a new element, the synthetic highly radioactive element 113, more than a dozen years after they began working to create it.

Kosuke Morita, who was leading the research at the government-affiliated Riken Nishina Center for Accelerator-Based Science, was notified of the decision on Thursday by the U.S.-based International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry.

"Now that we have conclusively demonstrated the existence of element 113, we plan to look to the unchartered territory of element 119 and beyond," Morita said in a statement.

A joint working group of the IUPAC and International Union of Pure and Applied Physics also announced decisions on recognition of discoveries of elements 115, 117 and 118.

Discoveries of atomic elements have often involved competition between scientists. The news is a morale booster for Riken, which has undergone a reorganization of some of its research following a scandal over stem-cell research.

"To scientists, this is of greater value than an Olympic gold medal," Ryoji Noyori, former Riken president and Nobel laureate in chemistry told reporters.

Riken had earlier said japonium might be proposed as a name for element 113, which provisionally had been named ununtrium.

However, Morita has no specific candidates under consideration. He said he planned to spend part of next year considering a name for the element.

The IUPAC group gave collaborating teams from the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia; Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee the right to name elements 115 and 117. Separately, scientists from the Dubna laboratory and Lawrence Livermore were invited to name element 118.

Element 113 sits between copernicium and flerovium on the periodic table. A joint team of scientists in Russia and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the U.S. also were vying for naming rights for 113 after announcing its discovery in 2004.

Morita and his group used Riken's linear accelerator and ion separator to search for new synthetic superheavy elements, beginning in the late 1980s. In 2003, his team began working to create element 113 by bombarding a thin layer of bismuth with zinc ions traveling at about 10 percent the speed of light, Riken said.

Isotopes of element 113 have a very short half-life, lasting for less than a thousandth of a second, making its discovery very difficult. After twice succeeding to create it, the group tried for seven years before further success, in August 2012.

___

http://www.riken.jp/en

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The CEO sitting across from me is explaining how he and the other executives of a telecommunications firm were caught off guard by a new technology that disrupted the firm’s business. “We did not see WhatsApp coming,” he says, shaking his head. He wants to increase his capacity to learn, to spot and understand developments inside and outside of the firm. He believes this is vital not only for better performance now, but also for the continued success of his career. “I’m in my early 50s, and I’m afraid that the next time I want to change jobs, people will see me as irrelevant. I’ve seen it happen to plenty of others. How do I stay fresh and convince people that I still have a lot to contribute?”

His hunch is right on target. Research shows that leaders who think and act from the same assumptions and behavioral repertoires they’ve used for years are prone to stagnate, underperform, or derail. As David Peterson, director of executive coaching and leadership at Google puts it, “Staying within your comfort zone is a good way to prepare for today, but it’s a terrible way to prepare for tomorrow.” To sustain success, you must develop learning agility.

What is Learning Agility?

Learning agility is the capacity for rapid, continuous learning from experience. Agile learners are good at making connections across experiences, and they’re able to let go of perspectives or approaches that are no longer useful — in other words, they can unlearn things when novel solutions are required. People with this mindset tend to be oriented toward learning goals and open to new experiences. They experiment, seek feedback, and reflect systematically.

A desire to develop by acquiring new skills and mastering new situations is a fundamental element of learning agility. Agile learners value and derive satisfaction from the process of learning itself, which boosts their motivation as well as their capacity to learn from challenging developmental experiences.

As a result, they don’t get defensive and they’re willing to take risks, such as making a mistake or appearing non-expert in public. The CEO in the opening paragraph epitomizes non-defensiveness. Our conversation took place at the Institute of Coaching (a Harvard Medical School affiliate) Leadership Forum, held in October at IESE Business School. He talked openly about his challenges and fears, inviting feedback from four executive coaches whom he’d just met. Unfortunately, many leaders miss out on key learning opportunities because they avoid questioning themselves or intentionally moving outside of their comfort zone.

Learning agility also involves being open to new experiences, people, and information. Two senior management professors I’ve encountered at academic conferences over the years exemplify opposite ends of the spectrum. Professor A has a voracious appetite for new ideas. Despite his lofty academic stature, he converses just as enthusiastically with graduate students and junior faculty from little-known universities as he does with fellow academic stars, and he collaborates with a wide variety of scholars. Well into his 70s, he’s vibrant, energetic, and recognized as an active leader in his research domain. Professor B, by contrast, shows little interest in scholars outside of his familiar circle of followers. His presentations generally rehash old ideas; it’s been a long time since he produced anything new. Although he made many important contributions earlier in his career, the low level of learning agility he exhibits now accompanies his fading reputation. He’s fallen into the exact career trap the CEO is seeking to avoid.

How Do You Develop Learning Agility?

Since developing learning agility involves learning to recognize and change automatic routines, the aid of a coach can be invaluable. Coaching, which Peterson calls “the ultimate customized learning solution,” helps clients understand how their minds work and how to make them work better. But even if you’re not working with a coach, there are steps you can take on your own to enhance your learning agility.

Ask for feedback. Think of one or more people who interacted with you or observed your performance on a given task. Tell them you’d value their perspective on how you did, and ask what you could do differently the next time. To maximize learning from their feedback — and this is vital — restrain any urge to defend yourself. Thank them for their input, and then ask yourself what you can learn.

To reduce your defensiveness and develop a learning mindset, consider adopting a motto like Peterson’s: “There has to be a better way, and I don’t know it yet.” The power of the motto lies in the word “yet.” As research on growth mindset by psychologist Carol Dweck has found, if you hold the view that there is always more to learn and embrace the process of wading into unfamiliar waters, you can free your thinking, dissolve your fear of failure, and power your success.

Experiment with new approaches or behaviors. To identify new behaviors for testing, Peterson recommends reflecting on a challenge you’re facing and asking yourself questions such as “What’s one thing I could do to change the outcome of the situation?” and “What will I do differently in the future?” You can also conduct thought experiments, unearthing possibilities from trying out a different point of view. For example, one of my clients was concerned about leading the first team development offsite with her new team of highly talented country managers. With some reflection, she realized that she had gotten stuck in the perspective that in order to be seen as credible, she had to know more than they did. Since she was new, this was impossible. Holding on to that perspective would have caused her stress and undermined her credibility. By letting go of the assumption that she had to be the subject-matter expert and adopting the perspective that she could add greater value as a facilitator, she was able to design and carry out a meeting at which creative ideas flowed freely. The team, which had previously suffered from poor coordination, developed more collaborative relationships.

Look for connections across seemingly unrelated areas. For example, Peterson has systematically applied principles he’s used to learn about wine to the domain of leadership development. Oenologists develop expertise by trying many different wines, comparing them, and discussing them with fellow experts. Borrowing these principles, Peterson realized that he could extend his mastery of leadership development by seeking out a wide variety of leaders to coach, comparing leaders to each other on various qualities, and discussing leaders with other experts. To try this technique yourself, choose a domain you have expertise in but that’s unrelated to your work and ask yourself how you might apply that knowledge to your current challenge.

Make time for reflection. A growing body of research shows that systematically reflecting on work experiences boosts learning significantly. To ensure continuous progress, get into the habit of asking yourself questions like “What have I learned from this experience?” and “What turned out differently than I expected?” Leaders who demonstrate and encourage reflection not only learn more themselves, they also spur increased contextual awareness and reflective practice in others, thereby laying a foundation for higher levels of learning agility in their teams and organizations.

Practicing these strategies will help you extract the maximum learning from experience. What did our CEO learn? Among other things, he realized that he’s been seeking advice on a current challenge from people in his network who are likely to have similar perspectives, and that he stands to learn a great deal from two individuals in different industries. He articulated what he hoped to learn from talking with them and scheduled a time to pick up the phone the next morning.

Every year, people make and lose vast amounts of money playing the stock markets. Predicting what will happen is notoriously difficult, but if you backed these British companies in 2015, life is probably looking pretty good right now.

Of the top ten gainers on the FTSE100 index in 2015 — all of which saw their value increase my more than 30% — four were major property developers. 

This is all thanks to the worst kept secret in the country right now: Britain needs more housing.  

The UK's markets shut for the year at 12:30 p.m. GMT (7:30 a.m. ET) on New Year's Eve and we can officially say that 2015 was a pretty lousy year for Britain's biggest companies.

The blue-chip FTSE100 index lost more than 7% of its value, the index's worst performance since the financial crisis, driven down by struggling mining firms, who were themselves, crushed by the continuing commodity price crash.

A handful of companies even saw their share value drop by more than half.

But it wasn't all doom and gloom, and, as ever, some companies really took off this year. While the FTSE's biggest failures were all mining companies, the biggest success stories in Britain's markets in 2015 were the house builders.

The chronic undersupply of housing in the UK, which has sent demand and prices for property skyrocketing in the past few years has allowed property developers to capitalise and make big profits, buoying investors' hopes, and helping to send share prices up hugely.

These were the top performing stocks on the FTSE100:

1. DCC – up 62.39%
2. Taylor Wimpey — up 51.71%
3. Hargreaves Lansdown — up 50.8%
4. Berkeley Group — up 49.01%
5. Inmarsat — up 43.31%
6. Direct Line Group — up 41.76%
7. Provident Financial — up 37.99%
8. Barratt Developments — up 37.66%
9. Carnival — up 33.62%
10. Persimmon — up 30.56%

Housebuilders may make up a big share of the most improved companies of 2015, but it's a relatively unknown firm that topped the pile. Irish-headquarted DCC, which describes itself as "an international sales, marketing, distribution and business support services group," was up 62.39% in 2015. The company killed it this year, and in its interim results in September announced profit growth of 26%, along with a 4% bump in top line revenues.

FTSE250 companies soar

The FTSE100 may have been down this year, despite the best efforts of the property companies, but it was a different story on the FTSE250, which gained almost as much as the 100 lost, finishing the year 6.8% above January 1's market open.

The top stocks on the FTSE250 were a little bit more diverse, but two property-based firms — online estate agent Right Move, and Redrow, a property developer, feature in the top ten stocks. Given the smaller size of the companies on the index, it's not surprising that the biggest gainers far outstripped the performance of those on the FTSE100. These are the FTSE250's biggest gainers in 2015:

1. Betfair — up 151.46%
2. JD Sports — up 105.75%
3. NMC Health — up 86.41%
4. Supergroup — up 85.86%
5. Rightmove — up 85.56%
6. Greggs — up 79.52%
7. Rank Group — up 78.78%
8. OneSavings Bank — up 70.95%
9. RPC Group — up 69.55%
10. Redrow — up 65.44%

With 2016 just hours away predictions for how British markets will perform next year are generally positive. According to a poll from Interactive Investor, the vast majority of investors expect UK stocks to climb in 2016, with more than 75% betting on a rise of more than 150 points. 26% think that despite getting routed this year, commodity stocks are the best bet for 2016.

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NOW WATCH: GE CEO Jeff Immelt explains the importance of traveling to meet people face to face on their home turf

Jet.com launched only four and a half months ago, but the e-commerce upstart is already taking on Amazon. It's raised more than $500 million at a $1 billion pre-money valuation. And the company thinks it has unique technology that will allow it to beat Amazon's prices and still turn a profit. 

Jet.com co-founder Marc Lore is no stranger to Amazon. He was an Amazon executive after he sold his company Quidsi—known for brands Diapers.com and Soap.com—to Amazon. At Business Insider's IGNITION 2015 conference, Lore sat down with deputy editor Alyson Shontell.

Alyson Shontell: The big promise that you’re making here is that you’re going to be better than Amazon and better than any other e-commerce solution on the web and the price point being the differentiator. Is that still true?

Lore: Yeah, I don’t think it’s about necessarily being better than anyone. I think we see a really big opportunity in the market. E-commerce is still early days. We’re about $300 billion online today. Over the next ten years, it’s going to be about a trillion dollars online so we have $700 billion of market size that’s yet to come online and we think there’s an opportunity for multiple very large players, certainly in the offline space. There are nine retailers with greater than a $50 billion market cap, 5 retailers with greater than a $100 billion market cap, and you don’t have the same online. There’s really only one player today.

Alyson Shontell: Yeah I mean the opportunity is clearly huge. Amazon is a $90 billion market? So there’s definitely an opportunity there. But how are you making the prices better? Because the original plan was to do a sort of Costco-like model, right? But that’s not around anymore.

Lore: That was just one part of the business model. At the core, it’s really about the technology we build. It’s really a next-generation, e-commerce marketplace technology that really empowers consumers to build bigger, smarter baskets to pull supply-chain cost out of the system. So in a typical marketplace, it’s a very product-centric approach where you basically pick the retailer you want to buy the product from — that adds a lot of shipping and fulfillment costs to do for all the ecosystem because you’re not likely to pick the most efficient retail combination to fill the basket of items if you’re picking the retailer at the product level.

So on Jet, we actually pick the retailer for you once we know the composition of your basket

We actually pick the retailer for you once we know the composition of your basket

. We know where you’re located and we know where all the pools of inventory exist and we’re trying to figure out how we get that basket from one common warehouse location in close proximity to where you live. And then we’ve taken it a step further and we actually, in real time, transparently show the consumers what the cost savings are of choosing one product over another based on what’s in their basket. So we actually calculate the marginal cost to ship items that you’re searching for relative to what’s in your basket. So some items can ship very cheap if they can go in the same box with what’s already in your basket. If they can’t, it’s a lot more expensive. And so we telegraph that transparently to the consumer by showing them these smart-cart bonuses, which is basically just the cost savings of shopping in a smarter way.

And we see that consumers are shopping in a smarter way. They’re building much bigger baskets than we typically see in the marketplace. 

Alyson Shontell: But is that something that a larger company like an Amazon can build? Because you saw this with your last company, when they were like, “Oh soap.com is on the up and up,” they undercut a lot of the prices and they’re really hard to compete against. And at a certain point it comes down to, ‘Who can last the longest?’

Lore: Yeah, our technology is built to look more like a real time trading system than it is an e-commerce site so it’s a very different technology. It’s all natively built in the cloud. It’s built to do this real-time calculation. It’s built to steer people toward building bigger, smarter baskets. It’s very different than what the other marketplaces have focused on right now. So we think that there’s enough opportunity to differentiate, to create a really big business.

Alyson Shontell: Why did you do away with the $50 a year plan that you had in place at first?

Lore: Yeah it was. Our original plan was to double down on price. We had a price advantage with the smart cart. We were going to take all of our profit that we would make and put that into lower prices as well and charge a membership to make our profit for the membership fee. Well, it turns out, after launch that the cost to acquire a new customer was so good at prices that were at parity with the market that we didn’t feel like it was worth it to basically reduces prices further and limit the size of our market to people that only wanted to pay. It was really just about big opportunity — people building bigger, smarter carts. We’re getting customers and when we reduce prices further, we weren’t seeing that much of a benefit relative to charging it. So it’s just an opportunity that we saw and took advantage of.

Alyson Shontell: So one thing you mentioned there that I wanted to ask you about is the customer lifetime value versus how you acquire a customer and how much it costs. The prices are pretty good to acquire a customer it sounds like.

Lore: Yes.

Alyson Shontell: But you know one thing that’s been in the news is that you guys are spending somewhere between $20-30 million a month on marketing so for a four month old company, does that really make sense?

Lore: Yeah so that, I mean, like you said, it all comes down to the economics. So it really doesn’t matter how much you spend in fact the more you can spend, the bigger, more scaled the company will ultimately get. And so that’s where we’re at right now is the cost to acquire a customer is very attractive.

Alyson Shontell: What is it?

Lore: It’s come down, you know, from early on it was over $100 and today it’s under $50. And it continues to come down every month with an expected lifetime profit for a customer that’s over $200. It’s a great so 4 to 1 plus relationship there so we feel really good about that spending money.

Alyson Shontell: And are people continuing to come back? Because that can be one thing is you can acquire customers that you think will be loyal and then they’ll dwindle off and, you know, when a company is so young it can be hard to tell that right away.

Lore: Yeah, I mean you do tell a lot though in the first 90 days just by looking into the repeat rates — 30,60, 90 days. And we have a comparable because we kind of did this before previous company and we feel like repeat rates are really good and will only get better with time as we continue to improve the experience so we feel really good about where things are.

Alyson Shontell:  You do some really interesting things about how you run the company. Before you launched, as a marketing thing, you gave outsiders equity in the company. What was that about? I mean that’s something I’ve never seen or heard before. I didn’t even know it was legal.

Lore: Yeah, we tried to gamify the idea of telling your friends about jet before we launched and the more friends you told, the higher ranking you were and, if you ranked in the top ten, you got stock in the company. And if you ranked number one, you got 100,000 shares in the company so pretty sizable piece of stock. And I think that just fueled the game and people had a lot of fun and at the same time, we got a lot of exposure for Jet and not very big cost.

Alyson Shontell: So did it drum up a lot of people for your wait list. I would imagine. . .

Lore: Yeah, it was hundreds of thousands of people ultimately had heard about and signed up for Jet before we launched, which was a good start.

Alyson Shontell: Yeah not so bad. So another thing that you do is you have salary tiers for your employees, which is interesting. No one can apparently ask for a raise because they fall into this tier and it’s understood so how does that work?

Lore: Yes, so we have, it really comes down to we have three core values in the company that we want to live in a way that no other company does and that’s trust, transparency, and fairness. And on the fairness front, I think one of the things that, you know, always made me feel uncomfortable with previous companies was the way which raises were done, bonuses and things, you know it was, if somebody was working really hard, head down, introvert, doing their job, and it came for raise time, the discussion would go something like, “I think this person would be happy with ‘X’.” And then yet another person that maybe that is already making more money that wouldn’t be happy with ‘X’ and so they get ‘X+’. And it was not done in the most fair way. It was done sort of what the company could get away with. And I really wanted to do away with that because I think it destroys trust. So we went and moved to this system of compensation where everybody at the same level makes the same amount of money. At the same level meaning the same ability to contribute to the company, which seemed fair. If everyone has the same ability to contribute, they should be making the same amount of money. And so that means

if somebody goes out and gets another job offer for more money and come back and they say, “Hey I got more money. Will you match it?” Well, it wouldn’t be fair to do that because then they’re making more money doing the same job as someone else.

 

If somebody goes out and gets another job offer for more money and come back and they say, “Hey I got more money. Will you match it?” Well, it wouldn’t be fair to do that because then they’re making more money doing the same job as someone else.

 

Alyson Shontell: So just let the rockstar walk away or how do you deal with that?

Lore: We would. It hasn’t happened yet, but I think people know there’s no benefit in going out and getting an offer and bringing it back. Same thing when we hire people. We basically tell them, “This is what we have you leveled based on all the interviews you’ve gone through. And we think this is the fairest level to be at. Here’s the comp.” We know it’s a good comp because all the levels are market level comps. But if they happen to be making more money somewhere and don’t want to come to what we think is fair comp, then we wouldn’t increase pay for them. So I think it’s worked out really well. Lots of people have told us that, you know, they appreciate not having to negotiate because anytime you have to negotiate for a salary you feel like you left something on the table and that’s just not the case. And also people know that when we’re making decisions about whether to promote people to the next level or not, that we’re looking through the simple lens of what’s fair and not at all about what we could get away with. And I think that adds a unique element of trust and that’s really what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to build trust. We don’t have people sign non-competes and non-solicit agreements and things like that. It’s really trying to build a unique bond with people that they wouldn’t typically get at other companies.

Alyson Shontell: And transparency is another thing that you really value. And to the point that you actually show them your investor pitch steps, right? And boardroom meeting things?

Lore: Yeah, right. We after every board meeting. . .

Alyson Shontell: Every single employee.

Lore: Yep. After every board meeting we’ll give the entire board presentation to the company and post the board deck online for everybody to look at. We also have an app that every employee and investor have on their phone that gives them access to real time information of all the financials in the company. Margins, GMV, retailers, and we do push notifications no a daily basis about key milestones. And the idea is to keep people super connected to the vision so they really feel like owners in the company. We give people significant ownership stakes as well and it’s worked out really well so far.

Alyson Shontell: You’ve raised over $500 million and $1 billion pre-money valuation, spending a ton on marketing, acquiring new users, things like that. From my perspective it seems like it’s very admirable. It seems like you’re just going for it. You’re like, you know what, we’re going to be big. But is there a possibility that you’ll either be worth nothing or you’ll be worth billions, and there’s really no in between?

Lore: Yeah I think one of the things that’s a little unique about what we’re doing is that the business model has been proven to be successful. So most startups i think are going into businesses where you’re not necessarily sure how the business model is going to play out. So we’re creating an online e-commerce marketplace. And I think others that come before us have proven that it can be very profitable business. So I think people understand, especially investors, that this is a scale game and that the economics look better with every billion dollars of GMD scale. And so it’s when you look at the economics and the straight math of it, it makes sense to grow faster because it’s very expensive to just sort of be a sub scale e-commerce player and that’s one of the reasons why there really hasn’t been too many, you know, really large like number 2 number 3 commerce companies that you can point to in the U.S. because it is a scale game and nobody's is really you know raising the capital necessary to get the scale required to do that.

Alyson Shontell: So do you have the capital you need now? Is there still a chance this could go to zero?

Lore: I think we’re sort of beyond that now, honestly. We raised now at this round of financing it will be almost $500 million new, fresh money, which is enough to give us two years of runway to build a substantial asset. You can never say never, but I think we’ll be in a really good position to have created a meaningful asset and be in a great position to do that in the next round of financing two years from now.

Alyson Shontell: Well I bought a mechanical toothbrush off of jet.com. It does work. It showed up right at my door. So best of luck to you. You’re really taking a big swing.

Lore: Thank you.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Meet the founders of Jet, the high-profile online retailer with top backers. Can it take on Amazon?

A mailing list is one of the most valuable assets you can have in business today. You’ll find it right there amongst the fastest and most effective ways to drive sales of any online channel—with the catch being you have to build one first.

The fact is, it’s a privilege to be granted an invitation to someone’s email inbox. Especially today when it represents a rare place of calm in an otherwise chaotic world. Where else on the web can you really specify what information you see and don’t see?

In the eyes of the email marketer, this question translates to: where else can you really pitch something to a select audience and drive sales immediately?

However, it is a big challenge for most businesses to build a mailing list to a size great enough to see good returns (10,000 plus people). Traditional methods of giving away special reports or e-courses in exchange for an email address are losing their appeal, are becoming no longer effective on their own.

Thankfully, there are a lot of new ways which are proving to be highly effective in growing lists quick—and all for a lot lower cost-per-subscriber than in the past. Let’s take a look at some of the best ways out there today.

The SumoMe Apps

The SumoMe apps are often quoted among the best tools for building a mailing list. Here we are going to focus on two of their apps that are known for producing the best results: List Builder and Scrollbox.

The List Builder app is a popup opt in box, triggered after a certain amount of time on page (SumoMe recommend testing 15 seconds) or when a user is about the leave your site. For the guys over at Webprofits, the List Builder app has been shown to convert users about to leave to site at a rate of 2.24%.

Scroll box is a similar app which this time displays a pop-up in the corner of the page when a user scrolls a set percentage down the page. With the Scrollbox app, Webprofits saw a higher conversion rate of 2.59%.

We recommend opting for the paid version of SumoMe which allows you to customize the apps for specific pages on your site, and also do A/B split testing. That means, instead of using the same generic popup across every page of your site, you can make individual ones which relate to the content on the page, and figure out which of them perform best. Using this method, Webprofits saw a jump in their conversion rate to 3.58%—nearly a 17% improvement!

Write Epic Posts

An epic post is long-form article—generally of around 3000 words or longer—which readers often turn to as the definitive guide on a certain topic in a given niche.

The post is of such quality and depth that readers are urged to bookmark it, link to it, share it, print it out, or come back to it when they need refreshing.

If you can find something of value to offer your readers in an area lacking in comprehensive information, create an epic post and use it to drive traffic to your site through social and search, and watch the number of subscribers on your list shoot up.

Content upgrades

A content upgrade is simply when you upsell an article by offering a related piece of content that provides additional value.

The trick here is to create something that perfectly aligns with the original—usually by expanding on the topic in question, or offering something practical. For example: offering an additional 25 ways to build your email list, a print out of instructions for making a DIY cabinet, or an SEO checklist PDF to use when building a website.

As you may have guessed there’s no one secret trick to building your list, but rather many methods, which when used in conjunction—for example, an epic post, with customised SumoMe scroll box and content upgrade—can nicely pave the way for huge results.

Organic traffic is an important source for qualitative leads because users who enter terms or phrases into Google’s search engine are typically aware of the types of products or services that will fulfill their needs. Searchers use queries to identify brands that provide the products or services, and how or where they can make a purchase or arrange a demo.

Organic traffic is the broad term that defines website visitors who arrive at a destination via unpaid search results. Links to your website appear in search engine result pages (SERPs) based on your site’s relevance to search terms or phrases inputted into the search engine. Quality and useful content is imperative to direct desktop and mobile organic traffic to your online business.

Desktop Search vs. Mobile Search

Over the years people have changed how they connect to the internet by shifting away from desktops and laptops in favour of smartphones and, to a lesser extent, tablets. A study by International Data Corporation (IDC), named the Worldwide Quarterly Smart Connected Device Tracker, analyzed the smart connected device (SCD) market in 2010 and 2014, and also made bold projections for 2019. Here are a few highlights of the study.

• In 2010 52.5% of SCD shipments were personal computers while 44.7% were smartphones and 2.8% were tablets.

• In 2014 73.4% of shipped SCDs were smartphones. PC shipments declined to 16.8% while tablets increased to 12.5%.

• In 2019 IDC projects that smartphone shipments will continue to grow at the expense of PCs and tablets. The forecast expects 77.8% of all SCD shipments to be smartphones.

Over 60% of Americans currently own at least one smartphone and emerging markets like China will account for one third of the global smartphone market by 2017. This is why optimized mobile marketing is increasingly important for marketers to increase awareness and visibility while also boosting engagement and retention. Google’s mobile algorithm update released in April 2015 makes it difficult to rank in mobile SERPs without smartphone-optimized content. Therefore, you need to create mobile-friendly content to help mobile browsers find your brand.

Mobile First? APP-solutely!

Smartphones are more popular today than five years ago and the numbers project even greater demand by the end of the decade. People are using their mobile devices to browse the internet, visit social media pages, and connect to various types of content.

However, an increasing number of users are downloading mobile apps onto their smartphones to access their favourite digital properties. Statista compiled data on mobile app usage which states that 36 percent of smartphone users purchased at least one app in 2014, and projects that the number of mobile app buyers in the US will grow to 85 million by 2019.

The trend towards downloadable mobile apps explains a decision made by Google prior to the US Thanksgiving weekend. The search engine began to rank mobile app content in organic search results without the need for corresponding content on a website. This is a significant change to the status quo as app developers were previously required to maintain a website with related or supportive content to rank the app in mobile search results.

If the trial soft launch is deemed a success, users will be able to access app-specific content with or without the app installed on their mobile devices. If users do not have the app installed, Google will “stream” the app using its own cloud software instead of redirecting users to a web version of the app. The streamed app will function similarly to other smartphone apps and provide easy access to content with a simple tap on the mobile screen.

Users Prefer Apps

Charles Arthur, a former technology editor for the Guardian, used Google’s own data to determine that the average person conducts less than one Google search on their mobile device per day, and fewer than 30 searches per month. Arthur’s research supports the theory that users are searching Google for apps to download, and accessing content through the downloaded software.

Rajan Patel, Principal Engineer at Google and the person responsible for the new app index model, recognizes the trend on mobile is shifting away from websites and towards apps. Patel wants Google to remain relevant as user preferences evolve, and the streamed apps allow Google to direct searchers to valuable content.

“We want users to be able to have access to this content, regardless of whether it’s available on the web or in an app.”

Mobile apps will continue to change organic search habits in 2016. Momentology published 2016 predictions from 44 leading SEO experts, and many respondents stated they will be watching how mobile search habits and new applications impact the industry in 2016. The experts also suggested that marketers will need to redefine their strategies and focus on providing the best possible user experience to retain organic traffic in the new year.

Digital buyers in Canada typically turn to PCs to make purchases, but mobile phones and tablets are an important part of the research and buying process as well—more so than social media, even among young people.

The robots are coming.

And they're here to take your sales job.

At least, that's what we're afraid of. It might be true that technology can be integrated into many steps of the sales process. But, thankfully, it can't do everything.

For now, there are a number of skills computers can't learn, and one of those is our human ability to create empathetic connections with prospects and customers.

This is a key ability for the modern seller. Develop empathy and you'll enjoy more effective sales conversations. More importantly, you'll build a skill set that’s in demand and hard to replace with technology.

What is Empathy?

Quite simply, empathy is the ability to understand the emotional state of another person and respond appropriately. It doesn't mean you have to feel the same thing (that's sympathy).

Empathy is your capacity to sense what’s going on in someone's else mind and guess at the best way to engage based on your understanding of that perspective.

How Empathy Drives Sales Conversations

At its heart, sales has always been about the interpersonal engagement between two people. We always hear about sales professionals being "people people." That's simply another way of saying they’re empathetic.

When we talk about emotional intelligence, one of the most important things we're referring to is the ability to recognize, understand, and respond to the emotional state of others in an appropriate way.

Think about your sales interactions. Key steps include building trust, uncovering needs, and creating confidence. If you can't do those well you're not going to find a lot of success.

All of them are driven by sales professionals' ability to create a bridge with their prospects. By picking up on the subtle and not-so-subtle clues that our conversational partners apply, salespeople with high emotional intelligence can create stronger connections and more easily influence others.

This is especially important as sales processes get more complex and involve more people. It's critical to be able to understand the motivations and thoughts of everyone involved in the process. In a world where information is a commodity, you need to be more than a source of facts and figures.

You need to possess the ability to engage on an emotional level and become a resource for potential customers. If you want to guide them through their buying journey, it's imperative you connect on the human level.

Tips for Developing Empathy

Luckily, your emotional intelligence isn't a fixed trait. Much of your empathy is developed as you mature, but it's a muscle that can be exercised and improved. There are actually pathways in our brains called mirror neurons. They have evolved to recognize and respond to the hundreds of small, usually unnoticed, signals people give off when they interact.

Taking it a step further, as we grow up, we develop what neuroscientists call the Theory of Mind. It describes our ability to put ourselves in the place of someone else and see things from their perspective. It also allows us to understand others might have thoughts, feelings, and motivations causing them to do what they do. And it's why you can pick up on the unspoken signals of your friend and ask, "What's wrong?" before they even have to tell you they just had a bad day at work.

Building your ability to pick up on these signals, and learning how to interpret them, can pay huge dividends. And it's not complicated. You don't have to take special classes or training seminars.

In fact, your daily sales activities provide constant opportunities to build your capacity. Here are five exercises you can use to cultivate your empathetic skills.

1. Pay massive attention to answers

It seems obvious, but the first step is to pay attention to the signals your prospects and customers are already sending to you. In sales conversations, it’s way too easy to get wrapped up in what you want to say.

When your mind is filled with your own agenda -- and the nervous energy of potential customers -- you aren't picking up any of the signals they’re sharing.

Before a sales conversation, engage with the other person. Write a note to remind yourself of what you want to cover, so you don't have to keep it in your head. When you ask questions, look at them and listen to their answers. And, for the love of all that is good, put away your phone.

2. See and hear who you're talking to

Digital communication has made it easy for us to connect. Email, social media posts, and texting are part of our daily engagement. But when we engage with people on those platforms, we lose two main vehicles for conveying information in a conversation: vocal tone and facial expressions.

Research shows that the power of face-to-face communication is in it being … face-to-face. When people are back-to-back in the same room, their ability to create a connection diminishes. That's how important it is to see and hear each other.

There's a place for digital communication, but challenge yourself to set up meetings by phone, video call, or in-person whenever possible. Face-to-face conversations allow for the fullest interaction, and the closer you can get to one, the more effective you’ll be.

You might have gotten lazy, or maybe you hide behind your texts and emails. Stop it.

3. Share small talk

Small talk often gets maligned as simply talking about the weather. But if you don't know someone well, talking about the weather can be a great place to start. In communication studies, there's something called "phatic communication" which is designed for a social function versus information function. In other words, it lubricates the conversation so it will go smoothly.

Too often, salespeople want to jump right in and get down to business. In doing so, you miss out on a critical step in building that initial empathetic bridge. You end up spending the rest of the conversation trying to catch up and create trust and connection on the fly, which can be challenging.

On your next sales calls, slow the tempo down in the beginning. Create rapport (e.g., the emotional connection), then move forward. Of course, you don't want to waste time, but two or three minutes of conversation at the beginning of a presentation or demo can go a long way.

4. Get curious about your prospect's worldview

Even though our minds are great at picking up subtle cues about our conversational partner’s emotional state, we can make it easier on ourselves.

Asking questions is the hallmark of any great salesperson. But you can take it a step further than simply sussing out their budget for the year or identifying other decision-makers who need to be involved.

Your sales presentation probably has questions baked in already to gather information. Beyond the facts the prospects share, pay attention to how they answer you. Are they confident, guarded, excited, upset, or defeated? You can figure out a lot of what's going on in the organization by the way the answer is framed.

Or, to be more direct, get in the habit of asking "How do you feel about that?" You could be referencing a challenge they’re having, an organizational roadblock, or even the solution you're presenting.

You're not looking for a quantitative answer. Instead, you want to gauge where they are emotionally, which will show you how to proceed.

5. Debrief after failed interactions

One of the best ways to learn empathy is to examine your empathetic failures. Those come in two forms. Sometimes, you lose a sale and have no idea why.

In that situation, you've failed to pick up on what’s motivating your prospect. In other situations, you ignore the clues and push your own agenda. For example, your prospect’s signals might have indicated they weren't ready to move forward, but you pushed them because you needed to hit quota and they ghosted you.

It's important to debrief after these interactions -- even if it's just you and a notepad. Can you accurately assess their emotional state? What was motivating them in the conversation?

Ask yourself if there were things your conversational partner shared you didn't engage with in the moment, but, in hindsight, were really important. Were there clues foreshadowing the eventual decision they made?

By replaying these conversations in your mind, you'll develop a finer instinct for developing empathy. You'll be clearer about tuning in to the conscious and unconscious signals your prospects and customers are sharing with you.

With that information, you'll be much more skillful at honing in on their true concerns and hopes. That’s a core part of emotional intelligence. Once you can understand those emotional motivations, you'll be able to sell more effectively and efficiently.

There’s been a divide between the worlds of marketing and sales for as long as anyone can remember.

The traditional model had marketing strictly working to drive leads and sales professionals waiting around on the marketing team to deliver those leads so they could work them into paying customers. That worked well for a time (pre-Internet that is) which meant marketing and sales, while ultimately dependent on one another, rarely had to work together. However, buyers’ habits have changed dramatically over the past several years and along with it, the need for sales and marketing to adapt.

Today, more unified models have sales and marketing operating as a single unit toward common growth goals — each team seeking to equip, inform and empower the other. If you’ve seen this in action, you already know it’s a truly glorious (and profitable) sight to see. Yet, while unification has proven to be successful in creating leaner, more effective growth…it also has some unique challenges, especially regarding expectations and scope of work.

In this article, I’ll cover the key things that sales professionals should expect from the marketing team when both teams are working in a modern, unified fashion.

If you’re a sales rep reading this article, consider this a new checklist of sorts. It will ensure you get all the tools and knowledge you need to nurture more leads and close more deals (aka get those commissions, baby)!

1. Educational & Nurturing Content

Today’s buyers research everything online long before they engage with a salesperson. Even when they do engage, they are often not ready to buy right away…so they need a little extra nurturing from sales. It’s increasingly common for sales reps to provide relevant content (blogs, reviews, eBooks, guides, etc.) to the buyer to help guide them in their search for answers.

This is where marketing comes in.

Smart marketing teams should craft content that not only helps attract new leads, but also answers buyer’s questions at various stages within the sales cycle. This educational content is then handed over to sales to help them nurture leads while also keeping messaging, authority and conversion opportunities within reach.

What to expect:
This means sales professionals should expect timely, relevant and actionable content that they can use in a multitude of situations to help nurture their prospects into customers.

2. Campaign Updates & Notifications

Marketing teams are constantly seeking to formulate new campaigns or improve upon the existing ones. Each new or modified campaign often contains its own messaging, offer, supporting collateral, goals, etc.

Sales professionals need to know this stuff!

Although I’m a career marketer, I’ve also spent years in sales. I can’t tell you how frustrated I would get when a lead would call in requesting whatever marketing had promised and our sales team had absolutely no idea what they were talking about. This does more than just make sales professionals look stupid, it makes the company look stupid.

While marketing should have certainly notified the sales reps of the campaign, the real culprit was the absence of a process. There was no simple, reliable system for marketing and sales to effectively communicate with one another…something inbound sales was designed to solve.

What to expect:
Sales professionals should definitely expect campaign updates and notifications from the marketing team, but work together with them to develop a communications process first before pointing fingers.

3. Useful Technology

Today, great marketers are more than just marketers – they are technologists. In fact, according to Forrester, marketing departments will soon outpace IT departments in technology spend and implementation. I won’t even hire an Intern that doesn’t have at least a fundamental understanding of common marketing SaaS products.

So what does this mean for sales professionals? Effective sales and marketing alignment requires more than just shared terms, agendas and goals. It requires the alignment of technology too. Isolated software creates isolated efforts, which will work against you in the long run. It’s the marketing team’s job to implement and integrate these technology tools…not IT and definitely not sales. More specifically, we’re talking about marketing automation, CMS, CRM and analytics tools.

“Why is it the job of the marketing team and not sales or IT,” you ask?

The more time sales professionals spend on technology, the less time they spend “in production.” Yes, they do need to properly track and manage their leads within a CRM, but it’s marketing’s job to implement and integrate that CRM with the other software. This is also more advantageous for marketing because it helps them close the loop in their reporting, more easily obtaining key metrics like marketing cost-per-customer acquisition. While the IT department could handle the implementation, they actually live in a very different world of technology. One closer related to infrastructure, security and management than to marketing/sales specific SaaS products.

There are literally thousands of marketing and sales software tools out there with varying degrees of integration capabilities. A maze best routed by tech-savvy marketing professionals.

What to expect:
In short, sales teams should expect implementation and integration of a CRM tool (like Salesforce, HubSpot CRM, Microsoft Dynamics, etc.) that meets their needs for quick access/updates and contact management.

This leads us into #4…

4. Real-Time Contact Data

Contact record updates do tie into a few of the other items on this list, but it’s important enough to single out as its own item.

When sales professionals are managing a contact in their CRM, they typically see only those activities that relate to the sales rep and the contact. However, it’s advantageous for the sales rep to see ALL communications the contact has had with the company. This gives them insight that improves their ability to convert that contact to a customer, like what web pages they visited most, what marketing emails they’ve engaged with, what social media networks they’re most active in and so on. This type of data is only possible when the sales rep’s CRM is integrated with the marketing team’s CMS, marketing and analytics software.

What to expect:
So, if sales professionals want to get all this juicy, sales boosting info within their contacts’ records, they should expect marketing to integrate their CRM and extract this data in a simple to understand contact history.

5. Sales Focused Assets

Much like we discussed in item #1 above, sales needs content to help guide buyers further down the funnel to a close. But there is a distinct different between marketing content and sales focused assets or collateral.

This sales focused content is less educational and “soft sale” in nature and more centered on closing the deal or validating the brand. Most of this content lies toward the bottom of the sales cycle. A few examples might be a company overview with video testimonials, a guide explaining how to conduct a transaction with the company or even a simple pricing calculator. This could also be simple printed collateral like a company brochure or well branded personal business cards.

What to expect:
Sales professionals should expect these items from the marketing team in conjunction with the other, more middle/top of funnel, educational content they produce.

6. Feedback Mechanisms

The best way to learn how to sell more stuff to buyers is to simply ask the people buying that stuff. Want to know something about your buyers? Ask!

Quick rant:  It never ceases to amaze me how few businesses actually collect feedback in a consistent, methodical fashion. So easy yet so neglected.

There are all kinds of ways to go about collecting feedback from both customers and prospects. In the marketing world, we call these “feedback mechanisms” and they are amazing assets in driving both revenue and service/product direction. This includes a multitude of surveys, questionnaires, qualitative phone interviews and so on.

In my opinion, sales professionals shouldn’t be spending their time in the weeds of creating these feedback mechanisms. They should, however, work with marketing in determining what type of data would be valuable to gain (see more on this in #7 below). Soon after these feedback mechanisms are in place, a steady flow of powerful insight will start rolling in…and everyone, including leadership, will be stoked about this.

What to expect:
Sales professionals should expect the completed versions of these surveys, questionnaires, etc. in an easy to deploy format. While marketing deploys these a vast majority of the time, it’s still necessary for sales to kick a few out when needed. They should also expect a regular report containing actionable data that allows them to improve their numbers.

7. Collaboration

This pretty much goes without saying…

In order for sales professionals to get all the wonderful things I’m mentioning in this list (which they absolutely should), there MUST be some collaboration between the two teams.

This gets tricky when it comes to the typical personalities we’ve all encountered within both fields.

Sales professionals, due to the nature of their job, tend to place instant monetary value upon their time. 1 hour equates to 20 calls which equates to 5 meetings which equates to 1 potential deal closed which equates to $500 in commissions…that kinda thing. Marketing professionals, also due to the nature of their job, tend to get buried within the massive workload required to pull off a successful marketing campaign. Sales teams don’t want to lose out on commissions and marketing teams don’t want to miss important deadlines.

Regardless, both need to suck it up and collaborate.

What to expect:
With that said, sales reps should expect collaboration from marketing in order to get the ball rolling on all of this sales boosting goodness but understand that it’s a two way street. A potential commission sacrificed with marketing today will equal many more commissions tomorrow.

8. Respect

Yes, I had to close this out with a hippy-ish, “let’s all come together” type topic but hey…it’s true, man.

I’ll say that respect comes easier when both teams are working under a unified growth model, where each is making the other significantly more effective at their job. Moving away from unspoken, short sighted expectations will also help both teams create a better company culture – which is always good for growth!

What to expect:
Sales professionals should get respect from marketers and marketers should get more respect from sales professionals.

A Final Note for the Sales Professionals Out There…

You are the lifeblood of any organization and should expect some support to help you do more of what you’re paid to do – gain customers. But before you scribble all these expectations down on an old crummy leads list and staple it to the marketing team’s door, take some time to reflect on your company’s culture and direction first. If your leadership is not supportive (or at least open to the idea) of unifying marketing and sales for better performance, the expectations we covered here will rarely, if ever, be met.

Want more sales & marketing alignment insight? Download this guide!

The Complete Guide to Sales & Marketing Unification

Maximize your Q4 “downtime” to set up a great Q1-Q2 in 2016.

Consumers have Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, and New Year’s specials and pricing shoved down their throats throughout the holiday season. If your business is retail, it’s a busy time of year to put your revenue firmly in the black. (Although this year’s data shows a less-than-stellar holiday season for retail sales.)

However, if you specialize in B2B sales, the holiday season through December and leading into the first half of January are traditionally a tricky time. These are the doldrums of many sales professionals.

People are busy. They are trying to put a dozen things together at their own jobs before the holidays. Leads put sales calls off until after Thanksgiving. Then Christmas sneaks in and you’re told “Let’s talk after the holidays.”

If you’ve been in sales for any length of time, you know that “after the holidays” does not mean after Christmas or even the first week in January. People are coming off their own vacations and working to catch up at the office.

“After the holidays” can easily edge into the third week of January (or more) as companies calculate their own revenue from the previous year and look to their new year business projections and plans.

While it’s easy to be discouraged during these slow times, a savvy sales professional can overcome the holiday slowdown to hit the ground running at a dead sprint when you can reconnect with those leads.

What can you do to take advantage of your own holiday and post-Christmas slowdown?

Don’t disappear

There may be 4 more weeks of sales slowdown, and your contacts and leads may be busy, but don’t disappear. Stay on their radar. Drop them a small note. Check in with them. You’re not being pushy — you’re not even trying to sell to them (right now) — you are just reminding them that you’re there.

And if you’re not there, say you go on a vacation, be clear with your auto-responder message as to when you’ll be out and how they can contact you if they need to. Let them know that you hope they have a happy holiday season and a great new year, but you are also available if they need you.

You’re not selling, you’re subtly reminding them that you are the salesperson who is always available for them, no matter the time of year.

Be certifiably excellent

Use the extra time to renew industry training. Is there an online class you’ve been putting off that may help you close more deals? An area you know you’re a little weak in that you could strengthen?

This slow period is the perfect chance to get that certification you’ve been considering. Expand your knowledge and tackle that MOOC you’ve been thinking of. Hit up Lynda.com and find Sales training that will help you and your team. At the time of this writing, Lynda.com has 1,395 listings for business and/or sales-related classes and certifications.

Expand your skillset, both for the next quarter and for your career.

Polish sales and marketing collateral

These slowdown weeks are the perfect time to review and strengthen your sales and marketing collateral. Update out-of-date information in your documents, ensure your sales presentation is spot-on for the new year and ready to go at a moment’s notice.

Review, audit, and update your sales documents. Polish your proposals, beef up your quotes, and strengthen your business documents. This ensures that when you are connecting with all of those “after the holidays” contacts, you are fully prepared with any document or information they may need. You can turn around a stellar quote in moments because you’ve maximized your downtime.

Coordinate with your marketing team and make sure you are all on the same page. Don’t hesitate to let your marketing team know you are taking this time to update documents and sales collateral. Find out if they have any new graphics, data, or information you should incorporate.

Clean house and prune your leads

Review your leads, look at the long-tail of your funnel, and take this time to better quantify the most promising leads. Use the downtime to effectively groom your sales pipeline to best strategize on your next steps in Q1.

The team at HubSpot wrote a fascinating piece on the concept of “graymail” and why they chose to unsubscribe 250,000 people from their mailing lists. While I’m not advocating you cut loose a six-digit number of people from your funnel, their approach is noteworthy.

If there are leads you can identify as having been sitting in a sales limbo, it may be time to evaluate your ROI for the time you have spent on them. Consider setting up more automated workflows for these “lower-tiered” leads, or discuss the possibility of dropping them down into a neutral newsletter or drip campaign status. If they’re not hot, put them back on the burner.

After all, you have leads that have committed to talking with you. You need to focus on them and be willing to do a little house cleaning where it will best help your team.

Even a perfect bonsai tree needs careful pruning and nurturing to reach its full potential.

These are the bad habits you most likely cling to but should rid yourself of. It will enhance your productivity and make you feel better. 

Produced by Emma Fierberg

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This past Fall The National Petrochemical Industrial Company (NATPET) sent a request for proposals to several leading training companies to design and deliver a five day leadership program based on emotional intelligence to a group of 22 plant managers. Our proposal was accepted and so preparations began.

NATPET is situated in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which is the most difficult country in the world to enter as an outsider. I had been to Dubai, United Arab Emirates, twice before and Bahrain once, however, those countries do not require that you apply for a visa prior to arrival. You can only get a visa to visit the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) if you are working there or if you are traveling on a religious pilgrimage to visit the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.

To get a business visa one requires documentation from the host company, which you must submit, along with your passport and a lengthy application form to the country’s embassy in Ottawa, here in Canada. The KSA embassy does not deal with the general public, you must use an agent – a company who will take your application, passport, and documentation and submit it to the office on your behalf.

NATPET is located in Yanbu Industrial City on the Red Sea. Getting there is relatively easy as compared to some of our other unique work locations: Brunei, Nigeria, or Botswana. The route to Yanbu is Toronto to Jeddah, Jeddah to Yanbu.

I met a great group of managers who were quite interested in becoming better leaders. They had heard of emotional intelligence, but didn’t really know how it was going to assist them to do their jobs better. By the end of our five days together, they were very excited about taking what they had learned and applying it back in the workplace for greater authenticity, better communication, relationships, stress management, and improved problem solving techniques to better address their work-related issues and to be better leaders.

The post Leading with Emotional Intelligence at NATPET appeared first on The Emotional Intelligence Training Company, Inc..

In 2012 I was contacted by the Ministry of Education in Botswana regarding getting some of their employees certified to use the EQ-i 2.0. They first sent six employees to our Toronto certification course and then another six to the following certification course in Vancouver.

They loved the program and our business relationship continued. We were asked to submit a proposal to design and deliver a national emotional intelligence skills curriculum as part of assisting the country to achieve their Vision 2016 objectives.

Our team travelled to Botswana a number of times to learn more about the country, conduct a learning needs assessment and work closely with their team of education professionals.

In partnership with them, we designed a program and piloted the program with their facilitators through a train the trainer approach. During this phase we further customized the program to be culturally aware and appropriate and have a good fit for the prospective participants.

The program is four one week modules. We also created a facilitator’s guide and a PowerPoint presentation. In all, this project took two years, 800 surveys, 200 participants in interviews and focus groups and involved 25 facilitators. To our knowledge, this is the first emotional intelligence curriculum ever created, that is intended to be delivered nation-wide.

Finishing up this project was a highlight of 2015 for us. It was our honour and privilege working with the Ministry of Education in Botswana and I think it’s fair to say that we learned as much or more through our experiences working and living in Botswana.

The post National Emotional Intelligence curriculum, Botswana appeared first on The Emotional Intelligence Training Company, Inc..

You’ve heard us say it again and again over the years: make backups of your data! As someone who uses electronic data devices — whether those devices are laptops, smartphones, or even cameras — it’s your responsibility to keep your data safe. But I get it. Backing up data sounds like an advanced, overwhelming task. Maybe you don’t know the first thing about backing up data, and if that’s the case, then the fault is ours, not yours. The truth is, it’s not as complicated as it sounds! Here’s everything you need to know, starting from ground zero. In this...

Read the full article: 5 Basic Backup Facts Every Windows User Should Know

Uber isn't only about booking cars. It looks like it's thinking of becoming a travel agent. 

On December 24, Uber secured a new patent that could be used to plan trips.

Called "Uber Travel" in the images, it looks like a normal flight search like you would see on Expedia, but it adds Uber cars into the mix. 

A traveler could input their start location, date, and time, alongside a destination, and Uber would recommend an itinerary for them. The "magic" as Uber calls it in the diagram is being able to also incorporate plans for transportation. 

It's a deviation from how conventional travel is typically booked segment by segment now. You start with booking your flight, then choose a hotel, then eventually a rental car or some other transit.

Uber's idea, according to the patent, is to take the trip information and show a recommended flight, hotel, and the cost of an Uber to get you from point A to point B all-in-one.

In the whole process, Uber is acting as the facilitator, much like a Kayak.com, rather than the provider. These deals will probably be orchestrated by a team overseen by the patent's author, Howard Jaffe, who is the head of Uber's global procurement and supply chain.

In the patent, Uber states that it will tap into the network of airlines, looking at things like the planes on-time performance and an individuals preference for aisle and window seats. It will also work with traditional hotels and "shared-economy systems" that allow people to rent out their apartments, likely Airbnb.

The patent also covers a way to make travel so much easier.

Once Uber knows your scheduled flight, the patented system is designed to know when a flight actually lands at the airport so it can start calculating when you should call an Uber, taking into account customs and baggage times. 

"The information may include a location at the airport where the user can be picked up in connection with receiving the on-demand transportation service, and a timing indicator to indicate when the user should make a request to receive the on-demand transportation service based on a real-time determination of a number of available service providers in a vicinity of the airport," the patent states. 

Essentially, Uber is taking the guesswork out of when to call for a ride when a traveler lands by pre-emptively notifying them when they should.

It's an interesting move for a company that hasn't been welcomed by airports with open arms. Many airports still forbid Uber for operating on their property, often levying heavy fines on the drivers themselves who respond to pick-up requests. Uber has been working hard to change this, and in early December, Uber finally was granted permission to operate at Las Vegas' McCarran International Airport. 

Uber did not initially respond to a request for comment. We'll update this story if they do.

SEE ALSO: Why one of Kayak's cofounders took his Tesla and became an Uber driver

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To proceed with electoral reform, I asked Justin Trudeau before Christmas, “Do you think that your government needs to demonstrate support that’s broader than the Liberal caucus in Parliament?”

“Oh, absolutely,” the Prime Minister said. “I think we need to engage with Canadians, and I know the question’s leading toward, ‘Do we need a referendum on that?’ We’ve committed to consulting broadly as many Canadians as possible, as many different communities and organizations—including political parties—as possible, and we’re going to move forward with that and we’ll see where it takes us.”

I like the first two words of that answer best. The rest was mush, though I don’t think it was entirely meaningless. It’s easy to understand why Trudeau believed I was “leading toward” a question on referendums. Everyone is asking him about referendums. Trudeau spent the election campaign promising that 2015’s would be the last federal election held under the familiar first-past-the-post system, where the candidate with the largest number of votes in every riding wins a seat in the House of Commons. He has not specified which system should replace it.

Related: The Liberals’ plan to fix the way we vote

The Conservatives, temporarily meek about criticizing Trudeau on more value-laden matters, have latched onto electoral reform as a low-cost way to harry Trudeau. On the last sitting day of Parliament before Christmas, four Conservative MPs demanded a referendum. Scott Reid, the eastern Ontario MP, has launched a petition urging one. At this writing he’s collected about 4,000 signatures—maybe not a groundswell.

Related: Rona Ambrose sits down for a year-end interview with Maclean’s

But concern about Trudeau’s plans isn’t coming only from Conservative dead-enders. The NDP worries the Liberals won’t endorse proportional representation, which would make it impossible for a party to form a majority in Parliament with only 39 per cent of the popular vote, as the Conservatives and Liberals did after the 2011 and 2015 elections.

There is, you see, more than one way to reform an electoral system. First-past-the-post, the system we have, is easy to understand but it exaggerates the winning party’s advantage. It’s routine for a party to win a majority of seats without winning a majority of votes. Smaller parties get shortchanged. But you could “reform” that system by introducing a ranked ballot, where voters’ second and third choices help determine the winner. Such systems tend to reward centrist parties: If you love the Floating Wing-nut Party but you are willing to live with a Liberal, your ranked ballot will probably help elect a Liberal. To reformers whose goal is a proportional system, which would give 10 per cent of the seats to a party winning 10 per cent of the vote, ranked ballots are no improvement.

Are the Liberals required to hold a referendum before changing the voting system? Not by law. Maybe not by any standard. National referendums are exceedingly rare in Canada. We had one in 1898 on prohibition, another in 1944 on compulsory military service, and a third in 1992 on the Charlottetown constitutional accord. There was no referendum on the 1982 Constitution, which Charlottetown sought to amend. There is no rule, nor even a coherent standard of practice, to determine which changes get sent directly to the people and which don’t. In 2001, New Brunswick had a referendum on video lottery terminals. In 2004, Nova Scotia had a referendum on Sunday shopping, then ignored the result. There’s nothing magic about letting the people decide. Often they don’t decide. Often they think they have, but governments do something else anyway.

There are laws in British Columbia and Alberta that require referendums before the provincial legislatures ratify constitutional amendments. But a change to the electoral system falls well short of that standard of importance. It’s more in line with the wholesale changes the Harper government made to Canada’s elections laws in 2014. Without a referendum. Scott Reid forgot to launch a petition against those.

But it’s a bit short to say the Liberals are allowed to rig the electoral system because the Conservatives did. In fact, Liberal House leader Dominic LeBlanc has said something close to the opposite. In an interview with Maclean’s, he called Harper’s so-called Fair Elections Act “an example where a majority was changing the rules that affected everybody over the vociferous, and, I think, compelling arguments of those that opposed it. I hope and believe that that’s not where we end up.”

Well, then. How could LeBlanc ensure his government doesn’t end up like the Conservatives? He could ensure it meets a higher standard of public approval for its reforms. Hence my question to Trudeau. How could he show that his proposed changes, whatever they may be, aren’t just a mechanism for helping Liberals win more elections? He could get another party to vote for his plan in Parliament. He could line up a number of provincial governments’ approval. He could even hold a referendum. Political legitimacy isn’t binary: it’s not something you either have or you don’t. It’s a sliding scale—the more approval you gather, the more you show you’re changing the system for Canadians, and not just for the Liberal party.

The post The quagmire of electoral reform and the hunt for legitimacy appeared first on Macleans.ca.

In an era when technology and marketing trends change on a dime, the kiss of death is looking out of touch.

We might dig vintage design, nostalgic throwback posts and old-timey music but no one digs outdated marketing. At best, it makes you look behind the times and at worst it makes potential customers think you’re not good enough.

No matter how charming you think your old school methods are, you have to face the fact that, with every passing year, these outdated practices are making your company appear more and more irrelevant.

So, it’s time to take a hard look at the way your business is marketed so you can get rid of the old and welcome the new.

1. Your Social Media Updates Are All About You

When companies first jumped on the social media train, it was common to see nothing but yawn-inducing, self-congratulatory updates that resembled an awkward cross between a newsletter and an ad campaign. But those days are long gone and today’s savvy social media users expect a whole lot more if they’re going to give you their attention or their business.

Your company’s social media pages are not the place for a hard sell to would-be customers nor are they a place to shout your latest accomplishments. Sure, you can pepper a few of those in occasionally, but the bulk of your posts should fall in the realm of entertainment or useful information that your followers will really and truly appreciate.

2. Your Blog is Totally Self-Serving

The same theory that guides your social media should also rule your blogosphere. As you brainstorm topics for content on your own blog or other sites where you contribute, put yourself in the shoes of your customer and cut out anything that they wouldn’t find interesting or beneficial.

A blog that is all about why your company is so awesome is an immediate tip off that it’s actually way behind in the times. If you want to blog about a new change within the company or the industry, include in a list of other exciting changes that will benefit or impact your customer’s experience in the new year. Otherwise, frankly, they just won’t care.

3. You’re Tweeting Just to Tweet

There’s a mistaken (and grossly outdated) belief among some marketers and business owners that the key to social media success is frequent posting. If you Tweet it, they will come, right? Wrong. While consistent posting is important, quality always trumps quantity.

Although each social media platform requires a different posting frequency, keep in mind that your followers are smart enough to recognize when you’re posting for the sheer sake of posting and they’ll roll their collective eyes at your old-school approach. As your teacher used to say, if you don’t have anything nice to say, say nothing at all.

4. Your Website Copy is Awkwardly Keyword-Driven

In the olden days of SEO, the keyword was king and ruled with a powerful and awkward fist, turning all of your website’s copy into garbage. But in today’s SEO landscape, this sort of hardcore keyword optimization is not only ineffective but can actually be harmful to your website in both organic and algorithmic ways.

Obviously no human wants to read copy that’s being driven by your geocentric keywords, so visitors will be clicking the back button before they even get to your pitch. Additionally, Google will actually penalize your site for being stuffed with too many keywords. As with most things that help, keywords need to be doled out in moderation or they begin to hurt.

5. You’re Spending Money on Obsolete Formats

If you haven’t recognized the fact that new forms of communication are not just dominating the old, but making it obsolete, you’re marking yourself as terribly outdated. Still doling out cash for print mailers or newspaper ads? Stop.

Unless you know for damn sure that your customer base still relies heavily on one of these older forms of marketing, you need to pack it in immediately. That money would be much better used on social media advertising, website upgrades or a video marketing campaign. When it comes to marketing, invest in the future, not the past.

6. “Always Be Closing” Is Your Marketing Mantra

The old school of marketing thought told business leaders to “always be closing” but today’s consumers can sniff a sales pitch from a mile away and they know that they don’t have to listen. If the feeling that people get from your marketing is that of a greased-up 70s salesman, you’re doing it wrong.

Instead, take the approach of that rare bird, the cool kid who also happens to be super nice to everyone in school. The cool nice guy doesn’t need to sell himself aggressively, because that’s clearly desperate and off-putting. He knows that what makes people love him is that he’s actually kind and smart and charming. It’s the very same idea with your company – stop talking the talk and start walking the walk when it comes to customer care, killer services or products and genuine value.

If you want your company to stay relevant, it’s critical that the image you portray is just as relevant. And if you don’t feel that you can do that on your own, it’s time to hire an individual or team who can.

Just as it’s always been, the companies who succeed most are those who are best equipped to be agile and forward-thinking in an ever-changing world.

It is possible to create a passionate desire in the minds of B2B technology buyers, but beware of lustful nerds.

Humans, including IT people, are of two minds, namely the practical and the desirous. We all need and want things, even in our daily jobs. Back when I was running big iron for a national retailer (my pre-marketing guru days), I had a boss who had a messianic drive to convert all of IT to UNIX. I took fiendish joy in finding the precise moments to demonstrate why it was, in the short run, foolish and extravagant, thwarting his sundry attempts to drive my proprietary platforms into non-use. But I did save the company millions in unnecessary short-term costs, so I don’t feel too bad.

My boss had UNIX lust, and it overrode his objective thinking. This is a major part of consumer marketing – generating irrational desire for products. Take a husband, wife and their new baby car shopping, and the divide between the rational (she wants a minivan) and the lustful (he wants a Dodge Charger) becomes instantly apparent.

Similar mechanics play in B2B marketing. People want things. Often they want things their own way, and they make corporate purchasing decisions to fulfill their personal want. My old boss was willing to spend whatever it took to achieve an IT environment that was top-to-bottom UNIX. His judgement was clouded by a passionate craving.

For SuSE Linux, an early Silicon Strategies Marketing client, we did something similar. Using deep interview processes, we explored what CxOs wanted in IT, then paired various elements of Linux with those desires. The key was starting with desire, then doing nothing to interfere with that desire. Instead we amplified it, justified it, and presented products to make it happen. When CIOs said they wanted their staffs to have deeper understanding of fewer technologies, we told them that story with a Linux ribbon tied around it.

Alignment is the key to B2B product lust, because of people like me, the ones that insert practicality into uncomfortable places. There is a constant battle within organizations between what individuals want, the organizational mission, and what is practical. You cannot help someone achieve their personal desires if it conflicts with corporate mission or if your solution is insanely impractical. But you can show how your product helps buyers obtain their vision. Begin by understanding their lust and organization’s needs, then transfer that lust to product features that satisfy both. You obtain significantly unfair advantage in doing so.

There is, however, one major reason not to do this. If you are successful in leveraging personal desires to achieve B2B sales, and your products do not make long-term sense for the organization, then you damage your brand. You make your quarterly numbers, but you poison the well for up-selling, cross-selling and buzz building. Unhappy customers include people in the customer company that were not your sales target, and they count.

The world’s billionaires are en route to Canada’s High Arctic—and judging by their luxurious, ice-busting rides, Ottawa may have trouble keeping up. In yet another example of how the once-foreboding Northwest Passage has landed on the itineraries of well-heeled global tourists, Dutch shipbuilder Damen wowed the Monaco Yacht Show’s attendees this fall when it unveiled its latest luxury toy: the world’s first polar-capable super-yacht. Called SeaXplorer, the “purpose-built luxury expedition yacht” boasts a double-acting hull that, when piloted in reverse, can crunch its way through nearly a metre of first-year sea ice. Other handy tools for venturing into the frigid Arctic include, on the biggest version: a pair of helicopters, two submersibles, several launch boats and a heated outdoor bar surface—so your highball doesn’t turn into a Popsicle under the midnight sun.

It sounds like something straight out of a James Bond flick. But Damen marketing manager Victor Caminada says the company’s Amels yacht-building arm is merely responding to requests from its well-to-do clients. “We see a demand among super-yacht owners, particularly younger people, to go on adventures and do different things with their yachts,” Caminada says. “They’re tired of just sitting around in the Mediterranean and Caribbean seas.”

Billionaires aren’t altogether new to the Arctic, of course. Canada’s own Jim Balsillie, formerly of BlackBerry, was part of the Canadian team that discovered one of Sir John Franklin’s lost ships last year. In 2010, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s 126-m mega-yacht, Octopus, was spotted in Pond Inlet, near the passage’s eastern entrance. But the fact yacht-makers are now building polar-ready leisure vessels, costing upward of $100 million, demonstrates just how popular the idea of an Arctic adventure has become among those who can afford one. It also underscores the need for Canada to build more infrastructure in the High Arctic—deepwater ports, search and rescue stations—to support the extra traffic as global temperatures warm and sea ice recedes. Yet another example: the cruise ship Crystal Serenity plans to become the first luxury cruise liner to complete a transit of the Northwest Passage in 2016.

Related: How Jim Balsillie plans on selling the North

The ballooning number of amateur Arctic explorers poses a particular headache for those charged with keeping them safe. Despite the lengthening navigable season in late summer, the Arctic remains an unpredictable and unforgiving place. Open channels quickly become choked with ice. Clear skies rapidly deteriorate into howling storms. And if sailors run into trouble, it can take hours for search-and-rescue teams to arrive above the Arctic Circle. “When cruise ships are trying to push through the North and are hitting the ice edge, and they need ice escorts, or go so far under their own power and are then forced to call in Canadian assets—the forces of last resort like icebreakers and the like, or search and rescue—that’s when we get concerned,” says Rear-Admiral John Newton of the Royal Canadian Navy. Case in point: the Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker Sir Wilfrid Laurier rescued a group of jet skiers back in 2013 after they ran into trouble near Gjoa Haven. The group had been attempting to complete the Northwest Passage—all while being filmed for a reality TV show.

Caminada, however, says Damen won’t send its wealthy clientele into the Arctic’s maw unprepared. Available in 65-m, 90-m and 100-m versions, SeaXplorer is designed to be fully compliant with the upcoming Polar Code, a set of international standards for ships operating in polar regions, and can comfortably operate for more than a month at sea with up to 30 guests and 50 crew aboard. That means carrying spare parts and plenty of food and beverages. “A normal yacht can go for seven days with its guests on board before the fridges are literally empty,” Caminada says. “SeaXplorer can take provisions up to 40 days—and good provisions, not dried space food or anything like that. It’s still a luxury yacht and you still need to cater at the very highest level for the luxury guest.”

To that end, SeaXplorer offers many of the usual super-yacht trappings, including well-appointed cabins, luxurious lounges and an outdoor Jacuzzi. But the ship also boasts several unique features designed specifically for polar tourism. They include: an observation deck at the bow of the ship—unusual on most yachts—since that’s where most Arctic wildlife tends to be spotted, and a commercial-grade tender launch system that can quickly lower a small sightseeing craft through a set of hull doors. “If a humpback whale pops up near the bow, you will want to get the guests very quickly from the luxury accommodations into the tender,” Caminada says. “We can actually launch the tender with the guests inside.”

All in all, it’s a remarkably functional design—so much so that some Arctic experts ask whether SeaXplorer will outclass the ships Canada is supposed to use to keep tabs on it and other Arctic sea traffic. Michael Byers, a professor of political science at the University of British Columbia, notes the 100-m version of the SeaXplorer is almost the same size as the Arctic offshore patrol ship, or AOPS, being built for the Canadian Navy. It also boasts “almost the same ice-capabilities, speed and range,” he says, and has room for a second helicopter, more small vessels and, of course, much nicer accommodations. “The important point is that the capabilities of the AOPS are being replicated on commercial vessels, which suggests they’re not very capable,” says Byers, who has referred to the AOPS as a “slushbreaker” because of its limited ice-breaking capacity. He argues Canada would have been better off ditching its $2.3-billion investment in five or six AOPS vessels and instead spending the money on a couple of full-fledged icebreakers for the Coast Guard and a few purpose-built navy patrol ships for the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.

Newton, however, says the comparison doesn’t hold water. Not only is the AOPS outfitted with tons of high-tech gear—and a 25-mm gun—it’s meant to function as part of a larger Arctic security and surveillance regime that includes several government agencies, including Coast Guard, border services and the RCMP. “The elegance of the hull is but one aspect of a ship,” Newton says. “Its capabilities, personnel competencies, command and control, sensors and sensor network and broader alliance of partners are what really make the difference.” Besides, the world’s ultra-wealthy don’t pose much of a threat in Arctic waters. Their eye-catching super-yachts stick out like sore thumbs and are piloted by professional crews who seek the necessary permissions and clearances. Put another way, if you’re wealthy and important enough to afford an ice-breaking super-yacht, odds are you’re going to take all the necessary safety precautions when sailing into dangerous Arctic waters. “They tend to work with us, not against us,” says Newton, adding the same can’t always be said of smaller sailboats and personal watercraft that venture into the Northwest Passage.

So when can we expect the first SeaXplorer in Pond Inlet? Caminada says Damen generally needs 36 months to build and customize a super-yacht, which means it would likely be early 2019 before the first one slides into the water. But make no mistake: it’s definitely coming. “We have several serious leads [from potential buyers] at the moment,” Caminada says. “So now we’re zooming in and developing the boat to specifications and costing those leads. It doesn’t happen overnight.’”

Good thing, too. The navy is scheduled to receive its first AOPS in 2018. If Canada is destined to be outclassed, if not necessarily outmanoeuvred, by a bunch of billionaires in our Arctic backyard, the least we can do is get there first.

The post The world’s first ice-busting yachts open the High Arctic appeared first on Macleans.ca.

As we prepare to ring in the new year, we all begin to focus a little more intently on the future. What will 2016 bring? And what changes took place in 2015 that we need to be sure we’re adapting to going forward? We recently held a webinar on this very subjected titled, “6 Things Your Sales Organization Needs To Prepare for 2016,” where we sat down with top sales leaders from Zenefits, Grovo, Rocketrip, Skaled and Greenhouse.

Needless to say, the session was so jam-packed with great insights and lively conversation that the panelists ran out of time before they had a chance to do a Q&A. Fret not, they’ve taken the time to address most of the audience questions that came in here on the Sales Hacker blog! Huge thanks to Skaled for bringing together such a brilliant group of Directors and VPs. Enjoy and Happy New Year!

1. What are some ways you balance the focus of finding and signing up new logos and growing your footprint with existing customers?

Typically these are two separate roles when possible, as the skills are different. If you have one person doing both, the simple rule is: your best customers are usually your current customers. This is NOT true though if the upsell potential is light. You have to know the market and upsell potential to know exactly what will impact revenue the fastest. – Jake Dunlap, CEO of Skaled

 

2. Question for Jake Dunlap: I work at a company in a similar market as Glassdoor’s. During your time as VP of Sales at Glassdoor, what was the ideal hiring profile that was developed for your account executives?

When we hired from the industry, it worked out less often than when we hired for people with SaaS experience. We switched our model and almost exclusively stopped hiring sales people from the space, but I know in later years, GD had success with a good amount of people from Careerbuilder as they teach a sales style similar to a SaaS model.

The other big piece we screened for was problem solving – people had to know how to position us in the space and understand the real value that we added to a business. We found from assessment testing that the people with poor problem solving skills were usually the ones that didn’t work out. – Jake Dunlap, CEO of Skaled

 

3. Do you require sales people and Sales Managers to show you their W2 forms from prior years?

I personally do not. However, I have been at companies in the past where it was required. For me, while past performance is certainly a factor, I’m not making my hiring decision based on it. My decision is based on what I have determined are the skills, traits & characteristics that will make someone successful in their role at this company. I am looking for candidates that can demonstrate those attributes. – Marc Jacobs, VP of Sales at Greenhouse.io

 

4. How often do you refine your qualification criteria? Is it automated?

Qualification criteria needs to be a constant and ongoing conversation between the marketing, SDR, and AE teams. Create a feedback loop between the teams and facilitate this constructive feedback. Push the envelope on how far you can take an initial discovery conversation with the goal of shaving time from the sales cycle. – Robby Allen, Director of Sales Development at Zenefits

 

5. How can we empower Millenials to create a self-learning Sales Organization that promotes leadership through knowledge sharing?

The company has to provide the environment for this to thrive. It’s a big fallacy that these things “just happen.” The company has to praise the top people and provide a platform for them to share their ideas. Then it makes it easier for this type of culture to take place. – Jake Dunlap, CEO of Skaled

 

6. What resources do you use to train cold callers?

Manager coaching, preferably every single day. Managers should spend a good deal of time side by side coaching when reps are cold calling. Use feedback forms to log in real time, and share feedback with the rep after each call blitz. Create accountability for feedback by uploading forms online and reviewing in 1×1’s. – Robby Allen, Director of Sales Development at Zenefits

 

7. What role does big data have in your plans to take your sales program to the next level in 2016?

This will be huge in 2016/17 with the rise of predictive analytics. We are already seeing dynamic lead scoring to make sure people are spending time with the right people based on historical analysis and behavior and we are now seeing lead routing using big data to get leads to the right people. The old way we assigned leads will be a thing of the past in the next 2-4 years as we use data to get the right leads to the right people and then get those people spending time with people who have the highest likelihood to buy. – Jake Dunlap, CEO of Skaled

 

8. What are some of your top resources to help you stay ahead of the trends? Favorite blogs? Books you’d recommend to the audience? 

I really enjoy First Round Capital’s blog as it puts out content on a variety of topics. I also recently read the book “Who” to tighten up the things we are doing in the interview process. We now recommend it to all of our clients. – Jake Dunlap, CEO of Skaled

 

The post Modernizing Your Sales Organization for 2016 – Q&A with Skaled, Zenefits, Greenhouse appeared first on Sales Hacker.

We’ve all been the recipients of particularly bad prospecting efforts. As a CEO and sales leader, I’ve noticed salespeople make a few common mistakes when reaching out to me. Some prospecting mistakes can be subtle, but there are a few ways to kill a deal before it even takes its first breath. And they are anything but subtle.

If your reps make any of these mistakes, it’s your job to coach them through it. As a sales leader, you’re in a unique position to help reps slip into the shoes of their prospect and actually feel how their approach comes across. Building that kind of empathy is key to actually creating meaningful engagement and earning the right to ask for a next step. Make sure your reps start 2016 off on the right foot with these key lessons.

Baron Schwartz is the Founder & CEO of VividCortex, a SaaS product for database performance monitoring that accelerates IT delivery and improves performance.

1. Earn Your Right to Sell

Many sales reps don’t understand that attention is earned, not deserved. When your reps are asking for a first conversation, they need to give before they get. But what about the first few words the rep and the prospect ever exchange? Has there even been an opportunity for the rep to give yet?

Yes, there has, in fact. The first words the rep writes or says to the prospect need to demonstrate that prior to the outreach, the rep has gone to considerable lengths to research the prospect. This is why the rep needs to begin by saying “I’ve already given you [my time and effort] and that justifies me asking for your attention for the next few sentences.”

It’s easy for reps to forget that each word they say has but one purpose: to earn the right to say the next. A rep recently reached out to me with a cold email, absent any engagement or interest from me, that went like this: “Thank you for your interest with (company). I look forward to connecting with you. Please provide a couple good days/times you have available this week.”

That was pretty much the whole email. There are so many things wrong with that email, I hardly know where to start, except by pointing out that the rep obviously had not earned the right to ask me for a call.

Your rep’s first email or call is trying to sell something simple: the privilege to have a conversation.

Your rep’s first email or call is trying to sell something simple: the privilege to have a conversation. That privilege must be earned. At each step in the selling and buying journey, the rep must lead with a demonstration that what he or she is asking for has been earned. Reps have to earn a call, they have to earn the right to claim they can solve a problem, they have to earn the right to ask for information about the prospect, they have to earn the right to send a proposal. So few of them understand this. If you coach your reps on this, they’ll be miles ahead of the competition.

How can a rep earn the right to ask something from a prospect? In most cases, you earn by giving the gift of attention. The best way is by demonstrating that you have researched and really understand the prospect’s life. When prospects reject sales people, the root reason most of the time is that they fundamentally don’t believe a salesperson will really listen and understand. If your reps don’t understand the lives of the people they’re selling to, you need to help them walk a mile in their prospects’ shoes.

2. Don’t Simulcast or Prospect Groups

Many business leaders belong to multiple email groups in their organization, some of which are necessarily open to inbound email from the Internet. I’m talking about jobs@company.com, info@company.com, sales@company.com and the like. Few things irritate me more than prospectors sending messages to these groups.

Similarly, if I see that a prospector has sent messages to me and several others at the same time, I’m highly likely to tell them to go away and not come back.

If you use a technology that automates outreach, your reps might be doing this. And it’s not the reps’ fault. They’re just being efficient with the tools you gave them.

I coach my reps to do personal outreach to the most likely prospect before setting up automation. When I do personal outreach, for example, I’ll reference 2-5 things I found online, and not just in a superficial way. I won’t just name-drop a blog post–I’ll discuss something you have to scroll down 3 screens to find. And, I won’t just mention it. I’ll actually extend the topic one step further as a conversation. If this initial attempt doesn’t work, automation might be a helpful tool, but it needs to be used judiciously.

Reps may resist this because it requires a high level of research. You can only do so many deep research efforts every day because the pressure is on to hit the numbers. Point out to your reps that this research is table stakes for getting a conversation started anyway, and refer to my previous point to justify this claim.

3. Learn How to Read Between the Lines

Research is great and necessary, but if you get too focused, you might miss the forest for the trees. Keep an eye on whether your reps are missing the obvious.

For example, when we were a team of about 20 people, a sales development rep reached out to me asking who was the “appropriate person” to discuss a technology choice. If that rep had even done a minimal amount of research on LinkedIn or our “about us” page, he’d have seen that there was literally no one else at the company who was even slightly appropriate.

I admit that I might have flown off the handle a bit. I wrote back caustically asking him who he thought was the appropriate person in a company of 20, if not the CEO?

This type of bull-in-a-china-shop prospecting demonstrates clearly that the rep hasn’t done any research, or isn’t clued in enough to understand what the bare facts imply. Your reps need to be coached on this, on a case-by-case basis, by individually reviewing accounts. Especially when they are new. You have the experience as a sales leader to help them formulate an appropriate outreach strategy. They don’t. There is simply no substitute for one-on-one review of individual accounts and their communication history.

One strategy I like is to ask reps to select 5 recent email threads and forward them to me, and I’ll give my unfiltered impression as though I’m the recipient. It’s hard to put yourself into the recipient’s shoes when you wrote the words. But it’s easy for me to play that role and reflect back to them how I’d feel and what my impressions would be if they’d sent the email to me. I have found this to be an easy and effective way to encourage reps to get reps to evolve their communication strategies.

4. Stop Bouncing Accounts Around Without Notes

There are a few companies that I don’t know very well, but I can tell do not have a culture of detailed record-keeping in their sales teams. I know this because every time they churn through a sales rep and a new one replaces a departed one, I get called all over again. Despite the fact that I’ve already explained patiently to three people that the product is not relevant and never will be relevant, the next rep never seems to have a clue that the previous conversations ever happened.

This is a sure way to create enough frustration to lose business, but it’s not just burning good leads by treating them badly. It’s also wasting an epic amount of time.

If your reps are repeating history again and again, never learning from each other, you really need to institute a culture of information sharing. It doesn’t have to be much. You can use the Predictable Revenue prospecting statuses—Aaron Ross suggests a few types of “avoid” and “poor fit” ones—or you can just put a summary into the account’s notes or description.

Anything will work. Anything’s better than nothing.

5. Engage Inbound Leads Instantly

A few months ago I was evaluating a few different sales tools. Tool A offered me a free trial, and directed me to a signup form. After filling out the form, I realized I’d been suckered. There was no instant online access or free trial. All I’d done is fill out a contact-me form that was going to a sales team to schedule a call before the trial. At best, I was going to get a demo or GoToMeeting.

It got worse, though. Not only had I not been granted access to a trial, but the Tool A didn’t contact me quickly. An hour went by, then a day, then I got an email to schedule a call, which took place the next week.

Let’s think about what happened in the moments before I’d filled out that “free trial” form to begin with. I had this idea of researching a few sales tools on a low-priority to-do list, and something had happened. For whatever reason, I’d taken some time to do something that wasn’t a top priority for me. That very moment was the only time I was willing to devote to this, from an emotional standpoint. When I filled out Tool A’s contact form, I instantly realized that I was no longer in charge of the schedule for evaluating this tool. If I wanted to continue evaluating, I’d have to do it on their sales team’s terms and schedule.

It is hard to overstate what a turnoff this is.

Still, it could have worked out okay—if they’d called me immediately. But they didn’t. I ended up giving them a call, reluctantly. And even if the sales call went okay, which it didn’t, my first impressions almost surely would have predicted the kind of customer support I would have gotten from Tool A.

At the same time, I filled out a free trial form for Tool B. Unlike Tool A, this one actually created a fully functional online account for me to start using immediately. Within 15 seconds or so I was surfing around Tool B and I was pretty impressed at what I was seeing. I had only clicked a couple of times, though, when my phone rang.

“John Smith from Tool B here,” the voice said. “I see you’ve signed up and I wanted to know if I can assist you. Do you have any spreadsheets I can help you import?” I was impressed. Tool B obviously understood that if they’d waited even a few minutes, it might be too late. My next meeting would have started, I would have gone to get a cup of coffee, or started something else. And this lightning-fast response also promised great things about their responsiveness in the future.

There is absolutely no time like the present. In sales, the present moment is golden. Nothing happens in the future or the past, only the present.

Are your reps seizing the moment as it happens? There are all kinds of quantitative evidence of how magical the first few minutes are. Anecdotally, I can tell you the quantitative evidence doesn’t even capture the full story.

I ended up buying Tool B, which has been so impressive I want to tell you about it: datafox.co. It’s a key tool in our sales team’s toolbox.

In sales, the present moment is golden. Nothing happens in the future or the past, only the present.

These bad behaviors have been repeating patterns that I’ve noticed. I selected them because they’re not only incredibly harmful, but as sales leaders we have at least some ability to influence our teams for the better, and in some cases a little bit of coaching or process change can make a dramatic difference.

The key thing for sales leaders to understand is that these damaging practices are easy to miss if you’re not dedicating some time and attention to individual, personal, case-by-case reviews of at least a sample of your reps’ activities. You need to look over their shoulder, listen in on calls, examine notes in Salesforce, and have regular 1:1 coaching sessions to catch these kinds of things. If you do, the payoffs will be worth it. If not, you’ll risk being outrun by your competition who is making simple changes that pay big dividends.

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