Rnordman

I recently met a friend of mine, whom I had not seen in years. So much so, that he did not know I had founded an online marketing agency. He had married his college sweetheart and moved to the East Coast. As we were catching up, he shared that he had recently launched a business and hired a local online marketing agency. Then he asked me to take a look at their proposal, since he valued my opinion and “knew nothing about the Internet”.

The incident got me thinking about how hard it for a small business owner to evaluate an online marketing proposal. Though savvy businesspeople know that moving their advertising dollars from print and traditional media to the digital arena is necessary, they often lack the tools to assess what they are being offered and what to expect. If you have been looking for an online marketing agency and reading proposals, this is what you should consider…

First things first

Hopefully, before you were presented with any strategy or quote, you met with the agency. On that meeting, you should have had the opportunity to share information about your business and the goals you wish to accomplish with the campaign. The agency must describe their services and explain how they can help you achieve your vision. Though I am evidently a tech fan, I really prefer to meet any potential clients in person, which lets me get a better sense of the business and the people behind it.

The proposal

Moving on to the proposal document itself … Though each agency has their unique way of presenting a proposal (or at least they should), these are some key elements you should look for:

• Perceptiveness. Did you get a sense that the agency really understands what you do and are looking for?
• Opportunity identification. Does the agency know where your business is missing opportunities, and how seize them with online tools?
• Options. Even if they recommend a certain package or strategy, they should at least give you an alternative. It could be offered as an add-on or upgrade. Having these options empowers you as a customer.
• Tools. Does the proposal clearly state the methods and channels (Facebook, twitter, etc.) it will use? Can they explain (either on the document or verbally), why they consider those to be the most appropriate for your business?
• Pricing and features. Look for as much detail as possible… The number of social on each channel, in the case of a social media campaign; the number of pages and sections, in a website design proposal….  How often will you be able to meet/consult with your executive? Are there any expected extra costs, such as picture royalties or meme design?
• Timeline. Does it establish a clear time frames and implementation times for the various elements of the campaign or project?
• Responsibilities. What are theirs? What is yours? (You’ll probably have to turn in some information or graphic elements, within certain time frames, so they can meet their deadlines too)
• Reports. How will success be measured? How often will you be receiving those reports? How extensively will you be able to discuss them?

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A word about packages: 

Some agencies, such as Bloominari, offer packages that fit the needs of most clients. This certainly helps the customer compare different options and prices. Once you choose a package, though, you should receive a full proposal with further detail and personalized implementation ideas.

There are two final elements you should really look for. One is agile response and the other is original content. One of the main differences between traditional and digital media is that the later one allows for daily monitoring. We now have unprecedented information about the way people are interacting with our ads and content.

Do they open your webpage? What day of the week? What section? At what time do they see your Facebook ads? Any reputable agency should be able to quickly adapt to this information and make small changes, which will improve results.

The other important element is content. If an agency presents you with a series of social media blurbs or blog titles to choose from, be sure to ask if the content is original. Some agencies will just use a content curation tool to collect articles, and adapt a phrase or two for social media. This is fine if your goal is to fill out digital space with letters, but you should know that rehashing previously published content will do nothing for your website in terms of SEO (positioning at the top of search engine results).

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You are by no means obligated to become an expert on online marketing (that’s why you are hiring one). But if something doesn’t feel quite right, it probably isn’t. Better, consult with an agency that takes good care of you, and knows how to help your business, too.

Segmentation is a crucial factor behind successful email marketing. It enables you to send the right message, to the right customer, at the right time. But how can you segment your data to provide a better experience for your customers? Here are 5 useful pointers.

Email Behaviour

Using your customers email behaviour, you can target those who never open your emails. This could be done through a re-activation campaign to win back some of your customers, perhaps including an incentive for the customer within the email. Additionally, you can keep these non-openers held back from the list by suppressing those inactive users.

Demographic

The most common type of segmentation is based upon simple data held against each individual such as gender, date of birth, location and more. To make the most of this type of segmentation, think about what is a priority for your business. If you have retail stores, then campaigns coming from the customer’s local store or announcements of new openings in their area are a great addition. Alternatively, maybe you have different offerings for each gender which you take advantage of. And I’m sure most people will appreciate a happy birthday email.

Preferences

It might be appropriate to ask customers for their preferences, but, this isn’t necessary for all. They work well in certain situations, such as product areas the customer typically buys. Perhaps a clothing retailer might want to ask what their customers favourite departments (Mens, Ladies, Kids) are or which brands they like. However, customers often don’t have pre-defined preferences. Take for example the clothing retailer again – you wouldn’t ask about styles or types of clothing as this will change over time. Make sure that the information you are asking for is going to be relevant beyond the short-term in your communications.

Purchase History

Purchase data allows you to know an awful lot about your customers, enabling you to can create highly targeted campaigns. At a simple level, knowing the historic value of a customer, the number of purchases and the date of the last purchase, gives you the ability to target exclusive discounts based upon past activity. Not forgetting the opportunity for anniversary emails.

Where purchase history data gets really interesting is when you look at the specific items customers have purchased, leading to a whole new world of opportunities. In fairness, this is often a step too far for segmentation, and the world of dynamic content and data tables will present automated content based upon purchases.

Browsing Behaviour

Analysing the data of what people are browsing plays a different role to purchase history data. This enables you to identify those who are thinking about buying, but might need that extra nudge.

Email marketing can pay off big time—but only if you do it right. And obviously, if you’re spending a lot of money on emails but not getting any of them opened by your target audience—if those emails go directly from inboxes to trashcans, contents unseen—then you’re doing little more than wasting money.

So what can you do to ensure that those emails get read? We’ve shared some email marketing best practices before. Today, what we’ll offer is a set of don’ts—some common email marketing elements that are sure to get your messages promptly deleted.

In other words, these are rookie errors—boneheaded mistakes—that will basically squander whatever effort you put into your email marketing campaign. Naturally, we recommend avoiding them at all costs!

Email Elements it Pays to Avoid

1. Spelling and grammar errors. Yes, it sounds like common sense—but you’d be amazed at the number of business owners who take time to proof their messages but not their subject lines. If somebody receives an email from you and it’s got a glaring error in its subject heading, that immediately undercuts your authority—and all but guarantees your email gets rejected.
2. Impersonal greetings. Here’s something else that can wreck your subject line—and thus, your entire email: A greeting that’s obviously impersonal and unspecific. Any message that comes with a title like Dear Sir or Madam will look like spam, and likely be treated as such.
3. Spammy words. Along the same lines, spammy buzzwords located in your subject line will get your emails buried and your servers blacklisted. Avoid saying click here, % off, order now, sale ends at midnight—anything that clearly marks your marketing email as cheap or salesy.
4. Bombast. Finally: Remember that a subject line is meant to be short and snappy. If your subject line lacks brevity, it may turn off busy readers who’d rather you get straight to the point.

There is plenty you can do to make email marketing a more effective tool for your business—but also plenty you shouldn’t do. Keep these tips in mind as you strive to achieve email marketing success.

Sales Management and Discipline

Last week it happened-again. I received a call from a former client that was concerned about the status of their sales team and VP of Sales-it seems that their revenue was off more than $2M over the previous year and below their growth goal! The President wanted some answers and certainly a fix.

My first question was why did it take the President so long to recognize the problem or revenue drop and why wasn’t it addressed in June! After that conversation I next interviewed the VP of Sales. After 10 minutes I had a good idea of what had happened or more importantly what had not happened.

The VP of Sales and President failed on one major tenet of sales leadership; they forgot about the need for discipline. Definition: training that corrects, molds, or perfects the mental faculties or moral character, control gained by enforcing obedience or order, orderly or prescribed conduct or pattern of behavior. The President failed to pay attention to what the sales manager was doing and both let various “systems” that were in place fall away. In past blog’s I have discussed the need for sales management to have discipline, accountability and control, and while I had introduced this to my client several years ago it slipped away. BTW: This all happened even through the President/VP formally meet twice each month.

What the VP got focused on were tactical actions that caused him a loss of leadership, vision and execution and most importantly lost control of his time management. So what are our next steps?

• Review session on the 5 styles of leadership/management and coaching techniques
• Development of a Sales Plan for the new year with quarterly objections/goals
• Re-Introduction of a 2016 salesperson business planning tool.
• Kick start their sales recruitment plan-for him to attain his new revenue goals for 2016 he needs to hire 4 new salespeople ASAP
• Re-install his quarterly salesperson training program
• Analyze his marketing plans
• Implement an Account Planning program for Growth, Target, Key Accounts
• Increase the focus on CRM execution
• Build a weekly/monthly/quarterly sales management checklist.

These are all fairly basic actions and frankly easy to fix, but without them and discipline to operationalize and make them part of the standards of a sales organization revenues become unpredictable and potentially decline. In this particular client situation the VP of Sales now recognizes what must be done, he learned the hard way and luckily will keep his job.

Lastly, as a President or Sales Leader; it is critical to inspect what you expect and remember your sales team will pay attention to what you pay attention to.

What will you change in your sales organization in 2016? Let me know?

Last weekend, I found myself in a familiar situation: It was after midnight, I was far from my apartment, and I wanted to go home and go to sleep.

I was in an area of Brooklyn where I couldn't just walk outside and hail a cab, so I opened Lyft to try to get a ride home. But demand for cars was off the charts, so "Primetime" pricing was in effect, meaning prices were exorbitantly high.

I opened Uber, and it was surging to nearly twice the normal rate.

I thought I'd have to suck it up and pay a ridiculous amount of money to get home. But a friend I was with suggested I try the app Way2Ride, which I'd never heard of until then.

So I downloaded it, signed up, and got home by paying a normal cab fair. No surge pricing.

And because of Way2Ride, I don't think I'll ever pay for surge pricing again.

After you download the app, you'll have to create an account and enter your payment information.

Way2Ride is basically the traditional taxi industry's answer to Uber and Lyft — it's a way to hail taxis and then pay for the ride through your smartphone. 

There's currently no fee for using the app, so you just pay the cab's metered fair.

For now, it's only available in New York, but the service is coming to major cities in the US early next year. There are 14,000 New York cabs that work with Way2Ride.

The app is made by Verifone, the company that makes the payment technology and video screens you see in many taxis.

After you sign up, simply tap "hail" to get a cab.

You're then asked to confirm where you want to be picked up.

The app uses your phone's GPS to find you, but you can also type in your address. There are 23 cabs around me!

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Don't start writing the eulogy for cable companies just yet.

There have been rampant calls that the end of traditional linear TV is nigh. The fear is over the fact that as more over-the-top options such as Netflix and Hulu have popped up, the number of subscribers to cable has begun dropping in earnest.

This is a dramatic turnaround after decades of subscriber additions and growing fees for content providers.

According to Credit Suisse analyst Omar Sheikh, the cord cutting doesn't spell doom.

So now that third-quarter earnings for most of the major players on both the service and the content sides have been released, Sheikh compiled five reasons to show that traditional TV can survive.

The rate of cord cutting is slowing down.

The fear of many was that as net subscribers descended into negative territory, the trend would pick up steam and drop further and further into the red. This hasn't been the case, Sheikh said.

"The fear in the immediate aftermath of the Disney profit warning in August was that the decline in domestic pay TV subscribers would accelerate," he wrote. "Instead, Q3 delivered the normal seasonal improvement in net subscriber losses with the run-rate on an LTM (last twelve month) basis remaining at around -1% [annually]."

The numbers are even more encouraging for cable companies as opposed to telecom providers.

"Q3 net losses narrowed to just 19 4K, taking losses over the last twelve months to under 1m for the first time in 6 years (Q3 2009)."

People are watching more linear TV, while Netflix watch times have remained the same.

Another trend that doomsayers have pointed to is that the amount of time that viewers were spending with traditional TV dropped, while minutes spent on over-the-top services were rising.

This is no longer the case, as cable watching has improved, increasing over 2015.

"The latest data, for October, shows linear TV usage is actually flat year-on-year at 274 minutes per person per day," he wrote.

Additionally, he notes that over-the-top consumption has plateaued.

 

Advertisers are coming back to traditional TV.

The lifeblood of the traditional cable model has always been advertising. Concerns over the willingness of companies to spend on a dying medium began to emerge along with the cable-cutting phenomenon, Sheikh said, but again the numbers suggest this is overblown.

"The evidence from Q3 was that domestic advertising revenues (broadcast + cable) declined again, but at a slower rate; and the commentary from media owners about the strength of pricing in the scatter market suggests a further improvement is likely in Q4," Sheikh wrote.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Field sales has always been challenging. Reps are on the road constantly, visiting customers, merchandising products, and managing their work from their cars and hotel rooms. They must balance flexibility and productivity, while setting their own schedules each day and staying focused on meeting tough sales goals.

Today, however, many of the biggest headaches that the mobile workforce once faced are disappearing. Increasingly, sales reps are no longer searching for fax machines in dated hotel business centers. They no longer have to carry heavy samples, catalogs, and paper order forms into meetings. And they don’t have to return from a long day on the road to re-enter orders from paper forms into their computers.

So what’s changed? Technology is now enabling sales reps and other members of the mobile workforce to be productive on the go. Employees are no longer tethered to a desk or confined to their offices. They can work effectively, remotely. Let’s take a look at how a mobile sales rep app in particular can not only help field reps sell products more easily to retailers, but also more effectively.

How a Mobile Sales Rep App Can Increase Sales Effectiveness

1. Access to Information, Offline

One of the biggest challenges to working on the go is information access––getting access to information like pricing, customer order history, and inventory levels while on the road. Today, however, mobile order writing applications are putting that information directly in the hands of sales reps. Instead of having to call the back office to check or confirm numbers, things like customer-specific pricing and inventory levels for each item are stored in the application and available even when offline.

2. A Digital Catalog

Another advantage to these applications is that reps no longer need to transport cumbersome product samples, fabric swatches, and catalogs, to each and every store visit. Instead, high resolution product images are organized into an easily navigable digital catalog. These images can be zoomed in on for detail, and retailers can get a comprehensive sense of the entire line.

3. A Replacement for Paper Order Forms

Too many mobile sales reps are still using old-fashioned paper order forms, or other manual methods of order writing (like fillable PDFs and Excel spreadsheets). Instead, mobile order writing applications allow reps to write orders as they are browsing their digital catalog. As already mentioned, customer contact and pricing information are stored within the application, so that reps can build an order in just a few taps.

4. Integration with Back Office Systems

A mobile sales rep app that can be integrated with back office systems can save reps an enormous amount of time. Where reps were once obligated to re-enter every order they’d written into an ERP or accounting system, their orders are simply synced with those systems once reconnected to the internet. The back office team can then receive it immediately and begin the fulfillment process.

It has never been a more exciting time for sales reps on the go. Mobile order writing applications are enabling them to work faster and more strategically, replacing the tedium of order taking with more strategic value.

Questions about how mobile applications can help transform your field sales team? Let us know in the comments.

During the past two weeks I had the opportunity to consult with two CEO/entrepreneurs. They’re both in the tech space  just coming up to the point where they are looking for focused sales resources. These are start-up situations.

Since they are very concerned about burning through cash, the idea of having commission-only salespeople selling for them is very appealing.

But, based on my experience, it’s not such a good idea, certainly in these two cases. I’ve seen some real successes using this model and some real disasters as well.

Although I didn’t interview the candidates, they are evidently experienced and were sure to stress to the CEOs the size of their Rolodexes with contacts in the industries these CEOs were pursuing. Both CEOs were quite impressed.

This is what I told the CEOs:

Many salespeople who work on 100% commission (or commission-only plus equity) represent several, or even numbers of, companies. They have a portfolio of products they sell into one or more vertical market segments. I’ve coached dozens of CEOs of smaller companies over the years overcoming significant problems created when they counted on these independent reps to deliver revenue at predictable levels and timeframes, and they didn’t. Targets were missed, investors got nervous, company valuation shrank…

Many of these commission-only people are talented, committed, and work hard. But they are self-employed. And they go where the money is. If they are representing five companies’ products and you’re number six, you have a long hill to climb before you grab their mind share and, as a result, their wallet share. They will sell what they are familiar with. They know those five products, their strengths and challenges, the competition, the messaging, the objections, and how to manage those objections. Layering in your product is time consuming, and time is money.

“But we have a product that no one else has,” said one of the CEOs. He does. It’s quite disruptive, and the CEO was able to articulate to be in very compelling terms the financial value this product will bring to his future customers. But getting an independent rep to sell a brand new product, with no references, is a missionary sell. Time consuming, frustrating, and unpredictable in outcomes.

It may seem a good thing that you only have to pay them when they sell something, but you have no real control over them, what they sell, and how much time they will spend selling your stuff versus what they’re familiar with.

It isn’t easy for a start-up CEO understand that they would fare better if they hire the right salesperson and put them on a comp plan that would admittedly make a major dent in any cash the company has.

If you’re in a situation such as this, let me know privately. Happy to share my additional thoughts.

By the way, if you’re a commission-only sales rep, I don’t have any issues with you. Many of you perform a terrific service in situations other than what I described above.

Image Source: Amazon.com

Chances are if you’ve stayed in a hotel recently you’ve noticed that little card on the vanity counter. You know, the one where the hotel preys on your sense of environmental responsibility in an effort to get you to reuse your towels instead of sending them to the laundry. Ever think about why you did or didn’t choose to comply with their request?  The authors of the book Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive, conducted an experiment and found that they could get 45% more people to reuse their towels by simply tweaking the verbiage on those cards. Noted author, Simon Sinek, conducted a similar experiment, changing the words on a New York panhandler’s sign, in turn increasing its impact five-fold!

As it turns out, the art of persuasion isn’t strictly reserved for clever Jedi looking to elude droid-seeking Storm Troopers on Tatooine. Words and concepts when used in just the right way are more powerful than we think, and in a world full of distractions and conflicting priorities where competing for our customer’s attention has never been harder, mastering some of these tactics is critical for today’s sales professional. Here are three scientifically proven communication tactics that both the strong and weak-willed will be powerless to resist!

1. Summon the most powerful word in sales

Certain words and phrases simply have magical powers. The word because is one of them. In a sentence, a conjunctive because triggers the listener’s brain to say, “Oh, the thing I’m going to hear after this word will be a justification for the thing I heard before it”, and the magical way this word works can be a formidable ally in your sales efforts!

For example, the aforementioned book references a study led by behavioral scientist Ellen Langer where people making photocopies were asked by the stranger next in line if they could go ahead of them. When asked simply if they could use the photocopier (i.e. “Excuse me, I have 5 pages. May I use the machine?”) 60% of people complied with the request. However, when a reason was given using the word because (i.e. “May I use the photocopier because I’m in a rush”), compliance skyrocketed to 94%. What’s more amazing, even when the reason provided was poor (i.e. “May I use the photocopier because I need to make copies” — duh!), compliance remained at about the same level, 93%.

So the next time you need to justify your price, defend a company policy, or position your solution against a competitor’s, summoning the word because might just be your mind trick you need!

2. Do unto others, first

Reciprocity is one of the oldest and most powerful forces in business. It’s an incentive-based behavioral equation; I want something from you and in exchange I offer something in return. For example, I want my kids to brush their teeth and go to bed on time without fuss, and in exchange I may offer extended TV time the next day. Simple, right? Well as it turns out, the order of operation here is more important than we think!

In the earlier example of hotel towel reuse, the researchers hoped to promote guest compliance by offering to donate a portion of the energy savings to a not for profit environmental protection organization. A “you do this for me, I’ll do that for you” proposition similar to my children’s bedtime routine. Interestingly, this incentive resulted in no additional degree of compliance to the request. However, when the researchers reversed the order of the incentive by stating they they had already donated a portion of the anticipated savings to the not for profit environmental protection organization, the degree of cooperation increased by 45%!

What this means in a business context is that as sales professionals we should be focused on adding value to our customers at every interaction in advance of any ask. For example, instead of pinging your prospects with the all too familiar “just checking in” emails or phone calls, why not send them an article or business book you feel they’d enjoy? (i.e. the “just thinking of you” approach). Or how about making an introduction to a like-minded customer or third-party expert that can help them in their role? There are dozens of things you can do to add value to that customer and build reciprocity but the key is whatever you do, it has to be no strings attached. While you hope that one day the other party will reciprocate the favor (i.e. give you access to their business or ultimately make a purchase), your gesture needs to stand alone as a value-added experience whether they do or not.

3. Deliver your message with conviction!

At my last startup we had a saying, “often wrong, but never in doubt.” We used this phrase to underscore the conviction with which we executed our strategy and rallied both employees and customers behind it, even if that strategy required iteration from time-to-time. Indeed, conviction is a powerful force in the science of persuasion. Toastmasters international speaker Mohammed Qahtani masterfully employed this tactic in his 2015 World Championship winning talk, The Power of Words. In it he asserts how “words when said and articulated in the right way can change someone’s mind, they can alter someone’s belief.” Still, while the power of conviction may be well understood and very powerful in a sales context, summoning it isn’t automatic.

In the hit sitcom, Seinfeld, George Costanza teaches Jerry to defeat a lie detector by invoking the convictive mantra, “it’s not a lie, if you believe it.” For most of us though, operating with fake conviction is as detrimentally transparent as a squeaky-voiced minor with a fake I.D. trying to buy beer at a liquor store. Conviction needs to reside within you and stem from real-world mastery and personal experience. The good news is while a personal experience is the quickest road to conviction, much like excitement, credibility, and lightsaber skills, conviction can be transferred.

Customer stories and data like usage metrics or industry statistics can all fuel your team’s conviction on a particular topic. Picking an enemy for your product or service (i.e. a polarizing message against a generally accepted practice or status-quo state that your solution address) is a tactic that can generate almost instantaneous conviction in your customer interactions (for example, in our last business our enemy was the dreaded annual performance review). Regardless of the strategy, the key to delivering your message with compelling gusto is practice and familiarity. Nail that and your audience will be powerless to resist it!

It’s amazing how many simple yet powerful persuasion tactics can be used in support of our sales efforts. Backed by science and the study of human behavior, there’s no reason not to use them early and often in the field. Don’t believe me? I find your lack of faith disturbing…

Are you targeting the right prospects? Download the free Salesforce e-book to find out.

As much as we B2B marketers don’t like to admit it, having lead goals is easy. It’s comfortable, and that’s because deep down we know that lead numbers are somewhat simple to manipulate when we really need to.

But for that same reason, lead goals are holding marketers back from being recognized as true contributors of business value. That’s one of the many reasons why we say that lead goals are dead.

Marketers will only truly be appreciated when they are held accountable to bottom-of-the-funnel metrics, like revenue.

When marketers are measured in terms of revenue, they are aligned with the sales team and able to speak to their outcomes using the same terms. It gives Marketing weight in budget discussions, and legitimacy in the boardroom.

Too often, marketing is seen as a business cost. Only when marketers have attribution data that directly connects marketing to revenue, will marketers’ efforts be seen as profit-generating.

Additionally, only with a smart attribution solution, will B2B marketers’ true amount of value be revealed.

Take single-touch attribution — a simple, but not-so-smart attribution model — for example. One of the single-touch models is first-touch, which gives the first customer engagement 100% of the revenue credit. In all likelihood, this is a top-of-the-funnel marketing touch, like Social. Every other marketing touch throughout the customer journey receives 0% credit. Even if the first-touch attribution model is connected to revenue, all the marketing initiatives that nurture and educate the prospect along their journey look like they have zero impact, and those marketers are unable to prove their value.

The same goes for last-touch attribution models. When 100% of the revenue credit goes to the last-touch, marketers who create awareness and educate the prospect early in the journey get 0% of the credit. Their business value is extremely underrepresented.

The bottom line is that single-touch attribution grossly misrepresents B2B marketers’ business value.

Multi-touch attribution, on the other hand, gives marketers at all stages of the funnel the ability to receive revenue credit, so that they’re able to demonstrate their business value.

In addition to connecting to revenue data and having multi-touch capabilities, what does a smart attribution solution look like?

It tracks online and offline marketing

As companies grow and marketing teams mature, they add more marketing channels to their mix. And even though we are well into the digital age of marketing, offline efforts are still critical to the B2B customer journey — whether it’s meeting people at a conference booth or taking prospects out to dinner.

It would be unfair and inaccurate to ignore the impact of these offline marketing efforts. B2B marketers who engage in offline activities deserve the same opportunity to receive credit for their contributions as digital marketers.

It takes into consideration the account-based nature of B2B sales

Account-based marketing is specific to B2B and is something that many attribution solutions fail to consider. In the B2B sales process, it’s typical for three or more people to be involved on the customer end. One person will engage with top-of-the-funnel content, doing preliminary research and identifying whether it is worthwhile to pursue further. Another will learn more and perhaps do a demo to see if the product meets their needs. And finally, a decision-maker will come in near the end of the process and make the final purchase decision.

Without account-based attribution, marketers who engage anyone except the buyer will not receive any of the credit. When it comes to identifying which marketers are creating business value, their contributions will be underrepresented.

It tracks the true first touch, even if it’s anonymous

Any marketer will tell you that it’s a challenge to break through in today’s noisy marketing atmosphere. You’re competing not with just your direct competitors for your audience’s attention, but also with whatever else is on their Twitter feed, their mobile notifications, their email inbox, etc.

That’s why it’s important to give credit to the true first touch — the one that broke through the noise. Because most attribution solutions, like the ones offered by marketing automation software, are contact-centric or lead-centric, they consider the “first touch” the touch that started the session where the prospect first filled out a form, and they ignore any anonymous touches that may have happened in sessions prior to that one.

B2B marketers on the team made huge efforts to create that first engagement (through social channels, paid search, display advertising, blog articles, etc.). They brought real value to the organization, and only a smart attribution solution will recognize that.

Advanced marketing attribution is tough, and it must take into consideration a wide array of factors, many of which are B2B specific. If your attribution solution is missing any of these components, you aren’t seeing your true business value — and neither is your organization.

For the complete, in-depth guide of what makes a smart B2B attribution solution — including two additional advanced attribution components — check out Components of a Smart B2B Attribution Solution.

Have you ever heard of resellers? What about the Supreme brand?

People will wait twenty hours in line, and hope that they can get their hands on some kind of product. No, we're not talking about the latest iPhone from Apple and we're not talking about waiting in line for Star Wars - The Force Awakens (which, by the way, is an incredible movie that I saw at 6:30 am today!). We're talking about clothing... and brand called, Supreme. I had seen the logo around, but never knew - or spent the time to understand - just how amazingly powerful of a brand that Supreme is. 

Here's how Complex describes Supreme: 

"In 1994, James Jebbia opened the first Supreme location in a small storefront on Lafayette Street in New York. At the time, Supreme was a brand for skaters by skaters -- even the design for the shop was more open so skaters could come right in with their skateboards. But today, 21 years later, Supreme is a legendary streetwear brand that's cultivated a cult following well beyond that original fan base. Continuing to release product in tightly controlled, limited amounts, the brand is as big as it wants to be in New York, Los Angeles, and London; a titan in Japan -- arguably its largest market.

Complex has covered Supreme for well over a decade (Complex was founded in 2002). Most of it was from afar; we wrote about releases or lookbooks. But for the last year or so, our Complex News team has been reporting from the Lafayette Street shop to cover in-store launches. Every story was the same: Lines snaked around the block, kids camped out for hours or days, sometimes even in subfreezing temperatures, just to get any Supreme item. Each Thursday drop was chaos. In April 2014, the NYPD canceled the Supreme x Nike Air Foamposite One in-store launch at the NYC flagship after a riot nearly broke out earlier that day."

There's something happening here.

We all strive to manage the brands that we represent. Few of us will be as fortunate as the brand architects behind Supreme. Still, times change. And, if the company controls the inventory and the brand too much, the crowd can (and does) often step in. In Supreme's case, many of those people lining up for their big drops would later take the merchandise and resell it online... for massive profits. Some of the markups were 1200% above the retail value (not a typo). The team at Complex started to meet these resellers. Admittedly, the idea of buying goods at retail, and selling them at a higher markup is nothing new, but there seems to be something else happening here. Watch how these resellers build their own platforms, brands and businesses through social media. Notice their strategies when in comes to eBay versus Instagram. Take note of Supreme's roles (or lack of one) in this sub-culture. It's a fascinating group of entrepreneurs, who take the notion of "hustle" to a whole new level, and offers up some very interesting marketing insights on branding, digital connectedness, social media, retail and the global nature of something that started off so small.

This truly is a fascinating 40-minute documentary (warning some of the language is NSFW): Sold Out - The Underground Economy of Supreme Resellers. 

Tags: apple brand brand architect business blog clothing complex complex news digital marketing agency digital marketing blog ebay economy entrepreneur fashion fashion brand instagram iphone j walter thompson james jebbia jwt lookbook marketing marketing blog mirum mirum agency mirum agency blog mirum blog new economy nike air foamposite one supreme reseller retail retailer skateboard skater social media star wars star wars the force awakens streetwear streetwear brand style supreme supreme brand supreme reseller  wpp

Smack in the middle of the Information Age, we all absorb visual and textual information from several mediums every day. We watch TV, text message, listen to the radio, browse the Internet, play video games, and more.

In fact, according to statista.com, Americans spend a mind-boggling average of 11+ hours a day on electronic media. That’s a lot!

As business owners, you know where your audience is, but how do you use that knowledge to your advantage? Well, one of the best things you can do is make the information about your business easier to understand. Your prospective clients don’t want to read pages of text to understand what you make and/or what services you offer.

Incorporating visuals is key to keeping your audience’s attention. So, what better way to clearly present data, layout a process, or explain a complex topic than by combining words and images cohesively into that beauty that is an infographic?

I’m just going to come right out here and say it: I love infographics and the science of using design to facilitate communication.

But, just in case you’re not geeking out over this visual media as much as I am, here are three reasons that may cause you to think differently and help you understand how creating infographics can give a huge boost to your marketing.

The numbers prove that visual content is a preferred means of communication on social networks.

Why is that exactly? One reason is our biology. A 2014 study conducted by MIT neuroscientists found that the brain could process images in 13 milliseconds. Mary Potter, senior author of the study, concluded that, “the fact that you can do that at these high speeds indicates to us that what vision does is find concepts. That’s what the brain is doing all day long — trying to understand what we’re looking at.”

That alone tells us that visuals are a huge component to how we comprehend our world. So it stands to reason that visual accompaniment to text increases our level of understanding.

We are also more likely to tell our friends about, e.g. share, visual content that we can understand and enjoy in a short period of time.

Infographics perform especially well on Pinterest. Their typical long, narrow orientation attracts attention by taking up lot of space on Pinterest boards and feeds.

Our most successful pin yet is an infographic I recently created to help business owners determine which social media platform is best for their business.

Initially, the blog post received significant engagement on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. Then, in the last few days in September, it hit a tipping point and that’s when the magic happened. The pin blew up! At last glance, it has been pinned over 1.6 thousand times and doesn’t show signs of slowing down.

Increase Website Traffic

Having your content shared over a thousand times is awesome. But what happens after it’s shared is even sweeter!

Each of those shares is a link back to your content!

Since the infographic has been our top-performing pin with significantly more shares than Facebook and Twitter, we looked at our Pinterest analytics to see if the shares were affecting our website traffic. Here’s what we found.

Remember that fateful day in September that my infographic went viral? As you can see, our click and visitor rates got a huge shot of adrenaline.

If you don’t have a Pinterest account, don’t worry. I pin images from businesses without Pinterest accounts all the time, and your audience can too.

Create Long-Term Engagement

As you can see from our “Sharing is Caring” numbers, infographics are share-worthy on several social media platforms. But let’s look at the potential of an infographic on Pinterest.

Twitter and Facebook posts have life spans of minutes and hours, respectively. The best pins, however, are evergreen (content that stays relevant over time). They live on Pinterest boards where they can be found and re-pinned over and over because they continue to provide value.

My infographic has steadily increased our Pinterest engagement and website clicks. And those thousands of shares are links that will live on pinners’ boards instead of getting lost in news feeds as with other social networks.

In Conclusion

In a sea of content, infographics are a great way to stand out and bridge the gap between informative text and appealing visuals. By combining the best of both worlds, you can keep your audience informed, interested, and even entertained all at the same time!

So what are you waiting for? Get those creative juices flowing and make your own infographic today. Bonus, if you’ve ever created any piece of content (which I’m willing to bet you have), it shouldn’t be too hard to repurpose it into an infographic!

According to a study from Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs, two-thirds of B2B marketers cite webinars and online events as the most effective method for generating leads and marketing to prospects and customers. Those in-person events can be very expensive, though. For a better balance between cost and results, webinars are your best bet.

But in order to get all the benefits of a webinar, first you have to produce it. And for many marketers, producing and hosting a live webinar looks like a daunting task.

However, it doesn’t have to be hard. There are a few simple steps you can take to make your event successful. First, pick a topic; find the right speakers; then set a date and time. Next, create a production schedule. (Get all the details on these beginning steps.)

Webinars aren’t overly complicated to produce, but having an organized, well-thought out production plan is absolutely essential to creating a flawless event. Here are 10 steps to help you get it done.

1. Review the schedule

You should go over the production schedule with your team every week to make sure your webinar planning is on track. Remember, your emails and other promotional campaigns included a specific date and time that you cannot miss. Make sure you have a Plan B in case a speaker gets sick or a producer has a family emergency.

2. Create the event in your webinar platform

Next you’ll need to create the event in your webinar platform. The way you do this varies by the software you use, but no matter which one you use, give yourself plenty of time to create your event and check your work. Here are three popular platforms for webinar production and staging:

• Citrix Online GoToWebinar: This is a simple, cost-effective tool for hosting real-time online events. You can invite up to 1,000 attendees and engage them with high-definition video, screen sharing, interactive tools and more.
• ON24: Solutions include marketing webcasting with single-click access, a branded webinar registration and console, and viewing experiences that attendees can personalize.
• Cisco WebEx: The WebEx Event Center helps you market your products and services with real-time online events and webinars that include multimedia, private preparation rooms, chat, polling and many other features.

3. Review, approve, and load the presentation materials

This is another place to plan to spend as much time as it takes. Review the slides the speakers have prepared. If the presentation doesn’t meet your quality standards, give the presenters plenty of time to improve the slides or have your in-house team do it for them. When you do have a final version of the presentation, load it into the webinar platform. If you want speaker bios in the deck and the speaker didn’t provide one, make sure you run any bio slide you create by the speaker. People can be picky about those. If you want attendees to use social media during the event (and you do, trust me) then make sure the master slide footer has hashtags or any other social info attendees need to make it work.

4. Conduct a short rehearsal

Do not be tempted to skip this. Even if your speaker has delivered this talk a hundred times, there are other people and other moving parts. You don’t need to go through the whole show, but it’s critical to hold a short dry run with the moderator and speaker(s) to ensure all participants understand the basic structure of the event and can articulate the key points they’ll share. Make sure that everyone understands logistics such as date, time, phone number, and URL, as well as functional items such as passing and granting presenter rights, making introductions, segues, etc.

5. Hold a pre-webinar meeting with the speakers

Make sure that your webinar starts on time. The best way to do this is to make sure that the moderator and presenters dial into the event at least 15 minutes prior to its official start. They should also log into the webinar system at this time such that everyone can review event logistics and get any last-minute questions answered.

Five minutes, and then one minute, prior to the start time, remind everyone that the event is about to start. Finally, ten seconds before the start, wish everyone good luck and start your countdown. At the end of the countdown, the webinar is live and the moderator should welcome all attendees.

6. Kick off the live webinar

The way you begin the webinar is critical to engaging attendees. The moderator should welcome the audience to the webinar and clearly state its title. There are usually housekeeping logistics to cover such as how the audience can ask questions and participate via social media. Make this as short as possible! The moderator should introduce the speakers and perhaps allow them to make brief introductions about themselves. Note: Nobody should be making any overt product pitches at this point. When that’s done, the moderator should hand the event over to the first speaker.

7. Let the speakers present

The speakers should have 30 to 45 minutes to present (in total, not each) during the webinar. This should make up the bulk of the event. Whether you have one or multiple speakers will determine exactly how the time will need to be managed. Regardless of the format, the speakers should be engaging and make sure that they are aware of the time so that they can make it through their entire presentation.

8. Use social engagement during the webinar

The major webinar technology platforms allow for engagement via features like Q&A and polls, but you should also make sure that you use Twitter and other social tools during the webinar. If you use Twitter, make sure you create an event-specific hashtag that attendees can use when tweeting about the webinar.

9. Field questions from the audience

During the webinar, attendees may send questions in via the webinar client software. It’s a best practice to save these questions until the end of the event and then have the moderator ask them of the speakers. Make sure that this time is built into your schedule, and that the moderator knows to save five to ten minutes at the end of the session for Q&A. It’s also good when you begin, in the housekeeping section, to tell your attendees the process for asking questions.

10. Have the moderator conclude the event

Make sure your moderator wraps up the event by thanking the speakers and asking the audience to stay engaged with you. For example, ask them to follow you on Twitter or sign up for your newsletter.

Once your webinar has finished, you can save the recorded version as a video and share it on your website and through social video channels as well. The great thing about the on-demand webinar format is that it has the energy and personalization of a live event but can also serve as persistent promotional content on your website and a rich mine for future presentations.

If you received a lot of questions during the live event that didn’t get answered during in the time allotted, you can use those questions to create a blog post or an article, which you can use to promote the on-demand webinar. Then you can also promote the blog post to registrants as well.

Check out this guide for even more information on hosting perfect online and in-person events.

Get buy-in from all your company’s departments and safeguard the future of your products and services by promoting brand consistency.

Brand Consistency Is King

Because of the digital era, we now operate in an increasingly global marketplace — it’s important that you master your brand to ensure your company’s ‘voice’ remains steadfast in a world crowded with mixed messaging.

After all, companies who have mastered brand consistency have achieved great things.

Think Apple, Google, Microsoft, Vodafone…

But the digital era has seen the challenges facing marketers evolve rapidly.

The Danger?

That as your brand is deployed through multiple channels — from traditional outbound marketing through to social networks — brand consistency can suffer, creating the potential for diluting or even harming your brand and its representation.

Whether your company is local or global, all departments need to be on the same branding page — or risk looking out of step and unconnected in the eyes of savvy buyers who demand and expect a consistent experience wherever and whenever they engage with you.

And if you can’t present a unified brand to customers, what does that say about you, your products and your services?

But how do you deal with such a disparate threat?

Personnel Non-Grata
● Don’t work in a silo or make other departments feel sidelined.
● Give them a seat at the marketing table.
● Let them know that their opinion counts.

Reach out to departments and staff through collaboration software, regular meetings, email campaigns, instant messaging and in-house social media channels to allow fresh ideas, new products/services and campaign themes to be discussed and include external providers where applicable.

The aim? To create buy-in from the top down to the bottom, giving everyone the opportunity to offer their feedback and insights.

Make Every Stakeholder Feel Like They Are Critical To Brand Consistency

And in turn, you’ll increase their loyalty and awareness; something that money can’t buy — and critically, something that customers will pick up on in every interaction with your company.

After all, together, your brand will be stronger. Divided, it will be weaker.

Need evidence?

Ask yourself — when was the last time you walked into an Apple store and didn’t feel that every single employee was an advocate for the brand.

Be Clear

Follow these three steps to ensure brand consistency:

1. Set out your core branding vision in a ‘brand charter’ that can be viewed by everyone in the company. Ensure that each department has their own area so they feel included and understand exactly what their role is in promoting and ensuring brand consistency.

2. Whether it’s an email boilerplate or an internal memo, create a marketing content library that clearly states how all and any communications should be branded correctly to encourage and retain consistency.

3. Archive old branding and offers, ensuring that they don’t interfere with the consistency of your current branding; marketplaces evolve quickly and continually, and so should your branding. For these reasons you need to be able to communicate your message quickly, efficiently, streamline the decision-making process and always ensure that your brand is fresh and relevant.

The aim? To create a single, uncluttered and up-to-date source that all departments can use.

Promote Internally, Not Just Externally

Not only do consumers need to be won over, but so do employees.

So promote your brand and its products/services to all departments quickly as well as creating the potential for enthusiasm and advocacy for your brand’s vision. After all, your company’s brand vision is integral for both customers and employees.

It represents why either would want to engage and be affiliated with your company, its ethos, its association, what you stand for. Whether it be design excellence, value for money or being a renowned specialist in a niche sector.

Whatever your company stands for, that vision must be broadcast consistently across all marketing platforms — and advocated by your employees to ensure your vision is fit to meet the rigours of the modern marketplace.

The Right Comms To Promote Consistency

Consider deploying a unified communications strategy that both office based and remote workers can use to enable brand consistency. Some of the practical comms channels available include:

● Seminars

● Hold online webinars to inform, educate and enthuse employees; promoting best marketing practices, encouraging feedback and announcing new products or services.

● Videoconferencing

● Hold meetings without the inconvenience of travelling or bloated budgets, video gives you the ability to bring departments together at zero cost wherever they are in the world whether they’re 100 miles away or 10,000.

The End Result

A consistent brand that everyone in the company will buy-in to. After all, it’s a strategy for brand consistency that they will all have helped to nurture and maintain, meaning they’ll become advocates for the brand, not because they have been told to by management, but because they’ve invested in it themselves.

Remember:

● Don’t work in silos; everyone should be involved in dealing with brand consistency.
● Do promote clear brand guidelines that teams can engage and be creative with.
● Don’t just promote externally; engaged employees will drive external success too.
● Do deploy a unified communications strategy to allow your employees to get involved.

Ensuring branding consistency in a digital, multi-channel age is just one of the many challenges facing the modern marketer, find out how to show your worth as you overcome these challenges by reading: ‘The connected business: Proving the worth of marketing to the wider business now’

This post first appeared on the Arkadin blog.

A procurement executive recently wrote a post on LinkedIn about how salespeople aren’t good at cold calling.

The first half of his post suggests that salespeople use poor opening lines and waste time trying to build rapport, and he’s not wrong. Needless to say, if you are cold calling procurement, you have a lot to learn about selling, about who you want to call, and where you can create value.

“Where you create value” bring us to the second half of this procurement executive’s post, and it explains a lot about the disconnect between procurement people and salespeople. This procurement professional suggests that when you call him that you should tell him what you are selling, how you are different from your competitors, and specifically why you think his company would benefit from what you sell.

Then he suggests you mail him information and wait for him to need you when he lets an RFP. But he adds two things that he wants you to know: 1). He doesn’t sit around waiting on salespeople to sell him stuff, and 2) He doesn’t share business information with strangers.

No Value Created. And None Accepted.

One could argue that this procurement person isn’t creating enough value for his company. By refusing to talk to salespeople when he isn’t buying something, he is intentionally cutting himself from new ideas, learning about what other companies are doing to improve their businesses, exploring new products and services, getting to know potential suppliers who might serve him better at a level that generates trust, or proactively working to improve his company.

No one knows everything they need to know. No one has a monopoly on good ideas.

Ideas Come From Everywhere. Even Outside.

Refusing to take calls or meet with salespeople is a myopic view for someone in a leadership role. It’s a mistake for procurement people not to meet with salespeople and get to know the people and the companies they are hiring are well enough to make a decision that’s more than the result of canned responses to boilerplate questions and a price quote (speaking of scripts).

The more strategic the decision, the more salespeople you should meet. And the best of the salespeople you meet will do more than sell you a product; they’ll help you shape your strategy.

The post How Procurement Can Fail Their Company appeared first on The Sales Blog.

Powerful presenting is something that that many people aspire to and with the New Year rapidly approaching it can be far easier than you may think.

Knowledge, process and emotional expression are the critical elements that every presenter needs to be mindful of. They are so important that people have been speaking and writing about them for over 2000 years.

There is a plethora of advice on how to speak with impact on the internet and in book stores; some good and some not so good.

As we are in the holiday season the image of the 3 wise men in the traditional Christian nativity scene comes to mind where they each come bearing gifts. Imagine if everything we’ve learned over the last 2000 years about effective communication could be handed to you gift wrapped in 3 beautifully simple messages by 3 wise men.

I believe that we would receive 3 very wise words.

1. Focus

The wise presenter knows that the success of any presentation or speech regardless of content begins and ends with focus. That means pinpointing with clarity who your audience really are, what they need from you and how you can make a meaningful difference to their personal or professional lives.

The real value of the gift of focus is that it’s mindfully simple yet immensely influential because you only need to concentrate on 6 things:

– Getting and keeping their attention

– Ensuring that everything you say is perfectly relevant to your audience

– That your message is clear, compelling and not something they already know or can find out from an email or Google

– Making certain they don’t have to work to understand you by bringing your words to life with clear and colourful examples.

– What do you want them to do the moment you finish speaking

– How you want them to feel.

A pre-requisite of any high impact presentation is that you also focus on making your presentation content rich and that means delivering the facts. If your content is weak or senseless it doesn’t matter how entertaining or graceful you are as a speaker – you will lose your audience.

They need to hear and understand with absolute clarity why they should listen to you. To achieve that you need to deliver:

– A logical argument

– Accurate data, simply expressed

– The benefits

– Examples

– Case studies

2. Feelings

Presentations fraught with facts at the expense of making an emotional connection with an audience are extremely dull. When it comes to making decisions our minds struggle with the noise of logic versus emotion.

The emotional and intuitive part of our mind is extremely powerful and even though you may not be aware, it’s often the emotional part that overrides logic when we are making decisions. Having received the gift of getting your facts straight it’s now time to frame them in a way that makes your audience feel something.

It’s your job to decide what you want them to feel way before you build your presentation. Only then can you begin the construction process.

Here are a few features which may help you:

– Stories

– Metaphors and anecdotes

– Thought provoking questions

– Suspense

– Shock

– Humour

– Surprise

The greatest gift a presenter can give his/her audience is to help them feel something.

3. Future

You’ve crafted a presentation which is content rich, supported with compelling facts and data and you are ready to help your audience to connect with you emotionally.

Now what?

They need to see the future.

Every presentation has to help the audience see the big picture. It’s incumbent on the speaker to take their audience on a journey from the problems and challenges of today to the possibilities of tomorrow.

Having invested 20 minutes of their lives listening to you they want to know exactly where you are taking them and what their brand new world will look like.

The pleasure-pain principle expressed originally by Sigmund Freud suggests that human beings only ever act to either move towards some form of pleasure or to avoid the perception of pain. What’s the pleasure and promise of listening to your message and acting on it and what’s the pain associated with not doing so?

The wise presenter knows that there are only 3 gifts you need to deliver a powerful presentation.

– What you focus on and help your audience to focus on

– How you make them feel

– What the future looks like

Image Courtesy of: Flickr.com

The hunch is now official – our attention spans have grown tangibly shorter – four seconds in fact – according to a recent Microsoft study.

In a world with 140-character limits on sites like Twitter, people reading on five-inch handheld devices and multimedia pushed to us everywhere we look – it’s no wonder our attentions are easily diverted.

The Impact of Short Attention Spans on Your Job Hunt

Our current eight-second attention span means the career documents that worked for you as recently as five years ago today might not even get a second look.

To differentiate yourself from the competition – your resumes, cover letters and Linked in profile must move from long to learn.

Below are three critical steps to help you stand out in today’s world filled with competing attention:

#1 Edit, Edit, Edit

If you can say it in fewer words…do it. Cut out extraneous words like “a,” “the,” and “that.”

More importantly, strive to keep your key accomplishments to two lines max to optimize your appeal to readers reading on the big as well as small screen.

#2 The So What? Litmus Test

Take a hard look at what you’ve written. If anything can’t answer a “so what?” question sure to be posed by a reader, go back to the drawing board.

Each and every achievement must add value to your story AND align with your career aspirations.

#3 Measure & Quantify

Numbers speak volumes – and in many cases much louder than words.

While it is no doubt easiest for those in sales to drum up numbers to back up their accomplishments, the truth is that numbers are attainable in every field.

Everyone can quantify their achievements…it’s just a matter of evaluation and measurement.

To calculate your bottom line impact, ask yourself if you saved time, money or manpower in any way, or if you contributed to greater growth or efficiency.

The goal is to make a connection between your efforts and dollars.

From Blueprint to Brochure

To differentiate yourself from the competition – your resumes, cover letters and Linked in profile must transition from blueprint to brochure.

This means a mindset shift from content that serves as marketing material versus a laundry list of everything you have ever done in your career.

Keeping it short, sweet and rich with results-oriented, measurable achievements that quickly show bottom-line impact is key to getting your foot in the door and differentiating yourself from the competition.

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GUEST:

Unicorns, it turns out, were never driving economic evolution in the first place. The simple fact remains that every business in the world thrives or dies based on one simple premise: The money has to come from somewhere.

In recent years, many tech startups have received hundreds of millions of dollars from enthusiastic investors. The mandate? Grow quickly and exit fast.

Participants in this “get rich by any means possible” phase grew so fixated on a big exit that many lost focus on the business itself.

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From VentureBeat

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Broken down in its truest sense, business is the “activity of making, buying, or selling goods or providing services in exchange for money.” It is not “a choice made by thinking about what will probably happen.” That is a bet, and betting is precisely what investors and startups have been doing instead of building businesses.

By all indications, the unicorn era is at its terminus, and the biggest profiteers have already run off with the gold. The coming fallout will reveal the strong businesses for what they are and let the weak fall by the wayside.

The rude awakening

Fidelity’s recent Snapchat writedown is the most recent expression of a long-needed adjustment back to normal. VCs, institutional, and private equity investors are tightening their bankrolls as pre-IPO unicorns like Groupon stumble in the public market, exposing discrepancies in initial valuations.

Entrepreneurs looking to grow the top line and sprint towards a lucrative exit are in for a rude awakening. Yesterday’s investment conditions were never normal. They existed to benefit a few major shareholders at the expense of quality. Rather than being a bad thing, a market adjustment will benefit everyone looking to build — not conjure — a sustainable business.

Looking beyond luck

Success in business and investment always takes a dose of luck — on top of savvy, intelligence, and guts. In recent years, the equation has weighed too heavily towards luck.

Entrepreneurs and investors alike placed disproportionate faith in top-line growth. Now that the first wave of IPOs are tumbling back to Earth and big late-stage investors are reigning themselves in, the entire startup community must rethink what it means to succeed long term.

Venture capital flowed to poorly functioning companies for so long that entrepreneurs started to build businesses based on top-line growth rather than sustainable metrics like net profit. The ease of building an online business, coupled with an innovation-hungry younger generation and a large amount of money flowing into American venture firms, led to a modern tulip craze that is only now adjusting to reality.

Gambling is a business, but business is not gambling

A company built with a short-term mindset evolves into a completely different type of business (I would argue non-business) than a company built to last on its own merits.

Founders spend millions to sell and market their product, in some cases at the expense of product viability. Deep discounts and acquisitions might gain a company more users, but they don’t make its product more useful or establish trust with users. The only way to become profitable after massive expansion is to raise prices or offer value-added tiers of service, and that only works if the product you discounted in the first place is useful enough to warrant payment.

It’s easy to use Salesforce as the poster child for land and expand, but the CRM giant, as well as fellow favorite example Amazon, is anything but normal. First of all, both companies fulfilled a real need, Salesforce for better, faster, easier CRM, and Amazon for reliable online shopping with fast delivery. Users grew to love the software, and revenue followed, although company margins took a long time to catch up.

This should not be treated as a well-worn path to success. Top-line growth always tapers off eventually. When it does, all those customers you acquired by growing so quickly had better be generating recurring revenue.

Most companies will not become unicorns. Yet over time, the idea has percolated to the point of cliché, and players began to believe that success meant scale. The current move back to reality represents a long-needed financial adjustment, and a mind shift.

Patience is a Virtue … For a Reason

Every startup is born with the opportunity to succeed as a business. It takes grit and patience to grow responsibly.

Four key rules every business leader should follow:

• Build a product that meets the needs of a loyal, growing customer base
• Raise money not out of fear or greed, but because you have a specific plan to use it for the bottom line
• Incentivize workers for long-term success
• Prioritize achieving cash flow breakeven followed by bottom-line profitability versus a singular focus on top-line growth.

Even if 2016 presents a startup crash to rival the dotcom boom, those entrepreneurs building real businesses will remain intact. The unicorn era may have obscured which companies were real and which were speculative, but when the tide rolls back, only the solid will survive and derive the return on investment they deserve.

Vineet Jain is cofounder and CEO of Egnyte.

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GUEST:

We are five years into the greatest transformation of the U.S. healthcare system in the half century since Medicare was enacted. Since 2009, over 500 healthcare IT (HCIT) startups have been founded, supported by $10 billion dollars of early stage venture capital.

As investors with front row seats, we are hopeful. The Affordable Care Act (ACA), HITECH Act, Health Data Initiative, and Great Recession have made health care providers, insurers, and patients more receptive to change. Equally important, entrepreneurs from across industry verticals are entering healthcare, believing that the time is right to attack a massive and growing sector, suffering from decades of lagging technology and productivity.

We see great companies emerging to capitalize on these changes and fundamentally redefine the cost and outcomes of healthcare in the United States. Unfortunately, we fear that many of the companies we meet with are doomed to failure, or worse niche status, as they run afoul of one or more of the “must have” tenets that are critical to this vertical – the five commandments for creating a successful healthtech company:

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From VentureBeat

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1. Know your ROI goal

Few companies involved in healthcare delivery make any money. Net margins across insurance companies, and hospitals are less than 10% at best. So if you expect these groups to buy into your product or service, you have to be able to deliver tangible ROI very quickly – ideally in the first 12, but no longer than 24 months. If your product takes longer to deliver that return — or if the ROI you deliver is too soft, you’ll never get high on the crowded priority lists of financially strapped buyers. Twelve months is also magic since that is how long a patient’s insurance policy runs, as well as the time frame for risk adjustments and shared savings payment models for doctors. For employers, you can occasionally get their attention with a two-year ROI, but anything beyond that is too long to overcome employee turnover at most companies. This is why preventative health businesses have struggled mightily to get any real scale. It takes too long to generate cost savings for the initial buyer to even get started.

2. Remember that sickness doesn’t drive engagement

People do not like being reminded that they are sick. So they only engage with healthcare when they have to. And when they do engage, it is either for an acute short-duration condition (e.g., recovery from an injury) or for a very serious condition (e.g., cancer or neurological condition). So technologies that focus on ongoing social engagement for more basic health issues have a terrible track record — low virality and dreadful churn.

Many attempts to build healthcare social networks have struggled to overcome the fact that healthcare is really thousands, perhaps 10,000, unique disease categories (e.g., stage 4 breast cancer patients have little in common with stage 1 colon cancer patients and are very different from patients with diabetes or high blood pressure). This leads to hyper-fragmented, tiny communities that struggle to engage people for long enough to overcome customer acquisition costs and churn.

Importantly, people with chronic disease feel fine most of the time. While it is true that chronic diseases do account for most of healthcare costs, it takes a long time for a patient to start incurring high enough costs to justify buying a product or service (see Commandment #1). As a result, app stores are littered with unused pill reminders, symptom trackers, biometric sensors, and educational tools.

3. Choose your customer carefully

Every dollar you save your customer is a dollar you’ve taken from some other player in the health system. This means you can’t be dependent on the participation or cooperation of whoever stands to lose revenue because of you (for example, counting on hospitals to share electronic health records to reduce admissions).

Equally important, it is essential to know who you are helping — and to make sure that the problem you are attacking is big enough so your customer will stand up to the other ecosystem parties who want you to fail. For example, Castlight Health’s customer is the self-insured employer; Castlight exists to decrease healthcare costs for employers, which necessarily reduces the revenues of healthcare providers, who the insurance companies depend on. To be successful in its early days, Castlight needed employers to go to bat on their behalf with insurance companies and pharmacy benefit managers to get the price and quality data they required. It is very rare to be able to please more than one stakeholder in the health system – so choosing, and standing by, your customer is critical.

4. Focus on B2B

In many cases, it is employers, not consumers, who pay most of the medical bills. 50 million Americans are insured through self-insured employers (large companies that assume the risk of covering health benefits for their employees rather than working with an insurer). With consumer out-of-pocket spending now capped at $6,600 per year by the ACA, these employers will be paying all expenses over that cap. Patients with chronic diseases and anyone who happens to have an acute condition (like pregnancy or an appendectomy) is likely to exceed the out-of-pocket maximum. This leads to patients only acting like consumers for inexpensive and elective care, like lab tests, imaging, and flu shots, not the expensive things that could bend cost curves. You always want to go where the money is – and it remains in the enterprise.

The other advantage of B2B is that it overcomes the vertical’s lack of virality among consumers. Since employers aggregate potential users by the tens or hundreds of thousands, they can be terrific channel partners – accessing users at much greater velocity and lower customer acquisition costs. While historically this has been done by lunchroom marketing and $25 coupons, employers are increasingly adopting material penalties and even absolute requirements of participation in order to drive adoption within their employee populations.

5. Understand that “Population Health” and “Big Data” are still just buzzwords

Health plans and doctors are very good today at identifying high-risk patients – plans through claims histories, and doctors with their intrinsic diagnostic skills. In fact, when you ask a doctor to list their high-risk patients, they often do better than the computer prediction. The hard part of population health and big data is not identifying patients at risk, rather it is doing something to change the risk.

While “big data” intuitively should be able to improve care by personalizing treatment plans, our health system is several sigma away from the reliability that is needed to make this a reality. For big data to matter, we first need a much improved healthcare system that consistently delivers the right diagnoses, treatments, and outcomes. Then we can optimize them.

So the good news is that we are finally seeing change and disruption in an industry that desperately needs it, and the talent pouring into the space is energizing. For this to continue, entrepreneurs and health-tech companies will need to keep focusing on these five commandments.

Bryan Roberts and Bob Kocher, MD, are partners at venture capital firm Venrock and active investors in many health tech companies, including Castlight Health, Grand Rounds, and Zenefits. They are cofounders of Lyra Health.

Describing startups with billion dollar valuations as “Unicorns” is getting to be a tired practice. Frankly, it’s outlasted the original novelty of the term. Which is why we at The Harris Consulting Group have decided to reclaim the word and apply it to something more meaningful and useful.

In mythology, a unicorn is a rare, horse-like creature with a single horn sticking out of its forehead. Stories give that horn magical powers and in many cases, people think the unicorns even bleed rainbow colors.

But how does this relate to business?

No matter what size your organization is, you will always contend with the demand for doing things Better, Faster, and Cheaper. Unfortunately, not many understand — or if they do, they won’t admit it — that you can usually only meet two of those three demands. Only in the rarest of instances have we seen an organization accomplish all three conditions. That organization, in our eyes, is a true unicorn.  

• Better – Improving on, or surpassing an existing or previous level or achievement
• Faster – Performing a particular type of action quickly
• Cheaper –  Low in price; worth more than its cost

Let’s look at the four possible combinations below:

A. Faster and Cheaper

We see this all the time in the startup world. In many startup sales environments, this is often mistaken for achieving scale. It occurs when a startup has a strong product/market fit and a few good and happy customers, at which point they then think that just hiring more salespeople can multiply the current success.

Unfortunately, what startup CEOs fail to understand is that in many cases, these initial customers are: early adopters, have a lead source of friends and family, and most often are buying the founder as much as they are buying the product or service. At this stage, hiring a sales rep to start selling is not always the right call.

B. Better and Cheaper

Unless you have a truly self-service model where absolutely zero human touch is required, this condition is difficult to achieve. Don’t get us wrong, it does exist. In fact, a huge part of the B2C app economy is built using the Better and Cheaper mindset.

While today’s B2B SaaS sales are drifting towards a B2C feel, once the deal crosses a certain threshold, it is going to require some level of human dialogue. This is when things become more expensive because skilled sales reps become necessary.

C. Better and Faster

We firmly believe that people should always focus on Better and Faster first. It may not be cheaper in relation to short-term cash flow but it will allow you to fail faster, improve more quickly, and thereby offset any short-term costs with long-term gains.

D. Better, Faster, and Cheaper

Better, Faster, and Cheaper is the sibling to Better and Faster. Just keep in mind that “cheaper” is defined as “worth more than its costs” and not “least expensive.”

We believe that Faster and Better is actually the same thing as Better, Faster, and Cheaper. What it means is that the goals of the organization are such that any short-term monetary expenditure will be heavily outweighed by the long-term benefits.

Better: Improve from a Baseline

The goal of any sales organization is to improve upon their previous level. No matter what you do in life you can only get better when you know what your baseline starting point is. From there, you’ll need to start giving yourself a reasonable and fair goal for improvement.

The challenge in most startup and early stage companies with SDRs and Inside Sales teams is that better is often thrust upon them like an albatross that is synonymous with our next word: faster. Remember, going faster will not make you better.

Faster: But in Shorter Sprints

Similar to the quality of better, you must first establish a baseline to know what you are being measured against. In sales, faster is often referred to as velocity and more specifically the velocity of a deal through the sales funnel.

One of the biggest mistakes we see sales teams make is when they focus on the overall velocity of the deal, measuring from the date a lead enters the funnel until the moment the deal closes. Yes, this is important, but trying to examine it under such a large microscope makes it difficult to improve.

What we’ve seen work best is breaking the process down into smaller, more manageable pieces. If you think about most athletes, while the overall performance is great they actually spend a ton of time focusing on very small parts of the overall process.

For example: Say you are given 300 leads from 100 companies, 3 people to target per company. These days, you now have tools that allow you to contact all 300 in less than 5 days if you wanted. That would certainly be faster and — depending on who you ask — it may even be considered better than your previous method. In fact, others might argue that this method would even be cheaper than a longer, more structured process.

Cheaper: Worth More Than its Price Tag

Far too often, companies focus on Cheaper as it relates to the outlay of cash. They will ignore the long-term benefits and overall reduction of costs at scale. This is the real definition of “cheaper” and really, the only definition that matters.

In the end, companies that we call unicorns are rare (and magical) precisely because they are able to strike the perfect balance between those three conditions in order to build their business and sales organization with the requisite amounts of speed, value, and quality.

Do you agree with our definition of what a unicorn company is? Hit the comments and tell us.

 

Special thanks to Trish Bertuzzi of The Bridge Group and Steve Richard from Execvision.io for their input and support on this topic.

The post Real Unicorns Do It Better, Faster, and Cheaper appeared first on Sales Hacker.

When it comes to your career, you probably have a tendency to leave things until the last minute.

Why do you need an updated resume, a stellar LinkedIn profile, a thriving online presence – if you already have a job?

Aren’t those things more appropriate when you’re actively looking for a new position, or to less senior professionals who haven’t had a chance to build a career yet?

The answer is, categorically not.

The most obvious reason is that you never know when you’ll be an active job seeker. Unexpected redundancy could thrust you back into the job-seeking world with little warning, or your own priorities could change.  What might be your ideal job today might not be tomorrow. Merges and acquisitions happen. Structures change. Management prerogatives change. Your personal situation shifts.

The right career tools aren’t just relevant to help you change career, either. Many people view LinkedIn purely as an online resume, but its value goes far beyond this.

Used holistically, LinkedIn enables you to build your professional brand – and having a strong brand is relevant irrespective of whether or not you’re looking for a role.

It directly impacts how your colleagues see you, how your boss sees you, how potential investors and shareholders see you – which will either facilitate or hinder your success.

Here are my top 19 guidelines for ensuring you get the most out of LinkedIn in 2016.

1. Optimise Your Profile.

With 400 million people using LinkedIn, there’s no excuse for not having a polished LinkedIn presence. Your LinkedIn profile is your online shop window, and making sure it’s on point is critical for building your professional reputation.

2. Claim Your Personalised URL.

The URL LinkedIn gives you is an unmemorable, unattractive and unprofessional string of numbers. Follow LinkedIn’s instructions here to change it.

Once you’ve changed it, include it in your resume, your cover letter, on any business cards and in your email signature – the aim is to create an interlinking professional web, in order to cement your personal brand.

3. Add A Professional Photo.

Having the right headshot is an important part of building your image as it conveys the message that you’re professional and committed.

Reinforce your brand by choosing a custom cover photo that is memorable, professional and ties back into your core value proposition. If you’re active on other social networking sites, using the same cover photo can help build consistency cross-platform.

5. Set Location and Industry.

You’d be surprised how many people this slips under the radar for. It’s a simple thing, but ensuring you’ve set your location and selected the right industry makes you easier to find – and having them set incorrectly speaks to a lack of attention to detail.

6. Collect Endorsements.

Recommendations and endorsements act as social proof, and can be a powerful way of testifying to your unique skills.

You can set a maximum of 50 skills for people to endorse. Take advantage of this, because they’re a valuable way to get keywords into your profile and give a condensed version of your abilities that will appeal to recruiters. In fact, profiles with skills listed get an average of 13 times more views than those without.

Saying that, you’re better off choosing 20 really representative and relevant tags, rather than adding ‘filler’ skills such as ‘Microsoft Office’.

7. Ask for Recommendations. 

Recommendations are another powerful way to bolster your professional reputation. You should aim to get a stratum of recommendations that fortify your value proposition.

For example, if you’re a Regional Sales Director with a proven ability to navigate cultural change, grow teams and drive profitability, you’ll ideally have recommendations attesting to each of these factors.

When asking for a recommendation, direct contacts to the area you’re hoping to focus on, and offer to write a rough draft or some bulleted suggestions. Not only will this save time, making them more likely to accept your request, it’ll ensure you craft a recommendation section that powerfully reinforces your professional brand.

8. Get Your Headline Right.

Your headline is the first thing people see in the search rankings and is given priority as a search factor, so the words you choose are critical.

It’s a balance between optimising for people and for search – making sure LinkedIn’s sorting algorithm knows who you are and what you do, but also making sure that recruiters, colleagues and hiring managers click through to your profile from the search results.

The best LinkedIn headlines encapsulate who you are, what you do, who you help and the problems you solve, while focusing on searchable terms. For example:

Senior Finance Director | Driving Finance Revenue Growth in $50M+ Turnover Companies

Digital Account Director | Helping Tech Start-Ups Deliver Digital Innovation & Growth

Avoid hollow rhetoric such as ‘guru’, ‘rockstar’, ‘wizard’ or ‘ninja’ – they’re shallow and they’re not terms people search for.

9. Craft Your Summary.

The summary of your LinkedIn profile is the most read area of your profile – and it needs to work the hardest in terms of the impression it conveys.

We’ve explored the world of the LinkedIn summary in a lot of depth previously, so let’s summarise.

• Show, don’t tell – use practical examples that demonstrate your worth. Not, ‘I’m a highly motivated leader’; instead, ‘Grew team from 6 to 12, driving revenue increase of 135%’.
• Be human and relatable – tell your personal story, rather than that of a generic professional. Use your summary to tell people what makes you, you. Your LinkedIn profile shouldn’t be as formal as your resume – you’re aiming to capture some of your personality.
• Make it scannable – A recruiter should be able to quickly scan your LinkedIn summary and immediately understand what you do and where you add value. Think short paragraphs and unconvoluted sentences, with keywords that jump out. The same applies across your profile –scannability for people and visibility for search engines.

10. Complete Your Experience.

The experience section of your LinkedIn profile shouldn’t be a copy and paste job from your resume, as the audience and purpose of the documents are vastly different.

Your LinkedIn profile should be tantalising and suggestive, while your resume should be comprehensive and definite. Focus on capturing the essence of each role – what you were mandated to do and how you achieved it – in broad strokes (your resume should  fill in the detail).

11. Network.

Aside from acting as your professional shop window, LinkedIn is a valuable networking tool.

While attending face-to-face meetings, conferences and events is doubtless still valuable, the rapid acceleration of platforms such as LinkedIn has meant online networking is simpler, quicker and increasingly important.  

12. Leverage Warm Leads.

The Who’s Viewed Your Profile feature topped the LinkedIn favourite features list again last year, with 76% of respondents naming it their number 1.

Use it to target ‘warm’ leads who’ve already been looking at your profile, building your network and boosting your exposure. The People You May Know feature is also helpful, suggesting potential connection opportunities based on your current connections, professional activity and search record.

13. Interact in Groups.

Groups are a powerful networking tool, allowing you to build relationships, demonstrate your credibility and expertise and expand your visibility.

You can join up to 50 groups, although it’s better to commit to being active in a few than inactive in many.

LinkedIn consultant and expert Wayne Breitbarth credits Groups as being one of the best career boosting features of LinkedIn, noting that he’d “be in 500 groups if they’d let me!“.

14. Search for Hiring Managers.

There’s a reason that recruiters are LinkedIn’s biggest customer base – and that’s because it’s an incredibly powerful search tool.

As well as applying to active job adverts, take your career into your own hands and seek out hiring managers directly.

Once you’ve identified the hiring manager you’d like to get in touch with, send them an email directly. If they don’t list their email address on their profile, do some simple online sleuthing. You’ll need their company domain first – it’ll either be listed on their website, or run a search for company emails that are likely publically available such as “contact@companyname” or “mediarelations@companyname”.

Then search for their email address using various common company formats, putting the full email in quotation marks: “firstname_lastname@companyname.com.au”; “firstletter_lastname@companyname.com.au” and so on.

Frequently email addresses will display in search as they’ll be listed on searchable documents such as internal .pdfs or press releases.

Failing that, you can run their email through an email verification service to check if it’s valid, then include a read receipt to ensure your mail has arrived and been opened by a real person.

15. Connect to Relevant Recruiters.

From the perspective of someone who worked in recruitment and HR for many years, I can tell you how valuable it is to build relationships with relevant recruiters before you’re looking for a job.

A great recruiter has a huge network and will hear about roles long before they come onto the general market.

A well-informed recruiter will know exactly which roles are worth approaching you about and when. Even if you’re happily employed, this means you’ll get first refusal on roles you might never have heard about – and if that 50% salary increase or CFO to CEO move came along, wouldn’t you want to know?

Use the Advanced People Search function to find a recruiter who specialises in recruiting for your job titles in your sector, preferably one who has a bulk of experience in that area and multiple recommendations from other senior professionals they’ve worked with.

Reach out to them and organise a preliminary chat, then stay on their radar over time.

16. Use Pulse.

Acquiring then integrating Pulse from 2013, LinkedIn entered the world of content marketing with a resounding bang, and has since become one of the most powerful publishing platforms in the world.

Using LinkedIn Pulse can have a huge positive impact on your career – building your credibility, carving out a reputation as a thought-leader, keeping your finger on the pulse in your industry and increasing your visibility.

17. Create and Publish Content

Posting great content can be a huge boost to your career – but what does great content look like?

It should be informative and engaging, for starters. That doesn’t necessarily mean new – it’s about bringing your unique perspective to bear in order to help your audience solve their problems.

Consider this article – I’m far from being the first person to write about how to use LinkedIn more effectively, but I’m uniquely positioned to write about LinkedIn as a branding tool for senior professionals because that’s my core expertise.

Whatever your USP, great content is about distilling that into an article that helps others see their problems through fresh eyes.

18. Curate Content.

This isn’t a substitute for creating content but it’s still a valuable activity, especially if you’re as pushed for time as most of us are.

Curating – that is, sharing – content through your statuses means you appear on your network’s newsfeed more often, increasing your visibility, and helps cement your reputation.

Bear in mind that sharing content is de facto endorsing content, so don’t share anything you wouldn’t want to be associated with.

The best practice for endorsing content is to add your own thoughts to whatever you’re sharing as a jumping off point for other conversation.

Coming back to expert Breitbarth, he dubs LinkedIn statuses as one of the best marketing features on LinkedIn given you follow the 90% rule, whereby 90% of your content is non-promotional and customer focused.

19. Interact with Content.

If you use Pulse for nothing else, use it to read and engage with other people’s content.

The comment section of Influencer Articles are always a hub of activity and are a great way to get on the radar of other professionals in your space.

A simple comment such as ‘Insightful article James, thank you’ is appropriate, but the benefits in terms of building your own credibility and influence will come when you create conversation.

Engage critically with Pulse articles and make a habit of adding your thoughts, particularly on pieces with viral readership. Become part of the conversation, engaging with and replying to other professionals in your space.

Key Point To Remember:

LinkedIn is multi-faceted. It’s an online branding instrument, a networking tool, a job board, and an ATS for recruiters.

In all, it’s a holistic personal branding tool that can be used to build influence, gain credibility, convey professionalism and tell your unique story.

Whether you’ve held the same role for 15 years or are looking for your next career move, LinkedIn is not something you should ignore in 2016.

Is your credibility as a marketer making it harder for you to keep up with the latest jokes and memes? Does it ever feel like too many people are responding to your offers, forcing you to process new sales and service clients when you’d rather be napping?

Don’t worry – I’ve got just the solution. Today, I’m going to show you how to get rid of those annoying leads and customers, and make sure your website stays conversion-free, with my three can’t miss – and proven – ways to scare away prospects fast!

Before I get into the actual advice, let me assure you that we’re talking real world here, not some weakling “concept” like so many business marketers banter about like yesterday’s flat white. Unlike a lot of other trust-destroying systems, these won’t fool you at the last minute and leave you with unwanted attention or revenue. I’ve seen these tactics used often enough to practically guarantee they’re going to work for you, regardless of what kind of business you run or which potential customers you need to repel.

With that little bit of quality assurance out of the way, let’s look at what you can do to tone down your marketing efforts and free up your life once again…

#1: Pitch With a Guarantee (But no Proof)

You have to be careful with guarantees. If you can prove that your product or service can actually help someone, then customers might take you seriously if you start to provide assurances that they’ll be satisfied or get their money back. Things like testimonials with actual names, photos, and links, or detailed case studies, could give buyers the wrong impression.

A better tactic, if you want to be left alone, is to give a very vague guarantee. What you want is something that says, “You probably couldn’t hold me to what I’m promising you, even if you tried.” Don’t give any specifics about what your guarantee actually means, or how you’ll make things up to a customer if they aren’t completely happy. And, no matter what you do, don’t give them any proof of what you can do, since that only invites deeper thinking and possible click-throughs.

#2: Gate Information (if You Have Any at All)

Now, you might be tempted to add some useful information to your website. Unfortunately, content in the form of videos, downloadable reports, buyer’s guides, and white papers can all be extraordinarily useful to someone who’s trying to learn about a company, product, or industry. So, to be sure that customers stay away from these items – and stop bothering you with unnecessary orders and requests – it’s important to put these resources behind some kind of gate.

The genius of this strategy is that, if someone wants to get at this information, they have to join your site or provide payment info first, and without knowing whether anything you’re offering will be worth the trouble. Most visitors aren’t going to be willing to take that step, of course, which puts you right on course for an afternoon off, and maybe even a long weekend.

The best thing about gates is that it doesn’t necessarily matter what kind you use. As long as it’s restrictive, and people have trouble finding out what you’re really offering, you can be sure the barrier will work as intended and keep buyers at arm’s length.

#3: Require a Credit Card to Initiate a Trial

If the first two measures I’ve suggested aren’t working for you, I promise this one well: don’t let anyone try anything you have to offer without entering their credit card number first.

Doing so is the ultimate protection against bothersome intrusions. Because searchers don’t know you enough to trust you, and don’t know enough about your products or services before they’ve tried them to tell whether they’ll actually want them after a trial, they are going to be very hesitant to share financial information with you. What if they end up being a bad fit for what you have to offer? Or, what if they try to cancel and you charge their card anyway? Heck, what if you’re just running a scam and collecting credit cards without offering anything?

People who are looking around for answers online already have these questions in their heads. All it takes from you is a little nudge – the request for a credit card number before you’ve given them anything of value in return – to get them to stop bothering you and take their annoying business somewhere else.

Are You Ready for More Peace and Quiet?

People who are searching the web want useful information and proven solutions. If you give them that, especially in a helpful, non-overbearing way, they are never going to leave you alone. In fact, leaving fresh, verifiable content with citations on your website will attract searchers and customers like stray dogs. That’s why I advise you to stay away from it (you know I’m joking, right?).

Instead, make the most of your leisure time by convincing buyers that they either have to take you at your word, with no proof that they’ll get anything in return, before they provide their email address and credit card information. It’s the only way you can be sure you won’t have to deal with annoying details like phone calls, downloads, and bank deposits in the future.

You’ve done your 2016 sales and marketing planning, right?  Do you know how many converting leads you’ll need to meet your revenue goals for the coming year?  No, because you’ve been too busy? I hear that more often than not. Do you know what your revenue targets are? If so, here is a quick way to figure out how many leads you need to meet your revenue goals.  

Lead volume and quality are important metrics for sales and marketing teams. Knowing the raw number of leads you need to produce is crucial. It can help you assess the overall efficiency and effectiveness of your marketing to sales pipeline and help you and your team be more proactive and maintain momentum.

Now is a great time to calculate your company’s leads-to-revenue ratio for the next year. In just two easy steps, you can quickly convert your sales revenue goal into clear marketing objectives. I’ve found the best “get it done” approach is to work backwards through the sales funnel. In addition to your revenue goal, you’ll need a couple of other metrics to get an accurate picture of where you need to be you: your average revenue per order or closed deal and your average lead-to-customer conversion rate.

Ready? Let’s get started!

Step One

Using your sales revenue goal (we’ll use $10 million as an example) and your average revenue per order or closed deal, you can determine how many converting leads you will need to close in order to meet your goal. Simply divide your annual revenue goal by the average revenue per order or closed deal (we’ll use $50,000 as an example).

$10,000,000 revenue / $50,000 revenue per order or closed deal = 200 converting leads

Step Two

Not every lead is going to convert. That’s why, when tracking activity in your marketing funnel and sales pipeline, it’s essential to know the conversion rates of leads to prospects to customers. For example, only one out of every four leads you generate might end in a sale resulting in a 25% lead-to-customer conversion rate. So step two is using your average lead-to-customer conversion rate to calculate the total number of leads you need to generate in order to satisfy your revenue goal. Simply divide the number of converting leads you need (from the previous step) by your average lead-to-customer conversion rate. Using a 25% conversion rate as an example, we find that in order to meet a revenue goal of $10 million, we must generate a total of 800 leads.

200 converting leads / .25 lead-to-customer conversion rate = 800 total number of leads

Calculating an annual lead-to-revenue ratio makes it easier to manage and analyze your efforts, helps ensure that you’re staying on course, and is a key component in staying productive. Now that you know how many total leads you need to generate, you can better allocate your resources so that your marketing funnel and sales pipeline is never too empty or too full.

But when it comes to sales metrics and tracking leads, many businesses don’t know where to begin, or they don’t understand how metrics are used. Quality metrics are vital to your marketing and sales success. If you want to gauge the efficiency and performance of your sales funnel or find out what the ROI of your lead generation program is, you’ll need to know which metrics to monitor and how to evaluate them.

Image: PhotoSpin

“Could I really be replaced by a computer engine?”

It’s a thought that’s often echoed by sales teams after a fancy new content marketing tool is introduced. But we’re not prepared to sound the death-knell for salespeople just yet.

We fundamentally don’t believe that sales and content marketing are mutually exclusive strategies, as content marketing is simply a value-added tool to boost a sales person’s credibility prior to securing that all-important face-to-face meeting.

Part of the reason why there’s so much conflict between marketing and sales teams is that marketing often bypasses the salesperson altogether in order to roll out great content and drive new leads. While lead generation is critical and helps educate prospects in a new paradigm of shoppers self-educating before initiating conversations, it’s the sales person who will ultimately deliver how the product will benefit the customer and make the tie with real-world examples. The sales person is the only one who can uncover a client’s most pressing needs through conversation and engagement.

How can content marketing assist, rather than replace, the sales team?

• Create the “like-me” customer
• Continuously use data to keep moving the needle
• Implement a strong recommendation engine

The “like-me” customer

Getting instantaneous information about existing clients whose challenges and opportunities mirror those of prospects is critical for leveraging unique expertise. Sales reps can see what’s been successful for similar clients and then replicate recommendations for current prospects using real-time data and business intelligence.

Move the needle forward with data

All types of sales organizations must use data to keep business momentum moving forward. Being able to see and act upon information like lead quality, volume and conversion rate will help sales teams sell smarter and more effectively. Whether the greatest business opportunity is with a B2C or B2B prospect, data can inform a more intelligent and targeted response.

Recommend the right stuff

Having a “Guide Me” workflow and recommendation engine within your sales platform is a must in order to recommend the right tools to your team. A CMS component of the site helps with this so that you can change how marketing is displaying new messages, new content, alerts, and more out to the field. With The Marek Group’s platform you can even change the look and feel of things by groups. The Recommendation Engine tells you what tactic to use, just as Zappos tells you what shoes you will want to buy.

An example

Let me share with you one example of how all these benefits combine to help a sales team member. Say our client has a prospect that works in a mid-size financial services company in the Southeastern part of the country. They know he is in middle management, and specifically struggling with meeting his quarterly revenue goals. How do they know these things? Because they’ve done their research – a robot definitely could not find out all of these important details!

Based on the criteria, they can search within the recommendation platform to find specific content that has historically performed well in mid-size financial services firms, in the Southeastern United States, for middle managers looking to meet revenue goals. The way that the recommendation engine knows to surface particular content items is based on what has worked in the past – intelligent data that predicts what will work well in similar situations in the future.

After receiving a smart, data-based recommendation, the CMS tool allows them to quickly personalize the marketing content with the prospect’s name, company’s name, a short personalized note and voila! This new prospect outreach is automatically tracked within the system, adding to the data gathering process. If the content performs well for the prospect, the system will continue to recommend the content for future similar situations. If the content has grown stale, the system will take note and recommend different options in the future.

It’s all about using technology to our advantage to help augment the sales process and improve communication at all stages. And spoiler alert – in this situation, the content our client sent over to the middle manager in financial services in Florida did resonate really well – they closed the deal, and now they’re helping him and his team to exceed their quarterly revenue goals. It’s a win-win-win with the help of smart salespeople and smart content marketing systems.

As you probably already know, writing for your blog regularly is one of the basic foundations of content marketing. However, there are a lot of different ways to do it, and shaking up your style and your posting methods can be smart.

For example, if you have never written and posted blog posts in a series, it’s a good idea to consider doing so. Pick a topic that is related to your niche, and make sure that it is something that you can write multiple posts about. Then, consider releasing a series and adding to it on a scheduled basis — such as every week — until you have covered the topic thoroughly.

There are quite a few reasons why posting in a series can be a smart idea. These are a few of them. Consider these benefits, and you might find that you’ll want to come up with a blog series topic to start writing about right away.

Keep Readers Coming Back

One of the main benefits of posting in a series is the fact that you can keep readers coming back that way. If someone reads just one blog post that you have written, he or she might share it on social media or type a comment. However, the blog post will probably be forgotten about pretty quickly after it is written.

This is not the case with a series, however. If the reader really enjoys what he or she read or learns something, then he or she will be more likely to bookmark your blog and come back later to read another part of your series. This can help you develop long-term readers who will naturally become more interested in your products and services or who will be more apt to click on your advertisements.

You can even capitalize on this by promoting your series each week on social media. Check out the social media profiles for your favorite show, for example. You will probably see clips from last week’s episode, clips from next week’s episode, light spoilers and advertisements reminding you to tune in next week to see the next episode. You can do something very similar when promoting your blog series. This will keep people talking about your website and will encourage readers to come back later to read the next installment of your series…and the next. Since your readers are already interested after reading your first post, you don’t have to sell them on the value of reading your next post like you would if you completely switched topics.

Go a Little More In-Depth

Some topics deserve a little more attention than others. Ideally, you’ll choose a topic that deserves a lot of attention when you’re picking a topic for your blog series.

People disagree about how long a single blog post should be, but it can pretty much be agreed that no one is looking to read a blog post that is the length of an e-book.

By creating a series, however, you provide yourself with the opportunity to dive in and go a little more in-depth on a topic that is important to your industry. This is great for giving certain topics the attention that they deserve or for really teaching and informing your readers. Plus, it gives you a little more time in-between each post to do your research and really write a solid post.

Establish Yourself as an Expert

You want people who visit your blog to see you as an expert in your chosen industry. Your entire blog can help you with this, but the truth is that plenty of people can write on short blog post about something. Not everyone can create a whole series that covers a topic in-depth, however. Taking the time to build a strong series can allow you to show your readers just how much of an expert you really are in regards to your industry.

Enjoy More Page Hits

This isn’t necessarily relevant for all blogs, but if you rely on advertising revenue on your blog, then creating a series can help with this. Later on, when people are reading your series from start to finish, they’ll click to each page, one-by-one. This equals more page views and can help you bring in more advertising revenue.

If you are looking for posting ideas for your content marketing campaign and would like to improve your blog, consider creating a blog post series. Your series can vary in length between a few parts or many, and you can write about just about any topic that you want.

It’s best to choose a topic that people in your industry will be truly interested in, something that you can truly go in-depth with and something that isn’t too saturated and overly written about online. Take your time in choosing a topic, and make sure that you write each post for your series as well as you can. If you do these things, you’re sure to see positive results from your series, and you might decide to do it again on another topic later.

What if I told you there’s a super easy way to find content that’s proven to be sharable AND it will naturally boost your Page when you do it? Spoiler: I’m going to tell you exactly that.

I know, there are figuratively a gazillion and one tools to curate content – many of which are fantastic and I use all the time – but I’m not talking about one of those.

I’m talking about using your Facebook Page’s Newsfeed.

Honestly, if you’re managing a Facebook page and rarely (if ever) look at your Newsfeed, you’re not alone. I’ve certainly been guilty of that in the past, but I have seen the light!

There are several advantages to doing this, a huge one being that there are built in analytics. It’s literally right there on the post how many likes, shares, and comments it’s gotten.

Using this method, you won’t have to guess what people will like. You can just see what they’ve already liked, then share that!

Follow these 3 quick and easy steps to mine Facebook for great content to share:

The 3-Steps to Curate Content from Your Newsfeed

Step 1: Stuff Your Newsfeed with Relevant Content

First things first, you’ll have to populate your Newsfeed with content. Finding and liking/following relevant accounts will fill your Page’s Newsfeed with quality, sharable posts.

The quickest and easiest way to do this is to piggyback off what other pages similar to yours have already liked. If you go to another business page, you can access all the pages they’ve liked for a handy collection of relevant accounts you can like too. Here’s how:

Search for the Page of a competitor or similar account; for us that might be one like Social Media Examiner.

Next, scroll down the left sidebar until you come to the “LIKED BY THIS PAGE” section. Click on the link and you’ll have access to all the pages they’ve liked and then you can pick and choose which one’s you think will provide great content in your Newsfeed.

Step 1(b): Let Facebook Get to Know You

At this point, it’s going to take a little time and effort on your part to get your Newsfeed churning out the right content for you to share. Basically, you’re going to have to let Facebook “learn” what you want to see.

Facebook’s algorithm is designed to serve you up more of what you’ve previously interacted with. So it’s your job to engage with the posts most like what you want to see. Liking and/or clicking the link on a post are the easiest ways. Commenting takes a little more effort, but (probably) holds a little more weight in Facebook’s eyes. And sharing is (most likely) the strongest signal to the algorithm.

But, as we’ll get to a little bit later, engaging with posts has advantages that go far beyond creating a relevant Newsfeed for curating content. Stay tuned…

Step 2: Find the Best Performing Content

Now that you’ve got a good baseline of content to choose from, look through the stream and see what’s getting a lot of likes and shares.

Assuming it’s relevant to your audience – which it should be if you’ve done step 1 correctly – this is content proven to get engagement; pretty sweet, right?!

Consider the example above. It fits right with our target audience (business owners who need marketing) and garnered 758 likes and a whopping 587 shares. Granted, “Entrepreneur” has upwards of 2.2 million fans, but this is still a great indicator that this is an engaging post.

Once you find a gem like this, click the link, copy the address and plug it back into Facebook to make a post of your own.

This brings us to the next, very important part: creating your own commentary that compliments the article link to make it appealing and share-worthy.

Writing great copy for a post is a topic for a whole other post, one that was, fortunately, already written by the fine folks at AsEspresso.com. I cannot recommend that post highly enough.

Also, whenever possible, tag the source of the content in your post copy so they get a notification that you’ve mentioned them and shared their content.

Often times, businesses and brands you’ve tagged will check out and like your post. And, depending on the size of the organization, them simply “liking” it can send the post’s organic reach through the roof, leading to a snowball effect and even more engagement.

Step 3: Show Some Social Love with Shares

So far we’ve discussed curating great content and making your own posts from it. But you’ll also want to mix in some shares.

A quick note on shares: When you share a post, it’s going to appear differently on desktop and mobile devices, so plan for it.

On desktop, there will be a link description included with the share. On mobile devices, your copy will stand alone.

Just make sure that your copy compliments and adds to the link description and also makes sense by itself.

When considering sharing, think of the golden rule of social media (that I just made up), “engage with others as you would have them engage with you.”

It’s great when someone links to your content, but it’s icing on the cake when they share directly from your page, right? Of course. So occasionally make it a point to share some posts.

So what are the best types of posts to share? Well, let’s go back to our golden rule of social. You would prefer people to share posts linking back to your original content, right? I think you all probably see where I’m going here..

Anyway, keep doing this and soon you’ll probably notice the favors are getting returned. Over time, when you’re consistently liking, commenting, and, yes, sharing other businesses’ posts, companies doing social right will take notice and reciprocate.

Aaaaand segue into the second promise of this post:

How This Method of Curating Content Will Naturally Boost Your Facebook Page

While you’re employing this method, you’ll already be hanging out in your Page’s Newsfeed, so be active. We’ve already discussed that you’ll need to keep engaging with pages that are consistently posting great content to “teach” Facebook to keep them in your feed.

So here’s where the magic happens. When you’re consistently engaging with other businesses’ posts, you’re going to get noticed. Don’t believe me? Put yourself in their place.

If there’s a business that is constantly liking and commenting on your posts, eventually you’re going to check them out, visit their page, maybe even go to their website.

At the very least, all this activity is going to drive more people to your Facebook Page. Prepare for it. Pin a post of your choosing to the top of your page.

If you’re not currently pinning posts on your Page, it’s super simple. Just pick a post, click the down arrow in the top right and click “Pin to Top.”

This will keep whatever post you choose at the top of your page to get maximum exposure, so choose wisely. We typically keep a link to our most recent blog post or video pinned to the top.

Wrapping Up

So, are you pumped to stop ignoring your business Page’s Newsfeed and take advantage of all it has to offer? Again, you can quickly and easily find great content that’s already proven to be engaging, and boost your Facebook presence in the process!

So now all that’s left is to get out and do it to it! Take five minutes right now and go like five or ten new pages that are posting relevant content and check your Newsfeed tomorrow. I promise you won’t be sorry.

The Europeans pretended that multiculturalism was a form of tolerance. It may have been intended that way. What it was in practice was a ghetto without walls. Behind the willingness to accept perpetual distinctions was the unwillingness to allow the stranger to become one of them. At the...

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