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We talk a lot about strategy on our blog, but there are everyday tactics that can give you instant success. Here are 10 tactics for email marketing success.

Time of day

How often are you asked what’s the best time to send an email campaign? Probably loads right? The correct answer is that there is no definitive time of day to send an email. Analyse your audience to identify when your subscribers are more susceptible to emails and look at your previous campaigns to identify what send times have worked well in the past.

Subject Lines

Subject lines can be over-rated, but a strong subject line should simply state clearly what the email is about, in a tone of voice that suits your brand. Remember, the most important thing is to give people that clear direction of what the email is about, not getting people to open the email on false pretences or out of curiosity. Opens are vanity, clicks and conversions are where the real results are.

Who is sending the email?

When you receive email, the first thing you look for is who it is from, then what it is about. Therefore, the from name actually has a greater importance than the subject line. Try a first name in the subject line alongside your brand name and you should see an improvement in results.

The Pre-Header

Most email clients now preview the first line of the email. Gmail does this alongside the subject line, Outlook shows this as a new email pops up in the bottom right of the screen. While it may not be as significant as the from or subject line, it does give you another opportunity to describe the content of your email and Maxemail enables you to specify this as you wish.

The Split Test

A number of these factors mentioned in this blog can benefit from a split test – putting any theories you may have to the test to see what works best. Whether this is testing two different subject lines or experimenting with different send times for your campaign, you can send your email to a small proportion of your database before sending the winning combination to the remainder of your list.

Resends

Just because someone does not open the email the first time doesn’t mean they are not interested. Remember the inbox is a busy, crowded place and you will find resending to non-openers can get you half the response again. However, make sure that the resend is not an exact replica of the previous message. Make some changes to the copy, perhaps some different imagery and tweak the subject to help grab the attention of the customer this time around.

Mobile Friendly

There are a number of statistics out there stating that more than 50% of your opens will be on a mobile device. Email is the number one most popular activity on smartphones, with your subscribers likely to check it multiple times a day. Make sure your emails are optimised for mobile to avoid missing opportunities with these readers.

Grab the readers attention, fast

It’s likely that your customers will only look at your email for a few seconds, therefore, you don’t have long to grab the readers attention. Design your email with the idea that you only have just a few seconds to get your message across and you should start to see big differences in your stats.

Generic Links

Your email landing in the inbox will nudge customers into remembering about your brand. That’s why it’s important to have links at the top of the email to the most popular parts of your site. These can account for 20-30% of all clicks in your email as a result.

Try plain text

Yes, you heard that right! In some circumstances with inactive customers who never respond, it might be better to send a personal response from a specific individual. Customers can switch off from endless graphical promo’s, so keep this in plain text, or at least rich-text, change the from name to an individual along with omitting any awful ‘no-reply@’ email addresses and you may find that you get a much better response.

There are few cars in the world more iconic than the Porsche 911. Over the years, the rear-engined sports has gotten bigger, faster, and more technologically advanced. But its spirited driving dynamics and on-track capabilities have continued to make it a favorite among enthusiasts worldwide. 

However, you often hear the complaint that all current 911s pretty much look same. And if you ask critics such as ex-"Top Gear" host and longtime newspaper columnist Jeremy Clarkson, he'll tell you that all Porsche 911s since the model's debut in 1963 look identical.

The truth is, most of the various versions of the current generation of 911s do look similar, but they can all be identified by numerous subtle but important differences.

Like Taco Bell in the fast food industry, what Porsche has managed to do so successfully is create multiple iterations of the 911 by mixing and matching the same ingredients, and packaging them in lots of different ways. And if you've ever driven a 911, you'll probably agree with me in saying ... there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.

Porsche is in the middle of transitioning the 911 lineup from the current generation — the 991 — to the next generation model known as the 991-2.  The 991-2 features an updated chassis, upgraded aerodynamics and a new twin-turbocharged, flat-6-cylinder engine. Thus far, all the cars have been upgraded to 991-2 spec, with the exception of cars carrying the GTS and GT3 designation. 

The transition is expected to be completed sometime next year.

So here it is — the most current lineup of Porsche's 911 Taco Bell Menu.

SEE ALSO: You won't believe what this $500,000 armored Mercedes-Maybach limo can do when it's attacked

Carrera: The Carrera is the "base" 911, if there is such as thing. The 991-2 Carrera powered by a 3.0-liter 370 hp twin-turbocharged, flat 6 ...

... and the Cabriolet is the convertible version of the Carrera.

The Carrera 4 Coupe is a Carrera Coupe with all-wheel-drive ...

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

When you’re in debt or living paycheck to paycheck, it’s hard to be interested in personal finance. What’s the point in learning to manage money when you don’t have any of it? It’s easy to ignore your situation altogether, but the point of personal finance isn’t to make your finances perfect; it’s just about improving them.

Read more...

IDEO’s origin story sometimes sounds like a myth or a fable, but it’s actually true. David Kelley founded the company with a simple goal: to create a workplace made up of his best friends. In the beginning he did, in fact, bring in some of his closest buddies to launch the Silicon Valley firm that would become IDEO. More than 30 years later, we’re a global design company that employs more than 650 people. Obviously, we didn’t get to that size by hiring only our friends. But David’s early intention still greatly informs the way we work. There are, in fact, four elements of our culture that came directly from his founding statement. We think they’re essential factors in keeping employees engaged — not just at our company, but at any company.

Permission to play. When people play together, they form stronger bonds and are more willing to take risks and imagine new possibilities with one another. Employees need to know that experimentation is not only allowed, it’s actively encouraged. At IDEO, we achieve this by creating maker spaces that offer people the right environment, materials, and tools to bring their ideas to life.  We have Brainstorm Kits that include Post-Its and Sharpies in every meeting room, signaling to participants that they should feel free to express themselves in a variety of ways. Employees are also invited to create their own work environments. For example, in our New York office, where I’m based, we all came together to design our “phone booths,” or rooms for private calls, each themed after a famous New Yorker (Woody Allen, Robert De Niro). We have “tour stops” — areas to bring visitors to so they can get a sense of what our people create and care about. And we’re constantly trying to find ways to turn the mundane into the engaging. One ritual is to insert elaborate animated GIFs into office-wide emails, so that they have a narrative, build community, and encourage dialogue.

Insight Center

A common purpose, tailored. IDEO’s purpose statement — “Positive and disproportionate impact in the world through design” — is ambitious and intentionally broad. On its own, it might inspire the people working in our studios around the world, but it probably isn’t quite enough to help them connect the dots to their work. (How do I have positive and disproportionate impact? Where do I begin? Are my interests and passions the same as IDEO’s?) That’s why we also ask our locations to tailor IDEO’s purpose to their particular markets or studios. For example, in China, a localized purpose statement might be something like “Creating new value for the country by enabling enlightened leaders to tackle systemic challenges,” while in London it might be “Enabling organizations to deliver on and exceed their promises to people.” And in a larger office, like San Francisco, each part of the business might create its own purpose statement, such as the Food and Beverage studio’s “Bridging the worlds of culinary and science to solve the world’s food problems.” This helps employees figure out which work best aligns with their skills and where they’re going to be most engaged and successful in the organization.

A social contract. You might have heard about the Little Book of IDEO. In it, we talk about seven common values that bind us together: be optimistic, collaborate, learn from failure, embrace ambiguity, talk less and do more, take ownership, and lastly, make others successful. These values are, in fact, the behaviors that drive our social contract. They allow teams to govern themselves without needing lots of oversight and management, and they help people understand what success looks like. We’ve found that they are also a great aid in development. The employees we hire rarely struggle with the skills of their jobs, but sometimes they do need support in adhering to these values.

Bottom-up innovation. Top-down directives don’t work terribly well at IDEO. We’ve learned that the best new ideas and capabilities are often incubated from the bottom up through someone’s personal energy and commitment. For example, one of our fastest-growing businesses focuses on education. Sandy Speicher, the managing director at IDEO who leads that work, grew a team of 23 people with projects across the world because she believed that her passion — education — was something that IDEO should also care about. When leaders want to initiate a project, we always explain the underlying need and give a clear sense of the desired outcome so that people get aligned around a common goal. The best strategies are ones that people can make their own.

In a world where great talent is hard to find and harder to retain, companies succeed by keeping their employees engaged, happy, and fulfilled. There is no silver bullet. But these four principles have helped IDEO go a long way in achieving that goal.

The most forward-looking companies are willing to take risks to achieve greatness. Most leaders give lip service to this idea, but few actually do it. We have worked with banks willing to take on toxic assets (again) and hedge funds willing to take a $100 million gamble on a failing company. But their leaders would still be terrified to ask their employees to stop working for two minutes a day to watch their breath go in and out.

In over 700 of our talks at conferences, we have only twice heard a senior leader follow up the financial goal-setting for the next year by telling the company that one of the biggest keys to success will be mindfulness. “Hard work, working faster, doing more with less” — those are the limited solutions of myopic, risk-averse organizations. The problem is that our calculus for risk and strategy at work is wrong. Truly forward-thinking leaders recognize that one of the best business strategies is developing the mindfulness of their workforce.

Aetna, one of the leaders of the movement to apply positive psychology practices to work, instituted a mindfulness training program designed to teach employees how to take short breaks to center themselves through meditation and yoga. More than a quarter of Aetna’s 50,000 employees have taken part. Mindfulness scores increased as expected, but incredibly, on average, stress levels dropped by 28%, reported sleep quality improved 20%, and pain dropped by 19%. Aetna also calculated the savings to the company, finding that, on average, mindfulness participants gained 62 minutes of productivity a week, which is an estimated $3,000-per-employee increase in productivity for the company each year. Individuals in the top 20% of stress rankings have nearly $2,000 more in medical costs for the preceding year, so this intervention could create significant medical savings. Based on Aetna’s experience, that’s potentially a $5,000 average swing per employee, depending on the employee’s starting point. And even that number probably underestimates the financial value of mindfulness, as it doesn’t include the positive impacts on turnover, rehiring costs, retraining costs, customer service, or client-facing sales.

You and Your Team

Recently, more researchers have brought mindfulness from the mountaintop to the meeting room to study its effects on business success. Ellen Langer, a psychologist from Harvard and one of the world’s leading experts on the impacts of mindfulness, helped clarify what mindfulness looks like at work and beyond in the New York Times. She says that it’s “noticing moment-to-moment changes around you, from the differences in the face of your spouse across the breakfast table to the variability of your asthma symptoms.” (You can watch her video about Mindfulness for Senior Executives here.) In our own work, we define mindfulness as “the awareness of events and potentialities within an environment.” Observe your team at work: Do they seem very aware? Or are their brains constantly ahead of the present and missing what’s happening in the here and now — the facial reactions of other team members, opportunities to see meaning in stress, and the opportunity to praise or recognize someone before jumping into problems? A lack of mindfulness robs everyone of the opportunity to see potential paths to success.

It’s not hard to spot the ill effects of mindlessness. We can all fall victim to the productivity trap of frantically filling our days with meetings to attend and forms to fill out. Think about these questions: 1) When you aren’t doing something “productive,” do you feel like you are getting behind or not using your time well? 2) When you aren’t scheduled, do you fill micro-moments by pulling out your phone and checking stocks, refreshing your inbox, reading headlines, or playing a quick game of Angry Birds? 3) If you have downtime, do you sometimes feel lost as to how to fill it? 4) Do you want a more successful team? 5) Do you want a promotion? If you answered yes to any of these, you or your company may be ready for mindfulness training.

Mindfulness training, with significant results, is possible in just minutes a day. In a fascinating intervention, Amy Blankson from the Institute of Applied Positive Research ran a pilot study with Google’s new hires, called “Nooglers.” The pilot study encouraged the new hires to practice mindfulness by meditating for two minutes a day and writing down gratitudes in a journal. Engagement scores rose for those who took part in the program. While this is just one example of many, the reason we’re highlighting Google is because it might seem from the outside that the company has the least need for finding ways to increase engagement. But as Laszlo Bock, the Head of People at Google, described in his book Work Rules, after the newness and excitement of all the great perks in the Google environment (endless swimming machines, micro kitchens, colorful bikes, free sushi, etc.) wear off, engagement can drop unless the employee takes proactive steps to consciously choose mindfulness and gratitude.

Some of you might be thinking that you have too much going on to focus on meditation. We would argue you have too much going on NOT to focus on it. Researchers from the University of Washington found that your accuracy rates, ability to multitask, and ability to handle stress significantly improve if you practice mediation for just eight weeks. In an article published in one of the top psychology journals, our research colleague Alia Crum found that by making individuals mindful of the meaning behind their stress, the negative effects of their stress dropped significantly. Mindfulness training can help people become aware of meaning when we would otherwise miss it.

There are lots of researched ways to increase mindfulness, but instead of overloading you with options you probably won’t adopt, let us suggest an easy one: When you first get to work in the morning, spend two minutes a day starting a ritual of doing nothing except watching your breath go in and out and being aware of your surroundings.

Too often, the most ambitious leaders assume that if you are running around, you are achieving much. If you want to be a forward-thinking professional, stop thinking about the future for a moment. If you want to do more today, sit down and practice being aware of your breath and the fact that you have access to meaning right now.

With the end of 2015 quickly approaching, I am in process of assessing the year’s performance in regards to our ANNUITAS training initiatives and goals. plus looking at opportunities for 2016. I’ve had some candid conversations with my stakeholders about the efficacy of our current programs and what our most pressing training and development needs for the coming year. While in the midst of it, I started thinking about what training can realistically influence, as well as how I’ve experienced training used as a tactic for avoidance of larger and often much trickier problems in past.

There is no doubt that training is and will continue to be an important part of both employee and organizational growth. Training will continue to evolve and organizations will make significant investments in time, technology, and development of new training programs in the future with the outcome of supporting business goals and employee growth. Let’s be clear though, while training is an excellent strategy for knowledge gaps and development, there are several things that training will not be able to do, no matter the investment behind it because these issues are systemic in an organization.

Poor Leadership / Lack of Management:
Imagine the poor folks subjected to training after training because they are seen as continually deficient for failure to meet performance goals, wherein the real issue is lack of management. No training program, no matter how good it is, can make up for continual lack of direction and feedback. This also includes inability to enforce policy and procedure. Yes, we can absolutely train on what and how to do things, but it is up to management to provide consequences for failing to do so. Training employees repeatedly on what they already know, but are refusing to do, is absolutely useless.

Insufficient Resources:
Is your company still running on Windows 98? Okay, I doubt you are and I am being dramatic here, but I am making a point. In other words, is your organization expecting world – class performance from your employees with a subpar working environment and insufficient resources and counting on training to fill that gap? Or think about insufficient control over available resources, do you have someone with all the responsibility and little to no control over resources to get the work done? Training is not going to fix that either and failure to address these issues will contribute to employee burnout.

Bad Hiring Choices:
Training is a definitely a possibility when employees are lacking knowledge. For example, changes in technology, procedure, performance standards, as well as the creation of new roles entirely may warrant a training program to bridge the gap. These are what the Society for Human Resource Management calls “Can’t do” categories: the employee is missing skills or information necessary to do their job. The issue that training cannot fix is the “Won’t do” issues such as bad attitudes and poor cultural fit. Toxic employees cost more than a non-toxic employee and they often have a company wide effect. Again, training will not remedy a poor hiring decision.

In conclusion, attempting to use training to thwart any of these issues ends up failing and creating an overall problem towards any future training with a “training doesn’t work” mindset.

Christo Popov, CEO of FastTrack writes, “For training to have real value, your company must first have a clear strategy and execution plan in place. Your strategy should clearly articulate three to five core skills and competencies and three to five key activities that will make execution possible. Your training should then focus on these skills and competencies.” It always comes back to strategy, even in training. Taking the time to asses and strategically plan your training needs will allow you to avoid training on issues that training cannot fix.

We don’t take political stances on Yodle Insights, but suffice to say, Donald Trump is one of the most controversial public figures in recent memory. Against all odds, he’s polling better than ever: the CNN Poll of Polls currently finds Trump tops Cruz 33% to 17% in the race for the Republican nomination.

So how does a guy with no political career suddenly dominate the Republican polls? His advisors have committed to time-tested marketing principles. Here’s the top marketing takeaways from Trump’s success:

Mission Simplicity
Donald Trumps’ campaign is engineered around one memorable slogan – “Make America Great Again”. Your service might solve a lot of problems. Your product might have a lot of features. But Trump (as well as brands like Uber and Apple) can all testify that a marketing campaign should be free of superfluous choices, options, or nuance.

Marketing Takeaway: Drop the frilly adjectives and boil your mission down to your most powerful value add.

Strategic Apologies

Have you ever accidentally sent an incorrect email blast out or made a marketing blooper?

There’s a very specific way of apologizing that satisfies two key conditions: placating the client without accepting guilt. Donald Trump has become a master of diverting attention away from the issue and winning the public back with off-the-wall apologies like: “Apologizing is a great thing but you have to be wrong. I will apologize sometime in the hopefully distant future if I’m ever wrong.”

Marketing Takeaway: Even if your service has negative attributes in quality, customer service, communication, or price points – it only takes a well crafted apology for people to forgive you.

Be a Contrarian

Your prospects are seriously fatigued with the constant inundation of similar ads in their email inboxes, mailboxes, phones, and social media. Trumps advisors know the power of a fresh message, which is why everything Trump has done in his campaign is the absolutely opposite of his competitors.

Marketing Takeaway: To use this tactic for yourself, do some market research and see what your competitors are doing on social media, their blog, and what kinds of promotions they’re offering. When you identify some common themes, you can change up the game and attract attention to your business –for instance, a saturation of open houses on the weekends gives you the opportunity to set up an open house on a week day!

Finally, while Trumps’ campaign seems to be perfectly engineered, there is one lesson that Donald can teach you only indirectly…

Think Before You Speak!

Communications define the ethos of a company, from signage and social media posts to your daily face-to-face client interaction. Before you hit print, send, or publish, always remember to consider the impact of your words.

(Image source: huffingtonpost)

As of 2015, the Internet has become a virtually inexhaustible source of information. Choosing relevant topics to share with audience boasts our position as experts and makes us an integral part of the conversation.

But there is a lot to do in order to fulfill this role successfully: browsing for current, relevant and reliable information, organizing it in logical fashion, and distributing it through our social media channels.

This can all be summed up in a process called Content Curation, which entails:

1. Identifying

Finding out which topics pique our audience´s interest and investigating and gathering relevant sources of information.

2. Filtering

Evaluating and choosing relevant titles to share in accordance to our editorial line and the audience´s interests.

3. Distributing

Spreading the end result through our channels.

Clearly, this is A LOT of work…. Content curating tools were invented to automatize and ease this task.

Here are some you may want to try:

1. Trap.It.

This curation tool uses an algorithm that goes beyond choosing the highest ranking content, to find the content most relevant to your interests, even if it is, by all other standards, really “hidden”. It´s also “intelligent”, meaning, the more you use it, the more attuned it becomes to your needs. The company recently merged with Addvocate (a social sharing platform for company employees). This could be are hit or miss for the platform, since first time users looking for a Content Curation tool might find the advocacy message confusing.

2. Sendible.

Used by online marketing professionals, the social media management tool now boasts a content recommendation feature. The integration of curatorial capabilities with the many other virtues of Sendible (like scheduling posts to different social media channels) is a match made in heaven for marketers tending to a diverse clientele and their audiences.

3. Feedly.

A popular tool, since for the longest time it was free. And while the free option still exists and works extremely well –especially for novice feed users, the Premium tiers are very affordable too. Moreover, Feedly took the place of an old favorite, Google Reader (old in Internet Era standards, at least), after it was retired. Feedly is super easy to use, allowing you to add keywords and web addresses to lists, tag them, and organize them in different ways.

4. Scoot.it.

The Pinterest look-alike interface is a sign that this tool was born to share content on social media. Indicate what your topics of interest are, and the engine will not only show the most relevant articles, it will also include “complimentary” topics. Their paid and unpaid versions differ by the number of topics and channels they allow, the analytics and scheduling options, but for a very reasonable $11.00 dollars per year you can subscribe to the basic professional package. For marketing teams, they offer a supercharged tool, the Scoop.it Content Director, with automated publishing workflows, advanced scheduling options for multiple channels and topics, and comprehensive analytics.

5. Curata.

Curata´s content curation software is part of the larger content marketing platform. Theirs is more of a production-line approach, proposing to “build a predictable content supply chain”. Curata allows to easily organize, annotate and create content, using a “self-learning” recommendation engine that suggests entries and prioritizes them according to your previous choices. It integrates seamlessly with CMS, social curation, email and marketing automation, and therefore, allows the use of templates, schedules and publishing rules.   As a very nice plus, Curata comes with an out-of-the box responsive site and blog.

All of these tools are, of course, very cool. But in order to truly engage our audiences, it is our role to add value to the information found.

Here is an example of a commentary that does not add any value to the shared content:

No. If posts spoke for themselves, they wouldn´t need us.

On the other hand, here´s an example of clever commentary:

This remark demands thought and gets the conversation going. By infusing every post with our opinion, assessment or knowledge, we keep the audience coming for more.

There is no tool in the world that can substitute for that.

Price is something that greatly influences how likely someone is to purchase your products and services. Even the best items may be passed by customers in exchange for something that offers comparable functionality without as hefty of a price tag.

The trick is discovering what that perfect price is. You don’t want to sell your items short, nor do you want to overprice them so that no one purchases them.

Let’s examine five pricing strategies designed to make your products sell easily while ensuring that you maintain a clear profit margin.

Base Price Around Cost

The most basic type of pricing strategy requires you to base the price of something around the cost of creating a product or providing a service.

Your price should include:

• The cost of materials
• Any costs associated with labor
• Overhead such as taxes, insurance and marketing

The drawback of this pricing strategy is that it relies upon the cost of creating a product. It does not necessarily price your product in accordance with what your customers think of your product. Competitors capable of using cheaper methods for production may also be able to undercut your prices.

Look at the Competition

The competition likely has products and services that are similar to yours. Basing your price around what your competitors price their items at may be a wise decision, especially when customers in that industry are used to that pricing.

When using this strategy, ensure that you price your items in a way that allows you to reach as many potential buyers as possible. Your goal is to compete with the competition by expanding your reach, which will help you price future products in more favorable ways.

Price Twice

Front-end, back-end and tiered pricing plans allow you to offer two different prices. You can allow customers to purchase products individually or as one-time deals, and you can encourage multiple sales by offering lowered prices for repeat customers.

This pricing plan is designed to sell multiple products at one time or to encourage customer loyalty. You may be able to charge slightly higher prices for your products than what the competition charges while taking advantage of things like the economics of scale.

Consider a company that sells e-books designed to help online marketers. The company may price individual books between $40 to $80 each. They may offer an entire course of related products, which would include 4-10 products, for a flat fee of $100 to $150. They may attempt to sell to previous customers e-books for a lower price.

Companies offering multiple products that are similar, as packaged deals, or in the form of subscriptions will find this strategy the most effective.

This pricing plan is designed to sell multiple products at one time or to encourage customer loyalty. You may be able to charge slightly higher prices for your products than what the competition charges while taking advantage of things like the economics of scale.

Use Psychology

Price is arbitrary. While factors like the cost of creating something can influence it, the ultimate worth of any given product is decided by what someone finds as an attractive price. 

By using smart pricing psychologies, it means you’re using the customer’s emotional response to generate sales. There are number of studies show that by integrating psychological pricing structure with other pricing tactics and adjusting your pricing strategy a little bit could improve your sales.

Price Around Customer Feedback

Your company might offer something revolutionary or truly unique. Basing your price around the cost of the product or what similar products cost may be a mistake, as you may be underselling what your product is worth.

One strategy that avoids this is one based upon what your customers think about your product. While you must ask for their feedback, this can allow you to determine the most profitable price for a unique item.

You may be surprised at how much your customers want to pay for your product. Studies have shown that some will pay 20 to 25 percent more than what a company would charge for a product or service.

Pricing a Product Perfectly

While it takes a significant amount of work, luck or intuition to perfectly price a product, finding that price is worth the effort. You may be able to price your product in a way that results in significantly more profits than you would see otherwise.

The one thing to keep in mind is that no perfect price remains that way for long. Consumers’ opinions, the price of competitor products and services, and factors like inflation make that perfect price fluctuate.

Get Five-Star Amazon Reviews The Right Way

Whether you’re a business selling a product or an author publishing your next book, reviews on Amazon can propel you and your sales forward. Before you make any time consuming or costly mistakes there are some key strategies to help bring in great reviews.

According to an article on Econsultancy 61 percent of online purchases are made after reading a review. The article also reveals that recommendations increase your conversion rates and helps remove any doubts from a buyer’s mind. Other benefits include:

• Free word-of-mouth advertising for your product or book
• Stand out from the rest of the competition
• Perceived value

As an author or business owner great reviews also help establish a strong presence on social media, otherwise known as social proof. The more authentic ratings you have the larger your chances are of being noticed in the networks and on Amazon. The key is to have in place authentic, and verified purchase reviews rather than purchasing feedback. In fact, last April Amazon filed a lawsuit against four websites offering fake reviews. Engaging in this practice could mean serious damage to your reputation and possibly being banned from selling on Amazon.

The best way to get the review process started is to reach out to your current community online. This may include your subscribers, social media fans and followers, LinkedIn connections, ect. You will want to do this in advance of a product or book release, which also builds a level of anticipation. Consider hosting a giveaway event or offer free copies to a select group with a request to leave a review. If you’re an author using KDP you can create a free promotion right from your account, and list your book with legitimate promotion services.

Here are several important steps in keep in mind when attracting five-star reviews on Amazon:

1. Create an accurate title and description – Many bad reviews are based on customers feeling misled after reading a product or book page. The key is to be honest, clear, and concise as possible without too much or confusing information. Here’s a good example from one of my clients on his newly released book, Flying Thru Life:
2. Follow up with your buyers – Amazon will automatically send a reminder to verified purchases about leaving a review, which is generic and can be overlooked. A more personalized approach can get your customer’s attention, which can be done through a service like FeedbackFive, which helps you manage your product reviews for better conversions.
3. Reach out to your network – If any of your buyers are from your social media community or website subscribers list then this can be a great opportunity to thank them for their purchase, and ask them for a review. This is also a good time to offer something of value to them for free, which will help place your name or company in the forefront of their minds.
4. Contact Amazon reviewers in your niche – This may take some research and time, but is well worth the effort to locate top reviewers who have already made a favorable review on a product or book similar to yours. The place to begin is on Amazon’s Top Reviewer list, which offers a profile for each individual. There you can view their latest reviews, description, and contact information. Some do not wish to be contacted, and may say so in their profiles or leave out that information entirely: Alternatively you can perform a keyword search in Amazon to discover products or books in your niche and find reviewers that way. I use an Excel spreadsheet to keep a record of my contacts, but you will will want to use whatever tools works best for your business tracking system for contacts. The best way to approach someone is with a free offer for the review, which can be in the form of a gift card for purchase or the actual physical product. For books this can be either the printed edition or a digital copy, and some reviewers may specifically request a printed edition. Craft a professional, descriptive email that does not sell directly, but offers a clear description that will draw in their interest like this example from my Klout Score book promotion:

After you have reached out to your network, customers, and Amazon reviewers with a commitment to leave feedback you will want to stay in touch with them throughout the process to ensure that they have left a review and to thank them if they already have. This will ensure that the next time you have a product or book release they will be likely to review again.

What about bad reviews?

The Internet has a way of inviting in those who are willing to leave less favorable feedback. Don’t allow this to discourage you as it is bound to happen, especially on a website as large as Amazon. The key is to respond in a positive, and constructive way, and learn from legitimate complaints. Depending on the situation you can offer a replacement, refund, and in the case of book reviews acknowledge their viewpoints addressing any misunderstandings in a polite and professional manner. Amazon has specifically outlined its review policy here.

It’s important to understand that as Amazon reviews continue to evolve the best approach for your business or publication is to maintain great relationships online that generate an interest in what you have to offer. More recently the company announced that artificial intelligence will be slowly rolled out to reflect actual reactions from customers based on “helpful” product reviews. The authentic approach works best when attracting feedback, and can help move your name up to the top of the list on Amazon.

Today’s post is written by Andrew Angus

Here at Infer, we eat our own dog food when it comes to demand generation and sales development, and we believe in sharing successes in order to contribute to the growing community of forward-looking predictive practitioners. Here are three of our own use cases that we hope other sales development teams can leverage:

Inbound Lead Management

Our sales development reps (SDRs) only see inbound leads that are scored an “A” or “B” (the top 35% of leads that our model predicts are the best fit for our solution).

Leads scored as a “C” or “D” go to a nurture campaign and only bubble back up to the SDR team after hitting a stricter scoring threshold based on their behavioral scores. For example, if we’re seeing a flurry of marketing activity with a C lead who’s downloading a bunch of our predictive playbooks or attending a webinar, our model might predict that they’re exhibiting enough buying behavior to indicate an impending purchase.

The team’s Service Level Agreement (SLA) on what to do with different types of leads differs depending on the lead’s predictive score. For A and B leads, an SDR first qualifies them based on the contact’s authority to make or influence a purchasing decision and their company’s needs (i.e. a sales or marketing challenge where Infer can offer value). C and D leads go to the marketing team, who places them in a nurture campaign. If they eventually show more interest, we have SDRs qualify them more rigorously based on their authority, need, urgency and budget before routing the lead to an AE. We don’t waste time calling leads that are unlikely to convert, because we can use that time to stay on our A and B leads and call new leads faster.

All new leads are put through our own internally built tool, which assigns leads to SDRs based on lead score so that each SDR has an equal number of A and B leads. A notification goes to the assigned SDR, who follows up within 5 minutes of the lead’s first contact with our company. We’ve even set up our model to send an alert to the whole SDR team via Slack messaging every time a new A lead comes in.

This inbound lead management process minimizes our response time and increases the number of meetings we book. On the other hand, if you’re spreading your SDRs evenly across all leads and spending time with each category (good or bad), you could be wasting a lot of time that would otherwise go towards increasing the attention you can give to leads that really matter.

Outbound Prospecting

The key to effective outbound sales and account-based marketing is to focus on the right group of target accounts. We start by using data from InsideView, ZoomInfo, SalesLoft, and other firmographic, technographic and demographic signals to score our entire universe of accounts. Only leads with A and B scores are added to our sales database for outreach. Since everything is analyzed before it even enters our system, we have cleaner data and a better focus for outbound efforts.

Once we have this list, we work to refine it in alignment with the broader sales team. We want to make sure we are working not just the accounts that the data says we can sell to, but also the accounts that our sales team is going to be fired up about selling to. After we have a foundational list that’s been signed off by marketing, sales and the sales development team, we then assign an equal number of A, B, C and D leads to each SDR. Less than 25% of these accounts turn over from quarter to quarter and since ABM is such a long, high-touch process, we want to make sure we have just the right accounts in our mix.

Marketing & Sales Alignment

Everyone’s heard that marketing is from Mars and sales is from Venus, but with predictive scores, both sides of the house can come together and use a scientific, rational approach instead of arguing about what makes a good lead. At my previous company, it was very hard to implement an SLA between sales and marketing because it was tough to get agreement. You know the drill — a sales manager says “We’re not getting enough leads,” to which marketing responds with “What about these leads? Why haven’t you followed up with them?” Sales inevitably comes back saying, “Those leads are crap. We need more good leads!”

This endless debate can be put to rest with a common definition of good that both sales and marketing trust. Our predictive scoring has eliminated the finger-pointing that’s so common because there’s no need to try and hash things out based on individual team members’ intuition. We can all see the performance of the predictive model in real-time on our InsightSquared reports, and if a particular campaign is producing too many low-scoring leads, we have an easy conversation about why that wasn’t a great use of resources. Not only do we have all the metrics we need, but we can see them and manipulate the data to get what we need in order to make good decisions. With everyone on the same page, pet projects and guessing games are a thing of the past.

Today’s author is Andrew Angus.

Amazing photo by Bixentro

Leading into 2015, marketers ranked new business development and lead quality as two of their most pressing business challenges. How have you faired? Has your business successfully navigated these challenges this year? If you answered “not well” or “no,” it’s not too late to get back on track and start 2016 off strong. Using call analytics there are a number of ways to generate high-quality leads and steal more business from your competition.

Reach Consumers Before Your Competition

What business doesn’t love to see their market share grow? If you rely on calls to provide customers more information or close business, yet you don’t know where those calls come from, you’re already at a disadvantage against your competition. Call attribution software empowers your business with data you can use to optimize your campaigns and reach consumers more likely to call – before your competition does. It helps you:

• Understand which ads, campaigns, and keywords searched generate the most calls.
• Know how a caller interacts with your website before and after a call, which web pages they visited, how long they spent on your site and more.
• Follow leads through the sales cycle by integrating with CRM systems, so you know exactly which marketing sources drive the most revenue.

Make Your Messaging Stand Out

Using call analytics to craft the right messaging is the next step for marketers looking to drive more high-quality phone leads. You know which sources drive the most calls and can optimize for them, but if your messaging remains lackluster compared to your competition’s you’ll be unable to garner more business. Take advantage of call analytics to:

• Retarget ads to prospects that have already called and tailor the message to their stage of the sales cycle, or retarget to consumers that have not yet called, with messaging that entices them to call.
• Integrate with marketing automation platforms and add callers to email nurture campaigns with differentiated messaging and content.
• Improve your A/B testing programs by including a “Call Now” call to action to measure calls versus web form fills and ensure your messaging engages consumers.

Make Callers Feel Valued

After a caller dials your phone number, or clicks to call from a smartphone, a poor caller experience is a sure-fire way to send them running to your competition. Do you like to give your business to someone who bounces you around to 5 different people when you call? I don’t either. When you use call analytics to personalize the experience a caller has with your brand, you’ve made them feel valued and are much closer to receiving their business over a competitor. Try:

• Contextually routing a caller based on the ad they saw or their location, ensuring they get connected with the right department, office, or store location right away.
• Using screen pops with CRM integration to arm sales agents with caller information before they even pick up the phone, personalizing the conversation from the onset.
• Conversation Insight technology to dig into what happens on every call and understand a caller’s intent or frustrations, and use that data to enhance and personalize future marketing and call experiences.

If you’re beginning to think about using call attribution and conversion technology to make data-driven decisions with call analytics, this guide can help prepare you to make your decision: “Buyer’s Guide to Call Tracking Software for Marketers.”

The following is an excerpt from the new From Impossible To Inevitable (2nd Edition), the hypergrowth bible of Silicon Valley, by Aaron Ross and Jason Lemkin. It’s republished here with permission.

Mark Roberge learned a few things in helping HubSpot scale from $0 to $100M in revenue and from zero to 425 salespeople across multiple countries. What does he see as some of the biggest problems in sales teams and scaling them?

1. Where Can You Tie Sales Comp Plans to Customer Success?

The biggest problem Mark sees today in the sales world: sales doesn’t care enough about customer success. We talked earlier in the “Seeds” chapter about creating a dedicated Customer Success team, but how do sales comp plans affect customer success?

People talk the talk . . . but when push comes to shove, vanilla sales teams are going to do whatever it takes to close a deal, then collect a check, and let other teams pick up the pieces later. Can’t blame them. Executives -- and their bosses the investors -- expect and demand it, and it’s what salespeople are measured and paid to do.

To Mark, a root problem is sales compensation. Sales teams obsess 99% over their attention on contracts, revenue, and commissions, and what happens post sale gets crumbs.

Shelfware existed because a sales team would get a million-dollar deal done, then the client needed 18 months to implement it . . . and by that point, no one used it. This was an epidemic in pre-SaaS software (and still happens, even in SaaS).

The cloud/subscription model changed everything. It reduced the friction to implement software or move to a different vendor if one overpromised. By paying over time, software companies are incented to keep customers happy, rather than extract as much money upfront as possible. People understand this intuitively, but our sales compensation plans haven’t caught up.

Think about this scenario: you have two reps who both closed $1M in revenue this year.

1. Your first rep, all of her customers are happy and they’re expanding and renewing their contracts because of it.
2. While your second rep’s customers are miserable, complaining and churning out.

If your compensation model is set up so that both of those reps are compensated the same, you’ve got a problem. Mark proposes incorporating a customer lifetime value trigger into your comp plan.

Churn and retention are the best indicators of customer lifetime, but they take too long to tie to your sales comp. Mark says to find an “aha moment” in your product or service that your customer completes in the first two months that flag them as an ongoing success. Pay the sales rep half their commission when they sign the contract, and half when that “aha moment” happens.

Some popular examples of how a company knew a customer would be successful:

• Dropbox -- when an account has added one device, one file, and one user.
• Slack -- once a team exchanged 2,000 messages.
• HubSpot -- once the customer used 5 out of the 25 available features in the platform.
• Twitter -- after someone followed 30 other people.

2. Predefined Sales Promotions

In a role where success and failure are so easily quantifiable, having an annual performance review to decide on an annual percentage bump in salary doesn’t make sense. It provides little incentive for your top performers to push harder and doesn’t provide them a clear path to getting to the next level.

Instead, Mark recommends adding tiers to your sales roles -- each with clearly documented milestones to hit. Each milestone should have a sales component, a productivity component, and a customer lifetime component. If you hit all three, you get promoted to the next level.

Here’s what that looked like at HubSpot (ARR = Annual Recurring Revenue)

• Sales Associate Level 1: $50k base + $50k variable (6.25% commission on an $800k ARR quota)
  • Milestones—Close$800k in ARR, customer churn rate below “X.”
• Sales Associate Level 2: $50k base + $66k variable (7.33% commission on a $900k ARR quota)
  • Milestones—Close$ 900k in ARR, customer churn rate below “X.”
• Sales Associate Level 3: $50k base + $80k variable (8% commission on $1M ARR quota)
  • Milestones—Close $1M in ARR, a customer churn rate below “X.”

You’ll notice that we did not include a tenure piece in the milestones. Mark’s best reps took seven months -- and some took 20 months -- to hit their first level up. It was all up to them.

The stars can level up faster without waiting for annual (or arbitrary) performance reviews for the next bump. Additionally, providing clear and public expectations gives everyone transparency into what management values.

3. Have Reps Help Redesign Their Comp Plans

Mark always involved the sales team in comp redesign. He started with a “town meeting.” After communicating the goals for the plan, he’d open up the floor to structural ideas. The brainstorming would begin. As the meeting progressed, he’d share some of the structures that were being considered and invite people to offer their feedback.

As a follow-up, he created a page on the company wiki, reiterating the reasons for changing the plan, stating the goals, and describing some of the structures that were being considered.

The conversation would then continue online with ideas and reactions. He responded to most comments and taking it online allowed salespeople to catch up on and participate when they had time.

Involving your reps in helping redesign their plans reduces comp plan change friction; They have a voice and can contribute concerns and ideas, it reduces surprises, and reps are pre-educated before a new comp rollout.

4. Rate Salespeople Like Uber/Lyft Drivers

It’s not Mark’s advice, but this fits here. Do you know which of your salespeople are creating great customer experiences, and which ones are too aggressive or overpromising? (Remember: big megaphones.) If you can’t tie comp to an “Aha Moment,” maybe customers can rate your salespeople. After a string of painful SaaS buying experiences, Jason proposed . . .

1. Survey: 90 days after a sale, send an automated survey to buyers with one question: “How was the buying process, on a score of one to five?” Sooner than 90 days is too early. “Churn and burn” deals, where products are sold to customers that don’t need them and “fakeware” deals where the rep overpromises on features, don’t show up right away.
2. Sales Score: Reps with a five-star sales score on an individual deal, and a 4.8 or higher overall score get an accelerator bonus. Maybe even 20%. Enough to be material. Possibly this accelerator is in lieu of other accelerators, perhaps it’s the only one.
3. Public: Every salesperson’s Score is published internally, so everyone knows. Customer Success can be alerted when a low-rated salesperson is closing a deal, as can the CEO. And their calls can be listened to for corrective action earlier.

Align your salespeople to the metrics of success that customers and management care about. Even with these examples, it will take creativity on your part, because sales teams and customers vary so much market to market. But do it and you’ll reap huge short and long-term rewards.

The world of sales is constantly evolving — with new technologies and sales tactics emerging to help salespeople close more deals. Long gone are the days of cold calling, trade shows, and outdated methods.

Today, the best salesperson embraces marketing and a growth mindset. If you’re ready to level up your sales strategy, read through the top 20 sales tactics that will help you find and close more deals this year.

• What are sales tactics?
• Sales Tactics that Work

20 Sales Tactics That Work

Every team will develop its own unique sales strategy. However, these sales tactics offer a great starting point. Begin exploring below.

1. Adopt warm calling.

If you’re still cold-calling prospects and think it’s a great way to generate new opportunities, it’s time to revamp your strategy. Cold calling is difficult and negatively impacts your brand and potential success. It's also not nearly as effective as inbound selling.

Warm calling is preferable over cold calling. With warm calling, you connect with prospects who have already shown some level of interest or familiarity with your company or product. You’re less likely to confront unwilling prospects.

Warm calling typically involves contacting leads who have interacted with your company in some way, such as filling out a form, visiting the website, or attending an event. This makes it easier to establish a connection with the prospect, as they are more likely to be receptive to the sales message.

Of course, you still need to do call prospecting. Research to offer up a compelling reason for your initial call, work inbound leads that want to talk to you, and provide helpful insights to potential prospects on social media before engaging.

2. Utilize inside sales.

Back in the 1990s, inside sales was a stepping stone, not a career. In today’s world, actually meeting face-to-face is a nice to have, not a requirement. Inside sales, or remote selling, offers a more efficient and scalable process.

In the past, even early-stage sales calls were done in person. Meeting in person was not only expensive, but it was also a time sink. A simple 45-minute meeting became a three-hour ordeal — and all this just to start a relationship and conduct a basic needs analysis.

You had to dress formally, print out directions (remember, this was before smartphones), travel to the prospect’s office, wait in the parking lot, make small talk with the receptionist, and then make more small talk with your prospect before you could get down to business.

In-person meetings are often inefficient. Leverage inside sales to start relationships and for most transactions. Face-to-face meetings can be reserved for high-value prospects.

3. Be realistic about what your product can do.

You may feel tempted to paint your product as the solution to every problem your client faces. However, overselling the product can lead to challenges down the line. If your prospect’s expectations are not met, you may face high churn and dissatisfied customers.

So remember, don’t oversell. If you’re dealing with a 28- or 56-day sales cycle, you’ll be speaking with your prospects frequently. You can’t lie, and you need to sweat the details.

Be realistic about what your product can do and where your solution will alleviate customer pain. You’ll be more likely to garner repeat business.

4. Talk about your competitors.

Today, technology is homogeneous. Many companies offer similar software solutions, giving customers a wide range of options to choose from.

Be sure to discuss what makes your team different from competitors. The real differentiators are culture, company, and your ability to solve problems. Don’t be afraid to leverage the unique values that set your team apart.

Remember, your product demonstration is an end-all, be-all — everything you do before and after matters.

5. Personalize your solutions.

Today, 62% of consumers expect personalization from the brands they work with, according to Twilio. Those who fail to deliver will lose customers. Further, 49% of respondents in the same study said they would become repeat buyers if personalization is offered.

Make sure everything about your product, and the process you use to sell it, has a personal touch. Your emails should be addressed to the buyer. Your solution should be tailored to that prospect’s specific business needs.

You have to ask pertinent questions that pull out relevant information and make 100% sure you understand your prospect’s situation before you begin making any sort of recommendation.

6. Try the Negative Reverse Selling strategy.

If a prospect keeps ghosting your meetings, won't answer your calls, and isn't opening your emails, it might be time to get honest with them and hope for honesty in return. That’s where the Negative Reverse Selling strategy comes in.

Negative Reverse Selling is a tactic developed by David H. Sandler in 1967 as a part of his selling system. When using this technique, sales representatives make the prospect feel like they’re the one pursuing the deal.

The sales rep convinces the prospect that the prospect’s business desperately needs your. The prospect almost forgets that they’re being sold to.

To use this tactic, here’s what to do:

• Discuss your prospect’s business and pain points in depth.
• Ask plenty of questions to determine the root of customer pain.
• Once you have a comprehensive understanding of the person’s problem, explain how your solution can solve it.

Remember to focus on what your team can do to improve your customers’ lives. This helps the interaction feel less like a traditional sales transaction.

7. Take the time to understand your customer.

Landing a one-call close is a huge rush and seems like a quick win. But if you’re just paying attention to the short term, you may miss huge warning signs that your prospect won’t be a good customer.

Instead of speeding ahead to close a deal, take the time to really understand your customer’s needs and expectations. Delve deeper into your prospect’s situation so they’re completely informed about their decision.

Best-fit, informed customers won’t churn out of your customer base in a few months.

8. Focus on building relationships.

Not every interaction you have as a rep should be geared toward closing a sale. Networking with potential customers can help you foster deeper connections. You can then sell to them when the time is right or use their insights to improve your offering.

LinkedIn is a valuable online tool for relationship building. Find people who might be a great fit for your product. Then, send a personalized connection request. You can take a look at their posts and keep track of the promotion. If you notice their needs align with what you sell, you can follow up with an offer.

In-person events are another way to forge these relationships. Not only will you connect with potential future customers, you can assess industry trends that can help you improve your offering.

9. Develop a strong social media presence.

Social media is more than a distraction. These platforms are powerful tools for closing sales. Today, 61% of organizations engaged in social selling report revenue growth. In fact, sales professionals with a strong social selling index on LinkedIn have 45% more sales opportunities than those who don’t.

Use social media to build awareness of your product and services. If you are not on LinkedIn, TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, or Snapchat, then it's time to join the conversation.

10. Lean on your marketing team.

Alignment between your sales and marketing team is a key driver of success. Organizations that have robust alignment can see 20% growth annually. So remember, you’re only as good as your marketing department.

If you don’t have relationships with your marketing team, start by finding three marketers and connecting over coffee (virtual and in person). Share common pain points you hear from customers and ask for marketing collateral that they have related to these issues.

This should be the start of an ongoing relationship. Your departments should collaborate regularly. Bring the marketing team ideas for ebooks or blog posts that would help you in your sales process. Marketing can help you hit your number, but they need your help to do so.

11. Diversify where your leads come from.

If you’re doing all of your prospecting on LinkedIn or at in-person conferences, you’re missing out on huge swaths of potential customers.

Call your cousin and ask who at their company is responsible for the business area relating to your product. Call your closed-lost accounts from 2021. Go to a networking event and give out your business card while asking how you can help.

Above all: Make sure you’re looking for leads in multiple places.

12. Use an automated meeting scheduler.

Image Source

Scheduling a meeting over email often leads to an unnecessarily long thread of messages. An automated meeting booking app can save you from the back and forth.

You can also use HubSpot Sales to improve the meeting scheduling process. Your prospects just have to choose an available time on your calendar that works for them. Then, they’ll receive automatic confirmation of the meeting.

13. Always be learning.

As a sales professional, the information you need to be successful is always changing. You need product knowledge, sales knowledge, and customer knowledge to get the right results.

Ask your manager to review your calls and ask for ways to improve. It’s important to stay in a growth mindset and seek new information and skills constantly. Read blogs or go to industry events to learn about new trends.

You can also take the HubSpot inbound sales certification to teach yourself inbound selling concepts and learn how to apply them to your own sales process.

Image Source

14. Sell with a team.

Team selling always wins. If you are missing your numbers, or even if you’re just looking to level up, a team approach can help you grow.

See if your manager can join you for sales calls and give you tangible tips for improvement. You can also work with a sales coach who can share some of their tried-and-true best practices.

Then, get a sales mentor and meet regularly. Find someone who might be a bit further in their career and has shown a consistent approach to exceeding their numbers. You can both discuss ways to improve and how to advance your career.

15. Prioritize work-life balance.

Tired of the hustle culture? Most of us are. It's not sustainable to grind for 14 hours a day, seven days a week. It's important to have grit, but it's equally important to have balance.

Stay pumped up by getting enough sleep, eating a balanced diet, and surrounding yourself with good people. Take care of yourself — if you keep yourself healthy by exercising, staying motivated, and keeping your brain engaged, you'll be happier — and ultimately perform better.

16. Find creative ways to network.

Going to trade shows and setting up a booth is only one way to network. You’ll need to find new, creative ways to promote your product and yourself.

You should be reaching out to prospects on LinkedIn and other social media. However, you’ll also want to build your own brand and become a thought leader they trust. Consider writing blog posts, starting a podcast, or hosting webinars. This way you can grow your network and your credibility.

17. Have a thoughtful LinkedIn strategy.

Just because you have a distant, third-degree connection doesn't mean they're a qualified prospect. Instead, become part of pertinent groups on LinkedIn. Comment on and share articles in your feed.

Keep an eye out on what your prospects post and engage where relevant. Be sure to reach out only once you've made a meaningful, non-creepy connection.

A good rule of thumb for LinkedIn outreach? Always respond in kind.

For example, if a prospect "likes" an article you shared in an industry group, don't immediately send them a direct message asking for a phone call. Instead, reply to the article thread by thanking them for reading your article.

This might not be the fastest way to move leads along, but it will be far more successful than pushing a relationship before they’re ready.

18. Tailor your sales process.

Expecting every prospect to react the same way throughout your sales process is unrealistic. You might have prospects ready to sign on the dotted line halfway through your discovery call and others who need to talk to your lead engineer, their lawyer, and five executives before they're ready to buy.

Be flexible in your approach to each account, learn how to read the signs, and determine the next steps for any prospect you're working with.

Be sure to ask your prospect who needs to be involved in the buying process and how they prefer to communicate. This will give you a sense of how to keep in touch, who to connect with, and when to reach out.

19. Find the right call cadence.

If you call a prospect three times in a day and send two follow-up emails, you're coming on too strong. Don't assume your prospects are viewing your relentless "spirit" as admirable or a sign of dedication and hard work.

Finding the right call cadence is an important milestone for a salesperson and the team they work in. Here's what sales expert Jeff Hoffman recommends for a cadence that won't be off-putting for your prospect:

• Day 0: First touchpoint.
• Day 14: Second touchpoint.
• Day 21: Third touchpoint.
• Day 25: Fourth touchpoint.
• Day 27: Fifth touchpoint.
• Day 28: Sixth touchpoint.
• Day 29: (in the morning): Seventh touchpoint.
• Day 29: (in the afternoon): Eighth touchpoint.

20. Share your successes with your team.

The days of furtively clawing your way to the top of the leaderboard and staying there by keeping your most successful strategies to yourself are long gone.

Team selling is the way to get ahead at your company and close more deals. Whether you're a sales leader or a new rep, seek out your teammate’s tips and advice, and share the tactics you find most successful.

If a rep on your team has a call strategy that repeatedly solves a problem that your team gets a lot of, make her strategy an institutionalized part of your sales process and have her lead the training to the other reps.

Building Your Sales Strategy

There’s no one set of tactics that will work perfectly in every sales organization. That’s why it's essential to experience. Start testing these sales tactics today, and see what works in your organization. From there, you can incorporate the most successful ones into your strategy.

Guest author Christopher Lochhead is a cofounding partner of Play Bigger Advisors. He wrote this post with his partners Al Ramadan and Dave Peterson.

In mid-December, Atlassian pulled off a successful tech IPO and is now enjoying a $5.5 billion market capitalization. The software company founded by Australian entrepreneurs Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar has become Silicon Valley’s hot company of the moment. Some are speculating that their success is a sign of good things in 2016 for other young, hot tech companies with IPO dreams.

This raises a question, though: What makes one company hot and another, well, not? By any measure, it appears that Atlassian has built great products, a solid business model and is executing well. But so do a lot of companies.

Taking A Company's Temperature

Wall Street analyst Jason Carlamere had this to say about Atlassian's IPO on Seeking Alpha:

The growth of software applications across every aspect of technology is constantly expanding, which in turn supports the growing software engineering industry. As the industry grows the need for collaboration tools increase, which will benefit [Atlassian] if market share can [be] solidified.

In other words, Atlassian is in a new, growing category and it looks like it will be the king. That's what counts in measuring a company's hotness.

Why Yahoo Can't Warm Up

Brett Sappington, director of research for Parks Associates, recently told CNET, “At one point, AOL and Yahoo seemed like they were the Internet."  

That was when being a Web portal was the thing to be. Google redesigned the category and convinced users and advertisers to shift from portals to search. As the portal space went cold, Yahoo got hypothermia. 

Now Yahoo has a category problem. As analysts and press debate whether Marissa Mayer should stay or go, we think the more relevant question is, can Yahoo find a hot category to dominate? Mayer seems to think there's space Yahoo can stake out in mobile search—but plenty of others, including Apple, Google, and Facebook, are eyeing the same territory.

Owning The Category

Facebook is the most valuable technology company created since the turn of the century, with $288 billion in market cap. The Motley Fool recently declared Facebook "the big winner" in the shift to online advertising. 

So how did Mark Zuckerberg do it? Did Facebook build great products, a great business model, and scale like mad?

Yes, it did. But it also created a giant new category of Web service that is now loved by over one billion users and countless advertisers. Because Facebook made the category of social networking red-hot, Facebook is red-hot.

In 1999, Michael Dell was the toast of the tech industry, selling PCs, laptops, and servers directly to customers over the phone and on the Web. Today, the company is struggling. It had to take itself private to stop a constant stream of carping from shareholders. Now it is borrowing $40 billion to complete a hail Mary pass of a deal to acquire EMC. 

Dell still sells PCs, laptops, and servers directly to customers over the phone and the Web and it still has the same CEO that everyone used to love. What changed? 

A category crisis. The market categories it led in got whacked when smartphones, tablets, and virtualization took off and the market shifted. As analysts and press debate whether the merger will work, just like Yahoo, we think the more relevant question is, can a combined Dell and EMC find hot new categories to dominate? Because just selling existing products in existing categories cheaply and efficiently isn't cutting it anymore.

The Power Of The New

Companies that are considered hot create something new. They give us new ways of living, thinking or doing business, many times solving a problem we didn’t know we had—or a problem we didn’t pay attention to because we never imagined there was another way. They design a new product, a new market category, and new ways of doing business at the same time.

Think Facebook, Google, Salesforce, Uber, VMware, Netflix, and Palo Alto Networks.

What do these companies have in common? These companies don’t only invent something to sell us. They introduce the world to a new category of product or service. And when the category takes off, it takes the company with it. That’s why the category is the arbiter of whether a company is hot or not.

Photo by Aundray

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Social-sharing and scheduling tool Buffer has acquired fellow California-based company Respondly, a startup launched in 2014 by Favstar founder Tim Haines. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

This acquisition sees Buffer broaden its reach beyond social media publishing and into customer service, marking a notable evolution for the company.

Buffer’s raised around $4 million in funding since its inception in 2010, and the startup has built a solid reputation for its easy-to-use social sharing tool that lets you schedule messages to post at preset times throughout a day, in addition to other publishing tools and analytics.

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From VentureBeat

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With almost $2 million in funding to date, Respondly is a customer service tool for companies that use Twitter to deal with queries and complaints — it lets managers assign tweets to team members to respond to, and collates replies and mentions to ensure that nothing gets buried in the Twitter noise. The tool is used by some notable companies, including Slack, WordPress.com, and Stripe.

Effectively, this move pulls together the social publishing tools of Buffer with the customer service-focused Respondly to create an all-encompassing product for marketers.

“It’s been in the cards a while, for Buffer to expand our products and offer a more complete product to marketers and community managers around the world,” Buffer cofounder and COO Leo Widrich explained to VentureBeat. “We’d love to build out Respond as the essential social media and customer service monitoring tool that’s also affordable to a large customer base, similar to what we’ve done with Buffer itself.”

The move by Buffer is particularly notable at a time when bigger social platforms are diving into the customer service realm. Facebook recently launched Messenger as a platform for businesses, and the vision is very much to be the default support tool connecting customers with companies.

In the broader social sphere, there are many players such as HootSuite that are used for publishing and managing customer support. But Widrich sees an opportunity for his company to build a holistic tool that’s able to cope with the speed of social media.

“We feel that most products in the market right now around customer service don’t quite resonate with the fast-paced trend of Twitter, Facebook, and the like, and we’re excited to build on top of Respondly to build the kind of experience we feel is needed to create incredible and prompt customer service,” said Widrich.

And this gives a hint as to what’s on the roadmap for Respondly — Widrich confirmed that it plans to expand the service to include Facebook and email too, creating a central repository of customer support communications.

Though Respondly has only been in business for a little more than a year, it’s clear that it sees more sense in joining an established company that offers a complementary service, a move that could make it more appealing to a broader customer base.

“The next step for Respondly’s growth is figuring out how to get it into as many hands as possible, and for us, partnering with a larger company like Buffer has a tremendous upside for quickly expanding Respondly’s impact,” said Haines.

As part of the deal, Haines will be stepping down and won’t be directly involved in either company moving forward. The respective teams will remain separate entities, too.

From today, Respondly won’t be accepting any new signups through its existing Respond.ly portal. All new customers can apply for beta invites for the new product on Buffer, with the rebranded “Respond” expected to open for business in January, after which Buffer said it hopes it can transition old users over “one by one” throughout 2016.

The mobile revolution has been the catalyst behind a shift in how people access the internet as well as user behaviors. From Millennials and digital natives who do everything from their mobile devices, to holiday shoppers using their mobile devices to do their research and find coupons, mobile has enabled people to take the Web with them everywhere they go.

An infographic from social sharing and analytics provider AddThis provides insights into the shifting behaviors of internet users in 2015. And despite evidence that the smartphone market is slowing, it seems mobile is still taking over.

According to AddThis, mobile now accounts for more than half of all internet users worldwide. However, there are still some countries where people are more likely to use a desktop computer to access the internet including the U.S., Iceland and Cuba. Countries that over-indexed against the global baseline for mobile preference included Iraq, Syria, and Myanmar.

Accounting for 62 percent of daily shares, most social sharing still happens on desktop devices. However, mobile represents 38 percent of daily social shares, according to AddThis data, a 32 percent increase over 2014 data.

To see what kind of content is more likely to be shared from mobile or desktop and in what regions, check out the infographic below.

Top image courtesy of Shutterstock.

 

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has had almost two months since his election win to craft a sensible response to the question of why he’s withdrawing Canada’s CF-18s (and possibly other aircraft) from the combat mission against the so-called Islamic State. He hasn’t come up with one yet, and didn’t again Wednesday when asked by a member of the public at the Maclean’s Town Hall in Ottawa.

You almost want to sympathize with the guy, because his position—by its own logic—is shot through with contradictions.

Islamic State, he says, must be confronted, including militarily, and Canada must play a role in the fight against it. “The question that we have to ask ourselves, as a government and as a country,” he said during the Maclean’s Town Hall, “is how best can we help.”

Trudeau suggested that training local forces to take the fight to Islamic State is the answer. This is a skill, he said, that Canadian troops honed during 10 years in Afghanistan.

Fair enough, although training is hardly the only thing Canadians did over there. But there’s a strange implication here that Canada can’t do both: bomb Islamic State and train local forces. This, of course, is what Canada has been doing for more than a year. Trudeau added: “We know that Western armies engaged in combat is not necessarily the way to solve the challenges in the Middle East.”

This is a popular trope, but in this case it’s irrelevant. No one is suggesting Canada send an infantry battalion to the frontlines in Syria. The question Trudeau was asked is why he’s pulling out the fighter jets.

Maybe Trudeau also thinks airstrikes are ineffective. Evidence on the ground suggests otherwise. Islamic State has been stopped and in places pushed back as a result of coalition warplanes, including Canadian ones, coordinating their airstrikes with local forces on the ground.

But if this is what Trudeau thinks, let him say so clearly. Let him make the case that the air campaign isn’t working. It certainly has not been sufficient, but to argue that it’s not doing much good would require Trudeau to marshal evidence and rhetorical skills he has not yet deployed.

For that matter, if engaging in combat is not a productive way for Western nations to “solve the challenges in the Middle East,” as Trudeau says, why is he continuing with a “training” mission that involves Canadian soldiers calling in airstrikes and, on more than one occasion, shooting at Islamic State fighters on the frontlines?

It also appears that Trudeau will keep Canada’s refuelling and surveillance aircraft in the coalition.

This is noteworthy. During the election campaign, I asked Trudeau’s spokesman, Dan Lauzon, whether, if elected, Trudeau would withdraw those planes as well as the CF-18s.

“A Liberal government would transition away from all aspects of the combat air mission to re-focus our military role on training,” he responded by email.

This seemed to me to be leaving some wiggle room, so I wrote back:

“Thanks, Dan. I’m sorry for being redundant, but I want to be crystal clear. Would the surveillance and refuelling planes be withdrawn? I just want to be sure that your statement isn’t intended to be leaving grey areas in which those planes would continue to operate.”

Lauzon’s complete response: “Hi Michael — All aspects of the combat mission.”

Now, it’s possible Lauzon was being deceptive—not telling a bald-faced lie, a particularly brazen lawyer might argue, but engaging in deception all the same. If that’s the case, Trudeau should probably not make further claims about running an open and transparent government.

But let’s give Trudeau the benefit of the doubt and assume he did in fact intend to pull out the surveillance and refuelling planes, but will now keep them flying because he recognizes they’re doing good work.

The good work they’re doing is combat. Those planes aren’t dropping bombs. But how is finding targets and relaying that information to allied planes who then drop bombs on them any less combat-related than if Canadian pilots were to continue dropping the bombs themselves?

This is where the contradictions in Trudeau’s policy on fighting Islamic State really get messy—because despite panning a combat role for Western militaries in the Middle East, and despite plans to withdraw Canadian warplanes from the fight against Islamic State, he’s also admitted the coalition’s bombing mission is effective. Asked by the BBC last month to clarify that he’s not against bombing Islamic State, Trudeau replied: “Indeed.”

So now we’re left with a hodgepodge of statements and positions from Trudeau that don’t add up to a coherent policy:

–       Canada’s armed forces do an extraordinary job of whatever they’re asked to do.

–       There are things we can do better than drop bombs.

–       Bombing isn’t an effective way for Western nations to solve problems in the Middle East.

–       I’m not against bombing Islamic State.

–       We will transition from combat to training (even though Canada is clearly capable of doing both).

One final thing: In the Maclean’s Town Hall, Trudeau pointed out that U.S. President Barack Obama hasn’t asked him to keep the CF-18s flying.

Obama hasn’t asked, because he doesn’t want to embarrass Trudeau. The reciprocal courtesy is for Trudeau not to imply the absence of that request means Obama doesn’t want Canada to keep its CF-18s in the air over Iraq and Syria. He does—as do the leaders of Britain, France and other allied countries. If Trudeau isn’t careful, one of them might say so publicly.

The post Why Trudeau is lost on the Middle East appeared first on Macleans.ca.

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VB INSIGHT:

We can’t say it enough. Email marketing remains the leading channel for marketer ROI and is the preferred channel for customers to hear from their favorite brands. According to recent VB Insight research, personalized messaging is the leading indicator as to why email is so successful. And that’s exactly why some of the biggest email service providers (ESPs) could be in big trouble.

More targeted emails inherently means less emails. This is problematic when many large traditional ESPs structure their huge enterprise contracts to get paid on email volume.

I caught up with VB Insight analyst Andrew Jones, who authored a recent research report on email personalization. I asked him how traditional ESPs might hope to innovate in the future to counter this trend. “Part of personalization is knowing when NOT to email someone, and maybe engage them in another channel. That doesn’t play well into the traditional ESP pricing model. But there are plenty of other ways to make the email you do send more relevant. ESPs would be smart to begin by focusing there — with better data management, segmentation capabilities, trigger-based campaigns, dynamic content formatting, etc.,” he said.

ESPs may have to move quickly as well. In a related VB Insight survey of over 500 marketers, four in five were already doing some sort of email personalization.

To be fair, many ESPs have been adding more automation capabilities to address markets’ needs. For example, ExactTarget bought Pardot (before being acquired by Salesforce), StrongMail added campaign and cross-channel management features and rebranded as StrongView (recently acquired by HGGC), and MailChimp continues to add automation capabilities. With this being said, it will be difficult to continue using email as a blunt instrument. And multiyear, volume-incentivized contracts may be a thing of the past.

I asked Jones if he was surprised that most companies aren’t more advanced in using personalization tactics, despite the tools being readily available. “I liken it to the blind men around the elephant. The whole elephant is right there in front of you, but if you only look at one part at a time, your sense of reality can be very off. That’s the reality for many marketers today. But it’s changing rapidly.”

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From VentureBeat

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That rapid change means traditional email providers are going to be forced to behave more like marketing automation platforms.

Marketing automation platforms can store personally identifiable information (PII) for each individual, with segmentation and data management built right in to facilitate the design of single or multi-channel campaigns. As a result, email marketers won’t have to ask for data, because they will already have at least most of what they need within the platform.

In short, marketing automation makes email (and other channels) more efficient — and as a result, email marketers must evolve or face extinction.

More information:

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This was the year when tech companies turned their backs on the initial-public-offering market.

Investment bankers are expecting 2016 to be the year they come back.

Presented with an abundance of funding in the private markets and a volatile stock market that made closing IPOs much harder, many companies that would otherwise have hit the stock market chose not to this year.

CB Insights, which tracks private-market financing, says 190 tech companies it tracks raised a total of $25 billion this year from venture-capital firms and other investors.

That's way more than companies raised in the public market. Just 28 companies turned to tech IPOs this year, raising $9.4 billion, according to Dealogic. That's down from 62 deals valued at nearly $41 billion last year (which includes Alibaba Group's monster $25 billion IPO).

Perhaps the most hotly anticipated public offerings never to happen this year were those of Uber and Spotify. Uber announced it was raising another $2 billion at a $62.5 billion valuation earlier this month, and Spotify raised $526 million on an $8.5 billion valuation over the summer.

But the pendulum may start to swing back, in part because private-market valuations have begun to wobble for the first time in a long while.

"People haven't focused on the fact that private companies valuations can go up or down, because it had only really gone one direction," Noah Wintroub, an investment banking vice chairman at JPMorgan who focuses on internet and digital media, told Business Insider.

For years, companies like Uber, Airbnb, Snapchat, and Square were able to raise funds at higher and higher valuations.

Then in November, Fidelity Investments wrote down the value of its stake in Snapchat by 25%. If that sort of thing becomes more commonplace, companies may start to feel that one of the benefits of staying private has gone away, and early investors may look for exits from the more traditional route.

Lofty valuations

In the public world, the lofty private valuations may not hold up.

Some companies in 2015 went public at down rounds, meaning their IPO prices were lower than their valuations at their last round of private funding.

The highest-profile of these is the digital-payments company Square, whose IPO valuation was even lower than that of its second-to-last round of funding.

Box and Apigee are among other companies with down-round IPOs this year.

"We are in the middle of shaking out what exactly the private capital markets mean for disruptive companies — and if they're really good markets to provide liquidity as companies scale and grow," Wintroub said.

The fact that a high-profile startup like Square has traded relatively well since its IPO, however, could signal to other startups that it's OK to go public at down rounds.

So we could see a wave of tech companies go public, albeit at lower valuations than they might have anticipated a few years ago.

"It definitely gives people pause when they start to see a correction in the private market," said David Wah, Credit Suisse' global cohead of technology, media, and telecom banking. "When people find that valuations in the private market start to become more measured, you will see many companies turn to the public market."

The public markets are seen as healthier for companies than the private markets because of the discipline they provide. Public companies must report earnings on a quarterly basis and are held more accountable to investors than companies in the private market.

The public markets also provide liquidity more easily. When private companies want to raise money, on the other hand, they must convince investors that they are equally or more valuable than they were the most recent time they raised capital.

All the more reason for those companies to consider going public next year.

Calming markets

The second factor holding IPOs back in 2015 was market volatility, which can spook investors, who end up demanding lower valuations.

That was the explanation for Square's IPO pricing lower than expected, and it also prompted numerous companies to withdraw their IPOs this fall, including the computer-module maker Congatec and the telecom company Digicel.

But the New York Stock Exchange's global head of capital markets, Garvis Toler, is hopeful that will change in 2016. The NYSE hosted eight of the top 10 tech IPOs this year, including First Data, Fitbit, Pure Storage, Square, Box, and Shopify. Toler hopes to see many more tech deals next year.

"One of the reasons why we've had high volatility has been uncertainty around what the Fed is going to do and the timing of that. So I think as that settles out you'll see companies become a lot more comfortable," Toler told Business Insider.

He is referring to the Federal Reserve's decision on Wednesday to begin raising interest rates for the first time in nine years. There is no modern historical precedent for exiting a zero-rate environment, and the Fed moves could lead to heightened volatility in equities.

But with time, and with a clear message from the Fed, that volatility could ease up in 2016.

"A lot of companies that I certainly hear about and talk to that are probably good candidates for IPO and probably do want to go public — it's really some of this volatility and overhang that's preventing them from doing so," Toler said.

Toler expects to see more IPOs in the second half of the year in the financial technology, enterprise, and cloud-based application spaces.

"There's tons of companies watching very closely," he said.

DON'T MISS: Why Square could be a game changer for tech IPOs

SEE ALSO: Exploding startup valuations are changing how Wall Street banks work with tech companies

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Apple wants to replace the iPhone with this advanced technology

This three-part series on the sales management process began with Part I: Why Sales Leaders Need to Craft and Control It and Part II: Team Cadence Builds Accountability and Results. Now, I’ll address the remaining, critical element of communicating upward by scheduling one-on-one reviews with senior leaders.

There are many reasons for maintaining regular and scheduled one-on-one meetings with your senior leader. Within the hierarchy of your organization, your leader is an essential link to the next higher levels of management, often to the C-suite itself. Rule of thumb is to never surprise your boss, positively or negatively; but, beyond that guidance, you need to keep them informed of your plans, your progress, and how you are addressing any challenges. Think of your leader as your champion, representing your work and value to higher levels of the organization. At the same time, your leader is your conduit to those higher levels, funneling key information from above and providing key updates on initiatives back to you.

One-on-one meetings allow you to have a consistent touch point in which you can convey the status of each component involved in the sales management process. Your updates should be comprehensive, spanning what your team has accomplished since the last meeting, pipeline results, and activities underway that will lead to future results and provide value.

Meetings provide a framework to discuss how you are managing your team, what your people do, where they are focusing their energies, and the progression or obstacles facing opportunities in the pipeline. You should discuss your strategy, what you are doing in account planning and why, and the kind of impact that you are seeing as a result.

Your direct leader should leave these meetings with a clear understanding of the workings of your team while leaving you with worthwhile feedback and coaching to improve the overall effort.

Another important senior audience to meet with regularly, and individually, is the functional leaders within the organization: Operations, Contracts, Marketing, Project Implementation, New Business Development, Consulting, or whichever departments or functions form the basis of your company’s organization.

Collaborating with these leaders allows you to gain greater insights into the impact that you make and future opportunities. In reviewing current and upcoming projects, you can solicit feedback and gain a broader perspective from that leader’s functional space. You may also uncover opportunities to work together or to support one another’s work in new ways. As much as you need to convey your goals and strategies, you also need to understand what your colleagues are driving toward in their areas. Then, you can bring these insights back to your team and incorporate them into your strategy.

The key to a successful sales management process is communication — with your sales professionals, sales leaders, and functional leaders across the company. The ultimate goal is to establish a consistent and collaborative platform that supports the ongoing sharing of information and insights, keeping everyone in the loop, and recognizing those who demonstrate the right behaviors to have the desired impact on sales success.

Learn more about our Sales Management Process Development and Consulting.

The post Sales Leaders and Their Leaders appeared first on Richardson Sales Enablement Blog.

Dollar Shave Club, with its reported two million members, may be the clear leader in the emerging men's razor subscription service market, but younger New York startup Harry's is catching up quickly; and it's doing it with far less spending on traditional advertising.

Since launching in March 2013, Harry's has focused on a selective and efficient influencer model as opposed to using their capital to catch as many eyeballs as possible.

Harry's says it has reached well over a million total online customers (defined as people who have purchased at least one item) and is approaching one million subscribers, while maintaining a 60% retention rate among customers who started receiving Harry's razors in the mail every month or every few months.

"The way we think about [marketing] is that we introduce the brand to people through a credible source," cofounder and co-CEO Jeff Raider said. "So the best form of advertising is you trying Harry's, liking it, and then you telling your friends about it. And that always has been, since the moment we launched."

When Raider and his cofounder and co-CEO Andy Katz-Mayfield were developing the company pre-launch in 2012, pharmacy brands like Gillette and Schick dominated the industry due to decades of brand awareness and trust, and Dollar Shave Club began slowly acquiring momentum since launching the previous year.

Dollar Shave Club was going the traditional disrupter path of offering a sufficient alternative to mainstays that was cheaper and more convenient. The company's added value, however, was only its service, since the razors it sells are manufactured by the brand Dorco and available elsewhere at a slightly lower price.

Harry's, with eight razor blades retailing for $15, would have prices comparable to Dollar Shave Club's premium offering but be of notably higher quality. Raider and Katz-Mayfield determined that the way to achieve this would be to become vertically integrated, manufacturing all of their own products rather than reselling others and owning all means of distribution.

The founders' outreach focus would be, and still is, "telling guys everywhere that there is finally an option that they can be proud of" that's "at a price they feel really good about."

As Raider explained in a 2014 guest post on author and investor Tim Ferriss' blog, their pre-launch strategy focused on building brand awareness through social media teasers that compelled viewers to register their emails for Harry's updates and get their friends to do the same through tiered rewards. If a person got 50 friends to sign up, he'd win a year of free shaving — more than 200 people reached that goal. On launch day, Harry's was able to send an announcement to each of the 100,000 emails it had collected in one week.

Additionally, Raider told Business Insider, Harry's team "sent the products to hundreds of people, ranging from family to friends to highly discerning grooming editors at major magazines. We wrote personal notes to each and were so excited to share the brand with them." For example, GQ's style editors enjoyed Harry's aesthetics and performance and wrote a positive review in their magazine, which drove sales.

Even Raider's guest post on Ferriss' blog, with a supportive introduction from Ferriss himself, was a strong source of traffic to Harry's site due to its personalized tone and seal of approval from Ferriss to his hundreds of thousands of loyal readers.

Over the past couple years, Harry's has been a regular podcast advertiser, but its marketing team tries to make partnerships that will sound as authentic as possible.

"When we think about working with a new media partner, we send the hosts products to try out," Raider said. "We feel that it's really important for them use our product. If both parties feel like it's a good fit, we will move forward with a sponsorship, and we ask them to organically describe their personal experience with Harry's on-air."

Harry's main advantage is that it can promote having superior products and good value due to its business model. It has raised a total of $287.1 million at a valuation of $750 million, and used more than $100 million of that to acquire a German razor factory last year. Raider and Katz-Mayfield said they are using their money to further develop the factory and improve their products while maintaining their affordable prices.

They think in the long term their strategy can continue to win customers from the big guys like Gillette and trump Dollar Shave Club's expensive advertising push.

"Our biggest challenge is just awareness," Raider said. "If you surveyed the whole US population, a very small percentage of people know that Harry's exists, what Harry's is and what it stands for. ... So I think as we get older as a business and a company and have more customers who tell more people about us, word spreads, and that's naturally led to acceleration of our growth, which has been exciting."

SEE ALSO: The cofounders of a $750 million startup explain why they decided to have 2 CEOs

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Meet the founders of Warby Parker, the eyewear company disrupting the highly secretive Luxottica monopoly

The "secret" to getting rich is not much of a secret at all.

"It is practical. That which one man knows can be taught to others," George S. Clason writes in his 1926 personal finance classic "The Richest Man in Babylon."

Clason's collection of parables, based in the ancient city of Babylon, starts with the story of Arkad — the son of a humble merchant, of a large family with no hope of inheritance — who grows to become the richest man in Babylon, thanks to wisdom he sought out from a rich money lender named Algamish.

In hopes of turning his city into the wealthiest in the world, the King of Babylon asks Arkad if he can share the "secret to wealth" with the rest of the city. Arkad complies, and over the course of seven days, teaches a class of 100 men what he calls the "seven cures for a lean purse."

SEE ALSO: The single most effective way to get rich, according to a 90-year-old personal-finance classic

1. 'Start thy purse to fattening.'

Getting rich all begins with paying yourself first. More specifically, set aside a minimum of 10% of your earnings, Arkad advises: "For every ten coins thou placest within thy purse take out for use but nine. Thy purse will start to fatten at once and its increasing weight will feel good in thy hand and bring satisfaction to they soul."

Anyone — rich or poor — can put money aside and let it accumulate, Arkad assures his class. You just have to commit to setting aside a minimum of 10%, and you'll learn to live without it.

Today, it's even easier to learn to live without a certain chunk of your income, thanks to technology. You can automatically deposit money from your paycheck and checking account into a retirement account, savings account, or other investment vehicle, removing the temptation to spend. If you never see it, you'll learn to live without it.

"I, too, carried a lean purse and cursed it because there was naught within to satisfy my desires," the richest man in Babylon explains to his class. "But when I began to take out from my purse but nine parts of ten I put in, it began to fatten. So will thine."

2. 'Control thy expenditures.'

The next step is to simply spend less than you earn, which is easier said than done. Our consumer-driven society makes it incredibly easy to overspend — and what's more, when income increases, people have a tendency to boost their spending. It's called "lifestyle inflation."

"What each of us calls our 'necessary expenses' will always grow to equal our incomes unless we protest to the contrary," Arkad explains. "Confuse not the necessary expenses with thy desires."

To control your expenses, you have to become a conscious spender and recognize where your money is going. A good starting point is to record all of your purchases (whether in a notebook, through an app like Mint, or on an Excel spreadsheet) and analyze your spending patterns.

"Study thoughtfully thy accustomed habits of living," Arkad says. "Let thy motto be one hundred per cent of appreciated value demanded for each coin spent." Even if you're well on your way to accumulating a fortune, the habit of living below your means still applies. There are a surprising number of frugal billionaires who choose to save or give to charity, rather than drop their money on jets, yachts, and mansions.

3. 'Make thy gold multiply.'

Once you've made a habit out of controlling your expenses and setting aside at least 10% of your income, put that money to work.

"The gold we may retain from our earnings is but the start," says Arkad. "The earnings it will make shall build our fortunes ... Learn to make your treasure work for you. Make it your slave. Make its children and its children's children work for you."

Making your money your "slave" is the modern-day equivalent to smart investing through your employer's 401(k) plan or other retirement accounts, such as a Roth IRA or traditional IRA. Thanks to compound interest, your savings can grow tremendously over time — the trick is to set aside money regularly and to start as early as possible.

"Behold, from my humble earnings I had begotten a hoard of golden slaves, each laboring and earning more gold," explains Arkad. "As they labored for me, so their children also labored and their children's children until great was the income from their combined efforts."

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

First contact resolution (FCR) is a widely used measurement for how well a company is meeting customer expectations. In theory it measures both efficiency and effectiveness of a support team by calculating the number of requests or issues that were resolved in a single contact. The idea of course is that if the customer only has to contact you once to get their issue resolved, then they will be satisfied.

The problem lies in the execution of this standard. There are several reasons a high FCR rate is not always a good measure of support success:

B2B support is more complicated

In B2B (business to business) support, customer requests are often more complicated and therefore take longer to resolve. Business users also tend to be more technically advanced, so by the time they reach out to your support team they’ve likely exhausted all the usual suspects. This means that aiming to resolve the issue in a single contact is not only unrealistic, but potentially harmful to the customer relationship.

FCR emphasizes the wrong goals

Setting goals based on FCR may actually encourage bad behavior – support agents will be working to close the ticket as quickly as possible, often at the expense of addressing customer concerns fully and accurately. As strange as it may sound it is actually far more important to resolve customer issues accurately than it is to solve them quickly, especially in B2B customer support. Of course the ultimate is to do both, but that isn’t always possible.

It can provide an inaccurate measurement

Many companies measure FCR based only on personal interactions with an agent, and don’t take into account any self-service options accessed prior to these. So if a customer looks on your website, and checks the knowledgebase, and gets frustrated that they can’t find an answer so they call support – that is not a first contact. Their first contact was the website, and the phone call was a 3^rd contact. Odds are good this will not be a satisfied customer, but if you only measure the outcome of the phone call the results would tell you it is. To accurately measure FCR, you must make sure you are using an omni-channel support software that looks at ALL contacts as a whole. Alternatively, you can measure the two separately, but you should always measure both forms of customer support and understand that they should have different goals.

The impact of self-service

Self-service should eliminate a lot of the easier and more common issues that come through support, so if your self-service options are working then the FCR rate on other interactions (phone, email, chat) will naturally be higher. Of course your self-service FCR rate should be very high. If you measure all channels as part of your FCR, as mentioned in the previous point, your FCR will tell you if you are doing self-service right. If you measure FCR only on personal interactions with an agent, then you should expect that rate to be lower when you provide effective self-service options.

In the end, FCR is just a metric like any other. To be effective, you must understand how it works, and be clear on what you are measuring (and what behaviours you are promoting in your support team). You must also remember that, like any metric, FCR is most useful when considered in relation to other customer satisfaction metrics. True success in customer support means satisfied (happy) customers. The only true way to gage this is to ask your customers, either through customer surveys, reviews, or transactional assessments – for example asking “were you happy with the outcome of this ticket?” every time an issue is marked as resolved by your support team, and reviewing that data regularly. To learn more about First Contact Resolution, read our article on Business2Community.

How do you measure customer satisfaction? We’d love to hear from you in the comments.

To learn more about how TeamSupport can help you get the focus back on your customers where it belongs, watch our short video:

Why is LinkedIn the best social media tool for any business? Because it allows you to access the world’s professionals, a global pool of potential clients and partners. It  also helps you search and connect directly with your target audience. You can get in front of your ideal customer base, and build a relationship with them exactly where they are—on the web.

But emphasis on the word ideal. Be discriminating in making your connections, and build a network of engaged, relevant prospects and leads who care about what you have to say, and to whom you can provide real value.

So you want to spend a little time every day connecting  to people you know and people they know to build a quality network. Here are some tips on how to find the right ones:

1. Build traffic from outside. Invite others to follow you by placing your LinkedIn profile URL in your email signature and other communications to customers and prospects. You’ve already identified them as people worth communicating with, so why not nurture that relationship further on LinkedIn? Reminder to include an icon and link to your company’s LinkedIn page as well to drive views and followers to it.
2. Follow your clients and prospects. They’re on LinkedIn, using it to generate leads as well, so follow their company pages and connect with them.
3. Be clear about who your clients are.  Be upfront about who you work with and the kind of services you provide them so that it’s easier to find your ideal clients–and easier for them to find you.
4. Don’t connect with random people. Instead, search for companies and titles to narrow your criteria, the same way you’ve planned for people to search for you. Use the Advanced Search feature to further narrow down the factors that identify a target connection for you.
5. Request introductions. Ask people that you already know to connect you with contacts of theirs who would be worth knowing. LinkedIn makes this easy to do, so utilize this approach.
6. Be sure that your connection actually spends time on LinkedIn. Otherwise, you’re wasting your time on someone who isn’t engaged. 

   There are three identifying factors to help determine if someone is active on LinkedIn:

   A) Check that they have a profile picture on their profile. We’ve discussed the importance of a profile picture.  If they haven’t even put up a picture, then chances are they aren’t doing much else.

   B) See if they have more than 500 connections. 500 is a milestone; after you hit that number, your connections will forever be shown as the number 500+, whereas until that point you just have the actual number of connections—which doesn’t look good if it’s, say, 158. So a) work on that yourself, getting 500+ connections (it’s easier than you think when you expand to colleagues, past coworkers, college acquaintances, etc..) and b) use that number to judge valuable, worthwhile connections for yourself.

   C) Ensure that their profile isn’t empty. If their profile clearly hasn’t been filled in all the way, or if there hasn’t been recent activity, then it’s clear that this person hasn’t logged in a lot or isn’t updating. He might not even see your connection request!

7. Use LinkedIn groups.

We’re all for face-to-face contact, and even highly encourage it, but large scale events such as  trade shows only happen once or twice a year. You need to be doing something the rest of the year to meet your sales quota, and LinkedIn can be your single best effort in that sense. Building the right connections is an opportunity to expand your reach to the people that matter to your company.

Do you need to drive more traffic to your site, or are you more focused on creating engaging content? Whether you’re trying to generate leads, strengthen your brand, or convert consumers into customers, there are different types of content that work within each realm. From a consumer’s first encounter to their (hopefully) inevitable conversion, here are the types of content that ferry them along.

The Handshake

Whether you’re just starting your business or are trying to see what this whole “content marketing” thing is about, you’ll want to concentrate on bringing in traffic first. Actually, driving more traffic to your site is never a bad thing, so these tricks are helpful even if you’re already established. Search engine optimization is the primary way to bring traffic to your site.

When consumers search for specific terms, it’s the search engine’s job to return the most relevant and reliable results. It’s the marketer’s job to make sure your website is included in those results. One of the best ways to make search engines and consumers aware of your brand is to publish engaging content sprinkled with specific keywords. SEO has changed over the years, so stuffing a blog post full of keywords won’t work anymore.

Use keywords in a way that makes sense contextually, and use them strategically. These types of content offer great opportunities to use keywords and grab attention:

• Blog posts, specifically how-to’s and lists, are highly sharable and entertaining. They also allow enough space to use a few long-chain keywords in the body and/or headings.

• Landing pages are perfect for geo-specific keywords, which go after a targeted audience.

• Images and infographics are loved by consumers everywhere. They’re quick, sharable, and appeal to the eye. You can incorporate keywords into image tags and descriptions so the search bots will find you.

• Opinion pieces within your industry demonstrate expertise and deliver information in a narrative style. If you post opinion pieces on sites like LinkedIn or Qoura, don’t forget to link to your website.

The trick in this early stage of your relationship with consumers is to attract and engage. Content should be optimized for search engines, but should also be entertaining to explore.

Turning on the Charm

Now that you have traffic coming in, the next step is showing your visitors how wonderful you are. This is accomplished with content that educates and persuades. The content you used previously served as a handshake for your brand; it made consumers aware of your presence. It entertained them and kept you in their thoughts.

Now it’s time to woo them with your personality and expertise. During this stage, consumers are researching your products or services and comparing you with other brands. The content you publish for these consumers should deliver important data and facts. Additionally, it should deliver it with a hint of emotion. Speaking to reader’s rational and emotional sides of the brain is how you persuade them.

Content that works well for this purpose includes:

• Product demos and descriptions, which deliver hard facts about your products and services. Pair product descriptions with pricing guides for a one-two punch. Consumers can learn about your products and quickly compare them against other brands.

• Case studies tell consumers specifically how your product solves a problem. Back it up with data points and facts. This harmonizes factual information with an emotional point of view.

• Whitepapers and e-Books are similar in nature but different in length. While e-Books are in-depth, whitepapers are a bit more succinct. Either way, they both offer factual information about your company and your products or services. They also show off your vast knowledge of the industry.

• In-depth Blog posts expand your brand voice and inform your readers. The focus here is more on information and less on entertainment.

Winning Over Your Audience

The final and most important goal of content marketing is conversion. This is essentially getting consumers to do what you ask of them: buy something, subscribe, swear off all other brands for the rest of their lives… you get the picture. Strangely, many marketing campaigns don’t put enough emphasis on this stage of the funnel. If you’re seeing a lot of traffic and low conversion rates, it’s because you need to add or fix content that’s meant to convert.

Keep in mind that conversion isn’t a one-time thing. You need to repeatedly land the sale if you want to turn ordinary customers into loyal customers. To do this, you need to offer something of value in return for their ongoing patronage in addition to securing their trust. These types of content are sure to seal the deal:

• A compelling call to action. Your CTA is the most important piece of content on your website. It’s the doorway to a prosperous relationship with your customers. Make sure it clearly says what you want from your customers and what they’ll get in return. For example, offer a coupon or a discount on a product in exchange for contact information.

• Customer testimonials that brag about your products or services. Customers are more likely to be convinced of your greatness if a third party is telling them about it. Work testimonials into a narrative so they’re interesting to read.

• E-mail newsletters, hand-tailored to your audience. Newsletters build a relationship with first-time customers, encouraging them to purchase again. Newsletters showcase new products and services your audience needs. Targeting customers based on their audience profile shows them you truly understand their needs and care about their business.

Content marketing should work as a cycle. Just because a consumer has traveled through the sales funnel to become a customer doesn’t mean it stops there. Content should always be bringing in consumers, charming them, and finally winning them over.

My first tweet was underwhelming.

It had no link, was short and sweet and included just 3 words. “Watching the Cricket“. Now for some of you that will seem strange. Why was Jeff watching an insect? For those of you who live in London, India or New Zealand and other countries, they will know that “Cricket” is also something else!

When I started on Twitter my understanding was limited of what a tweets true potential could be. But an insight into social media’s addictiveness was revealed in one of my first stumbling attempts at a blog post.

That insight turned into a journey to uncover how I could make Twitter work for me as an online entrepreneur, digital marketer and a blogger.

The tweets journey

For many people the Twitter network is for making comments, observations and sharing images and something interesting or even news breaking. For many this is where it starts and stops. That is leaving a lot of tweets, traffic and attention in the bank.

So what is the real impact of a tweet?

It goes far beyond just sharing a personal insight or some news that you have may discovered. For me it has made a huge difference to my traffic, online influence and revenue. It has also opened up many global opportunities.

Below I will describe what a humble tweet can achieve once it is let loose into the wild.

This journey is not a linear but a convoluted trip that is broken by many interruptions, distraction and changing preferences.

Think of it as a backpacker on a 12 month round the world adventure. Many exciting views that stop them in their tracks, with drinks in bars and attractive distractions driven by youthful hormones. Fun for sure and often spontaneous. Sometimes sharing cocktails in a foreign land can led to a marriage proposal. It happened to me.

Any journey is about discovery and insight and and the impact of a tweet can lead from a passing interest to a purchase.

The tweets first job is to get attention

To start a conversation you first need that all important attention.

Twitter can gain that all important top of the marketing funnel brand awareness. But when it comes to the pointy end of the funnel (the sale), you need to ask “what marketing tactic got that “first click”.

The convoluted journey can start with a simple click on a tweet. You want to turn brand awareness into real business.

Twitter engagement metrics to consider

When you take a closer look at Twitter analytics there are 6 different types of engagement listed. And they are not all equal. My top 3 in order of importance are these.

1. Link clicks: This is where you want people to go. Your website or blog or maybe even a landing page
2. Retweets: Sharing is what social is all about and helps build your brand awareness and make your content move. That’s what I like to see.
3. Profile visits: Profile click is someone checking your bona fides and social proof (eg. how many followers you have). This is part of the trust and credibility building process.

The other three are nice but often don’t go beyond superficial actions.

• Detail expand is just someone taking a closer look.
• Likes are good but is a low level engagement. Nice, but not something that puts food on the table.
• Hashtag clicks are in essence a category interest on all other tweets that include that topic.

Below are 17 possible steps, actions and engagements that start with that first tweet. It is not a linear journey. Your potential prospects and customers will bounce in and out at different points.

Your challenge is to turn that first tweet into sales. Here is the journey of a simple tweet.

1. Headline attention

This is usually the first thing you see. This is often the first source of attention seeking from a tweet. Well written and crafted headlines make the difference between being ignored or creating some engagement and action.

2. Image engagement

If it isn’t the headline then it is often the image that captures the eye. This type of image below works well on Twitter and adds to the headline.

3. Sharing

After this initial engagement with the headline or the image, a decision is sometimes made to retweet without clicking the link. This is called “blind sharing”. If your online brand has created enough credibility and trust then this is not uncommon.

Many others won’t share till they have read or viewed the content. But a share is a share on a social web.

4. Website click

The goal of most tweets is just to get that initial click that drives traffic to your website or blog.

Once you have them on your turf it comes down to what do you do with that attention. Does your site have great content that backs up the promise of the tweet or does it under deliver. Do you have a pop-up on your blog or a call to action that converts traffic that you earned from a follower on Twitter into a lead. That is your email list.

5. Profile click

When people click through to your profile they are wanting to know more about you. So does your Twitter profile description impress them, possibly intriguing or just makes them yawn. The aim of your Twitter profile is to start to build that brand credibility and trust. A good friend of mine, Kim Garst does this well.

6. Liking

This was called a “favourite” in the past but this activity is a popularity and vanity metric that let’s people know it’s a cool tweet. So let’s call it a “light” engagement.

But serious commitments often start with a small action.

7. Site visit

They have clicked on your Twitter link now they are at your own online portal. You website or blog.

This is the real goal of the tweet. To move people from a rental property (social media sites) to your own digital asset. This is where the site design and optimizing is crucial. Can you move them from a fleeting visit to other small commitments?

This means pop-up and other call to action tactics and technologies.

8. Read, view or listen

Whether you are a writer, podcaster or video blogger you want people to hang around and not just read the headline and introduction but do a deeper dive. This is the role of great content. To make your blog and website such a resource that they want to come back.

9. Email subscription

If your design and website is built for conversion then you have a great chance to turn a passing visit into an ongoing conversation. Social media is a great tool to start the conversation and build brand awareness but you should not let it stop there.

Email allows that conversation to start and continue. This is the aim of Twitter to get people to that first small commitment.

10. The sale

Small email subscription commitments can lead to larger decisions. Getting them to pull out the credit card and make a purchase is the ultimate goal for an online business. It doesn’t have to be a big step but just a $7 ebook.

11. Revisits

We are all proud of our websites and blogs and we often think that everyone will love what you have to say. The reality is much different. Most people leave, never to return. That is why making sure your website converts is critical. You often only have one shot to move a visitor from just passing traffic to a loyal fan and subscriber.

12. More sharing

Getting sharing of your content on Twitter is great.

But with Twitter only having 350 million users there is more to be had on a social web. What you want is even more sharing. So make sure that the Facebook, LinkedIn and other sharing buttons are ready to make your content move to even more social networks when your visitors show up to your site from a tweet. There are over 2 billion people on social networks.

Be everywhere.

13. Inspired to write a post

If your content is so inspirational or such a valuable resource that you have motivated the reader to write about it, then you are getting serious engagement traction. This type of engagement is what all bloggers want and crave.

Motivating your readers and viewers to take serious actions.

14. Links to post

Once that post is created the author will often attribute and link to your site. This is what starts building that search engine ranking. The more organic inbound links that point to your site adds to your site authority.

That humble tweet has lead to some serious traffic from referring pages and then this leads to more traffic from search engines.

That simple 140 character tweet from months ago is now helping create free traffic from Google.

15. Lower cost Facebook advertising

Facebook re-targeting is one of the most efficient ways to get relevant advertising at minimal cost in front of potential buyers. How does the tweet help this?

The Tweet led them to your site where they read the content on a certain topic. Re-targeting then allows you to surface a Facebook Ad (that you have created), that is relevant to that topic and is also very efficient and cost effective. Relevant ad at low cost.

Boom..great conversions.

16. Networking

Tweeting has a human side.

It provides opportunities to connect with your tribe globally. When I started on Twitter it was one of the most fun aspects of the 140 character platform. Having a short chat in bursts with people that had the same interests and challenges from the other side of the world.

Those simple tweets over the years have led to powerful human connections that I value and treasure.

17. Joint ventures

Once trust is built through that Twitter conversation, the opportunities can extend to working together in the future. Joint ventures and collaboration can be a consequence of that simple tweet that start with the online networking .

What about you?

Did you think that Twitter was just a superficial social network that was just about sharing your personal insights. Could you use Twitter better? Are you leaving a lot of Tweeting power in the bank?

Over to you.