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Tesla's a polarizing company, and perhaps nowhere is that more evident than on Wall Street.

Among research analysts, long-term predictions for the company's share price range from as low as $180 to $450.

In a nutshell: it's either an appealing investment due to its disruptive prospects, or an overhyped carmaker struggling with its business fundamentals.

A $30-billion market cap has helped spur the interest on both sides of the trade. So has the company's ability to produce exciting, expensive, high-performance all-electric cars that do things like break Consumer Reports rating scale.

SumZero, a social network for hedge-fund analysts and portfolio managers, posed a handful of questions on Tesla's outlook and the valuation of its shares to a pair of investors. John Pangere, founder of Chicago's Windy City Capital, is betting against Tesla shares. Michael Frazis, of London-based private equity firm Torchlight GP owns Tesla shares. 

They discussed Tesla's need to raise more cash in the future to competitive threats, the company's "resale value guarantee," and the many demands on chief executive Elon Musk's time.

Below is an edited transcript of their responses to the questions, provided by SumZero.

 

What the market is missing

Pangere: I love the product the company puts out, but from a pure investment and business perspective, Tesla has some major shortcomings that I feel the market has continued to ignore. The company has yet to turn a profit on each car rolling off the line. Cash costs in order to hit its numbers in the next 5 years are coming, so I don’t see how an actual cash profit will be achieved in that time frame. For my money, Tesla is not worth more than Hyundai or Fiat.

Business Insider: Hyundai’s market cap is about the same as Tesla’s $30 billion, while Fiat Chrysler Automobiles’ is over $10 billion less, at about $18 billion.

Frazis: The parallels with Apple several years ago are uncanny. The company is selling every car it can make, pricing its vehicles extraordinarily high, and it’s making extreme capital investments in core technology, both in research and development and the factories themselves. 

Will Tesla achieve Elon Musk’s sales goal of 500,000 car per year target? Does Tesla have the funding to do so? If so, I’d expect the stock to appreciate three to four times from where it is now in the mid-term. If not, then the growth component of the equity value will vanish.

 

Tesla's cash needs

Pangere: Tesla’s first Gigafactory will cost approximately $5 billion to build. In order to continue growing at the rate at which management has stated, Tesla will need several of these factories to reach those goals.

As a company that has yet to produce a real cash profit, the only way to finance this expansion is through a combination of the debt and equity markets. 

Frazis: Tesla has unmet demand for a differentiated product that it builds out of steel and sells at a premium, so it makes sense to raise capital and build as many cars as possible. We’d prefer to have more capital doing this rather than less. Whether this is good or bad will depend on the path capital markets take. If there is a misstep and the debt and equity markets close at a time when Tesla needs cash, then any raise will be highly dilutive.

Cash is currently sitting at $1.4 billion after Tesla issued equity to raise $739 million net of fees in the second quarter. The market response to this was positive and I’d expect Tesla to consider topping up their cash balances on an annual basis.

 

The resale value guarantee (RVG) program and future profitability

Pangere: When you look into Tesla's resale value guarantee program from the outside, it’s a great deal for consumers. Tesla buyers “purchase” a brand new car with a guarantee that the company will “buy” that car back in 36 months at what amounts to roughly 50% of the MSRP of that car.

But the program is going to hurt the company’s cash flow in the future. 

From my perspective, this program does three things: 1) inflates sales by offering buyers with an offer that’s hard to refuse; 2) puts an artificial floor on the value of a used Model S; and 3) sacrifices potential profits/cash flow in the future for the immediate gratification of reporting higher sales in the present.

Frazis: The RVG is concerning, mostly for what it says about Tesla. Musk is willing to promise spending in the future to assist sales today. This is fine, but it’s a bad habit and has led to scandals in the past. The temptation to drive sales today by adding costs in the future should only be pushed so far.

Fortunately the resale market for Tesla vehicles has been very strong so we see this as a minor part of the story, and another indication of the value of these vehicles. But I do wonder if Musk would approach any future weakness in sales by making further promises and guarantees. This would not be good.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Why Your Retail Messaging Should Be Different for Online & In-Store Audiences

With e-commerce, online customer service, remote consulting, and social selling becoming ever more present, we’ve seen a divergence in customer mentalities.

On one hand there are those who take these new online amenities as a sign to never have to set foot inside a store or business again.

But there is still a vast amount of consumers who prefer to have in-person interactions, or see or try products before taking the leap to take out their wallets. When you have a brick-and-mortar business, but also an online presence, how do you streamline your marketing to appeal to these two different audiences?

Creating One Unified Message

The answer may be easier than you think. Let’s start from the beginning:

Develop a strong and consistent brand identity

They key to making sure you are successful in appealing to different buyer personas while being one company, is to showcase your brand identity and values across the board. If customers decide to flip flop from coming to you online to meeting you in-store, it is crucial for them to have a sense of familiarity and consistency. If you want to emphasize the quality in the products or services your in-person business provides, the same should be emphasized on your website or e-commerce site.

This also comes down to image. It’s necessary to use the same color scheme and logos, type fonts, and service and product names, between both online and offline parts of your business. Without this consistency, customers may feel confused, or even believe you to be a different company or subsidiary.

Establish the values, personality, codes of conduct, and company mission that you want your brand to exemplify at all times. Creating these things as the mantra for your business will make it easier to provide the same experience for all types of audiences, in any situation. These should be the same brand guidelines that direct your content marketing and social media presence, which are a reflection of your actual business.

Adjust your mentalities

If you have preconceived ideas about types of consumers or audience members who prefer your online business to your real store-front, or vice versa, stop right there.

There’s never been a more diverse landscape of consumer profiles than there are right now, so try not to place a value on certain groups of people until you have the tried and tested data points and sales numbers to prove it. A sale is a sale, and if you are working towards sustaining both an online presence and a brick-and-mortar business, then each group should be of utmost importance to you.

Now that we’ve gotten the basics out of the way, let’s talk marketing.

Snowballing on our last point, it’s also important that you don’t want play favorites – unless you take it all the way.

We use marketing to draw customers and potential customers to us. Decide right now if you prefer customers to come to you in person, or you want them to operate mostly online. If you want all things to be fairly even, then you shouldn’t focus your marketing mostly on one audience or another, unless you are trying to ramp up business in a particular area.

Think about the values that in-person customers have versus the ones that online customers have. Do people who come into your business value great customer service, a personalized experience, someone there to actually listen to their wants and needs and understand? And do online customers value speed of service, convenience, the ability to find what they need independently without the help of others, or a ‘nagging’ salesperson? Your marketing materials that target each group of consumers should appeal to these value sets and different needs.

Location, location, location

One large factor that can play a major part in how you do marketing for your online store versus your physical store, is location. It’s easier than ever to now target specific audience members based on location through Facebook ads, PPC and Display ads, or mobile ads.

You should not be wasting your time on marketing content to customers to get them to visit your storefront if they are not within a reasonable distance from your brick-and-mortar location. Mailed flyers with in-store coupons won’t work for people who are too far from your physical business, but you should definitely be focusing on those people for driving traffic to your website.

Alternatively, you can use geo-location tools to alert potential customers close to you about new store openings, or use specific content to get those people to come in and meet you in person. Convenience of location has a great deal to do with whether people will be more likely to purchase in store or online, so take that into consideration when creating your marketing strategy and audience segmentation.

Reduce risk

If you’re trying to bolster online sales, or have more products available online than in-store, a marketing tactic you can try is to ensure customers are aware that there is a low risk of making a wrong or bad purchase.

The best way to do this is of course to have reliable and quality products or services, but customers should also feel that they either have a way out, or the decision or purchase can be reversed. Consider offering free trials of services, or a generous return policy on goods. Having these safety nets in place not only make customers more comfortable, but they can be fodder for your marketing content as a way to appear confident in what you have to offer.

These policies can also drive customers to your brick-and-mortar businesses. Offer a free or reduced initial consultation for customers who visit in-store, or a buy-one-get-one incentive for those who are unsure of making a purchase online but are willing to come in to try your products out.

Also consider that in-store buyers may be more likely to be first-time customers of yours. Provide them with great customer service, and a quality product, and you’ll be more likely to see repeat business. Then, after the initial purchase, these customers may choose to make future purchases online, since they now know your business and products. Make that transition as easy as possible with loyalty programs, saved previous purchases, and the same great ease of use online.

Let’s look at one example:

The beauty retailer juggernaut Sephora has an incredibly strong online and retail outlet presence. How have they done this? By offering something different to each of their customer bases, while staying extremely true to their brand identity and ideals.

Customers who prefer to shop in-store are greeted by the opportunity to try products before purchasing, either in demonstrations by Sephora employees, or through samples they can take home to try. In marketing materials promoted by Sephora, customers are encouraged to come into the store for special makeovers, or are invited to attend events and lessons.

Online Sephora shoppers receive incentives through sales and deals that are only available online, and have access to a greater amount of inventory of products than are available in-store. Marketing materials that target online shoppers promote online gift buying guides and product tutorial videos.

Sephora’s online portal offers video tutorials and product reviews

Sephora makes it so that there is something for everyone, then they invite all their customers to share their experiences through the submission of reviews, or engagement through social media. They make sure to provide the same value to their online and in-store customers, only through different marketing tactics and incentives. Sephora caters to the different needs of its diverse customer base, but in a way that still emphasizes the quality of products and service, and the sense of community that is created through being a Sephora customer.

Now it’s your turn

Think about what you have to offer your different customer bases and play to your strengths. If you’d like customers and potential customers to check you out online without needing to come into your storefront, make sure your website is thoroughly comprehensive.

Offer plenty of relevant and useful content, make your website easily navigable with all the information a customer could need to help them make an informed purchase, or contact you for business inquiries. Include information about your company itself, answers to frequently asked questions, and detailed products or services pages.

Marketing to varying audiences is a task in itself, but when you have a brick-and-mortar business combined with an online presence, there are even more elements to consider. Utilize a strong brand identity across all platforms, ensure customer expectations and what you deliver are aligned, consider location and your customer’s values.

When you play to your strengths and have policies in place to make buyers confident in what you have to offer, you increase the potential for repeat customers, and you’ll be on your way to having both a strong online and offline business.

Get started identifying your unique buyer personas with our free collaborative prospect and persona worksheet. Download yours below:

Guest author Leo Sadovy is the director of global marketing at SAS.

During the Cold War, the KGB was so good at identifying undercover CIA agents that officials worried that there was a highly placed mole in the agency. But as Jonathan Haslam, a professor at Princeton University, wrote earlier this fall, that wasn’t the case at all. 

It turns out that the KGB was quite effective in mining data. The KGB gathered publicly available information on deployed U.S. Foreign Service personnel, along with observations and data from allied countries, analyzed it, and discovered how the agents’ housing and pay patterns were markedly different than those of the State Department officers the agents were posing as.

Data, Analysis, Insight

The KGB’s Yuri Totrov was able to find 26 independent indicators which invariably distinguished CIA agents from the genuine and otherwise harmless State Department field service officers, or FSOs.

For example:

• The CIA pay scale was significantly higher than for FSOs.
• FSOs could and typically did return home after a 3–4-year tour. Agents did not.
• When agents did return home, they did not show up in State Department listings.
• FSOs were always recruited before the age of 31. Agents could be older.
• Only real FSOs attended the three-month training session at the Institute for Foreign Service.
• Field agents might be reposted within a country. FSOs never were.

This wasn’t rocket science, and it didn’t require a high level mole as the more paranoid CIA chiefs suspected. No, the patterns and insights just popped right out of the data when the right analysis and investigative techniques were applied. 

These same sort of insights are available to businesses, although they may be hidden somewhere in a pile of enterprise data. There are a number of descriptive analytic approaches, data mining and classification techniques, available to handily tackle this problem. The most well-known include clustering, market basket analysis, and decision trees, much of which can even be accomplished visually and without the need for specialized skill sets. 

Let’s use customer marketing as an example. Concealed within customer demographics, purchase history, service calls, and product data lie the equivalent of Totrov’s 26 attributes and indicators. 

• Which customers leave after the introductory period and which will renew?
• Which customers will upgrade to the next model automatically, and which will switch brands at this point?
• Which customers will buy directly online versus those that buy in the store after doing online research?
• Which customers are typically motivated by an online discount versus those interested only in particular features?

The Buyer Who Loved Me

Totrov used his knowledge of a few known CIA agents to extrapolate into the unknown. The same approach is available to businesses that have known customers with known behaviors and attributes, which can be applied to an unknown market. 

Knowing that a certain age group, gender, ZIP code, length of service, method of purchase, method of payment, etc. is the key attribute signaling customer churn or an upsell opportunity allows sales and marketing to target various promotional investments more productively.

Here are a few examples of how organizations can take full advantage of customer data:

• A retailer can execute different marketing strategies based on a segmentation of seasonal versus year-round customers, maximizing the value of the latter while targeting, say, a Christmas-gift buyer at exactly the right time.
• A sports franchise can detect attendance and secondary market trends to identify which season-ticket holders are at risk (and lure them back), and which regular fans are the most likely candidates to become new season-ticket holders.
• An online retailer can use website traffic analysis to distinguish uninterested browsers from those whose online behavior suggests that they will become buyers with just a little timely nudge or incentive.
• A telecom provider can select the best second product to offer, understanding that customers who buy multiple products or services have a lower churn rate.
• A bank can use their customer data to recognize distinctly different paths to cross-sell and upsell based on the customer’s initial interaction with the bank. The next best offer to a first-time loan client is different from that of a savings account holder.

Totrov’s undertaking was the big-data project of its time. It may not have consisted of terabytes of data, but it was still a comparatively difficult task using the manual tools and techniques of the day. Today’s businesses, by contrast, have powerful tools that can mine far more data in mere hours.Customer and marketing insights won’t have quite the same intrigue as unearthing Cold War spy networks, and it likely will never be made into an action thriller starring Matt Damon or Daniel Craig, but it might help close a sale.

Still image via The Spy Who Loved Me

"...insights for scaleups"

HEADLINES:

Food Biz Stories Needed -- are you scaling up in the food industry? My next Fortune column is examining this industry - more info below, but first...

How Southwest Airlines Hires Such Dedicated People -- Receiving a job application every two seconds, Southwest has the luxury of having to hire only 2% of all job applicants. And Southwest hires based on values, not skills. My favorite paragraph from the recent HBR article:

At Southwest, for example, we talk about hiring not for skills but three attributes: a warrior spirit (that is, a desire to excel, act with courage, persevere and innovate); a servant's heart (the ability to put others first, treat everyone with respect and proactively serve customers); and a fun-loving attitude (passion, joy and an aversion to taking oneself too seriously.)

The first attribute aligns with Jim Collins' notion that you must first hire for "will." So in order, we suggest you hire based on:

1. Will - Southwest's definition of warrior spirit is perfect
2. Values - the test for culture fit
3. Results - in the end can they deliver on your KPIs
4. Skills - the least important since most skill-sets need updated every 5 years

It's a very short HBR article, worth 2 minutes to peruse for a few more key ideas.

Great Question for Getting a Bunch of Customers -- I love great questions and this is one of the best, posed by Andrew Davis, author of Brandscaping - "Who has your next customer as their current customer?" (best if you re-read it out loud - I'm serious). In my 4 minute interview with Davis at the Growth Summit, he describes how to think about this question and what to do next once you've identified the companies/organizations/people that already have a strong relationship with a big chunk of your potential customers. One strategy is to partner with them - building your brand by leveraging theirs (like our relationship with Fortune). Take a few minutes to watch the interview then read Davis's book to leverage an important strategy in building your customer base.

Addicted To Distraction -- Tony Schwartz, renowned human performance guru and head of the Energy Project (like is about energy management more than time management), wrote a very personal Op Ed in the NY Times about internet addiction and how it destroys one's ability to concentrate and focus. Notes Schwartz:

Addiction is the relentless pull to a substance or an activity that becomes so compulsive it ultimately interferes with everyday life. By that definition, nearly everyone I know is addicted in some measure to the Internet. It has arguably replaced work itself as our most socially sanctioned addiction.

Take 3 minutes to read about Tony's own battle and how he's overcoming it and reclaiming his brain - if you can focus long enough to read the article!

Master Newsjacking -- David Meerman Scott has spoken at several of our Growth Summits around the world. In his presentations one of the most memorable marketing strategies is Newsjacking: the art and science of injecting your ideas into a breaking news story to generate tons of media coverage, get sales leads, and grow business. David just launched a new online course titled "Master Newsjacking!" The course will teach you how to:

• Generate sales leads and win new customers. For free!
• Get media attention, with little effort!
• Grow your business, faster than ever!

And besides all that, there's a bonus: Newsjacking is fun! I've done it several times, most recently in Australia, and it works brilliantly. Here's a link to learn more about this important and inexpensive marketing tool.

This Video Explains "Rocks" -- The Stephen Covey video that demos his famous "rock" analogy of doing the most important things first each day/week is grainy and often hard to find. This 5 minute video by The Art of Manliness does the best job I've seen - worth showing to all new employees at their orientation/training program. And I suggest everyone watch it as a great reminder of the importance of setting a few priorities and working on them first, not last!

Food Biz Stories -- The food business has a notoriously high failure rate. For my next Fortune column, I'm looking at how entrepreneurs are beating the odds in this industry and succeeding. What surprising and counter-intuitive strategies have you used to differentiate yourself and create staying power--besides offering a great product? I'm looking for entrepreneurs in businesses from restaurants to food manufacturing. Please include the name of your business, the city where it is located, your annual revenue, your number of employees and the strategies that have helped you build a profitable, fast-growing business. Email me directly at vharnish@gazelles.com - thank you.

TECHNOLOGY:

Align Software puts everyone on the Same Page - Literally! See, in real time every person in your organization and how they are progress on their priorities - alongside how these Align to the Company Priorities! Scale Up your Rockefeller Habits implementation with www.alignwithgazelles.com - on your computer and on your phone.

Better Book Club -- What's your team reading? Increase your books read per team member. Easy, Proven, and in the Cloud at http://www.BetterBookClub.com.

COACHING:

Have you ever wondered if your company would be a good candidate to work with an executive growth coach? Click here to watch Gazelles International President Keith Cupp describes the four most important attributes of successful clients.

As we’ve alluded to on several occasions, there’s one aspect of LinkedIn that truly sets it apart as a critical resource for your company, and that is its Groups function. Since LinkedIn created this wonderful tool, it’s no surprise that they also provide the best definition to explain it: “LinkedIn Groups provide a place for professionals in the same industry or with similar interests to share content, find answers, post and view jobs, make business contacts, and establish themselves as industry experts.”

Let me explain it another way.

Inbound marketing is not really an approach that one would say comes with many bells and whistles. Its effectiveness is in its straightforwardness, and while there are many components to an effective inbound campaign, they boil down to one key ingredient: targeting.

Creating content designed for specific buyer personas is how you demonstrate relevance to your desired target audience, but to really meet them where they are, distribution dominates.

And what’s the best way to mix content distribution and targeting? LinkedIn Groups. Your buyer personas have conveniently gathered in groups for you online, and you can share relevant content to them directly–the inbound marketing ideal.

We’ve discussed the importance of thought leadership several times already. Well, LinkedIn groups is how you take that to the next level, by building up a targeted network of people who actually want to listen to what you’re saying. You want to demonstrate that you are an expert and authority figure in your industry. Well, what better way to do so than by providing the content that proves this to the very people you want to prove it to.

Groups are the perfect place to learn from peers and maybe teach them a thing or two. Post in groups, share content, look for opportunities to help people…the best mentality is to be super generous and open, to answer questions, provide feedback, and comment.  It will pay off, since people will see you, they’ll recognize you as a thought leader, they’ll want to check you out further, and they’ll be more inclined to help you out down the road.

But, as with any tool, Groups need to be yielded correctly.

The first step is to know which groups to join.  LinkedIn puts a cap on the number of groups you can be a member of at one time–50, to be exact. That may seem like a lot, but you’d be surprised at how quickly you rack up group memberships. You therefore need to be smart about what groups you join.

The obvious place to start is in finding groups with members who are the kind of people your company should know. Start by searching for colleagues, competitors, or thought leaders in the industry, review which groups they are a part of, and join those that are most relevant to you.

Also think about your target audience, and join groups that would be of interest to them. Trying to demonstrate why your company’s products are necessary for facility managers? Join groups made up of facility managers, facility maintenance workers, as well as health and safety groups that attract that very audience, to not only learn more about what that desired target is discussing, but also to engage with them directly where they are.

LinkedIn makes pinpointing these specific groups quite easy. First of all, if you go to your Groups page, and scroll down your group activity, you’ll see that LinkedIn suggest groups for you based on your interests, experiences, and skills.

Second, you can search for groups either from the “Find a group” box on your Groups page, or by selecting Groups from the dropdown list on the left of the search bar at the top of any page. You can type in specific group names, or, if you don’t know where to start, simply type in words related to your business or your target audience. Once you’re on the search results, you can narrow your results down further using the checkboxes on the left of the page.

Let’s walk through it using the earlier example. If you search for “facilities,” you’ll turn up thousands of results, as groups made up of workers in those sphere will likely include those words in their Group description (those keywords we’ve been talking about…) Scroll through a few pages of results, and you’ll see that each title is accompanied by a small snapshot with a group description, as well as number of members and number of discussions.

For the groups whose initial impression catch your eye, click the group name to get more information. You’ll get taken to its Discussions page, where you can see the type of conversations that are being had there–and how often they’re occurring. You should also click ‘About’ to get more information and its members.

Note that not all searches will yield as many results as ‘facilities’–which you can use to your advantage in breaking down your key audience. For example, the facility maintenance industry gets quite segmented, yielding groups for university facility managers, hospital facility managers, commercial property managers–multiple specific options, each with a different piece of the one audience you need.

Some of those smaller groups might not be relevant to your specific business, but it’s good to know the right groups with the right personas for you are out there. Just keep searching for company, industry, and persona related characteristics and keywords, and utilize LinkedIn’s suggestions.

But choosing groups is not just about the people in those groups. As we’ve discussed, your goal is to share content on these groups and engage in conversation–and not every group is conducive to that.

A few things to look out for:

1. Make sure that whatever group you join has a high engagement rate. The first way to do this is to check that the member size is healthy, though there is a caveat to that, which will be detailed below. Further, peruse the Discussions page–where you’ll be taken whenever you click a group name. Change the ‘sort’ option from ‘popular’ to ‘recent’ so that you can see the newest posts being published. In this way, you can ensure that the group is currently and continuously active. Scroll through the posts a bit, and see how many comments and likes each post has, which will demonstrate whether group members discuss the articles being shared or are more passive participants. Make sure that the comments you do find are actually about the articles being published, or related topics, and not just being used as an excuse for a group member to link to his website.
2. Read the group rules before joining to see what proper group behavior is–for example, some groups don’t allow sharing links, which could hinder the conversion that you’re seeking.
3. Pay attention to the number of members in a given group. You want to ensure there is a healthy number of group members, indicating that the group is active, but too large of a group can make it difficult to stand out.  For example, groups that only have tens of people in them, or even just a couple hundred, probably won’t be too valuable at scale. (Unless they are super active, in which case maybe you could join for a short period of time and see how it performs for you.) Be sure to seek out niche groups–which have membership in the thousands–in addition to the mega groups–with tens of thousands of participants–in order to capitalize on both opportunities, though note that actual numbers will of course depend on industry.

Once you’ve identified the right groups to join, it’s not enough just to post a link to your newest blog post with a catchy caption and call it a day. You need to take advantage of this opportunity to truly communicate with your desired audience. You need to consistently participate in the group and engage with group members. To respond to comments on your own posts goes without saying, but you should go beyond that.

Read articles that others are posting, and share your thoughts by leaving a comment. The articles will likely be helpful tools in understanding your personas, and your comments will build your visibility, demonstrate your industry expertise, and show that you care about multiple issues in their industry–not just those that your product or service can address.

Make your comments meaty; don’t just write ‘nice post.’ Acknowledge the discussion topic, ask a follow up question, and tie it into your personal perspective.

Another critical benefit of utilizing LinkedIn Groups correctly refers back to a different conversation we’ll discuss elsewhere about expanding your reach and making the right connections. Take advantage of the hundreds of new contacts at your disposal by adding group members as connections. Engaged users will likely follow you–and hopefully your company page–offering another direct line of communication between you. Further, as they publish articles, posts, or thought on their page’s feed, you’ll gain insight into what they are looking for and how you can help them.

LinkedIn groups may be the single most effective way for generating views and visits online from such specific, targeted audiences. You have the opportunity to share your insight with the right potential customers, and engage with them firsthand. Following the above steps can help you utilize LinkedIn groups in the right way, ensuring that your company stays front of mind for the readers you’re seeking.

Keeping with my recent end-of-year theme of refreshing well-received past posts, I’ve decided to provide a follow up for last year’s highly successful post 8 Ways to Better Market Yourself on LinkedIn in 2015.

2015 has been a breakout year for LinkedIn, both as a social network and (more importantly) as a content hub and distribution platform.

As of Q3 2015, LinkedIn had over 400 million active users and 37% year-over-year growth. Much of this growth is being fueled by LinkedIn’s doubling down on content hosting and distribution.

In an ever-crowded content marketing landscape, finding new avenues to reach consumers and build your audience is a high priority, and LinkedIn represents an underused (yet highly promising) opportunity to drive the quality visibility and engagement you’re looking for.

To help you glean the finer points of the platform I’ve tracked down ten of my favorite LinkedIn experts (and in digital marketing as a whole) and asked them to answer one deceptively simple question:

What’s one way brands can better master content marketing on LinkedIn in 2016?

Below are their insightful, actionable and engaging answers.

Ritika Puri: Leverage LinkedIn as a Distribution Platform

Ritika Puri is a content strategist and co-founder of Storyhackers. Her recommendation not only highlights some interesting, often overlooked LinkedIn features, but also shows how they can be used to strengthen your networking connections.

According to Ritika, “Over the last few years, marketers have found it harder and harder to drive web traffic to their content. In 2016, the task of reaching (and converting) new audience will be–you guessed it–even more challenging.”

The remedy to the ever-increasing difficulty of grabbing people’s attention is “up-and-coming distribution hubs and content ecosystems.”

LinkedIn, is exactly the kind of platform that suits the evolving needs of content marketers and the increasing diffusion of consumer attention. Not only is LinkedIn home to a highly qualified and sophisticated audience, but it presents “lots of opportunities to connect, engage, and re-engage with audiences based on [your audience’s] interests.”

This post will highlight many of these unique opportunities, but Ritika’s answer is very important because it calls attention to the fact that these opportunities exist in the first place.

Follow Ritika
Twitter | LinkedIn

Pam Moore: Test Often, Automate and Optimize

Pam Moore is the founder, CEO of Marketing Nutz, a Social Media, Digital Marketing, Experiential Branding Agency. Her answer is a great springboard off of Ritika’s, because once you realize that LinkedIn as a platform has potential, then the next step is to maximize that potential.

Pam points out that the central concern for marketers using any platform is to “understand their audience and their needs.” The next step for LinkedIn marketers then is to “understand how their audience is using LinkedIn.”

Once that is done, the final step is to “develop a strategy and plan that aligns to the needs of the audience and utilizes the LinkedIn features that will help them reach, inspire, engage and activate their audience.”

There are so many offerings from LinkedIn, as well as from third parties, that can help you truly match the needs of your audience and engage them directly. Pam urges marketers not to “be afraid to test out new features, schedule content at optimum times via automation tools such as Buffer and publish content on personal profiles as well as brand and showcase pages.”

Follow Pam
Twitter | LinkedIn

Rebekah Radice: Be Dynamic and Consistent

Rebekah Radice is currently the CMO of Post Planner and has an incredible track-record as an independent consultant for social and content strategy as well.

Her advice centers around identifying the core high-level approach that brands should take when they are attempting to establish a presence on LinkedIn.

Simply put “viewing LinkedIn as a static site to house yet another company profile is a mistake.” Rebekah notes just how common this problem is and then offers advice on how to fix the issue.

“Whether it’s networking, recruiting or schmoozing that brings you to LinkedIn, content is the connector that will create those opportunities for you.”

The core of LinkedIn’s new direction is their rapidly expanding Pulse publishing platform. Rebekah urges marketers to treat this new avenue for content delivery very seriously.

“Stay top of mind by consistently sharing relevant content to your LinkedIn page and taking advantage of expanded reach through LinkedIn Pulse. And don’t forget to cross-promote within your LinkedIn Groups and via your personal profile.”

Follow Rebekah
Twitter | LinkedIn

Aaron Lee: Learn from the Best on LinkedIn

Aaron Lee holds the colorful title of “Grand Master of Customer Delight” at Post Planner and also self-publishes social insights on his excellent blog AskAaronLee.com.

His advice can best be summarized by one of my favorite Pablo Picasso quotes “good artists imitate, great artists steal.”

Aaron points to a recent report published by LinkedIn profiling the ten most successful brands on the platform.

Aaron’s advice is to take the lead from the biggest brands and then usefully extract two core insights.

Tip 1: Have employees share and post your content: Your employees are your biggest advocates. Get them to help your brand in your content marketing efforts on Linkedin. 99% of the top global brands had employees share to their networks.

Tip 2: Update your company page regularly: According to Linkedin, 99% of top brands post an average of 12.6 updates per week on their Company Page.”

Can’t get more actionable and straightforward than that.

Follow Aaron
Twitter | LinkedIn

Sabel Harris: Leverage Employee Connections

Sabel Harris is currently the Director of Demand Generation at Contactually and has previously worked at several big digital players such as TrackMaven and General Assembly.

Sabel’s advice directs our attention to an incredibly unrealized avenue for LinkedIn influence – your employees and coworkers.

After all, LinkedIn is nothing but a network of professionals, and particularly well-connected individuals within your organization can help maximize the profile of your organization as a whole.

“One of the great things about LinkedIn now is that anyone can publish on it’s platform and you can use this to your advantage.” This aspect of LinkedIn enables companies to leverage the connections of individual employees and open themselves up to entirely new audiences.

If you already have a strong sense of what your audience wants then “See who has the most connections and then combine it with a topic your audience wants to read.” If you do this, “you’ll have a lethal and powerful content marketing post.”

Follow Sabel
Twitter | LinkedIn

Anita Newton: Focus on Quality Content

Anita Newton is the VP of Marketing at one of the leading digital advertising companies in video and social, Adknowledge. She has worked in the sales and marketing industries for 20 years and has had an illustrious career to say the least.

Anita gets right to the point in diagnosing the key challenge marketers will face on LinkedIn in 2016. Namely, that as more marketers flock to the platform, it will become more and more “cluttered with every kind of content imaginable – good, bad (and yes) the ugly.”

To get noticed and stay top of mind she admonishes brands to “skip the click bait, and opt for substance.” She importantly reminds us that “it is better to have a piece of quality content read by few readers than a puff piece ready by many.”

The next logical question is how to self-evaluate your own content, to see if it’s truly worth pursuing. She provides a three-step checklist:

1) Will this make my members of my network smarter?
2) Is this a positive reflection of my personal brand?
3) Would I be proud to have my (boss, mentor, recruiter) read this article?

If after performing this exercise you honestly “answered ‘yes’ to all three questions post and publish!”

Follow Anita
Twitter | LinkedIn

(Disclosure: Adknowledge is a Honigman Media client.)

Dave Kerpen: Embrace Long-Form Publishing

Dave Kerpen is a stalwart within the world of digital marketing and is the founder and CEO of Likeable Local.

Dave’s advice is something that I have publicly espoused on this blog many times – repurposing content is key.

Since there is so much content out there, and so much of it goes unnoticed, brands can’t expect to post a piece of content once just “hoping it’ll go viral.”

“In 2016, brands can better master content marketing on LinkedIn by realizing that, just like on Facebook and Twitter, most content on LinkedIn goes unnoticed. In order to have even your best content get seen, consider reusing it, posting at least 10 times on different days and times and with different creative and copy.”

Beyond persistent and tailored promotional strategy, Dave also urges brands to recycle content by repurposing it into various forms of content. For example “turning a blog post into a webinar into an ebook, for example.”

The beauty of doing this is highlighted perfectly in the last line of his answer: “One piece of great content can turn into a huge opportunity, as long as you reuse and recycle.”

Follow Dave
Twitter | LinkedIn

Peg Fitzpatrick: Get Visual With Your Content

Peg Fitzpatrick has an outsized reputation as a social media consultant and has most recently generated a ton of positive attention after co-authoring the book The Art of Social Media with the famed Guy Kawasaki.

In much the same way that Dave Kerpen’s comments mirrored previous posts of mine, Peg Fitzpatrick’s answer also serves to reinforce an idea I have championed passionately on this site. This idea is that in order for content to reach it’s maximum potential, it must be accompanied by strong visuals.

Peg notes something that should be common sense to most marketers, but is clearly not the case for many: “blog articles need to be tested to see what it looks like when the content is shared.”

I find this to be a particularly insightful comment in regards to LinkedIn, where many people are not constructing the content natively for sharing and many company updates have images that are formatted strangely or incorrectly.

LinkedIn is a professional platform, but even professionals are going to be swayed by quality visuals if they are accompanied by substantive content.

Peg’s answer serves to remind content marketers (on any platform) that “if people won’t look good sharing your content to their audience, they won’t share it.”

Follow Peg
Twitter | LinkedIn

Dennis Shiao: Promote Aggressively, Listen Intently

Dennis Shiao is the Director of Content Marketing at DNN and a contributor author to the book 42 Rules of Product Marketing.

Dennis gives a two-pronged recommendation and each half of his answer is equally important.

First of all, brands need to promote their content on LinkedIn and promote aggressively.

“The impact of content marketing can fall short without adequate promotion,” so make sure you leverage all of LinkedIn’s tools for promotion; such as “Company Updates, Sponsored Updates, LinkedIn Groups and LinkedIn Elevate (an employee advocacy product the company launched in 2015).”

The second half of Dennis’ recommendation is to use LinkedIn to explore what types of content and subjects your audience might be interested in. “Learn about challenges faced by users in LinkedIn Group discussions, then develop content to solve those challenges. Review popular posts on LinkedIn Pulse to understand what topics are trending, then create content related to those topics.”

These are just a few ideas, but the most important thing to takeaway is the high-level potential LinkedIn has for both bolstering your existing content and informing your future content.

Follow Dennis
Twitter | LinkedIn

(Disclosure: DNN Corp. is a Honigman Media client.)

Jason Miller: Leverage Direct-Sponsored Content

Jason Miller is the Head of Global Content Marketing for LinkedIn, which lends a whole degree of weight to his advice, and he certainly doesn’t disappoint.

The first thing Jason points out is that focusing on creating content is meaningless if you are not constantly optimizing that content for maximum reach.

One often overlooked LinkedIn product that can help marketers do this is LinkedIn Direct Sponsored Content. This tool allows “marketers [to] A/B test creative and copy, personalize content in the feed, and control what content you publish on your company page.”

Jason and his team used DSC to promote their The Sophisticated Marketer’s Guide to LinkedIn eBook “to personalize the message and target different job functions.” His team was able to “tweak the copy and creative to speak to the C-suites, Marketing Directors and Practitioners in their own language.”

The use of the tool helped to create broad appeal for this top-of-funnel piece of content since it could be suited to a variety of personas active on LinkedIn.

Follow Jason
Twitter | LinkedIn

With so many features, and so much forward momentum, LinkedIn is no longer just a professional social network – it is a content-creation and distribution platform that should be top-of-mind for your content strategy come the new year.

I hope this article has inspired you to take a renewed look at LinkedIn and given you many ideas on how to go about leveraging this highly promising platform in 2016.

Lastly, here are these same LinkedIn marketing tips in a ready to pin infographic!

Few of us enjoy making mistakes, but mistakes are inevitable when you’re trying something new or challenging—and failure is how we get better . Coder Christina Cacioppo writes about teaching students programming and how the most successful beginners were the ones who made more mistakes.

Read more...

Premier Christy Clark says she’s working with Ottawa to find a way to build Metro Vancouver’s transit projects without having to call another referendum. In an interview with The Vancouver Sun on Wednesday, Clark said she and her ministers have engaged the new federal Liberal government on funding for B.C.’s infrastructure needs and, in particular, big transit projects in the Lower Mainland.

British Columbia is taking a leaf out of the federal government's playbook with its announcement Tuesday of a $100-million technology innovation fund to fuel the venture capital market in the province.

In its heyday, the Railway Club was one of Canada’s top live venues, the place where budding stars like k.d. lang, Blue Rodeo and Los Lobos played their first local shows. But that was a couple of decades back. The Railway remains one of Vancouver’s key live rooms, but doesn’t have quite the same vibe it did in the ’80s or ’90s.

TORONTO – A new poll suggests that two-thirds of millennials are investing their money, but that most feel they don’t have adequate knowledge for the task.

The poll done for CIBC (TSX:CM) found 67 per cent of Canadians aged 18 to 34 reported have investments including stocks, GICs, bonds and mutual funds.

However, 82 per cent said they didn’t know enough about investing.

Meanwhile, the one-third of respondents who said they did not have any investments cited lack of financial knowledge and the fact that investing “intimidates” them as major reasons.

Not having any money to invest and other financial priorities were also cited as reasons for not investing.

Of those who do invest, 41 per cent said they don’t get the returns they expect, while 28 per cent found it hard to develop a long-term strategy.

Sarah Widmeyer, head of wealth advisory services at CIBC, says while it’s good to see millennials recognize the importance of investing, they need help.

“Their lack of knowledge is making them vulnerable to many common investing mistakes,” Widmeyer says.

The online survey done between Nov. 24 and Dec. 8 included 1,004 Canadians ages 18-34 who are Angus Reid Forum panellists.

The Marketing Research and Intelligence Association, the polling industry’s professional body, says online surveys cannot be assigned a margin of error due to their lack of random sampling.

The post Two-thirds of millennials investing, but most lack financial knowledge: poll appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

The B.C. Utilities Commission has given community utility company Creative Energy permission to build a new hot water heat system in Northeast False Creek. But in a blow to Vancouver’s plan to get the company, which is owned by developer Ian Gillespie, to convert from natural gas to biofuel, the commission has rejected a franchise agreement between Creative Energy and the city.

LOS ANGELES, Calif. – A settlement has been reached in a lawsuit over whether “Happy Birthday to You” — one of the best-known and beloved songs in the world — is owned by a music publisher who earned millions by enforcing its copyright.

U.S. District Judge George H. King ruled in September that Warner/Chappell Music Inc. didn’t own the lyrics to the song, only some musical arrangements — and thus the company had no right to charge for its use.

A trial set to begin next week in Los Angeles could have finally decreed whether the lyrics sung to generations of birthday boys and girls around the globe really is in the public domain.

Also to be decided at trial was whether Warner/Chappell would have to return any of the licensing fees — estimated at up to $2 million a year — that were collected for use of the song in movies, television shows and other commercial ventures.

But on Tuesday, King vacated the trial, saying all parties in the case had agreed to settle.

“It resolves all issues,” said Randall Scott Newman, an attorney for one of the plaintiffs.

He and other lawyers declined to provide details of the settlement, which is awaiting the judge’s approval.

However, the previous ruling and the settlement strongly imply that the lyrics will become available for free.

Jennifer Nelson, who was billed $1,500 to use “Happy Birthday to You” in a documentary she is doing on the song’s history, said she is “delighted” with the outcome of the case.

“We revealed a dark side to the happy tune,” she said Wednesday. “It’s a song that everyone’s familiar with and grew up with but nobody knew that this song was copyrighted and you had to pay a license for that.”

“The fact that it was illegally and wrongfully in the clutches of Warner/ Chappell really outraged people and now we’ve been able to rectify that situation. So it’s really gratifying,” she said.

“While we respectfully disagreed with the court’s decision, we are pleased to have now resolved this matter,” Warner/Chappell said in a statement.

The tune, with different lyrics, was written in 1893 by Patty Smith Hill, a Kentucky kindergarten teacher, and her sister, Mildred J. Hill. They called it “Good Morning to All.”

They assigned the rights to that and other songs to Clayton F. Summy, who copyrighted and published them in a book titled “Song Stories for the Kindergarten.”

Over the years, the rights passed from the Clayton F. Summy Co. to Birch Tree Group and then to Warner when it bought Birch Tree in 1988.

The lawsuit was filed two years ago by musicians and filmmakers who were billed for using “Happy Birthday to You.”

In his September ruling, King noted that while the tune has long been in the public domain, the lyrics to “Happy Birthday to You” have a murkier background. They were mentioned in a 1901 publication but the full lyrics didn’t appear in print until 1911.

It wasn’t until the 1930 that Patty Hill claimed to have written the lyrics at the same time that she co-wrote “Good Morning to All.”

King ruled that Summy Co. never actually acquired the rights to the lyrics — only to piano arrangements of the melody — and thus its successor had no valid copyright.

Among other issues the settlement is expected to resolve is a contention made this week that the copyright is owned by two charities that were beneficiaries of the Hill estate. The charities had accepted royalties from Warner/Chappell for more than 20 years.

The post Settlement reached in Los Angeles lawsuit over ‘Happy Birthday’ copyright appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

Imagine you’re at a conference. If you’re still making your way around with the help of a paper guide or website, your experience will be hit-and-miss. But new mobile apps can add value to your visit—not only by suggesting the best sessions to attend based on your past likes and dislikes, but with real-time schedule updates and hyperlocal networking.

“Attendees can find out who’s in the room with them and meet up,” says Jeff Sinclair, CEO of app developer Eventbase Technology Inc. “They can make better connections.”

With the announcement of $6 million in new funding on December 8, Vancouver-based Eventbase has moved closer to its goal of becoming the app developer of choice for corporate events and conventions. It’s already the go-to guide for signature happenings including Comic-Con in San Diego and the Sundance Film Festival. At this year’s South By Southwest, Eventbase deployed more than 1,000 iBeacons around Austin, Texas, to help attendees navigate the various venues. On the enterprise side, it has repeat customers in SAP, Microsoft, Cisco Systems, Salesforce.com and Hewlett-Packard.

In fact SBSW Tech LLC, a subsidiary of the music festival, was part of Eventbase’s earlier, $2-million round of funding in 2014. The new money comes from Madrona Venture Group and, Sinclair says, will help the company double its staff again next year. It currently has 72 employees in Vancouver and London, U.K.

If Eventbase can make gatherings more worthwhile for attendees, the payoff for organizers is even more tangible. “Getting a CTO of a large organization to fill out a survey of what they like and don’t like is next to impossible,” Sinclair says. “But those same people will spend hours going through the event app favoriting sessions they’re interested in, people they want to meet, exhibits they want to visit.”

Events remain the best way to introduce your customers to your products and build relationships between them and your staff, Sinclair says, noting how they now represent the largest component (12%) of business-to-business marketing budgets. “The growth in the event technology market is one to watch as more companies migrate their spending on event technology to mobile.”

MORE ABOUT MOBILE APPS & STARTUPS:

• Here’s how much people love sharing video and photos on their phones
• How teachers are using digital tools to truly personalize learning
• How Figure 1 plans to go global with its “Instagram for doctors”
• How a wave of delivery startups are remaking grocery shopping
• “Uber for goalies” app Puck helps pickup hockey teams man the net
• How to run your whole company from your phone

The post Eventbase raises $6 million to appify conferences and trade shows appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

LONDON (AP) — A trove of Viking jewelry and Saxon coins unearthed by an amateur treasure-hunter in a farmer's field may help rescue an English king from obscurity.

The Watlington Hoard, a collection of silver bands, ingots and 186 coins unveiled at the British Museum Thursday, dates from a tumultuous period. The coins were minted during the reign of Alfred the Great, ruler of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex, who battled a "great heathen army" of Viking invaders during the 9th century.

By coincidence, discovery of the hoard coincides with the broadcast of "The Last Kingdom," a big-budget BBC drama series that has boosted popular interest in the conflict between Alfred and the Vikings.

Alfred is renowned as the ruler whose victories helped create a unified England, but some of the coins in the hoard also bear the name of the far more obscure King Ceolwulf II of Mercia, a neighboring kingdom to Wessex.

"Poor Ceolwulf gets a very bad press in Anglo Saxon history," said museum coins curator Gareth Williams. What little is known of him was written at Alfred's court and paints Ceolwulf as "a puppet of the Vikings."

Williams said the hoard contains coins that carry images of two Roman emperors side by side — evidence that the kings were allies against the Scandinavians, but that Ceolwulf was "airbrushed out of history" by the increasingly powerful Alfred.

"Here is a more complex political picture in the 870s which is deliberately misrepresented in the 890s," Williams said.

"Perhaps we should be thinking more of Stalin and Trotsky, with Ceolwulf being airbrushed out of history because he's no longer convenient."

The find was announced by the museum as it reported on the Portable Antiquities Scheme, a government-funded project that encourages members of the public to report finds of archaeological interest.

The trove was discovered in October near Watlington, 40 miles (65 kilometers) west of London, by 60-year-old James Mather, an amateur treasure-seeker who called the find "every detectorist's dream." If a coroner declares it treasure — an official legal designation for old and precious items — the hoard will belong to the government, and Mather and the landowner will split a reward equal to its market value. The items will likely go to a museum.

With the help of local archaeology officials, the trove was dug up complete with the clay soil around it, bundled in cling wrap and taken to the British Museum.

It arrived looking like a "greasy clay haggis," said British Museum conservator Pippa Pearce, who led efforts to explore the trove and restore the items to gleaming silver glory.

"I've worked at the British Museum for 42 years and sometimes it's a shame to take the pay," Pearce said. "This was a joy of a hoard to work on."

___

Follow Jill Lawless on Twitter at http://Twitter.com/JillLawless . Her work can be found at http://bigstory.ap.org/content/jill-lawless

Join the conversation about this story »

This morning I opened my email and saw the following:

Dear sir,

For only $500 I can help your company grow. Please respond immediately for more information.

Delete.

Not only did they get my gender wrong, but there is no obvious value in this email. They didn’t tell me how they can help my company grow, they just told me how much it would cost.

Instead, the email should’ve look something like this:

Hi Rachel,

I’ve noticed [name of my company] has been trying to achieve [specific goal]. I can help you with this by [value proposition].

I’d love to discuss how I can help you with [specific goal]. Let me know the best times and days for you.

Of course with phone calls, meetings, and all of the other day-to-day tasks on sales reps' plates, it can be difficult to write personalized, valuable emails every time.

But we don’t have to choose between spending hours on email or sacrificing personalization and value. With the right email templates and a CRM that allows us to insert personalization tokens, like HubSpot’s CRM, we can minimize our time spend while still sending quality emails.

And we did the legwork on templates for your convenience. We talked with entrepreneurs, sales reps, and email hustlers to figure out what email templates work best. From these conversations, we compiled 36 sales email templates, each providing value and personalization.

Try these 36 sales templates that have helped CEOs and sales reps alike get in touch with decision makers and close $100,000 deals.

 

 

Think back to your last purchase. Why did you make it? We are drawn to complete a purchase when either the product, its price, or another element in the shopping experience successfully triggers an emotion suitable for that purchase.

We don’t make purchases just because we “like” something. The emotion is much stronger than simply liking something. In a study regarding the effect of emotion in eCommerce purchases, researches found that websites with a stronger emotional impact produced a greater intent to buy! Today we’ll get into how you can do the same for your eCommerce business.

Proven Example

The team at conversioner was able to increase the number of paying users for one of Asia’s biggest online dating sites by 340% with the use of emotional targeting. How did they achieve such optimal results?

The dating site got a new landing page that triggered a more relevant emotion: simplicity. In that specific case, a design that demonstrated the wide variety of people that could be met through the service made visitors feel wanted (see below).

Image via Conversioner

As you’ll see in this post, the smiling faces (more than one type of person), combined with a very short catch-phrase is all that’s needed to increase conversion rates. That’s a dating site, but the same tactics work for eCommerce conversion rates too.

How to Use Emotion to Increase Conversion Rates

Emotion: a conscious mental reaction (as anger or fear) subjectively experienced as strong feeling usually directed toward a specific object and typically accompanied by physiological and behavioral changes in the body (Merriam-Webster Dictionary).

Step 1: Who’s the Customer? Define the Buyer Persona

We won’t get into the technical details of finding your customer persona in this post. Just as multitasking is not a great idea, covering two very different, although connected topics, in the same post is also not a great idea.

However, to make sure this post helps you use emotion to captivate your shoppers, we’ve got to cover the basics. The buyer persona should be comprised of four basics factors:

• Demographics – age, gender, location, employment, education, etc.
• Interests – what your target customer is interested in
• Purchasing motivation – why your target customer wants to buy from you and what they hope to accomplish
• Purchasing deterrents – things that will hold your customer back from purchasing from you

The goal is to discover exactly what type of person your ideal customer is. The more you know about who you are trying to sell to, the more efficient your business will be, and the easier it’ll be for your to trigger the right emotion. Who is your ideal customer?

Step 2: Picking an Emotion to Trigger

What do you want to trigger? Is it a sense of trust? Maybe you want to trigger necessity? For each business, the answer can and will vary. One common trait found across the board to be true for businesses: positive emotion toward a brand has a deeper influence on customer loyalty than other triggerable emotions that are based on the traits of a brand.

Airbnb has more than one buyer persona, however there is one similarity across the board: the need for a cozy, good night’s sleep just like home, triggering trust, warmth, and belonging.

Emotions that work for every site:

• positivity
• belonging
• trust
• jealousy
• fear
• value
• instant gratification

What works for your site might be fear, while for someone else trust is the key emotion. You need to use the buyer persona to understand what makes the customer hit the gas full strength.

For Titika Active, it looks like jealousy or belonging (think of 20 something females) could be the emotion that they’re trying to trigger with the help of the lady on the right and the strong typography. Why jealousy? It’s on the female in the promotion, but not on the the female customer. If she’s jealous, and feels like she is part of the brand, then a purchase is inevitable.

Step 3: Using the Right Text (Copy)

Were all words created equally? Maybe they were created equally, but not all words have the same power or influence – even when they may have nearly identical definitions.

When it comes to the copy that you are using – whether to describe a product or on a new site-wide promotion – less is more. Research from the Nielsen Norman Group shows that visitors read less than 28% of text on the page! The lesson is to keep the text to a minimum, make it easy to skim for speed readers, and use the best words that will be read.

The Right Adjectives

You know that not all words have the same effect and that too many words aren’t being read. The next step is to active the right words that will be read. Instead of using common adjectives that leave your customers debating your product, use adjectives that have a concrete meaning.

For example, perfect vs. great. Great can mean many thousands of different things, whereas perfect has a simplified and stronger meaning: it’s the right fit, and there is no better one.

Remove these adjectives from your vocabulary:

• great
• awesome
• amazing
• cool
• terrific
• unforgettable

trust and instant gratification

What Bed Bath & Beyond Gets Right: it’s clear that I am getting a product that can get the job done better than the rest. There’s no shortage of trust, value, or instant gratification.

power and value

What Atlas Wearables Gets Right: it’s clear that this product will enable me to take my fitness to the next level. A sense of power and value are the first emotions that hit me.

This much is clear: using adjectives that provide a clear picture of what it will be like to use the product are the ones that lead to a noticeable improvement in your conversion rates.

Add these words to your vocabulary:

• perfect
• essential
• empower
• smooth
• clear
• versatile

Step 4: Images and Design

Your design needs to do the same thing as your text: bring to life an emotion that will make the customer complete the purchase. If the goal of your text is positivity, then the design should do the same. If your text is all about value, then the design should be that too.

According to web designer Paul Jarvis, in order to trigger emotion, your design needs to get four things right: visually appealing, enjoyable, memorable, and personal. You need to use those four cornerstones together to jolt the emotion to life.

The following image from Adidas is spot on. Even if the words “I’m not done” were not in the image, we would all still be able to understand that the brand stands for work ethic and competition.

Does this meet all of Jarvis’ basic points? You be the judge.

The sweat, action, and frazzled hair all resonate for their potential buyers that take pride in their work ethic. As a result, the customer is motivated and maybe a little jealous of the women in the picture.

The image is visually appealing, enjoyable (for their buyer persona), memorable (even more with the added text), and personal. The next step is completing the purchase.

jealousy and power

Over the last few years Dove has rebranded itself to be the brand for anyone and everyone – especially within the different types of females.

The first thing you see on their site is the following image. This design is as basic as it gets, yet it is still able to generate emotion within the customer. In this specific case, Dove is able to elicit a feeling of belonging for every customer that lands on their page.

Visually appealing, enjoyable, memorable, and personal: belonging and trust

Below is a Coupon Pop being used on the eCommerce site PYTHair. The design hits the nail on the head. Without paying any attention to the tax, the team uses the color blue and an image of a young lady – after using their product – to create a sense of both trust, happiness, and jealousy.

Step 5: Emphasize Benefits and Not Features

Notice that in the above Coupon Pop the brand did not mention their products or add an image of one of their products. They sell an experience that makes their customers happy; beautiful hair.

Now go ahead and visit the most successful eCommerce website you know of – whether it’s a giant brand or a small business. You will notice the same thing. The site, the pictures, and copywriting is all presented in a way that reflects the experience of using the product.

Why? Images and text that reflect the experience of using the product is much more emotionally engaging.

Notice the below image from Asics. For me it stands out because it makes absolutely no mention of any feature. All it does is tell me what I want to know – run more!

“More Miles” is the experience

Here JCPenney does not mention one bit of information about the technology or about some flashy feature. They sell people the experience of using the products.

Both Asics and JCPenney pass on mentioning features because although they may be important, generating a strong sense of emotion is much more difficult with a feature, whereas with an experience the customer gets to know the result. Results are what matter to your business, and they are what matter to your customers. Great results means happy people. Happy people spend.

Pro Tip: Typography

The font you use may matter more than you think. Although you might be limited to the type of fonts you can use in your themes, with the Coupon Pop you can use any Google font. This graphic breaks down just a few types of fonts and their psychological meanings in regards to the emotion they encourage.

Putting it All Together

Jiffy Lube is not an exciting business, at least not as much as say Nike, Jaguar, Uber, and others. In their own words, “a chain of over 2,000 businesses in North America offering oil changes and other automotive services”.

With this homepage design however, they have become exciting to their visitors. How much text? Only six words. Not only is the quantity perfect, but so is the quality of the words used, such as “worry behind” and then “clear driving ahead”.

The image completes the text, by using what appears to be a happy couple, using an old-school car. In addition, whether you noticed or not, the mirror reflects the man’s smile, while the passenger waives her hands in the air. These actions serve as proof to the text.

Emotion Clouds the Mind

Emotion is what take the customer from step A (wanting the product) to step B (buying the product). The goal for your eCommerce business is to improve your conversion rates. At the end of the day, that goal is one factor (high vs. low conversion rates) that plays a major role in whether you turn into a relevant, growing brand or not. The means to achieving this goal is by triggering the right emotion.

Once you are able to trigger the right emotion, all the rest of the pieces fall into place.

Your Homework

What is the buyer persona of your site → What emotions will make completing the purchase an urgent process? → How can you bring that emotion to life in as few words as possible? → How will you describe the experience your product offers? → How will you bring the emotion to life with images and overall design (including fonts)? → Constantly run A/B testing until you have found the winning emotion.

Good luck! If you’ve got any questions or comments, we’d love for you to say something in the comment section below.

There’s this wonderful magazine, yes a print magazine, in France called INfluencia. While it’s also equally lovely online, I thoroughly enjoy the intricate design work that goes into each page. When INfluencia reached out to talk about X and the future of experience design, I jumped at the chance. If you speak French, it’s online here. Below is the translated version if you prefer English.

INFluencia: Les start-up, l’avenir de l’expérience client ?

When I read the pitch of the book, that future of brand is tied to meaningful and shareable experiences, I’m tempted to say that there’s nothing new under the sun. You don’t think brands have already adjusted?

I suppose you’re right. Every brand believes in delivering meaningful and shareable experiences. After all, no executive has ever said that they don’t really care about customers.  Yet, some studies show that only 7% of companies are truly customer-centric.  However, if executives actively invested in experiences, then the entire state of business would be in a much better position.

Just spend time studying the disruptive forces that cause the Fortune 500 to turn over so dramatically over the years and you’ll see that in the end, the need to innovate and compete at new levels is accelerating.

More and more, incumbent businesses and even industries are being disrupted by startups around the world because, technology aside, they’re finding new ways to deliver products and services packaged as value-added experiences. These new companies are catering to a new generation of customers and building new businesses and technology models to do so. At the same time, they’re setting new standards for expectations, conditioning customers to think differently and thus forcing incumbent businesses to react and catch up….even though they may not actually do so from a truly customer-centric core.

Don’t you think that a service can be an experience?

Yes.

CX is heralded as the new competitive frontier, which means either you compete at the customer experience level or you compete for smaller and less significant market share. In fact, most customers (85%) have said that they would pay up to 25% more for a superior experience. That alone should serve as a catalyst to change. Businesses tend to think about CX though as improving technology and processes based on existing models for engagement. That’s partly true, although this is iteration rather than innovation at best. Disruption though must happen inside and out, starting with philosophy and perspective about what’s broken today and more so, what’s possible tomorrow.

Ultimately (and inevitably) companies need a new approach to customer experience to compete against outside disruption and evolving customer behaviors and expectations. But while technology is accelerating many changes, the core of the problems plaguing “service as an experience” isn’t new. Study after study find that customers (89%) will switch brands because of a negative customer experience. At the same time, only 37% of executives were motivated to start formal CX initiatives. That’s not all though. 95% of customers of taken action as a result of a bad experience. And, 79% have told others about their negative experiences.

Everything is different now. Your digital customers are accidental narcissists…and that’s a good thing. There’s no going back. Now in a connected society where people’s expectations are soaring, they’re far more connected and informed than any customer before them. Every app and digital channel they adopt teaches them that they’re the center of their own universe.

Companies that focus on a higher purpose historically outperform those that don’t. Customer experience and the services that define engagement in all moments of truth have demonstrated time and time again that they are the source of growth and loyalty.

What do you exactly call experience and I guess you also refer to the emerging trends of VR and AR?

VR and AR are technologies that introduce new channels and platforms for experiences. No matter how advanced or futuristic they are, innovation is only an enabler for delivering experiences (good, inconsequential or bad). Experience design takes vision and architecture to use technology, channels and all touch points as catalysts to deliver and reinforce desired experiences. These experiences can be designed as whole worlds or as part of thoughtful and connected ecosystems.

To the extent you know and care about people and their aspirations, challenges, and goals, you can be inspired to use VR/AR as well as traditional and emergent platforms for much more meaningful engagement.

What is an experience?

Before we get into tech, perhaps one place to start is define what an experience is and why it matters.

Quite simply, an experience is an emotion, observation or reaction. Experiences add up over time as a result of each engagement throughout the lifecycle, thus forming “the” experience. Customer experience isn’t just one thing. It’s everything.

Today, businesses are famously siloed as each group is responsible for a portion of the funnel. And, each operate independently of one another with different objectives, standards and metrics that often compete or distract from others leading customers toward a chaotic or confusing customer experience.

Before we can rethink channels or invest in new tech and touch points, businesses need to think holistically, aligning teams, work, and goals around a united experience. With experience architecture, groups have a standard toward which to collaborate. In the best examples, companies that invest in CX learn how to work differently with new models, processes, teams and supporting systems forming as a result.

Is experience a better tool for ad or marketing?

In an era of experience, one where how they are felt and shared, count for everything, experience is the new brand, the new marketing and the new catalyst for customer relationship management. If you think about it, that means that marketing plays a more important role than ever before. It’s no longer something to solely invest in for branding, top of the funnel or First Moment of Truth (FMOT) engagement. Experience architecture is now responsible for delivering, managing and strengthening the brand and the customer relationship in every moment of truth, throughout the customer lifecycle. From product design to advertising and marketing campaigns to sales to service and support through to loyalty and advocacy, experience design can unite, optimize and enhance every stage of the customer journey. By investing in experiences, businesses not only increase retention, but experiences that people have and share complement customer acquisition as well.

Experience is everything…

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I am such a hard-core believer in the value of having a sales management process because I know without it, long-term success will not happen. My loyalty stems from watching a mentor from earlier in my career construct and implement a process that became a motivating force for achieving results. When I transitioned from sales into management, I followed his lead and began incorporating this critical element into my work. I now credit it for my success.

Simply put, a sales management process is a disciplined approach to driving multiple facets of performance, with regularly scheduled touch points along the way. By defining such a process, specific to the goals and culture of your own organization, you can drive both execution and accountability over the long term.

I recommend this type of a process for any sales leader, whether you are responsible for a team of direct-reporting individuals or a larger global team. Even senior sales leaders should institute their own consistent, repeatable management process so that everyone can under them — every individual, every line of business, and every division — becomes aligned and committed to the same strategic path.

When you introduce a defined process into your organization, know that it’s not a short-term exercise running over a 30- or 90-day cycle. It takes discipline and a long-range view to gain the necessary buy-in and see results over time. Among your priorities should be the following:

• Creating a structured and disciplined team cadence, which adds reliability and predictability by providing regularly scheduled opportunities to connect, update, regroup, and reenergize members of the team
• Building in accountability for execution of each component of the process
• Fostering an environment of collaboration and sharing of ideas and experiences
• Honing necessary skills and expertise through annual individual development plans

Account planning sessions for strategic prospects form the foundation of the sales management process. What you are accomplishing in these regularly scheduled sessions is working as a team to better understand all that’s happening within specific potential accounts. What industry are they in? What kind of pressures exists within that industry? Is there any transformation occurring within the industry? What are the performance trends within each prospect’s company? What are their recent financial results? What new products or services are prospects offering? Have they acquired any new companies and, if so, how is integration going? How are they viewed by their clients? What is their value proposition to their clients? What are their key business objectives and growth initiatives?

Information about prospects can be researched and accessed in many ways: news releases, company websites, industry trade publications, financial reports, sites, such as Hoovers and LinkedIn, and company alerts through LinkedIn Navigator, Google, etc. The goal is to gain a well-informed understanding of the prospect organization, where it’s headed, recent company updates, and any obstacles or pressures it faces. Additionally, it’s important to identify the key people within the organization who are aligned with how your company can help support their key initiatives.

The point of all of this information gathering is to determine 1) how your organization can best help them achieve their business goals and 2) effectively taking this understanding and creating impactful messaging that will resonate and align with key business objectives of the contacts that you are focusing on. This message should vary depending on the role and responsibilities of the individual that you are contacting.

As a result of the account planning sessions, you should be well prepared to develop a defined strategy for engagement that identifies who on your team will be responsible for which elements. This typically would involve several individuals, including sales professionals, subject-matter experts, and support staff. Progress, milestone, and strategy updating should be addressed at regular intervals, typically monthly.

There’s a lot of homework to be done before Call One is made to the prospect, which is why this element of the sales management process is targeted to larger opportunities, often national or strategic accounts. If there is no account-planning component to the sales management process, you risk putting forth a much less effective message to your most important potential accounts. The value that you and your group create by spending productive time in thinking about the best path forward allows you to deliver a much more impactful proposition that will surely resonate with the prospect. Your chances of success improve when you can focus your messaging and value on driving improved business outcomes for the prospect. The upfront time that you invest allows you to convey greater value and gain credibility, gaining entrée to these most important accounts.

In my next post, I’ll cover the essential element of team cadence in the sales management process, addressing how it builds accountability and results.

Learn more about our Sales Management Process Development and Consulting.

The post Why Sales Leaders Need to Craft and Control the Sales Management Process appeared first on Richardson Sales Enablement Blog.

Brazilian hedge fund manager Luis Stuhlberger, the founder of Verde Asset Management, is bearish on his home country.

"We are positioned for a muddle through," Stuhlberger wrote in a November performance report to investors in Portuguese and translated by Business Insider.

Stuhlberger is one of the more closely followed money managers in Brazil. Just last month, he was profiled by The New York Times.

His fund has also posted tremendous returns since its inception in 1997, posting average annual returns of 30%. The fund's only down year was in 2008, when it fell 6.44%.

This year, Verde's Brazil macro fund is up 27.35% year-to-date. The fund rose 2.48% in November.

While Verde has thrived, Brazil has gone through major economic and political turmoil. Corruption was discovered within the quasi-state oil firm Petrobras last year, and the scandal that ensued has reached the highest levels of business and government.

It has taken down one of the country's most powerful bankers, and it is part of the reason President Dilma Rousseff has an approval rating of 10%. Her opposition started impeachment proceedings against her earlier this month.

In the midst of all this chaos, Brazil's major exports — commodities — started to plummet in price. Now the country is dealing with an inflation rate that has hit 10%, growing unemployment, and a plunging currency, the real.

Stuhlberger takes swipes at Rousseff and her political opposition. Both Rousseff's party and the opposition party are involved in the corruption scandal.

Stuhlberger, like many Brazilians, sees the impeachment proceedings as a way for the president's opposition to take the focus off them, and he thinks the process is wasting precious time the country should be using to enact crucial tax reforms.

In the investor update, Stuhlberger notes that foreign investors continue to have "great confidence" and "hope" in Brazil, adding that capital flows are still fairly positive.

Conversely, his fund, is "very negative" on Brazil. The fund's portfolio is pessimistic in its positioning for three reasons:

1. The market has correctly priced Brazilian assets at this point.
2. If Rousseff is impeached, there will most likely be a bull market, though it won't be sustainable.
3. Foreigners are still interested in investing in Brazil.

Around 20% of the fund is in US dollars and invested in stock markets abroad. The fund also has a large allocation in NTN-Bs (Brazilian treasury bonds) with a duration of three to four years. The fund has a small position in Brazilian stocks. Stuhlberger's letter also noted that the fund had a "variety of disaster hedges."

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Animated map shows all the major oil and gas pipelines in the US

The Internet of Things (IoT) —  a vast network of connected devices — is set to become the world’s largest device market over the next decade, potentially creating trillions of dollars in economic value. However, without a reliable and secure network connection, these devices will fail to deliver that value. Device owners can choose between a number of established and emerging networking technologies to connect their IoT devices and collect data from them for analysis.

BI Intelligence’s new IoT Networks Report examines these different networking technologies, their pros and cons, and how well they are positioned for future growth in the IoT market. We also outline how different networks are best suited for connecting specific types of IoT devices, including connected cars, drones, smart home devices, and wearables.

 

Here are some of the key takeaways:

• The need for interoperability — the ability for different devices to share data with each other — is driving the development of new networking technologies specifically designed for IoT devices.
• How Nest’s Thread network standard is positioned against other standards for connecting the smart home like ZigBee and Z-Wave.
• New developments in Wi-Fi and 4G LTE technologies could make them more suitable for connecting low-power devices like sensors and smart lights.
• New standards for low power wide area networks (LPWANs) could make it more cost-effective to connect large numbers of small devices over large geographic areas. 

 

In full, the report:

• Examines how different networking standards will best fit the needs of differet industries and environments.
• Shows how the lack of interoperability between different IoT devices could damage the adoption of IoT technologies,
• Forecasts the growth of new and established mesh networking technologies designed specifically for the IoT market.
• Explains how existing networks that connect PCs, laptops, and mobile devices can be modified to better suit sensors and other small IoT devices. 

 

Interested in getting the full report? Here are two ways to access it:

1. Purchase & download the full report from our research store. >> Purchase & Download Now
2. Subscribe to an All-Access pass to BI Intelligence and gain immediate access to this report and over 100 other expertly researched reports. As an added bonus, you'll also gain access to all future reports and daily newsletters to ensure you stay ahead of the curve and benefit personally and professionally. >> Learn More Now

 

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PS. Did you know...

Our BI Intelligence INSIDER Newsletters are currently read by thousands of business professionals first thing every morning. Fortune 1000 companies, startups, digital agencies, investment firms, and media conglomerates rely on these newsletters to keep atop the key trends shaping their digital landscape — whether it is mobile, digital media, e-commerce, payments, or the Internet of Things.

Our subscribers consider the INSIDER Newsletters a "daily must-read industry snapshot" and "the edge needed to succeed personally and professionally" — just to pick a few highlights from our recent customer survey.

With our full money-back guarantee, we make it easy to find out for yourself how valuable the daily insights are for your business and career.  Click this link to learn all about the INSIDER Newsletters today.

 

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We were asked to provide a cold email template for B2B. In our research we looked at 16, and identified a winning pattern amongst those 16. Then we improved it! I've then added the one missing ingredient and built you a template you can model your own cold email template on.  Let me start with the conclusions, and then show the research we did to arrive at those conclusions. I'll end with a cold email template you can model your own on.  Provide a benefit statement and a hint at the action request in the subject Evidence your research Hint at FOMO - both their competitor and the global push on the topic Write to more than one person in the company, and tell them all Show your credibility Don't mention your product, only that you can help End with a request

read more

During a conversation with my friend who is a kindergarten teacher, she told me that she spent the entire day building out a lesson plan for the week ahead.

She had everything sorted out — down to the hour — and knew how to execute the plan in a way that would work for her students.

In recent years, the job of a sales representative has developed into something similar to this type of role.

Reps have transitioned from simply being providers of information to providers of information and educators. Reps must offer context around the information they share as well as teach prospects about the features and capabilities of what it is they're selling in regards to their specific challenges.

With this in mind, reps might take a lesson from teachers and start building lesson plans for their prospects.

How to Use a Teacher-Approved Framework for Your Sales Plan

When you’re setting up your lesson plan, follow this framework many teachers use:

1. Set a learning objective: What are you trying to teach this person?
2. Identify the crucial points: What are the key things the student needs to understand in order to be successful?
3. Establish a test schedule: How are you going to test them on this information?
4. Allow time for questions: When will you give them a chance to seek clarification?
5. Ask for feedback: How can you change your teaching strategies so that students can more easily grasp the concept?

Without further ado, here’s how to apply the concept of lesson plans to a sales scenario.

1. Establish a learning goal.

If a prospect is going to learn one thing from you during a call, what would it be? Your answer to this question is the learning goal.

It’s important to enter each sales meeting with a learning goal in mind. Here are a few examples:

• A full understanding of your product’s functions
• How your product compares to a competitor's product
• The ROI of your service
• Why Strategy A is a better option than Strategy B

2. Focus on the key concepts and benefits.

As we all know from our school days, nobody likes information overload.Providing too much information interrupts how recipients of that information function as well as impacts their decision-making ability — and in sales, that’s not good.

Alternatively, just focusing on a few key concepts with prospects allows them to latch on to crucial ideas regarding how your brand and product or service can support them. So, before you go into your next meeting, decide what key points you want to hit on and then stay focused on them.

3. Include an assessment.

Why do teachers give tests? To ensure students are retaining information.

Just like teachers, it makes sense for sales reps to give their prospects tests. After all, it’s unfair to expect a buyer to pick up on what you’re telling them right away, and what is a test other than an opportunity to reinforce knowledge?

Granted, you probably don’t want to sit prospects down and have them write an essay about your presentation. However, informal quizzes can reinforce key concepts and increase the chances that they’ll buy (after all, people tend not to purchase products they don’t understand). Set aside times to review and ask questions to ensure your prospects understand exactly what you’ve told them.

4. Schedule time for questions.

Like any good teacher, leave some time for questions at the end of all of your calls. This is your chance to clarify anything your prospect might not have picked up on or understood. If they aren’t sure how something works, encourage them to ask questions and gain the knowledge they need to be successful.

It’s important to note that great teachers take time for questions throughout the lesson versus only at the end. Sales reps should use the same technique. Before you begin a new section or introduce a new topic, ask the prospect if they have any questions and take time to respond thoughtfully.

5. Seek feedback.

Finally, seek feedback through a customer survey, questionnaire, post-meeting debrief, or another format. Making adjustments based on prospect comments will help you fine-tune your presentation and the information you need to cover moving forward. Whether it’s talking too fast or not providing enough information that's tailored to a specific prospect's need, you can learn a lot about your techniques through feedback.

Start Educating Your Buyers

Teachers and sales reps might not have a lot in common on the surface, but both need to deliver information in an educational and supportive way to ensure their students and prospect understand and retain it.

The better and teachers and reps can instruct and impart knowledge, the more successful students and prospects will be.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in December 2015 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

When it comes to LinkedIn, the name of the game is being able to quickly locate, engage and develop relationships with your target audience.

It used to be a tedious, time-consuming task, but in recent months a new Internet browser plugin has emerged that automates the entire process.

God bless the Internet!

Because LinkedIn allows developers to create apps and add-ons that play nice with the platform, you and I benefit as a result.

The plugin I want to tell you about today is called LinMailPro, and it is one of the fastest methods I’ve seen to date for identifying, organizing and engaging with your target market on LinkedIn.

Watch this video to see how it works.

The video above is a tutorial I created that shows you how to find your target audience/buyers using LinkedIn Search, and then how you can tag, organize and instantly send personalized, 1-on-1 invites to everyone you find.

Best of all, it runs automatically, saving you the tedious and time-consuming task of individually clicking, copying and pasting invite after invite to these top prospects.

LinkedIn Invitations in a Few Simple Steps

As you can see in the video I made, it’s a simple process:

• Find Your Target Audience Using LinkedIn Search.
• Add Those New Prospects to the LinMailPro Queue.
• Choose which LinkedIn Tags to apply inside LinMailPro.
• Run LinMailPro & Send Personalized Invitations to Each Prospect Individually.

Important: Use Your LinkedIn Invitations Wisely!

Remember, the key to success on LinkedIn is personalized, 1-on-1 marketing.

It is not about volume.

It is about quality.

For example, if you try to send hundreds of LinkedIn invites a day using a tool like LinMailPro, LinkedIn is likely going to pop up a warning page that says, in essence, “Are you a robot?” and ask you to enter a CAPTCHA phrase.

And, if you ignore that and keep trying to force-feed invitations all day long, LinkedIn will (worst case) kick you out of the system and not allow you to log into the desktop version for 24 hours.

(Note: You can still log in via the LinkedIn mobile apps during this time period and use the platform that way.)

My long-winded warning is meant to say this: Use common sense!

A Winning Formula for LinkedIn Invitations

As long as you keep your daily invites to 50 or less each day, you shouldn’t run into any issues with a tool like LinMailPro.

More important, make sure you are personalizing your invites and targeting prospects on LinkedIn who would want to hear from you.

With that said, if you truly offer a product or service that would appeal to a specific, targeted audience gathered here on LinkedIn, then the process should be simple:

• Find that Audience.
• Invite them to Connect.
• Build a Relationship. Find out what they need help with, etc.
• Demonstrate Your Expertise or Value BEFORE asking for anything.
• Ask for the Sale.

If you follow that simple strategy, you’ll find that these professionals (A) Want to connect with you, (B) Want to hear from you – assuming the first thing you send isn’t a sales pitch – and (C) Will purchase from you after you’ve built up enough trust to earn the sale.

This is why I love LinkedIn, and why I spend every day teaching Small Business Owners, Sales Executives, Business Coaches, Trainers, Speakers, Consultants and many others how to generate business for themselves using this platform.

With 400 million professionals in 200+ countries, trust me when I say your audience is here on LinkedIn.

Take The First Step: Invite Others to Connect!

The first step, of course, is finding your target audience and asking those professionals to connect!

So get out there and do it!

It’s hard to believe, but it is already the end of the year. You’re likely well underway in planning how you’ll meet your company’s goals in 2016. If you haven’t yet, then hopefully it’s on the checklist for the next week or two! For sales, this means setting monthly bookings goals (not billings or revenue, read more on these often misunderstood terms here) as well as monthly rep quotas and compensation plans. For marketing, this means forecasting marketing’s contribution to the pipeline, along with the number of opportunities that will need to be sourced and bookings generated.

Building out sales models to forecast the next 12 months is no easy task, and you’ll likely need to make some assumptions along the way. With that in mind, here are four critical levers that are often overlooked at the expense of understanding exactly what it will take to, a year from now, be looking back on just how successful you’ve been at hitting your goals.

Don’t make these inbound sales planning mistakes

Quota attainment

No matter how great your sales team is, everyone is human. Even your all-star reps probably aren’t going to hit their quotas every single month. Because of this, we must introduce this variable to our sales planning models if we’re going to staff and forecast correctly. The only question is, what is a realistic quota-attainment benchmark?

The Bridge Group has studied the performance of inside sales teams and found that in fact only 67 percent of reps hit their quotas on a monthly basis!

Image Source: Bridge Group

By introducing this variable into the sales planning model you can then multiply each monthly target by the 67 percent. This means that a fully ramped sales rep with a $50,000-per-month target will in fact only book $33,500.

Quota ramp

It’s unrealistic to expect new sales reps, no matter their level of previous experience, to be fully productive right off the bat. They’ll need time to come up to speed on your specific product/solution and sales process. So again, if you don’t introduce a variable to account for this slower increase in productivity, you’ll be setting the business and your reps up for failure.

Turning again to data from the Bridge Group, it shows that ramp times can last anywhere from three to seven months, depending on contract size (measured here as annual recurring revenue).

Image Source: Bridge Group

With this in mind, revisit historical data and create a roadmap where reps will have time to reach full productivity and adjust your bookings expectations accordingly. Here’s an example of what that might look like for an inside sales rep (ISR in the chart below) with a ramp time of five months until full productivity:

With these two assumptions accounted for, you should be able to set realistic bookings goals, while accurately defining the resources and number of FTEs the sales team will need and hedge risk.

Employee attrition

The final variable that should be introduced into your sales team’s performance is employee attrition. The Bridge Group shows us that average rep tenure is 2.5 years, though this is something you should be also tracking for your own business.

Image Source: Bridge Group

The easiest way to account for this would be to apply a blanket expected attrition rate to the sales team. However, research from Sajeev Popat, of InsightSquared as shown that attrition rates vary drastically between ramping and fully ramped sales reps. This means that instead of a blanket rate, you’ll receive a more accurate picture of attrition by breaking out those two categories, like this:

Image Source: Sajeev Popat

Now you can add this number back into your bookings goals to help create a more accurate monthly bookings plan and hiring roadmap.

Marketing’s contribution to the pipeline and revenue

Armed with a better understanding of just how many opportunities and pipeline coverage you’ll need, it’s time to turn your attention to where these opportunities will be sourced. What percentage can marketing contribute? What percentage will be sourced by outbound sales, customer referrals, or other additional revenue streams?

SiriusDecisions advises clients to think about marketing contribution based on your go-to-market strategy. To do this, the company uses three tiers:

• Tier 1: Enterprise
• Tier 2: Commercial
• Tier 3: SMB

Each tier then influences not only the marketing budget, but also the leads sourced by marketing and leads influenced by marketing.

The Bridge Group has also broken down the percentage of the pipeline that marketing should be able to source, broken down by annual contract value, as seen below:

Image Source: Bridge Group

These metrics should enable you to work from a projected month-over-month growth rate and create demand waterfall model to judge marketing’s trajectory towards this goal. They will also demonstrate what additional investment may be needed. For example, by forecasting constant conversion rates through the funnel, a 5- to 10-percent month-over-month growth in traffic, and an assumed $10,000 in ACV, it could look something like this:

Plan your growth for 2016

These exercises will allow you to forecast your sales and marketing growth much more accurately, defining hiring and capacity, rep management, quota attainment, marketing goals and budget. If you’re looking for additional resources, I highly recommend looking at this Sales Team Planning Template from InsightSquared, the Bridge Group’s Inside Sales Report, and our Guide to Inbound Sales.

You love your product—it’s been your baby from day one. You pour all your time, energy and money into building it.

Sticking a price tag on this effort is harder in some ways: How do you put a number on all of your hard work and energy? How do you communicate enduring value with a dollar sign?

When it comes to your pricing page, you’re stumped. You don’t want to think about it, and shrug the problem off, focusing back on your product.

Don’t. Everything you’ve worked towards has led up to this point. The pricing page is where the magic happens—converting leads into paying customers. It’s the last door a customer has to walk through to get to your product. Your entire acquisition funnel points to the pricing page. It’s what keeps your business going—and it’s absolutely critical that you get it right.

You’ve built an exclusive, high-value product, and this needs to be communicated on your pricing page. A good pricing page will increase both your revenue and conversion rate, optimize your sales process by qualifying leads, and will lower your churn and customer acquisition cost.

Here’s how to make a killer pricing page.

1. Keep it simple stupid

When you’ve invested tons of time and effort in development, and bulked up your product with off-the-hook API integrations, migration tools, and crazy analytic features, you’ll want to highlight each of these features in your pricing page.

Fight this temptation. You’ve got around 8 seconds to catch your customer's attention—don’t waste them. Make your pricing page easy to use and intuitive for users. It should communicate the message you want to get across.

As Tomasz Tunguz points out, a good pricing plan needs to “appear simple and logical to the customer.” Under the hood, it might be extremely complex, with varying prices for different customer sizes and product features—but on your pricing page, the numbers you quote need to clearly match customer expectations for value.

MailChimp’s pricing page is a fantastic example of this.

It’s streamlined, easy to use, and looks amazing. Prospective buyers looking at the page slide easily into the pricing package they need.

If they want to find out more, they can take a deeper look—which is where MailChimp’s pricing actually becomes quite complex. Buyers either pick monthly plans, based on the number of email subscribers, or pay-as-you-go plans, based on the number of emails sent.

MailChimp’s value proposition is based on the number of emails sent, and its pricing page easily reflects this. Hardcore users have the option to dig deeper and explore which specific features will lead to their business success.

But for average users, MailChimp’s earlier pricing page seamlessly splits them into pre-sorted categories, making the purchasing experience easy and intuitive.

Takeaway: When you build your pricing page, make sure it looks amazing and pops off the page. Most buyers won’t need to know in detail about all the features included in each package—give them what they need to make the decision. Remove roadblocks from your pricing plan. You can always show off more detailed feature comparison further into the pricing page experience. The more complex your pricing plan seems, the more tangled your value proposition grows, and the more buyers will hesitate to purchase your product.

2. The scalable plan

Another great pricing page characteristic is to price based on a value metric—the core value that customers get out of a product. This could be the number of contacts in a CRM platform, number of active users, storage space, and so on.

Customers essentially pay based on how much they get out of your product. Pricing scales based on usage of the product.

One of the difficulties of using a value metric in your pricing plan is it can go against principle #1—keep it simple. If you scale pricing based on a single value metric, you add another dimension to the pricing of your product, and you need to make it clear to customers what they’re paying for on the pricing page.

Dropbox’s answer to this problem is to split its pricing into 3 tiers based on the value metric of storage—Basic (2GB), Pro (1TB), and Business (Unlimited). Customers know exactly what they get at each price point.

Another common solution is to price per seat, or number of users. For example, Asana, a product management and team collaboration platform, scales pricing based on the number of people you have on your team. It has an easy-to-use pricing slider:

Pricing around a value-metric can often be confusing for users, who’ve come to expect a more traditional, multi-tiered pricing plan. Asana’s pricing slide cuts through this confusion, and helps the user understand that as they grow with the service, so does the price.

With Asana, all paying customers get the same feature set. Asana’s subscription based pricing is tiered so that larger teams who grow and get more value out of Asana pay more per user than smaller teams. A five member team, for example, pays around $4 per user, while a sixty member team pays around $8 per user. That said, there are good reasons against pricing per user; the number of users is not always where value is derived for customers and it sets a negative incentive for adoption among your team.

Takeaway: There are a bunch of advantages to pricing based on a value metric. It lowers the entry barrier for new customers, making it easy for them to pay based on their current needs. It’s also a great way to get a lot of adoption early on, without having to create a free tier to pull customers in—and it’s never too early to start charging your customers.

And as their businesses grow, and they use the product more, their needs increase. Their pricing is automatically scaled to reflect that. The value-metric pricing plan allows for increased expansion revenue, without having to upsell existing customers to higher-tier plans.

3. Value over price

Even if you don’t explicitly use a value metric to scale pricing, you still need to have a solid understanding of the core benefits that your product provides to customers across different plans. Your product’s pricing should always be based on value.

Part of the difficulty of using a scalable plan like Asana’s is it reduces your pricing model to a single metric. This doesn’t necessarily reflect the various ways in which your product provides value to its users. It also doesn’t allow you to charge for all these extra ways you could be providing value.

Giving customers the option to pay more based on their needs, and including “premium” tiers like business or enterprise, is a great way to tap into this extra source of revenue.

Slack, the popular team messaging app, does this brilliantly. Its pricing page factors in the value metric of users per team, but also includes more features as you go up the Free, Standard, Plus and Enterprise plans:

Slack’s pricing page makes feature differentiation really clear across each tier, so that customers who arrive at the pricing page know exactly which solution they need for their business.

For example, Slack’s Plus package targets larger businesses, which often require more secure and stable connections, and are legally obligated to archive their messages. The Plus plan’s SAML integration and Compliance export features are must-haves for these buyers.

Not everyone needs premium options—but a lot of people want them.

Often, pricing too low will alienate certain buyers, who will perceive the value of your product as “cheap.” Make them feel special. Give them the option to give you more money, with premium and enterprise tiers.

Another way Slack’s pricing page maximizes revenue is by offering a discount for annual prepayment—which you should too if you don’t already. By getting customers to pay for the year upfront, they add significantly to your cashflow, and essentially lend you money for free. They’re more invested in the product, and will churn less frequently.

Takeaway: Don’t give in to the temptation to price certain features based on how difficult they were to build, or have a checklist with every feature checked. Instead, focus on what each of your buyer personas needs to succeed, and price accordingly. Buyers with larger budgets are often uncomfortable paying for “cheaper” options. Give them premium packages and the option for annual prepayment. 

If you price too low, or don’t allow buyers the opportunity to pay more, you’ll miss out on a potentially huge source of revenue. In doing so you’ll take away from your ability to improve what matters: your product.

Pricing never ends

Pricing is a process that you need to optimize continually. There's no single right answer to the question of how to price your SaaS product. The pricing model you use should change and grow as your business does. Constantly look to your product to see what key value metrics it provides for your customers, and align your pricing strategy accordingly.

Your pricing page is no different. Your pricing page closes deals for your SaaS business, all on its own. It's the culmination of your entire funnel—give it the attention it needs. Test it constantly. By doing so, you’ll see higher conversion rates and drive revenue growth, setting your SaaS business on the road to long term prosperity.

Various Quantum computer academics are still trying to downplay the claim that Google made that Dwave's quantum annealing system can be 100 million times faster Matthias Troyer of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. “This is 100 million times faster than some specific classical algorithm on problems designed to be very hard for that algorithm but easy for D-Wave.” In other words, the D-Wave had a massive home advantage.

Better versions of the simulated annealing algorithm can reduce this advantage to just 100 times faster, says Troyer, while other more complex algorithms running on an ordinary PC can beat D-Wave entirely. “A claim of ’100 million speedup’ is thus very misleading,” he says.

You should also keep in mind that the D-Wave is a specialised piece of hardware that costs around $10-15 million. As the Google team admit in a paper detailing their work, a similarly specialised but non-quantum device might be able to match the current D-Wave computer, though they think it isn’t worth exploring this avenue as they believe larger quantum computers will soon exceed these capabilities.

Google's Neven admits at the end of his blog post that other algorithms can beat the D-Wave, but the Google team think this advantage will disappear as quantum computers get larger.

Others are less sure. “This is certainly the most impressive demonstration so far of the D-Wave machine’s capabilities,” says Scott Aaronson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “And yet, it remains totally unclear whether you can get to what I’d consider ‘true quantum speedup’ using D-Wave’s architecture.”

Will we ever have definitive proof of speedy quantum computers?
Maybe – but it is likely to require new hardware. D-Wave’s goal has always been to get quantum computers to market as fast as possible, but Aaronson thinks their “quantum coherence” – a measure of the fragile quantum states necessary for computation – isn’t as good as that found in quantum chips built by teams who are taking a more slow and steady approach

Google is hedging its bets – it has hired external researchers to build its own quantum chip. And IBM recently received US government funding to develop its own version.

Both of these seem more promising, says Aaronson. “Things are happening a good deal faster than I’d expected,” he says. “But it remains as important as it ever was to separate out the marketing buzz from what’s actually been shown.”

Google and Dwave 100 million speedup tests research paper were with 1000 qubits but they have 2048 physical qubits in the lab already

Dwave's washington chip has 2048 physical qubits but they usually activate about 1152 qubits.

It seems clear that in 2016, the Dwave and Google research work will be with 2000 qubits. The unpublished work now is probably with 2000 qubits. By late 2016 or early 2017, there will be 4000 qubit work.

There are revised designs with more connections and lower temperature performance and other physical design improvements.

There does not seem to be any reason that Dwave could not rapidly integrate any new superconducting materials and designs that result from research at IARPA, IBM, Google or other places.

Dwave saw that between that 128 qubit and 512 qubit, there was a 300,000x improvement in performance. That kind of performance gain is really unprecedented.

It seems clear that the 4000 qubit systems will utterly crush any possible classical computing approach regardless of dedicated ASIC hardware or the best algorithms.

The slow and steady approaches are not getting tens of millions of dollars in sales and hundreds of millions in funding.


Jerry Chow, a program manager for IBM Research’s Experimental Quantum Computing unit, working on a quantum computer. (IBM)

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When it comes to wages, France is the best and America is the worst. 

This chart, which comes to us from GMO Capital's Jeremy Grantham, shows how inflation-adjusted wages in the UK and US have been flat over the last 40 or so years while France and Japan have enjoyed massive wage gains. 

"For the 50 years I have been in America, Business Week and The Wall Street Journal have been telling us how incompetent at business the French are and how persistently we have been kicking their bottoms," Grantham writes.

"If only they could get over their state socialism and their acute Eurosclerosis. And as far as I can tell we have generally accepted this thesis. Yet Exhibit 1 shows what has actually happened to France’s median hourly wage. It has gone from 100 to 280. Up 180% in 45 years! Japan is up 140% and even the often sluggish Brits are up 60%. But the killer is the U.S. median wage. Dead flat for 45 years!"

And overall Grantham's outlook, as you'd expect, is pretty downbeat. 

Grantham simply doesn't think the economic truths we've all come to accept about the US — which in his view effectively amount to a collection of positive bits of misinformation — are true at all. 

Not the least of which is the idea that US-style capitalism is what allows nations to live long and prosper.

Or something like that. 

"These are the uncontestable facts," Grantham writes. "So, all I can say is that it is just as well the French have not been kicking our bottoms. But how is it that we can believe so firmly in something that just ain’t so, and by such a convincing amount?"

SEE ALSO: 'It's a different world ...'

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