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Jeffrey Gundlach, CEO and CIO of DoubleLine Funds, has a simple warning for the young money managers who haven't yet been through a rate hike cycle from the Federal Reserve: It's a new world. 

In his latest webcast updating investors on his DoubleLine Total Return bond fund on Tuesday night Gundlach, the so-called "Bond King," said that he's seen surveys indicating two-thirds of money managers now haven't been through a rate-hiking cycle. 

And these folks are for a surprise. 

"I'm sure many people on the call have never seen the Fed raise rates," Gundlach said.

"And I've got a simple message for you: It's a different world when the Fed is raising interest rates. Everybody needs to unwind trades at the same time, and it is a completely different environment for the market."

Currently, markets widely expect the Fed will raise rates when it announces its latest policy decision on Wednesday. The Fed has had rates pegged near 0% since December 2008 and hasn't actually raised rates since June 2006. 

According to data from Bloomberg cited by Gundlach on Tuesday, markets are pricing in about an 80% chance the Fed raises rates on Wednesday. Gundlach added that at least one survey he saw recently had 100% of economists calling for a Fed rate hike.

The overall tone of Gundlach's call indicated that while he believes it's likely the Fed does pull the trigger, the "all clear" the Fed seems to think it has from markets and the economy to begin tightening financial conditions is not, in fact, in place. 

In his presentation, Gundlach cited two financial readings that were particularly troubling: junk bonds and leveraged loans. 

Junk bonds, as measured by the "JNK" exchange-traded fund which tracks that asset class, is down about 6% this year including the coupon — or regular interest payment paid to the fund by the bonds in the portfolio. 

Overall, Gundlach thinks it is "unthinkable" that the Fed would want to raise rates with junk bonds behaving this way.  

Meanwhile, leveraged loan indexes — which tracks debt taken on by the lowest-quality corporate borrowers — have collapsed in the last few months, indicating real stress in corporate credit markets. 

"This is a little bit disconcerting," Gundlach said, "that we're talking about raising interest rates with corporate credit tanking."

Gundlach was also asked in the Q&A that followed his presentation about comments from this same call a year ago that indicated his view that if crude oil fell to $40 a barrel there'd be a major problem in the world. 

On Tuesday, West Texas Intermediate crude oil, the US benchmark, fell below $37 a barrel for the first time in over six years. 

The implication with Gundlach's December 2014 call is that not only would there be financial stress with oil at $40 a barrel but geopolitical tensions as well.

(Gundlach noted that while junk bonds and leveraged loans are a reflection of the stress in oil and commodity markets this doesn't mean these impacts can just be netted out, as some seem quick to do: these are the factors markets are taking their lead from.) 

It doesn't seem like much of a reach to say that when compared to this time a year ago the global geopolitical situation is more uncertain. Or as Gundlach said simply on Tuesday: "Oil's below $40 and we've got problems."

SEE ALSO: Jeff Gundlach's last big presentation of 2015: 'Tick, Tick, Tick ...'

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: This 3-minute animation will change your perception of time

The customer perception of the value of your offering may surprise you, but it's what counts the most.

Editors Note: The “Godfather of SaaS”, Jason Lemkin of SaaStr.com moderates an all-star panel with three of the best SaaS VCs around in Jason Green of Emergence Capital, Tomasz Tunguz of Redpoint Ventures, and Stacey Bishop of Scale Venture Partners.

There were so many insightful panels at this year’s Sales Stack Conference that we decided to sift through all the great pearls of wisdom being offered by our panel members in order to bring them to you in bite-sized chunks for anyone who wasn’t able to attend or as a refresher for those who did.

Name one sales/revenue tool you’ve invested in over the past 24 months and why?

Jason Green: “SalesLoft and SteelBrick — both are sitting on the sides of CRM. Great teams, significant customer adoption and traction, and no real leaders in the space. Our philosophy is that you’ve got to be a platform of record, not just a solution on top of another platform of record.

We’ve looked at a lot of companies that are building on top of SalesForce to be able to better slice & dice the data there, get better access, etc. The problem with that fundamentally is that you’re not really owning your own destiny. Salesforce can build something on top of that in a few months or even a few weeks and then all of the sudden you don’t have a sustaining business model.”

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You’ve got to be a platform of record, not just a solution on top of another platform of record.
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Tomasz Tunguz: One company is Looker, which is a BI tool and has a very interesting sales-specific use case. One of their customers, Hubspot, uses Looker to tell salespeople exactly how they’re performing on four key dimensions of their compensation plan at any point in time that they would like to know about it. Those dimensions are quota retirement, deal terms, months of cash upfront, and churn. All of those calculations actually sum up to the salesperson’s compensation.

“What’s happening in markets today where that is a big enough market?”

Tomasz Tunguz: The stack in BI has changed and so what ends up happening is you used to buy your BI with a database, data cube, and then a modeling/visualization layer on top and you did it because databases were super expensive back in the day. That’s no longer the case. You need a new tool on top. What most BI vendors do is they expect a fully formed data set to tableau. Looker models the data, takes what’s in the brain of a data scientist or an analyst and lets everyone else manipulate the data as if they knew what the data scientist knows.”

Stacey Bishop: Bizible, which is in the marketing attribution space. It understands where your marketing spend is having an impact on closed deals and understanding it all the way through the funnel. Our theory is ‘Go after the market and then try to find the best team going after that market.’ So we believe that markets determine the outcomes, teams determine whether or not you can get that #1 position.

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Our theory is ‘Go after the market and then try to find the best team going after that market.’
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Why are dashboards exciting today?

Stacey Bishop: I just think the world has gotten complicated. Understanding where your money’s going and how to get more insight into all the data. Just think in the last ten years how many channels have exploded. You now have social, you have email, you have mobile, you have web. It’s no longer a simple world where 15 years ago it might’ve just been your website and understanding that traffic. You’ve got all these other places you need to track. Plus, the marketing budget’s gone up significantly.

Is it a shift of buying dollars or are the buying dollars growing and what is driving marketing budgets up?

Stacey Bishop: I think the buying dollars are growing in marketing. There’s a whole shift where products are no longer sold, they’re bought. So buyers are going out and doing all kinds of research and they’re very knowledgeable before they engage with the sales rep. Marketing is driving a lot of that and putting the information out there through content marketing, through the social channels. Especially in developer marketing, it’s all about content marketing. You can’t just cold call up a developer and expect them to buy. They have to know about your product, be aware of it, be able to download it, try it. And so that’s just becoming a critical element in the whole process of the sales machine.

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There’s a whole shift where products are no longer sold, they’re bought. @staceycurry
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What’s the bar in 2015? Should everyone in this room be fired?

Tomasz Tunguz: Flywheel businesses are companies that generate revenue even when no one is working. For a Flywheel business model to work, you need two things: You need a buyer that is very difficult to sell to because if a buyer is easy to sell to then the traditional channels work just as well. The second thing is you need very little competition in the space.

Imagine marketing automation. One company that does flywheel business model that decides to do mostly by product, bottoms up. And you’ve got another company that raises a ton of money, coins the category, hires a sales team, defines the category, and creates a conference. The second one is going to win 9 times out 10. Because the awareness that that company is going to generate is going to allow them to dominate the category. The business will grow faster, they’ll be able raise more capital, hire more sales people, spend more on marketing, and that’s a flywheel in and of itself too.

How fast do I have to be growing to get significant capital?

Jason Green: Our best companies are growing at rates of 3-5x per year. If you aren’t demonstrating that, there better be a reason why you can’t.. and that you can get there at some point. But doubling year over year is just not interesting anymore.

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Doubling year over year is just not interesting anymore. @jasonegreen
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Jason Green: If you can raise the capital and you can invest it appropriately, you should be as aggressive as you possibly can. The only caveat is that financial markets can change, they can change dramatically. You never want to be in a position where you have to raise that next round of capital.

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If you can raise the capital and invest it appropriately, you should be aggressive @jasonegreen
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Stacey Bishop: If there’s a switching cost—if another company was going to win that deal and they didn’t get it, it was two years before they got a chance at that deal again. If you don’t win it now, you may never win that customer.

How important is it to dominate a market by taking VC? 

Jason Green: When you take venture capital you are aiming high. You’re going for size of the pie. Otherwise I always say bootstrap your business, don’t take any VC, and own 100%. But don’t get stuck in the middle. That’s death valley.

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I say bootstrap your business, don’t take any VC, and own 100%. @jasonegreen
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Stacey Bishop: If you are stuck in the middle it’s not the end of the world, but make sure you have the cash to keep going and that you don’t need access to the VC.

Jason Green: If you’re growing 50-60% a year over 5 years you’re going to 10x your business. So you’re going to get there, just be patient and don’t pay any attention to the rest of the noise.

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If you’re growing 50-60% year after year, be patient and don’t listen to the rest of the noise.
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Tomasz Tunguz: Have a conversation with your cofounders early on about your plans, because if you have two founders with different points of view, it can cause a lot of complications.”

The post Sales Stack ’15 Video Recap: How to Grow 20% Month Over Month from Top SaaS VCs appeared first on Sales Hacker.

Customer lifecycle marketing (CLM) defines the key stages that a customer evolves through, from acquisition to retention, over the course of the relationship with a brand.

We all know about the sales funnel and its involvement in the Customer Lifecycle. A customer is taken through the four essential stages of targeting, acquisition, conversion, and finally retention. However, the question remains: What would it take to convert a prospect to a lead, a lead to a customer, and for a customer to become a part of a community?

What type of visitors can convert to a sale more often? Especially, when your resources are limited? How do you tap the lifecycle process to obtain the maximum retention of customers, especially first time buyers? How can you ensure that, amongst all the hundreds of existing ecommerce websites, you are the chosen one?

This article shares use cases, at each Customer Lifecycle Stage, that have created commendable noise in the market and enviable results for companies.

Targeting

Picking a target market means making a decision on how to spend your limited resource of time and money within your target market.

Some effective strategies used in eCommerce:

Geographic targeting Strategies:

• Showing location and time specific ads during searches,
• Analysis of search activity and sales results to target high-volume regions,
• development of custom keyword lists
• Base bidding strategy on campaign goals
• Demographic targeting Strategies:
  • Age and gender targeting. Searches will display advertising campaign that will only be visible to men or women in a certain age range.
  • Design products to suit the targeted audience
• Psychological targeting Strategies:
  • Exposure to something new and unique
  • Answer the customer’s’ mental questions beforehand
  • Inspire curiosity.

A standout campaign:

Heineken, the beer brand, attracted beer connoisseurs when it rolled out “Reinvent the Draught Beer Experience” challenge, inviting ideas for making draught beer “more special or worth talking about”. It attracted hundreds of ideas, widely shared by people who enjoy a good drink. That’s generating brand interest, popularity and social promotion to just the right audience. Smart move!

Acquisition

Some effective strategies used in eCommerce:

• Setting up referral programs to take advantage of existing customers by means of offering them an incentive in return for a to referral to their friends by word-of-mouth, social media, or anything else.
• Increasing advertising by using pay-per-click ads, remarketing ads, content ads, and print ads which are targeted towards new customers.
• Organizing giveaways or contests on social media to obtain new email subscribers. This includes posting blogs regularly, tweeting about any special news and expanding followers and fans.
• Creation of a new marketing campaign with a fresh look and feel that appeals to a different market segment. This means a makeover of your website in level with the modern norms, getting some media exposure, and creating buzz about something that you are doing differently than your competition.
• Make the best of ad-free social media marketing and word-of-mouth. For word-of-mouth marketing to be effective, you can introduce competitions or giveaways, every once in a while. Excitement of winning an expensive prize just adds to the thrill of buying the product.

A standout campaign:

Enhance the impact of referral programs by bringing together an overall reward system for your visitors. The idea is to give back more than what customers expect. Apps like SLoyalty and LoyaltyLion create reward mechanisms that include even small actions like creating a customer account and making a purchase.

 

Convert

Some effective strategies used in eCommerce:

It is the truth that we all know- It’s cheaper to get past customers to come back and make another purchase than it is to find new ones. The percentage of users that convert to customers is the key to boost your revenue, sales, and ultimately profits. Here’s what most marketers do to get there:

• Discounts, free shipping, and giveaways- A study by Compete says that 93% of online buyers are encouraged to buy more products if free shipping were offered. Additionally, discounts and coupons are powerful marketing tools that allow you to give your clients special offers.

• Referral discounts- Refer friends and receive offers. With referral discounts you can test different ways of presenting an offer which would work, but still be optimized.
• Reviews and Ratings- According to a study by Figleaves it was found that products with reviews had a 12.5% higher conversion rate than products that did not. It was also discovered that the number of reviews mattered a lot as products with 20 or more reviews had a whopping 83.85% higher conversion rate than others.

A standout campaign:

Belkin tied up with Lego in 2013, to develop an amazing campaign around customizable iPhone cases. The product itself was attractive. Belkin leveraged its impact by creating a social platform where customers could show-off their purchase and share its benefits.

That’s every product purchase snowballing into many!

Retention

 Some effective strategies used in eCommerce:

• Many ecommerce companies are implementing the strategy of rewarding customers for their loyalty. Another way they do it was by developing a loyalty membership to their store while also rewarding them for their repeat purchases.
• Regular Customer Newsletter Emails- Emails have, time and again, proven to be one of the top converting channels for ecommerce.
• Outreach and connecting with visitors on Social Media with regular posts

 A standout campaign:

Diamond Candles, a scented candles eCommerce store, collects product photos and even videos from their customers and optimizes them so these can be used for their marketing efforts.

The company is converting its product into a marketing tool and attracting more customers with each purchase. Its homepage promotes that buyers may discover a ring in their candles. Customers can enter the unique code on the candle and find out if their candle has a ring. They also see a call-to-action urging them to take a photo with the ring and share it on Facebook or Twitter.

According to the CEO, they had figured out that the best way in which they could communicate the value proposition was through a succinct photo that showed the ring coming out of a candle.

Conclusion

You don’t necessarily need to be a multinational corporation to do well in marketing. All you need is a little twist in your thought patterns and then add intangible value to your customers without adding to your marketing expenses.

A focus on engaging with your customers, offering them rewards that are irresistible, and take advantage of social proof and the power of word-of-mouth marketing.

This article was first published on TargetingMantra’s Blog.

As anyone working at a high-growth startup can tell you, things get very hectic and stressful very easily. Motivating a ten person team and also having a life of my own presents itself as a single gigantic challenge. Until recently, an acquaintance or social media follower would view my life as successful, but there was one huge problem: I was anxious, stressed out and not all that happy. Thankfully, over the past year I’ve taken a new approach to life that involves being mindfully aware, or “present,” that has made me a better manager and partner in quantifiable ways.

First, I should make a slightly embarrassing admission: much of my anxiety boiled down to FOMO (fear of missing out). I felt anxious on a daily basis about missing out on, well, everything that it seemed others were doing that I wasn’t. Faster revenue growth (because 150% isn’t enough). Boozy brunches. Unicorn valuations. Skyrocketing personal wealth with minimal work experience. Bottle service. Personal training sessions. One Direction hair.

I looked at the world and saw what I didn’t have and felt bummed out and a little bitter. And how did I overcome that feeling? I got intense, took control and lived on the edge of a stress-induced breakdown, which resulted in the occasional snippy comment, the short-term desire for a “quick win” in an argument with my wife, or a passive aggressive comment to a subordinate.

Basically, I was taking my unhappiness out on those around me and being a lot less of the person that I wanted to be.

So I started searching to see if there was anyone else in the world who was wrestling with the guilt of being someone with so much yet fighting bouts of unhappiness that came in waves every few months.

And it turns out that a TON of people have felt this way—not just startup VPs, or Americans, or millennials, but human beings for hundreds of years. The introduction in the book Mindfulness in Plain English crystalizes this common anxiety and convinced me that I could do something about it.

To combat my anxiety and unhappiness, I started meditating. It has worked by making me be more “in the present” (more on that phrase a bit later).

I was an economics major in college, so the way that I measure the success of mindfulness is by the increase in positive feelings (feeling happy more often) and decrease of negative emotions (feeling anxious less often).

Let’s tackle the biggest problem first: the anxiety that makes you feel unhappy. Every single time that I feel anxious I am thinking about something in the future, meaning that I am not in the present.  Things like hiring faster (we MUST go FASTER!), what our go-to-market strategy will look like in 6 months and getting industry recognition are all thoughts about the future. By meditating, I’m able to steer myself away from dwelling on those thoughts so that when they enter my mind, I gently push them aside. The result: so much less anxiety about the future!

Another big contributor to unhappiness is feeling annoyed by something difficult to avoid: other people. This is a life lesson and also a practical management one: it’s worth it to try to see things through someone else’s perspective. By practicing empathy you have a much better chance of going through life feeling happy rather than crushed by the boredom of standing in lines or dealing with a coworker’s nagging cough. David Foster Wallace’s This is Water captures the necessity of this mentality perfectly: be present and take a second to see the good in a situation or else you’ll be mired in petty annoyances and the feeling of everyone being in your way (especially during the holiday season!).

Seeing the good in others rather than getting annoyed by them has been the biggest boon to me experiencing more positive moments. Ellen Langer notes this in her podcast interview on the Science of Mindfulness as seeing someone not as gullible but rather as trusting, not as impulsive but as spontaneous. Sitting in an open work environment near others and managing different personalities has its inherent challenges, so why make it more difficult by not finding things to enjoy about those around you?  And in case you think that the idea of mindfulness and being present is only a Buddhist philosophy that requires time spent meditating, Langer’s research shows that being mindful is more about actively focusing on the here and now (rather than meditating to get you ready to be present).

The irony of FOMO is that by worrying so much about missing out you actually miss out. You miss the joy in seeing a new hire grow and gain their own recognition, the value in not knowing where your company will be in 2 years but knowing that today, in this place, is a ton of fun. You also miss the beauty that can be found in watching leaves fall from the trees, or the colors in a sunset or the way your kid’s voice sounds when they sing Doc McStuffins songs. This is the first year of my life that hasn’t flown by—it’s been rich with work and life moments because I’ve been here, in the present, much more often.

It’s a happier place and I hope that those that I get to meet enjoy it with me.

Be mindful about how your business uses analytics. Download the free State of Analytics report from Salesforce.

At a time in our history when there is more data than ever before, the overwhelming majority of companies have yet to see the full potential of better data insights. PwC and Iron Mountain recently released a survey on how well companies are gaining value from information. The results showed a huge disconnect in the information that is available to companies and the actual insights being derived from it.

According to survey findings:

• Only 4% of businesses can extract full value from the information they hold
• 43% obtain very little benefit from their data
• 23% derive no benefit whatsoever
• 22% don’t apply any type of data analytics to the information they have

The potential of utilizing data can equate intro very big wins and even greater revenue. Take a look at this statistic based on research by McKinsey:

A 15-20% increase is huge! So why aren’t companies taking advantage of this and implementing the necessary solutions to derive value from information?

A Marketing Analytics Report from the Technology Marketing Community on LinkedIn conducted a study to determine what the biggest challenges were to turn their data into usable insights. The study revealed that the biggest problems centered around a lack of systems integration, poor data quality, and the time required to collect and analyze data.

Historically, CMOs have relied on gut instinct to make decisions. But marketing has now become a science, and data management tools and solutions are now critical for competitive survival. Here are four steps you can take to transform your data chaos into real information that will drive revenue.

1. Establish an ROI

Establishing a strong return on investment (ROI) will help get new data projects off the ground.  Begin by documenting any problems caused by incorrect data, including missed opportunities, and wasted marketing spend. This doesn’t have to be a time intensive project, but gather as much supporting documentation as possible to justify the investment.

Check out the following two examples of companies who encountered data problems and correlated a data management project to increased ROI.

a. Mid-Sized Retailer

Numerous errors in billing and shipping were causing frequent product returns, inaccurate deliveries and queried invoices. The problem was tied back to inaccurate customer addresses. The customer database contained approximately 100,000 customers. If addresses were improved by 5% or 5,000 customers, product redelivery costs would be reduced, cash flow would increase when invoices are paid in a timely manner, and customer service representatives would become more productive when they no longer need to spend time resolving customer invoicing issues.

b. National Financial Institution

Customer data was stored in different systems, spreadsheets, and databases. The marketing department had no way to access a 360-degree customer view in order to identify new revenue opportunities. By integrating each of these data sources into one database, unified household views can be established and analyzed to make informed marketing offers.  For example, using common identifiers, the “Smith” household can be linked together. By discovering that the Smiths have a college-age son, an offer can be made for a student savings account.

To further help establish an ROI, many vendors offer a complimentary data analysis to quickly identify discrepancies, inaccurate data, missing information, and other problems that may be affecting productivity.

2. Get Your Data Together

Hopefully once you have established a strong ROI, you are ready to move forward and get your data together. A data integration solutions provider will work with you to identify the data you want to integrate and your goals for the project.

While many companies believe they need to have a data scientist in place to do this, a data consultant and technology provider does the heavy lifting to seamlessly guide you through this process. In our experience, we have worked with clients to integrate data and establish a marketing database in as little as 8 weeks.

3. The Overlooked Step of Data Enhancement

Once your data is gathered, cleaned and available in one marketing database, you will probably be ready to dive head first into using. Unfortunately, you may still be missing a lot of valuable information on your customers and prospects. Customer records may be missing phone numbers or email addresses. At this point, you also have the opportunity to add valuable demographics to better understand your customers. Example of additional data you can add to your database includes age, income, occupation, presence of children, lifestyle, interests, and more. If you can think of it, the data is probably out there.

4. Better Analytics through Visual Data Discovery

Analyzing data through visual data discovery is becoming more prominent. Research has shown that when data is represented graphically, people are able to retain the information better, which in turn, speeds up the time to insight.

Traditional methods of analytics, based on reports and static graphs, are no longer enough to support quick decision-making. Visual data discovery allows a user to interact with data to explore multiple data sets, visualize correlations in data, and apply filters to quickly identify patterns.

For example, a marketer may want to better understand which products are being used by high-value customers. By viewing the data as a Venn diagram, a marketer can gain a better understanding of each customer group and which products may have an opportunity for up-sell. The user can then drill down into each segment for further analysis or to export the query for a CRM initiative or marketing campaign.

Companies using visual data discovery are more apt to find the information they need, when they need it, according to Aberdeen’s survey of organizations using visual data discovery. Companies using visual data discovery are also able to get analytics into the hands of 48% more employees, compared to those companies that depend only on reporting tools and spreadsheets for business intelligence.

Information is being generated every moment of every day. The flow of data never stops; however, by implementing measures to capture, cleanse, and analyze this data, you can extract meaningful insights to power your business to greater heights.

To learn how to maximize revenue with better marketing insights, download this free guide.

SEOUL, South Korea – Hyundai Motor Co. on Wednesday began sales of a flagship luxury sedan under its new premium brand Genesis.

The large-size sedan, to be called G90 overseas, is the first of six luxury car models that Hyundai plans to introduce under the Genesis brand by 2020.

Last month, Hyundai announced Genesis as a premium brand to boost earnings and burnish its reputation. Hyundai cars are best known for value but with Genesis the automaker is aiming to compete with Mercedes-Benz and other luxury cars.

In South Korea, the new sedan is known as the EQ900 and costs 117 million won ($99,300) for the version with the largest engine before adding optional features.

The G90 will go on sale in the U.S., the Middle East and other markets next year.

As the flagship model of the Genesis brand, the EQ900 packs some of Hyundai’s best features and technology.

It is equipped with highway driving assistance, an autonomous driving technology which adjusts distance from other vehicles and can bring the car to a stop. The feature will be available only in South Korea.

The post Hyundai Motor launches flagship luxury sedan under Genesis brand appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

During the last two years, the Google Quantum AI team has made progress in understanding the physics governing quantum annealers. We recently applied these new insights to construct proof-of-principle optimization problems and programmed these into the D-Wave 2X quantum annealer that Google operates jointly with NASA. The problems were designed to demonstrate that quantum annealing can offer runtime advantages for hard optimization problems characterized by rugged energy landscapes.

We found that for problem instances involving nearly 1000 binary variables, quantum annealing significantly outperforms its classical counterpart, simulated annealing. It is more than 100 million times faster than simulated annealing running on a single core. We also compared the quantum hardware to another algorithm called Quantum Monte Carlo. This is a method designed to emulate the behavior of quantum systems, but it runs on conventional processors. While the scaling with size between these two methods is comparable, they are again separated by a large factor sometimes as high as 100 million.

While these results are intriguing and very encouraging, there is more work ahead to turn quantum enhanced optimization into a practical technology. The design of next generation annealers must facilitate the embedding of problems of practical relevance. For instance, we would like to increase the density and control precision of the connections between the qubits as well as their coherence. Another enhancement we wish to engineer is to support the representation not only of quadratic optimization, but of higher order optimization as well. This necessitates that not only pairs of qubits can interact directly but also larger sets of qubits.

Google's quantum hardware group is working on these improvements which will make it easier for users to input hard optimization problems. For higher-order optimization problems, rugged energy landscapes will become typical. Problems with such landscapes stand to benefit from quantum optimization because quantum tunneling makes it easier to traverse tall and narrow energy barriers.


Arxiv - What is the Computational Value of Finite Range Tunneling?

Read more »

Twitter has begun experimenting with its feed, by showing some people tweets that are not in chronological order. The test seems to be about whether Twitter becomes more useful if you show people the most relevant, or most viral tweets, instead of merely the most recent one.

A lot of people — hardcore Twitter users — don't like it. They don't like change.

But Twitter needs to change, because it is being left behind by alternative social media platforms like Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram, all of whom have audiences that have far eclipsed Twitter. One of the reasons Twitter is being left behind is that reverse-chrono order is often not the best way to read tweets. It sometimes makes Twitter feel like a never-ending burst of random nonsense. Sometimes the nonsense is charming or serendipitous. But a lot of the time it's just chaotic and unhelpful.

Twitter is still great for seeing what just happened 3 minutes ago. But it's not great for anything else. And Twitter seems to have missed major movements in social media, such as messaging (WhatsApp) and photos (Instagram) or both at the same time (Snapchat).

So now that Jack Dorsey is back as CEO, and now that he is fulfilling his promise to change Twitter for the better, here are eight small tweaks I'd love to see that would make Twitter so much more useful.

1. Give us the ability to edit tweets. Sometimes I post a really good tweet, and it goes viral. I'd love to be able to add to it — like add a link to a relevant story — once I can see that a tweet is successful. You can edit posts on Facebook or Instagram. But on Twitter, your tweets are carved in (virtual) stone, forever, unless you delete them. Let us edit our tweets!
2. Use hotlinks. Twitter is constrained to 140 characters and it is not helpful when some of those characters are used up by HTML code for the link you're trying to draw people's attention to. Facebook is great at hotlinking text to an external web page. Tweets should do this too.
3. An easier way to namecheck people we know. Right now, you have to manually type in the name of someone you're trying to tweet "@". It's easy to get wrong. Twitter's search is OK for finding people, but making sure you're talking to the right Joe Smith can be laborious. Adding someone's name to a tweet should be easy, not a chore. Again, Facebook is very good at this.
4. Better handling of photos. Twitter once tried to acquire Instagram, so you know that there is huge value in being able to see nice photos. Twitter does not display images well, however. This can be redesigned. (And yes I know Twitter has already begun this.)
5. A parallel news feed that shows me most relevant tweets, like Nuzzel or Facebook. Tweet discovery is actually quite difficult on Twitter. If you didn't see the tweet right then, you probably missed it forever. I'd like to be able to customise my Twitter so that I can flip between the chrono firehose, or choose to see the most viral tweets from the past hour or day or week or more.
6. Make Twitter Analytics a tab or function in the app. Most people don't even know that Twitter Analytics exists. It's fun to see how well - or how badly - your tweets do. Let people see this in the app!
7. A Chartbeat for tweets. I'd like to see the larger movement of traffic, trends and tweets on the platform, maybe on a country, region or city basis. I'd like to see them swirling and changing the way Chartbeat shows news stories for publishers. Chartbeat is an app that ranks the popularity of content in a continuously updated, animated way. News publishers use it so they can see what is popular and what is not on their sites. I'd love to see something similar for the whole of Twitter. I know what is big inside my Twitter, but aside from trending words on Twitter I don't really know what is hot and what is not.
8. Longform tweets via an extra click. It's constrained media, 140 characters, we get it! Part of the interest of Twitter is the way it forces you to get to the point. But Instagram successfully encourages people to keep it short and still lets people wax on at length, occasionally. Why not let us use a format in which anyone who clicks on a tweet can jump through into an extended tweet to get the full rant?

Disclosure: The author owns stock in Twitter.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: 5 hard-to-find iPhone tricks only power users know about

Rosie is our 1 year old Wheaten Terrier, and when I watch her operate, I can’t help but see how “most” of her behavior is the perfect illustration for how to successfully use LinkedIn for business!

(I say “most” because I don’t think chewing shoes or licking strangers’ faces will endear you to prospects and new connections on LinkedIn. Then again…)

But seriously, close your eyes and think about your favorite dog. What do you love most about him or her? (And if you’re not a dog person, just play along for a minute!)

Key Traits to Leverage on LinkedIn

Here’s what I love about our dog:

Her Personality. She’s always happy to see you, no matter what the rest of the world thinks or has told you. She’s always ready to engage and brighten your day.

Her Unselfishness. Dogs are always giving – love, affection, interaction, play, intimacy, entertainment. Cats are takers and manipulators. (Sorry cat people, but you know it’s true. Your cat owns you! LOL.) Dogs are givers – they’re always bringing some sort of value or benefit into your day.

Her Ability to Read People. Our dog seems to have this innate ability to understand or “read” people – Why doesn’t this new person like me? Maybe if I jump on her and lick her face I’ll win her over! – and responds in an effort to win their attention and affection.

Her Willingness to Ask. When the time is right, I’ll get a nudge or a polite whine or even a playful bark. Can we go on a walk? Can I have some of that pizza? Will you play tug-of-war with me? Rosie has a way of asking that isn’t intrusive, annoying or inappropriate – she seems able to read situations and settings and then adjusts her “ask” accordingly.

Her Transparency. Our dog is … well, a dog. She doesn’t try to pretend she’s something she’s not or have a hidden agenda. Consider this video of her shortly after coming in from a wintry morning romping in the freshly fallen, wet and sticky snow:

Think about all the attributes I just outlined above:

• Personality
• Unselfishness
• Reading Others
• Willingness to Ask (when the time is right!)
• Transparency

If you can display all (or even some!) of these traits in how you approach and interact with prospects on LinkedIn, you’re going to have massive success. For instance, the ability to “read” your prospects helps you understand what to engage them about and how to engage them. And the willingness to make an “ask” at the right time makes all the difference when it comes to converting a lead into a customer.

YOUR TURN: What about it? Can you share how some of these traits help YOU when it comes to marketing or doing business on LinkedIn? Or are you just an offended cat lover preparing an angry rebuttal for the comment section?  Either way I’d love to hear what YOU think!

Marketing in a digital economy is more difficult now than it was in the days of mass media. Then, big budgets and strong messages were enough to get consumers to remember you. Today, not only have audiences fragmented, requiring a more targeted approach, but digital activity is tracked — so even if you succeed in building brand awareness, your rivals can retarget those consumers with competing offers.

That’s why many brands have turned to content. Rather than paying to be sandwiched within ad breaks and between editorial pages, content marketing lets brands communicate directly with consumers. Unfortunately though, the result is all too often a longer-form version of the same old ads. Marketers need to change their approach. Here are four questions that will help you create a viable strategy:

1. Why do you need content? In an overview of the subject, the Content Marketing Institute explains that marketers need content because, “traditional marketing is becoming less and less effective by the minute.” That may be true, but it doesn’t explain why content is the answer. In fact, it is exactly that line of thinking which makes it difficult for marketers to succeed.

Traditional marketing, which was heavily skewed to broadcast media, worked because it allowed marketers to reach a lot of people in a short amount of time at very low cost. Content does neither, so it’s hard to see how anyone could possibly replace a traditional broadcast strategy with a content strategy.

On the other hand, today’s digital environment does allow marketers to communicate directly with customers, partners, and the general public in a way that wasn’t possible before. It reaches fewer people and takes more time than a traditional broadcast strategy, but it also opens up exciting new possibilities to create greater engagement.

Clearly, the solution to an ineffective 30-second TV spot is not ineffective 10-minute videos. So don’t treat content as a long-form version of an ad campaign. Think seriously about what it is you expect to achieve. If the only reason that you are doing content is to replace traditional marketing efforts, you are almost certain to fail.

2. What value are you offering for exchange? The main advantage of content is that, when done effectively, people see it as an exchange of value rather than an interruption. It offers the resources and expertise of an enterprise to customers and partners in a way that holds their attention and builds an ongoing relationship.

For example, Nike leverages its relationship with top athletes to create compelling videos that millions love to watch and share with their friends. American Express offers its customers expert business advice on its Open Forum. The Institute For Advanced Study invites some of the world’s top scholars to give personal accounts of their groundbreaking work.

So the first principle of any effective content strategy is to be clear on what value you are offering. Are there relationships you can leverage like Nike does? Are you offering advice, like American Express? Can you offer access to world-class experts, like The Institute For Advanced Study?

Notice how this approach is diametrically opposed to a traditional marketing campaign. Marketers have been trained to be consumer focused. But successful producers and publishers are mission focused and that makes all the difference.

3. What’s your anchor? A traditional ad campaign has a defined beginning and an end. When it’s over, you compare the results to your initial goals to determine whether it’s successful or not. Successful content efforts, on the other hand, are open ended and often run for years. They must transcend changes in the marketplace, the audience and even the personnel who initiate it.

That’s why it’s important to anchor your concept. In Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath note that Hollywood films anchor through “high concept schemas,” like “Diehard on a bus” for the hit film Speed, or “Jaws on a spaceship” for Alien. In much the same way, Life magazine was the “showbook of the world” and Cosmopolitan is “fun, fearless and female.”

Notice how the consumer target is implied—you certainly wouldn’t market “Jaws on a spaceship” to toddlers—but not a primary focus. What’s essential is the editorial and creative mission. “Diehard on a bus,” seeks to be exciting. A “showbook for the world” conveys understanding through pictures. “Fun, fearless and female” inspires confidence.

It is only through anchoring a concept that you can create a consistent experience that your audience can relate to. That’s how you hold their attention.

4. What type of experience do you want to deliver? Traditional marketing campaigns rely on popular programing to build an audience. Brand publishers, on the other hand, need to hold the audience’s attention by their own merits. To create material that people will want to read or watch, marketers need to shift their emphasis from crafting messages to creating experiences.

Most marketers have become aware of the importance of user experience in products and websites, but ignore it when it comes to publishing and producing. Instead, they fall back on traditional marketing conventions such as targeting and messaging. That may work for a 30-second spot or half-page ad, but is less effective for creating a compelling experience.

Successful publishers pay close attention to their things like format, structure, and voice. It goes without saying that you write a different article for a daily newspaper than you would for a feature in a magazine, just as you would approach a TV pilot differently than you would a full length film.  Delivering a consistent experience matters, and successful content efforts put significant effort into creating and documenting standards.

Magazines have “brand bibles” that clearly define architecture, voice, and pacing. Radio stations run on clocks.  TV shows have clearly defined story structures, character arcs, and so on.  These rules not only set audience expectations and make content easier to take in and enjoy, but also form the crucial constraints in which creativity can thrive.

So instead of thinking about content as just another marketing ploy, think seriously about the experience you want to deliver, almost as if you were inviting customers into your operation. The experience you create for them will be what they remember — and determine whether they ever want to come back again.

Relationship building is the new link building. Gone are the days of black hat SEO and buying links to boost your way up the rankings; after the various Google updates, the best way—the only way—is to naturally build links from related, high caliber sites through relationship building.

The good thing is, much like any other area of SEO, there is a way to optimize relationship building by following a process proven to work time and time again. From the first step of identifying influencers, to lastly obtaining the link, we are going to show you exactly how it’s done.

Identify Influencers

Every industry has its circle of influencers. If you can get on just one of their radars, and offer them something of value, you shouldn’t have any problem getting a link from them. But first things first, you need to know who they are.

Luckily there is a tool out there that can help you find out. FollowerWonk is a program by Moz that quantifies Twitter influence, enabling you to find the top players in your niche with in a matter of minutes.

You can also do a bit of snooping on the influencer’s Twitter page to see who they follow. If they only follow a selective number of people, whose names you see cropping up quite often, you may have just found the industry’s group of A-listers.

First Contact

With your list of influencers at the ready, it’s now time to make yourself known. You could send a ‘cold email’ and request a link back to your site, but 9/10 times this is going to fail. A better and more effective approach is to initiate contact without asking for anything in return. This is more likely to get you a response and through persistence and nurturing of the relationship, get you that precious link.

Keep up to date with their online activities by subscribing to their RRS feeds and try leaving a comment on one of their posts that sparks your interest. Bear in mind you should be adding something of value here; declaring your love for the author is surprisingly not as effective as an intriguing and insightful comment that raises their awareness to a piece of research, or tool related to the topic in question.

Follow up with Value

Just like with a relationship in the real world, time is needed before you go asking for favours. And even then it helps if you offer something in return. This is especially true here as the influencer isn’t going to just give you a link, they need a solid reason to do it.

A great reason for them to give you that link is for a guest post. Your influencer is no doubt in search of high quality content that meets their audiences’ needs, so if done properly, it’s a sure fire winner. There’s no worry of the whole thing feeling needy or transaction here either, successful bloggers all have two things in common: they blog, and they love it. There is an appreciation of great writing that, once you get to know your influencer, will be shared mutually.

What makes someone uncomfortable depends on the person, but what's universally true is the value of recognizing boundaries and continually pushing them.

As Quora user Joos Meyer explains in response to the question, "What uncomfortable things such as cold showers can improve your life?" pushing your comfort zone is the key to self-betterment.

"I think the best methodology is to every day or week set a task or find a situation that makes you slightly uncomfortable. Do that thing. This will incorporate the experience into your model of 'normality' and hence expand your 'comfort zone,'" he writes.

Here are some uncomfortable things that other Quora users have found helped them grow:

 

 

SEE ALSO: 14 things you should do as soon as you get laid off

DON'T MISS: The 27 jobs that are most damaging to your health

1. Question everything.

"The most uncomfortable thing one can do is to question everything that is taken for granted and seek answers," writes Malli Gurram. "Try to see the other side of the norm."

2. Be honest.

Being the most honest you've ever been with someone in your life will be one of the most uncomfortable things you can do, Ryan Brown says, but it could also be the most valuable.

To do this, he suggests writing a list of all the people to whom you have something — good or bad — to say, writing down the honest feelings you need to convey to them in a letter, handing the person the letter, and writing down what happened and how the experience affected you and the other person.

"If you're being really honest, each letter you write should make you quite emotional as you are writing it," Brown writes. "That is how you know you have tapped into your actual emotions and feelings — that it actually means something to you."

"Don't forget what you have learned from the experience," he suggests. "Let it be with you forever."

3. Meditate.

Oftentimes slowing down and finding inner calm can be especially difficult for those of us who are constantly on the go and thinking of the next things we need to do.

But as Nathan Hershey points out, the benefits can include enhancing your cognitive capacity, emotional intelligence, and overall self-discipline.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Every year around this time, I, along with many others think about how quickly this past year went by. It seems like a millisecond ago, my team and I were assembled at our 2015 kick-off making plans for the coming year and alas here we again, the end of another year and looking forward to 2016.

As I look back at 2015 and to 2016 I think about many of the things that we as B2B marketers still need to do in order to keep pace with our sophisticated B2B buyers. No doubt, we have made some incremental strides, but there are still many things that we need to improve upon in order to become the strategic cog in the wheel for our companies.

1. A Reality Check:
I was speaking with a prospect a few months ago about their demand generation needs.  She explained to me that their organization was in dire need of a demand generation overhaul. They currently needed a new marketing automation system, had no true insight into their buyers, no vision into the lead-to-revenue process and little in the way of content. As we continued our conversation, she told me that their CMO and executive team wanted to have a solution in place within 90-days and were expecting to see an increase in pipeline within that timeframe.

I was not shocked to hear this as this is not the first time there have been unrealistic expectations handed down from executives.However, I did feel for her as she had been put in a no-win position by her executive who did not understand that transforming demand generation is not an overnight, or even a one quarter quick fix.

As we enter into the new year, CMOs and other executives can enable their teams and drive longer term value if they properly align expectations and understand that the changes that need to occur will take time, but are worth the effort.

2. The Creation of Less Content:
According to Content Marketing Institute, the last three years have seen the majority of organizations increase both the amount of content created and amount of budget spent on content creation. However, over the last two years, the ability for organizations to show the value of that content has decreased in total by 12% from 2014 – 2016 (most recent study) with only 30% now saying they can demonstrate the value of their content.

As we head into 2016, organizations should look to pull the foot off the content production pedal and think more strategically about producing content that aligns to the various stakeholders (personas) involved in the purchase process and develop perpetual programs that are relevant to a buyer to Engage, Nurture and Convert. In doing so, not only will they see more value from their content, they will drive better interactions with their buyers.

3. Say No to the Shiny New Object:
Over the past few weeks my team and I have been working with a new client in establishing a demand generation strategy. As part of our engagement, they have sent detail of their marketing and sales technology stack. In the document there are over 60 different technologies that this organization owns. When we asked how they all work together to support the marketing function much of what we got were, “I don’t knows.”

There is absolutely no question that there is some amazing technology available from content management, to marketing automation, to social and predictive tools, but most organizations are purchasing technology in hopes of driving better overall results. This will never work as technology is not, nor never will be, a strategy.

As we enter 2016, marketers need to think through the strategy they are looking to implement to drive better overall buyer and customer engagement and then look at the enabling technologies they will need. Strategy first.

4. Invest More in Skills Development:
In the latest ANNUITAS Demand Generation study, more than 50% of organizations said their marketing personnel was only somewhat effective or not effective when it came to demand generation. Additionally, in a recent Forrester report, 96% of CMOs responded by saying that “marketing is being asked to do things it has never had to do before.”

Yet with all this change, the skills gap within B2B marketing organizations continues to grow and is becoming a serious obstacle to companies advancing their ability to market effectively.

While organizations spend a considerable amount of money on enabling their sales force, very little is done for marketing.  We live in a new age and are experiencing the disruption of an informed, educated and information-obsessed buyer and to not spend on skills development for the marketing personnel is to not equip them to do their jobs effectively. Investment in marketing skill set is essential in 2016.

5. Have More Fun:
I have the privilege and opportunity to speak many times throughout the year and at each event I encounter many marketers who are stressed out, defeated, and at their wits end regarding their jobs. While there is indeed quite a lot to be done, B2B marketing professionals need to understand the opportunity for us to truly change our profession.  This, in and of itself should excite, rather than exhaust us. Few times do people get to be on the ground floor of a movement like the one that is happening in B2B marketing. Rather than get weary from it, embrace it and make the changes necessary in your organization and reap the rewards of this success.

I fully expect 2016 to be an amazing year of advancement, and what I hope will be monumental change!

Author: Carlos Hidalgo @cahidalgo is CEO/ Principal of ANNUITAS

Businesses used to say they not only meet but exceed buyer expectations.

It turns out that goal is now unattainable for most.

The explosion of online media gives buyers abundant information for comparative shopping. This includes products, pricing, and the reputation and character of competing businesses.

Smart companies now recognize they need to acknowledge this marketplace condition.

Develop Accurate Buyer Personas

Start by thoroughly assessing your buyers and what they care about.

#1 – What are their most relevant problems? Solve these first.
#2 – What are their aspirations, what they really want? Hint: It’s often outside of their budget, but if you can help them get it, they’ll usually find the money.
#3 – How much do they know about it?

Make this more about the buyer as a person than as a buyer. If you are focusing on products and services then you are missing a major shift in buying behavior today, namely, those subtle qualities and experiences that lead to likeability and trust.

Now consider your business. Who are you and what do you care about that is meaningful to your customers? An example could be sweating the details. That capability aligns with a particular type of buyer, and usually not one concerned about getting the best price.

#1 – Does your business have a unique culture?

#2 – What are its general capabilities and strengths?
#3 – In what areas is its expertise strongest?

Now take the results of these assessments and marry to a meaningful process.

Build A Meaningful Process

I’ve never been a advocate of the marketing funnel because it tends to focus on what the business wants, and that only leads to mistakes when buyers do not behave as expected.

Instead, plan to collaboratively accomplish what everyone wants by focusing on the comprehensive customer experience.

Imagine and map the ideal experience from the first referral, or consumption of content online, to long into the future when that buyer becomes a repeat customer.

Then ruthlessly simplify that experience into the fewest elements possible. For example, choose only a few marketing channels with which to excel. There must be a reason for every little thing that happens or it should be eliminated.

You are building an experience like an attorney builds a case with the available evidence. He or she is trying to win over the judge or jury, and you are doing the same with the buyer.

Manage The Narrative

Your challenge is designing an approach to the marketplace that is uniquely your own. It should communicate who you are, what you care about and why, and how your business can help those buyers.

You’ve heard it before, but it merits repeating: Focus your marketing so that buyers feel like you are communicating directly to them. You have to speak their language in every way by telling relevant stories, answering important questions, and backing it all up with research.

This is not a one and done event, but a process that you are always reassessing and refining. For example, if your buyers are not asking the right questions, then you have to be prepared to do so at the right times.

Research, study, and implementation are what makes this work. The results you create are the raw material for making it better

Over time, you will progressively build a toolbox of industry data, case-studies, typical problems with solutions, visuals, preferred communication channels, and more.

All of this gets integrated into a process that you own.

It becomes a guidance system for responding to the right buyers, in the right way, and at the right time.

Keep it simple and learn to trust it.

It’s your marketing GPS.

Guest author James King is the founder and CEO of UpDownLeftRight.

We had a brief, passionate, but ultimately tempestuous relationship. When we first met, I was excited about what the future could hold for us. I wanted to introduce it to all of my friends. I took it to meet my parents, hoping they would love it as much as I did.

I couldn’t put my finger on exactly the moment that things turned sour, but the passion started to ebb away. Little things started to irk me—too many notifications, too many little reminders. The things that excited me in the first weeks were the very things that made me want to retreat.

Self-assuredness is one of the most attractive things in other human beings. But that was the biggest problem with this device. Once you get past the shiny newness of the Apple Watch, you begin to realize that you’re interacting with a device that has no sense of who or what it actually is.

Why Wearables Need Fixing

A report from third-party analysts Slice Intelligence shows that Apple Watch sales are down 90% since launch—which is a big deal, since it implies early adopters aren't converting more cautious buyers with word-of-mouth. It also notes that Fitbit is outselling Apple in the wearables space.

Apple may already be giving smartwatch companies like Pebble a run for their money, but its watch has failed to disrupt the larger wearable marketplace.

Is this simply a case of Apple just getting it wrong (for once), or does it point to a wider problem facing the entire “wearables” category?

Comparatively, Fitbit continues to crush it, still holding the biggest slice of the wearables pie. However, everything may not be as rosy over at Camp Fitbit as this might suggest.

In a fascinating break down of Fitbit’s IPO and S-1, Malay Gandhi at Rock Health calculated that more than 70% of Fitbit purchasers from the first three quarters of 2014 churned before year’s end. This aligns with more anecdotal evidence that many owners lose enthusiasm, as the novelty of knowing how many steps they've taken wears off. One research firm, Endeavour Partners, estimates that about a third of these trackers get abandoned after six months.

So what needs to change? How do we create hardware and experiences that will get people to engage and stay engaged? To get them to feel the same way about a wearable gadget as they do about their iPhone?

A Wearable Is Not A Smartphone

In reality, activity trackers and smart watches don't actually create any unique experiences—we’re all aware, on some level, how much we’ve been moving and can get some variation of that data. In the case of a smartwatch, we get “glance-able” extension of a smartphone’s feature set, which is not destined to disrupt consumer habits on a large scale.

As the iPhone completely reinvented the “in-hand” experience, wearables needs to do something completely new with the “on-body” experience, if their makers want to make them mainstream.

The Apple Watch, for instance, seems to be a device with a distinct lack of “design purpose.” When it comes to Apple, the company may be the greatest marketing machine the world has ever seen. There has always seemed to be a tangible sense of what I call “Marketing By Design" that runs through its entire product suite. Yet, for once, even Apple seems to have no clear idea on what exactly the Apple Watch is for. That’s clear, just from the TV spots: Essentially, you just perform a limited version of all the functions available on your iPhone, but on your wrist. Not especially compelling, since the handset—stashed in your pocket—is only ever a few inches away from you.

Design For Revolutionary Uses And Services

The highly competitive fitness tracker is built around some particularly narrow usage scenarios and habits.

For a tangible example, visit any gym in the western world in early January. Visit the same gym in March, and you’ll see those numbers drastically reduced. (This may be why Fitbit is reluctant to release clear data on user retention.)

To expand the appeal of wearables beyond early adopters and “quantified self” fanatics, we need to design services and experiences that extrapolate further on the data sets these devices produce. 

In an excellent post on Zero UI, my old colleague at Fjord, Andy Goodman, said:

Zero UI refers to a paradigm where our movements, voice, glances, and even thoughts can all cause systems to respond to us through our environment. At its extreme, Zero UI implies a screen-less, invisible user interface where natural gestures trigger interactions, as if the user was communicating to another person. The replacement of these monolithic screen-based devices by ambient technology that surrounds and immerses us is being driven by Living Services. In the end, this could be a very good thing because social interactions could become more natural again – and not as obviously mediated by devices. Our attention could again return to the people sitting across the dining table, instead of those half a continent away.

With this in mind, we need to focus on designing wearables for the scenarios of the future—not reference, imitate even, the experiences and designs of the past. Devices that provide immediately useful data and metrics, but then simultaneously look to execute these in revolutionary frameworks and systems that look to the future of an integrated world, say, built on the Internet of Things (IoT) and “Living Services” (see below). They will prevail, not only in the short term, but also in the long term as scalable, industry-defining platforms and businesses.

One of our investors, Mark Curtis (also a fellow Fjordian) has provided fascinating insight on “liquid expectations” within “living services.” Living Services are the result of two powerful forces: the digitization of everything and ‘liquid’ consumer expectations. They respond by wrapping around us, constantly learning more about our needs, intents and preferences, so that they can flex and adapt to make themselves more relevant, engaging and useful.

Consumers demand this now as the standards are being set by the best of breed across the entirety of their experiences, not restricted by sector—hence liquid expectations. Indeed, I believe the companies that will lead the charge in the wearable sector will look to define those “expectations”.

We must blur the lines between rapidly established verticals. The IoT space is currently overly focused on the hardware that will make up this connected ecosystem. While we, of course, need to lay out the infrastructure for IoT, we also need to rapidly focus on the key agents in this system: the users.

While embeddable and even ingestible devices may come into prominence in the future, the best tools for indexing the user, and providing identity in a connected world, are the wristbands and smartwatches of today.

Low-impact devices can act as the central interface terminal for all our interactions with services, experiences and things. Meanwhile, gestures will play a huge role in the development of Zero UI. Fitness trackers and smartwatches—with their plethora of gyros, accelerometers, and magnetometers, coupled with their position on the body—are the best positioned to do this.

The way forward, to finally fix wearables, seems as clear as the watchface that used to be on my wrist. 

Images courtesy of James King

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Google appears to be more confident about the technical capabilities of its D-Wave 2X quantum computer, which it operates alongside NASA at the U.S. space agency’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California.

D-Wave’s machines are the closest thing we have today to quantum computing, which works with quantum bits, or qubits — each of which can be zero or one or both — instead of more conventional bits. The superposition of these qubits enable machines to make great numbers of computations to simultaneously, making a quantum computer highly desirable for certain types of processes.

In two tests, the Google Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab today announced that it has found the D-Wave machine to be considerably faster than simulated annealing — a simulation of quantum computation on a classical computer chip.

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From VentureBeat

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Google director of engineering Hartmut Neven went over the results of the tests in a blog post today:

We found that for problem instances involving nearly 1,000 binary variables, quantum annealing significantly outperforms its classical counterpart, simulated annealing. It is more than 10⁸ times faster than simulated annealing running on a single core. We also compared the quantum hardware to another algorithm called Quantum Monte Carlo. This is a method designed to emulate the behavior of quantum systems, but it runs on conventional processors. While the scaling with size between these two methods is comparable, they are again separated by a large factor sometimes as high as 10⁸.

Google has also published a paper on the findings.

If nothing else, this is a positive signal for venture-backed D-Wave, which has also sold quantum computers to Lockheed Martin and Los Alamos National Laboratory. At an event at NASA Ames today where reporters looked at the D-Wave machine, chief executive Vern Brownell sounded awfully pleased at the discovery. Without question, the number 100,000,000 is impressive. It’s certainly the kind of thing the startup can show when it attempts to woo IT buyers and show why its technology might well succeed in disrupting legacy chipmakers such as Intel.

But Google continues to work with NASA on quantum computing, and meanwhile Google also has its own quantum computing hardware lab. And in that initiative, Google is still in the early days.

“I would say building a quantum computer is really, really hard, so first of all, we’re just trying to get it to work and not worry about cost or size or whatever,” said John Martinis, the person leading up Google’s hardware program and a professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Commercial applications of this technology might not happen overnight, but it’s possible that eventually they could lead to speed-ups for things like image recognition, which is in place inside of many Google services. But the tool could also come in handy for a traditional thing like cleaning up dirty data. Outside of Google, quantum speed-ups could translate into improvements for planning and scheduling and air traffic management, said David Bell, director of the Universities Space Research Association’s Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science, which also works on the D-Wave machine at NASA Ames.

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I hate choices as much as the next person. Trying to choose the best brand of 1% milk at the grocery store can seem impossibly painful – and deciding on a restaurant for date night? Forget it.

But, although most of us may resent it, our lives are comprised of choices. There are big choices, like where to go to college or which house to purchase, down to the smaller choices that make up our everyday lives: what shirt to wear, what shoes to buy, having oatmeal or eggs for breakfast.

Sometimes these smaller choices can be overwhelming, especially for today’s consumer. We are constantly bombarded with advertisements and products at every turn, to the point where many consumers choose not to choose.

How analysis paralysis affects sales

This phenomenon is referred to as “analysis paralysis”, or a state of overthinking a situation so that an action is never taken – hence the paralysis. If there are too many choices for a consumer to decide between, or not enough product details to distinguish the products, a consumer can become so overly analytical that they will avoid making a decision all together.

Professor Sheena Iyengar, who acts as the Professor of Business in the Management Division at Columbia Business School, conducted a famous study on “The Art of Choice” and held a keynote about it at the Guided Selling Live! conference.

With her team, Professor Iyengar set up a stand inside of a high-end grocery store called Draeger’s Market, a store known for its wide selection of products. The stand offered free samples of jam and coupons to purchase the jam, with one twist: on some days, the stand offered six types of jam, while on other days the stand offered 24 types of jam.

Ultimately, more customers stopped at the stand with 24 types of jam, about 60%, while only 40% of customers stopped at the booth offering six types of jam.

However, when it came to buying a jar of jam, the results were quite different. On days when the 24 jams were offered, only 3% of people actually purchased the jam, whereas 30% of consumers purchased jam when there were only six options. That makes consumers 6 times more likely to purchase jam when their choices were more limited.

Professor Iyengar’s results continue to be the most prevalent evidence of analysis paralysis negatively affecting sales to date.

So while you may be proud of the 53 different types of tea you offer in your coffee shop, it turns out that less really is more. Consumers not only become confused by all the choices they are offered, but they have an innate fear that they will choose wrong.

Who can’t relate to that?

Buying my first car ranks as one of the top ten most stressful decisions of my life, mostly because I was terrified of choosing the wrong car. I was mortified by the idea of choosing a car that cost hundreds of dollars a month to maintain and had terrible gas mileage, when really my perfect car had been the Jeep two rows over.

4 ways to combat analysis paralysis

Making the wrong choice is a scary thought.

Even worse, because of their choice overload, studies have shown that consumers who do make a decision are more likely to choose poorly and regret their purchase later on.

So what’s to be done? Your consumers are staring at your 53 tea options and feeling confused, annoyed, frustrated, and nervous to choose incorrectly.

Luckily, there are ways to combat analysis paralysis.

1. Get rid of extraneous options

Do you need 17 different kinds of pomegranate mango tea? Limiting your excess options will reduce consumer choice overload, encouraging sales and increasing your profits. On top of that, you lower your cost of goods by only stocking 5 different kinds of pomegranate mango tea instead of 17.

2. Concretization

Imagine that your 17 boxes of tea just say “Pomegranate Mango Tea” on the box…how would any of your customers know that one kind of tea has antioxidants or that another is Free Trade Certified?

Showing the benefits or details of each product helps to distinguish them from each other and assists your consumer in making an educated decision.

3. Categorize your products

Categorizing your products into groups that mean something to the consumer can help your customers understand their options and make the most informed choice possible. For example, if your tea is grouped into “Black Pomegranate Mango Tea” and “Green Pomegranate Mango Tea”, then green tea-lovers won’t be sorely disappointed by their misinformed decision to buy black tea.

4. Guiding prospective buyers

The most accurate and thorough way to understand your customer and assist them in making the right purchase, however, is through Guided Selling methods. Guided Selling is a process that helps potential buyers make the best possible purchase to satisfy their needs.

Sophisticated Guided Selling Solutions perform as well as your most experienced and efficient sales rep. They assists you in four basic steps:

a. Understanding the customer’s needs

This is getting down to the nitty-gritty; Guided Selling interactive product advisors ask the need-to-know questions that really get down to what your customers are looking for, without making them feel interrogated.

The potential customer is asked need-oriented questions to suss out their current needs and expectations.

b. Analyzing the customer’s needs

So the shopper expresses that his floor is dirty and (surprise) it is revealed that the consumer needs a vacuum cleaner. The consumer may have already known he needed a vacuum cleaner, but what he doesn’t know is the technical end of his product need.

Guided Selling solutions are able to take the expressed desires and translate them into technical product specifics based on the issue the consumer has described – as it turns out, not only does your potential buyer need a vacuum cleaner, but he requires a vacuum with rug, hardwood and tile floor capabilities.

Who knew?

c. Recommending appropriate products

Once the system has identified the consumer’s need and translated them into product features, it will analyze your assortment and recommend the most suitable product or service to the user.

To continue with our vacuum example, the Guided Selling solution would bring up a list of triple-function vacuum cleaners and automatically eliminate vacuums that could clean only carpet or only tile.

Product attributes (i.e.; cordless, long battery life) are also matched against all user expectations. If for some reason some requirements cannot be filled, it will find and display the closest alternatives.

d. Providing buying arguments to the customer

Now that the potential buyer has found the perfect product to solve their identified need, a helpful Guided Selling solution will provide all the logical proof that has been accumulated to convince this prospective buyer to make the purchase.

Here is where Guided Selling Solutions have a true leg up on a traditional salesperson (or mere product filters). Everyone knows the stigma of the greasy car salesman; chasing you around the lot trying to get you to buy the car that will get him the best commission. We feel a bias, an inherent cynicism, to distrust salespeople.

But a reasoning engine that seemingly has no hidden intentions is much easier for a potential consumer to trust. Guided Selling Solutions can act as an unbiased third party, laying out all the logic and facts as well as all the advantages and disadvantages of each product. It can obtain the buyers trust easily, turning them from a prospect to a satisfied customer.

Choices can be hard, but they don’t have to be for your customer

Take the time to review your products: are some of them redundant? Do you have any distinguishing details to set your products apart? You could be inadvertently overwhelming or confusing your customer.

Avoid this debilitating confusion by limiting unnecessary products, giving more specific details to differentiate products, or categorizing your products into meaningful groups for your buyers.

And integrate Guided Selling solutions that  help you determine your shopper’s needs, translate them into technical product features, identify the best product match, and recommend these products to reduce analysis paralysis and choice overload.

You have been officially armed with the knowledge to effectively combat analysis paralysis. Now go help your consumers and watch your profits rise.

Often, I’ll find myself staring at my blog backlog, trying to figure out which posts I’m going to write tomorrow. For some reason, it’s always a tough decision at the end of the day.

Earlier that morning, I had no problem choosing which stories I wanted to write. But after a long day, the decision feels a lot more difficult.

This predicament is due to a psychological phenomenon called decision fatigue. It means not being able to decide on something -- simple or hard, it doesn’t matter -- because you’ve already fought an uphill battle all day and you’re out of mental energy. It’s why you buy junk food at the grocery store after a long day instead of fruit. Your ability to weigh the options and make a good decision in the aisle is gone, so you just go with your impulses -- yes, you do want that bag of cookies. Now.

But decision fatigue doesn’t just affect how we buy -- it also affects how sales reps sell. Reps often schedule calls with prospects for 5 or 6 p.m. local time because that’s when busy business leaders are available. However, when these prospects hop on the phone after a long day, they might not be able to critically think through and decide if this is the product or service for them.

So what is a rep supposed to do when decision fatigue strikes their buyers? The key is to understand the phenomenon, and then respond correctly.

Good news: We’re here to help. Here are the signs of decision fatigue in prospects, and how to beat it.

4 Signs of Decision Fatigue

When you notice a prospect is acting differently than usual on a late afternoon call, you’ll first need to determine whether they’re suffering from decision fatigue or whether their behavioral change can be attributed to something else (disinterest, genuine indecisiveness, etc.).  

Look for these signs to assess if you’re dealing with decision fatigue.

1) Decision avoidance

The first tip off is if the buyer can’t seem to make up their mind at all -- even on relatively insignificant decisions. For example, you might have kicked off the call by asking “How are you?” and found that they can’t decide if they are great, bad, or fine.

A few more indications of buyer decision avoidance:

• Dodging questions by asking for new, detailed information
• Pausing for several moments after every question
• Expressing a desire to go back and review old conversations at length
• Continuously asking you for your opinion on what they should do

2) Hurried thoughts

Is the prospect rushing you? Although your call is scheduled for an hour, are they talking and moving quickly, obviously trying to get through the meeting so they can go home?

Watch for these behavioral indications of hurried thoughts:

• Hopping around in the presentation
• Pushing you through important information to get to the end
• Asking the same question multiple times

3) Raising new concerns

Salespeople should never blow past legitimate concerns. Unfortunately, buyers sometimes raise phony objections simply to put off making a decision.

Is your prospect suddenly worried about price or need when they seemed rock solid on these points before? An abundance of new concerns might signal that the prospect doesn’t want to make a decision at this time. If they ask for more information, they can end the conversation and revisit the issue later on.

4) Forgetting key information

We all forget things, but sudden amnesia of key information during a call should raise a red flag. If the prospect is unable to recall their business need, your name, or the last time you spoke, they might have hit their mental wall.

3 Tips to Beat Buyer Decision Fatigue

 

Unfortunately, behaviors that arise from decision fatigue can make a great prospect seem like a bad one.

Keeping the behavioral signs above in mind is the first step for reps to start noticing this problem. But what should you do once you’ve diagnosed your buyer with decision fatigue?

The following action steps can help.

1) Catch prospects in the morning.

If your prospect is too exhausted to think clearly during a late meeting, reschedule it for the next day, ideally between 8 a.m. and 12 p.m. Not only will they be refreshed and their stores of mental energy restored, but science says they are likely to be more honest with you.

2) Focus on one thing at a time.

Decision fatigue can make information seem overwhelming. If you’re asking someone to stare at the analytics on their business unit or explain their strategy to you after a long day, respect that they might not be in the mood.

If you sense decision fatigue in your buyer, scale back your presentation to keep it simple and concise. Avoid throwing out too much information, and instead focus on key concepts. Hit a few singles, and don’t worry about the home run.

3) Know when to reschedule the meeting.

If you aren’t getting through to your prospect at all, end the call and reschedule it.

Some signs that it might be better to cut your losses include dismissive behavior, heaving sighs and overly lengthy pauses, or a difficulty remembering information you’ve already discussed.

Instead of souring the relationship by continuing a disastrous call, give the prospect a chance to relax. This will allow you to not only schedule more time with them, but it’ll also showcase your emotional intelligence.

Decision fatigue can be difficult to diagnose because a prospect might not know when they're experiencing it. Unlike physical fatigue, people don’t always feel when their brain is low on energy, and so it’s not something a sales rep can ask about directly.

It’s up to the rep to determine whether or not their buyer has enough energy to make a decision. By learning to recognize the signs and taking the steps to counteract decision fatigue, reps can ensure they’re getting the best of their prospect each time they speak.

Generating new sales is the bread and butter of business. Sales are what keep your business moving on and moving up.

But, customers tend to get bored easily. So it’s important to think of fresh and exciting ways to generate new sales. One great way to generate new sales is through video.

People love videos! Which is why videos are amazing for generating new sales – but only when used correctly.

Here’s Wyzowl’s own Adam to explain how…

Full Transcript

Hi, I’m Adam, Account Manager at Wyzowl.

One of the questions we’re often asked is: “How can video help generate me new sales?” That’s exactly the question I’m going to answer today. I’ve got 5 tips for you to try in this video. So let’s dive right in.

1. Gate your video

Gating your video means that the user has to complete a short form before they’re able to watch it – and it can be great for lead generation. This technique isn’t going to suit every video – we wouldn’t recommend it for a simple explainer, for example, where you’re aiming to reach a wide audience and give a snappy overview of your business. But if you’re offering highly valuable content that would really help your audience gating the video would work perfectly. It’ll generate high quality leads and form the basis of a valuable conversation when your sales team first makes contact with them.

2. Include a call to action

The attention span of the modern online user is notoriously short, so, particularly on a home page explainer video, don’t include every last detail. Just give your audience the information they need to capture their attention, and then give them CLEAR direction on what to do next — whether it’s to visit your website, sign up for a free trial or make contact with your sales team.

We all know the sales process is a bit like a journey — and a journey without signposts is never any fun. So make sure the path is clearly signposted for your customers, and you have a much better chance of them reaching their destination!

3. Make a video demo

For software or app developers, the opportunity to present your product to an opted-in audience is priceless. But setting up those calls can be painful. With time differences and scheduling clashes, it can be weeks before you finally get it done — by which time the prospect’s interest may have cooled.

By producing video demos, you can demonstrate your product or service all day, every day. All the customer needs to do is press ‘play.’ Using video in this way helps you move your sales journey forward faster. It frees up your sales teams’ time and makes life easier for everyone involved.

4. Use video in your nurture sequence

Nurturing leads into sales takes time. And video can play a key role in your email workflows. It’s one of the most popular forms of media available to online marketers and the ability to send out dynamic, useful, engaging content to prospects is a much nicer way of staying in touch than the standard ‘How’s it going,’ emails or non-stop sales pitches.

5. Showcase video testimonials

Social proof plays a huge role in most purchasing decisions. And recent research suggests that 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations from friends or family. When we relaunched our own website in the summer of 2015, we made customer testimonials a key part of the user experience for that very reason; we wanted to show potential customers just how much our existing clients trusted us and enjoyed working with us. Gathering these might involve some travel and equipment costs but it’s ultimately worthwhile.

So there you have it, 5 ways you can use video to grow your sales. Of course, there are plenty more ways. If you’d like to talk more about how video can help your business, get in touch with us at wyzowl.com. And if you enjoyed this video, check out some more of our other content including The Ultimate Guide on How to Create the Perfect Explainer Video.

How many times a day do you silence a call, glance at a text message only to forget about it, or lose an email in your avalanche of an inbox? Well, you’re not the only one. In today’s barrage of communication mediums, quality sales leads are getting harder and harder to reach. From email, to phone, to social touchpoints, it can take at least 7 touches before you connect with a viable sales-ready lead.

Not All Leads Are Created Equal

For starters, not all leads are created equal. Depending on where they are in the buying process, a certain amount of nurturing may need to take place to get them sales-ready. Take Stage 1 leads for example. These prospects are simply dipping their toes in the water. They may be new to the company, new to a position, or just plain green to the entire SaaS industry, but they’re certainly not ready to buy. Getting their attention is going to take a few extra touch points.

Some leads, on the other hand, may be in the market for tools to help them in their process, but they’re not sure which tools, yet. They’re shopping, they’re researching — they’re planning out their sales tech stack — and you want in. This is where the lead nurturing comes into play.

Throughout your cadence of touches, you need to cover all of your bases to connect with these leads. From sending them valuable content, to question answering and objection handling — this is where a relationship is built that leads to a quality sales-ready lead. You may get pushed back, put off, or rescheduled, but don’t lose heart. These are the points in the process where you are building a solid case for your tool.

Not All Leads are Pre-Qualified

What’s a good qualified lead? Most SaaS sales reps are dying to get a buy-ready decisionmaker on the phone. But most of the people you’re calling are not that person. Instead, the people you’ll talk to are usually the bottom of the totem pole, new guy, possibly an intern, and with little to no authority to buy.

This is where pre-qualification comes in. A sales development qualification best practice is the ANUM model. As a Sales Development Rep, your responsibility is to qualify prospects based on the first two sets of the ANUM model, Authority and Need. Find out if the prospect has Authority (Can they sign? Were they asked to look into this solution by their manager? Do they hold the credit card?), or Need (Do they have a sales team? Are they actively searching for a tool to add to their tech stack?) before passing on to the Account Executive.

Getting to the bottom of these questions is going to take some time, and this all goes back to aligning your messaging with your lead. Remember that just as you wouldn’t start talking about weddings on a first date, you wouldn’t start talking about pricing packages on an initial call. Just as you do in any normal conversation, you should always recognize the stage of the buyer’s process and match that stage to your messaging. Keeping this alignment in mind when going through your cadence of touchpoints will give you a better chance of connecting with a lead at the right time in their process.

Not All Leads are Listening

Aligning your messaging is important, but knowing how to creatively connect with leads is just as critical. The leads you’re trying to connect with may be at the top of your list, but odds are, they’re at the top of every SDRs list. Prospects are inundated with emails, blog posts, cold calls every single day, and they’re immune.

This is when stepping outside of your comfort zone (i.e. LinkedIn) and using other platforms (i.e. Twitter and Slack) is going to give you a better shot at connecting with sales-ready leads. Adding personalization and variety, even in the smallest ways, can cut through noise these leads hear on an everyday basis.

Some Leads are Lost

While a typical Sales Development Rep is running outbound cadences on prospects, it’s the inbound SDRs’ responsibility will respond to marketing generated leads and inquiries to identify their place in the ANUM model. But some of these prospects come in hot, and unless the rep jumps on the opportunity to successfully nurture the lead, those leads are lost.

It’s important for every rep to remember that even if a lead is hot, it may not necessarily be sales-ready. It’s the rep’s responsibility to get them there. Just like an outbound lead, connecting with a lead that is ready to buy may take just as many touches to fully develop, even if they initially came to you.

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It can be disheartening to feel like you’re running in place in your cadence, but sales development is a game of inches. A well-oiled process of at least 7 touches can be the determining factor behind the connection with a sales-ready lead. Take each step as a unique opportunity to prospect with sincerity, add value to conversations, and connect those sales-ready leads that will convert.

The post Turning a Prospect into a Sales-Ready Lead Takes Heart — And At Least 7 Touches appeared first on SalesLoft.

Sales is very often a game of motivation and focus. It is not a job that you can just “phone in”. (Pun intended). You have to have your game face on for each call, meeting, presentation, etc. You have to be in the right frame of mind. You have to have your focus in the right place.

We can always choose to focus on those things that are in our control or those that are out of our control but psychology and human nature causes sales reps to suffer from the self-serving bias; a bias that in the long run serves no one.

Realizing A Need To Shift Focus

Moving from sales into sales management made me realize that one of the most important aspects of being a manager is being aware of psychological concepts for sales people to fight and utilize. Particularly, making sure you and your reps’ focus are on the right things.

Issues sales people focus on that are out of our control and a waste of energy:

• Leads – If you’re looking for the perfect list, you might as well be looking for a unicorn. If there were a perfect list, there would be no need for sales people anyway. From a sales rep’s perspective, what good does it do blame the leads?
• Clients – You can’t always control their decisions. You don’t always understand them. Sometimes they seem downright illogical. You don’t know all that could be going on in their world.
• Processes changes – Sometimes you are given a process that you do not fully understand, or seems counterintuitive to your approach. Then you are told, “That’s just the way you have to do it.”
• Organizational/Structural changes – It can seem that things happen on a “need to know” basis. Well, I need to know what’s going on.
• My Dog, my car, my…It’s really hard to focus on a sales call when you are focusing on all the distractions of life.

Where is your focus? Do you complain about the leads, processes, and tools, whatever? Or, do you focus on what you can control?

Issues Sales people should focus on because they are in our control:

• How do I work these leads to the fullest? – Focus on building your list, follow up on appointments if you can’t get a one call close, fight through objections and ask for referrals, make the most of every call.
• How do I leverage efficiencies in these processes? – Instead of complaining about it, how do you work it? Whenever you observe a problem, propose a solution.
• How do I best utilize tools given to me? – Learn how to use them efficiently and ask your peers and trainers for help.

Reps focusing on the wrong issues need great managers to put them on the track to success. Great managers acknowledge the difficulties they are facing that are out of their control, but then shift focus from the out-of-control to the in-control.

The Psychology And Sales Dangers Of Placing Blame

It is human nature to look externally to explain why something happened to us. It is easier to put blame or focus on something that is out of our control. Placing blame on external factors is a well-known psychological concept sales people need to fight called the self-serving bias.

Be very careful pointing blame and allowing others to point blame. “It’s not my fault!” Is such a powerful statement. As a single rep you can’t change the leads, clients, or processes this very second.

What impact can you have on something that is truly out of you or control? Studies show that engaging the self-serving bias will push you to believe you cannot improve what you’re doing if you point blame. Complaining about, and focusing on, those things you cannot impact is wasted energy and has a negative impact on your professional growth.

Treat Your situation Like A Game Of Poker

In Poker you have no control over the cards you are dealt. Great players don’t dwell on that; they accept it. It is up to you to play those cards to the fullest. Focus on what you can control.

Challenging the self-serving bias applies to all levels of the organization. Sales people can’t blame their customers to their perceived benefit. Managers can’t blame their reps. All the way up to the CEO level, you can either point blame, and apply the self-serving bias, or look at something that you can control, often within, and take responsibility.

Sales Psychology Lesson

Focus on what you can control

• Point blame at yourself if you want to improve.
• Making yourself a better sales person. Learn something new.
• Measure your activity. Set your goals, push yourself, focus your energy.
• Help your people develop. Focus on the How of development.

Bonus psychology for your sales career:

• Using psychology to handle sales objections will help you own your next pitch.
• Understanding what is in or out of your control, and changing those perceptions impact your locus of control. Give this 4 minute psychology podcast from Two Guys on Your Head a listen to understand who is in control of your destiny.
• Utilizing social proof to make your sales pitch stronger.

In case you missed it, LinkedIn now accounts for 64 percent of all corporate website traffic that comes via social media channels. (Read the story here.)

Think about that for a minute: 64 percent of ALL the traffic coming to your corporate or business website from social media channels is coming from LinkedIn!

This is one of the main reasons I was able to do $135,000 in revenue in just 90 days on LinkedIn. Even though I was operating inside a tiny B2B niche (selling marketing services to debt collection agencies), a TON of my ideal prospects (debt collection agency Owners, CEOs, etc.) were already on the site looking for what I had to offer! More important, I realized I had everything I needed to instantly locate, engage and close these prospects without ever leaving my laptop!

Regardless of your niche, here are 3 Simple Tips to help you create nonstop LinkedIn Lead Generation in the B2B Marketplace!

Tip 1: Create Your Own LinkedIn Group – With a Twist!

I refer to LinkedIn Groups as ATMs, because once you understand how powerful they are, you will literally be withdrawing money from them on a regular basis!

The first thing you need to do is create your own LinkedIn Group. It is extremely important that you make sure your Group name is something that displays value to your sales prospects and gives them incentive/reason to want to join. For instance, I named my LinkedIn Group “Debt Collection Agency Marketing: More Revenue. More Clients.”

That tells my ideal prospects (Debt Collection Agency CEOs and Owners) that if they join this Group they’re going to get tips on how to market their agency and land new clients. Notice my company name is nowhere in the title! (Instead, I have my company name displayed via the Group logo and other image areas.) Instead, the title is all about the specific benefit and value someone will get from joining the Group!

REMEMBER: Your sales leads don’t care about you! They only care about themselves and solving their work problems/challenges. Your Group name needs to reflect that fact and catch their eye!

Tip 2: Pick a Group + Refine Your Prospect Search

Here’s the secret sauce to finding your ideal, ready-to-buy prospects right away! After you have your LinkedIn Group set up, go out and join as many Groups (LinkedIn allows you to be in 50 total) where your prospects are hanging out. In my case, I joined as many “Debt Collector” Groups as I could find.

The next step is to pick ONE of those new Groups you’ve joined and start working the “Members” page to find prospects. Once you’re inside the Group and approved as a member, click on “Members,” then filter the list of members further by searching for certain job titles or something else to winnow down the list to your IDEAL prospects. In my case, I joined a Debt Collection Industry Group that had 5,000 or so members. I clicked on “Members,” then filtered the search by “CEOs”, and instantly had a list of ALL my ideal prospects – Debt Collection Agency CEOs.

Tip 3: The Art of the (Personalized) Invite!

Once you’ve found your list of ideal customers, reach out to each person on your new prospect list with a PERSONALIZED invitation! Do NOT just bang through as many generic invites as you can – this is a HUGE mistake! Instead, take the time to look at each’s person’s profile for insights into how you can personalize your invite. Where are they from? What are their passions/hobbies/interests? Where did they go to school? This is the exact approach I used to get a $10,000 project from a debt collection agency executive who’d never met me before I reached out on LinkedIn. I spent all of 14 seconds looking over his profile, saw where he went to college and ended up leveraging that fact into an unforgettable LinkedIn invite that led to the $10,000 contract.

Your LinkedIn invite needs to do three things:

• Explain HOW you found them (choose the option saying you share the same LinkedIn Group).
• Explain WHY they should connect with you (i.e. what VALUE you are going to bring to them as part of the relationship).
• ASK them after connecting if they’d join your LinkedIn Group.

As an example, here’s the type of personalized invite I’d send to Joe Smith, Debt Collection Agency CEO – located in Green Bay, Wisconsin:

“Joe – As a Minnesota Vikings fan I have to admit I’m not sad to see Aaron Rodgers out of action for a while! Meantime I’d love to connect and also invite you to my new LinkedIn Group on Debt Collection Agency Marketing Tips. I think you’d find the posts/discussions valuable to helping grow your agency, and I’d love your insight/input as well!
Thanks!
– John Nemo”

Then I copy and paste the “Meantime I’d love to connect…” sentence into the next invite, and just top it off with a personalized sentence for the next prospect. So say the next person is Jane Smith, a Collection Agency owner who attended the University of Michigan and is a member of several UM alumni Groups that display on her public page. My invite to her would look like this:

“Jane – I have to ask, is the campus atmosphere for Michigan football REALLY as good as it looks on TV? Always been curious about life inside the Big House! Meantime, I’d love to connect and also invite you to my new LinkedIn Group on Debt Collection Agency Marketing Tips. I think you’d find the posts/discussions valuable to helping grow your agency, and I’d love your insight/input as well!
Thanks!
-John Nemo”

Then I’m onto the next person on my list. See how it works? Within 10 or 20 minutes I can crank through a dozen or more personalized invites! And people LOVE getting invites like these, because I’m starting off the connection by getting them talking about what they love: Where they went to college, where they live, a favorite sports team or hobby, etc. Invites like these also make me much more memorable and personable to my new connections. Then, once these sales leads connect with me, I follow through and invite them to my LinkedIn Group.

Why Does Your LinkedIn Group Matter So Much?

Here’s why: Once these folks join my LinkedIn Group, I have all my proverbial fish in the same barrel – all my best prospects in one place! I can control this LinkedIn Group so that no competitors get in, and I can share great/valuable content within the Group that my prospects will love. I also get to demonstrate my value/expertise for them while avoiding overt sales pitches or spam. Plus I also have a built-in email list, focus group of my core prospects/clients, and so on … all thanks to my personal LinkedIn Group!

See how easy this is? There’s a reason LinkedIn is taking over the B2B marketplace when it comes to social media. Make sure you capitalize on the tips above so you can take advantage of the opportunity!

YOUR TURN: What do you think? Have you tried this approach yet on LinkedIn in your niche? Why or why not? Let me know in the comments!

Companies are using AI virtual sales "assistants" to slog through mountains of leads to find the hot ones and pass them over to a "real person" to do what they do best: sell and close. Here are five reasons you should look into this.

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EXCLUSIVE:

It is a topic as old as time itself — how to increase the quality of leads being produced by the marketing team, in order for the sales team to close more deals.

A new commissioned study, released today by ToutApp, tells us that lead quality is still at the top of the list of subjects marketing wants to discuss with the sales team.

In fact, almost half of the 300 marketers surveyed  — when asked to identify what they would like to discuss with sales teams the most — agreed on these top four focus areas:

• Lead generation quality and conversion to sales: 46 percent
• How messages are received and questions that arise in their delivery: 40 percent
• Problems leads say that they’re facing in sales conversations: 32 percent
• Competitive companies that come up in sales calls: 27 percent

Leads have always been the most divisive of things and are a major contributor to the constant battle between the marketing and sales teams. Why haven’t we moved on from that in the last 25 years of CRM and sales force automation products?

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From VentureBeat

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“Leads are easy to generate,” Tawheed Kader, chief executive and founder of ToutApp told me. “Qualified and engaged leads? That’s a whole other story. Getting in sync around what makes for a sales-ready qualified lead is a step that most marketing and sales organizations skip when defining their go-to-market strategy, which causes misalignment down the line.”

So communication is still the key in bringing sales and marketing closer.

“If marketing and sales can get in crystal clear sync on what makes for a “sales-ready and qualified” lead, then you’re golden,” Kader said. “This is why research shows that companies that prioritize such marketing and sales alignment close more business.”

With that in mind, it is no surprise that among all marketers surveyed, 70 percent said that they want to meet with their sales teams “more frequently” to review and discuss strategy.

Meetings might be something sales and marketing teams want, but is that really a workable solution?

“For sales leaders though, their question always is ‘why aren’t they on phones closing?’,” Kader continued. “The key for successful meetings is to ensure marketing brings to sales clear and actionable bite-sized things that they can employ on the next 5 calls and next 3 sales scenarios. Too often, marketers get caught up on their own Powerpoint slides, their theory, the conceptual and the abstract. They actually lose salespeople in the first 2 minutes because they’re left wondering ‘how does this help me on my next deal?’.”

The research suggests that those who do meet regularly are seeing good, if not stellar, results.

When asked to describe how effective or ineffective intra-team meetings typically are in improving marketing outcomes, 89 percent deemed them “effective.” There was room for improvement, however, with 51 percent citing them as “moderately effective” versus 39 percent “very effective.” Only 11 percent of marketers called marketing and sales team strategy meetings “ineffective.”

The biggest challenge found in the study? The thorny topic of metrics and KPIs.

Marketers believe they “measure success differently” from sales. 25 percent picked this as the biggest hurdle, followed by “my company doesn’t have a system in place for regular meetings” (22%) and “our goals are different” (16%).

Of course, there is a large amount of investment going into sales technology at present, some of which helps marketing and sales become more transparent about those data points. In Q3 2015, sales technology ranked fourth among all marketing technology investments.

For now, it seems that the answer is for sales and marketing teams to meet more often, but do so armed with the right intentions and questions. The full study is available today from ToutApp.

 

 

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An audience member at the Sharing & On Demand Economy Conference recently questioned a panel of entrepreneurs on whether people will possess anything of their own in years to come, be it their own home, their own car, their own wedding dress, or even their own power drill.

Owning things is expensive and finding places to store unnecessary luxuries in a world that's becoming increasingly densely populated could be seen as cumbersome, according to Alex Stephany, the former CEO of drive rental platform JustPark.

Entrepreneurs operating in the sharing economy, which is underpinned by the internet and the rise of smartphones, are describing their businesses as revolutionary, with Uber's Travis Kalanick saying his taxi-hailing app is changing the way people travel across the world. 

"We want transportation to be as reliable as running water everywhere for everyone," Kalanick said at Salesforce's annual conference in September. 

But there’s one potential problem that few people are talking about: many of these businesses, including Uber and Airbnb, aren't yet turning a profit. 

Fred Destin, a general partner at Accel Partners, which has invested in Facebook, Dropbox and Spotify,  doesn't believe being profitable is as important in a company's early years as you might think. "People obsess about profitability," he told Business Insider. "You can decide when you want to make a business profitable by simply growing more slowly.

"If you look at Uber, Airbnb, Blablacar, Deliveroo, all these companies do the same thing. They acquire customers up front. You have to make the investment upfront in marketing to get these people onto your platform. You don’t immediately make money. You make money when they use, and reuse, and reuse the product.

"The payback time, so the amount of time it takes to make money on a newly acquired customer, can be 12 months, 24 months, etc. So almost the faster you grow the more you burn money at the beginning, but you’re building an asset underneath it which is a base of stable, loyal users. That’s very good."

The Belgian investor — who sits on the board of restaurant food delivery service Deliveroo, which has raised $200 million (£133 million) — went on to remind Business Insider that Amazon was unprofitable for many years. "Now, with the level of brand they have, a lot of people, including me, probably do 60-80% of their ecommerce on Amazon," he said. "They've proven they're an immensely valuable company."

Uber and Airbnb, the most valuable sharing economy companies in the world by valuation, are spending vast sums on aggressive marketing and global expansion in a bid to gain as many new users as they can.

Uber is now a bigger company than Ford, General Motors, and most of the S&P 500 companies, according to an article on Nasdaq's website. It has raised over $10 billion (£6.6 billion) and is valued at over $50 billion (£33 billion). It's also losing millions of dollars every day, according to leaked documents that were obtained by US news site Gawker and published in August.

Airbnb, has raised $2.4 billion (£1.6 billion) for its home rental platform and is now valued at over $25 billion (£16.5 billion). But it's forecasting an operating loss of $150 million (£99.5 million) for 2015, according to The Wall Street Journal. 

Destin said he'd be surprised if Airbnb, for example, wasn't profitable "within three years, five max". He added that the startup is still in "hyperexpansion mode" and it's "probably the world's largest hotel company" despite having only been built in the last few years.

"If they decided to stop growing tomorrow, with the strength of their brand and their supply, they would probably throw off vast amounts of cash," he said.

Show me the money

But profits aren't coming quickly enough for some venture-funded startups and there's only so long they can wait before they have to start pulling back.

In the UK, parking rental app JustPark raised several million pounds over the last two years from well-known investment firms like Index Ventures but last month it announced that it was cutting at least 10 roles and losing its CEO.

There are certain things companies in the sharing economy need to avoid if they don't want to end up going bankrupt.

Destin said startups can go wrong when they start giving away free credit and and slash their prices in a bid to get people signed up to their platform.

"When you use aggressive discounting techniques you can get into trouble," said Destin.

With billions of dollars behind it, Uber can afford to offer coupons to new users but bootstrapped startups need to be more careful.

Many sharing economy companies aren't yet profitable, but they are still providing work for a large number of people around the world that may otherwise be unemployed. Uber for example, is helping over 20,000 drivers in London to earn a wage, while Airbnb is providing thousands of homeowners with an extra source of income.

UK government and the sharing economy

As a result, the UK government is very keen to support the sharing economy and the businesses that sit within it.

In March, Chancellor George Osborne showed his support for the sharing economy when he scrapped an outdated subletting law that meant UK residents could only let out their homes on Airbnb and other home sharing platforms for a certain number of days a year.

He also announced plans to trial a number of sharing economy services in Leeds and Manchester, dubbing them the UK's new "sharing cities".

The Chancellor made the reforms after digital minister Ed Vaizey tasked Debbie Wosskow, the founder and CEO of LoveHomeSwap, a startup that allows homeowners to exchange their properties, with carrying out a review on the impact of the sharing economy in the UK.

"With increasing UK economic impact, the opportunity is great for companies big and small — and for individuals all across the country to turn themselves into successful ‘sharing economy’ micro-entrepreneurs," said Wosskow ahead of the report.

Wosskow now chairs Sharing Economy UK (SEUK) — a trade body comprised of over 20 sharing economy companies either based in the UK or operating here in one form or another.

She had this to say about sharing economy companies turning a profit

"Though sharing is not a new idea, the sharing economy is still a very young sector and some of the businesses of which it is comprised are much younger still. It’s not possible to comment exactly how many businesses are profitable but it is fair to say that the potential of the sharing economy is huge and profits are already being made by the users, which is a success story in itself. SEUK businesses like Hassle.com, Airbnb and Under the Doormat, for example, are enabling users to create new sources of income through existing, and often unused assets.

“The real question is how do we support these businesses on their way to a profit. Key challenges such as insurance, taxation and regulation through more traditional systems and services are issues that the majority of sharing economy businesses have to spend a lot of their time overcoming. Rather than focusing on what should be the key items on a business agenda such as customer acquisition, financing, profitability etc. These are the key issues the sector needs to work on together to support individual businesses on their road to profitability."

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