Beijing issued its first-ever red alert for smog on Monday, urging schools to close and invoking restrictions on factories and traffic that will keep half of the city’s vehicles off the roads.

The red alert — the most serious warning on a four-tier system adopted a little over two years ago — means authorities have forecast more than three consecutive days of severe smog.

An online notice from the Beijing Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau said it issued the alert to “protect public health and reduce levels of heavy air pollution.”

Beijing hotel staffer Fan Jinglong said the smog forecast was “really worrisome.”

“We have no choice but to step up preventative measures like wearing a mask outdoors at all times,” he said.

Readings of PM2.5 particles climbed toward 300 micrograms per cubic meter on Monday and are expected to continue rising before the air begins to improve with the arrival of a cold front on Thursday. The World Health Organization designates the safe level for the tiny, poisonous particles at 25.

Along with school closures and limiting cars to driving every other day depending on the last number of their license plate, a raft of other restrictions will seek to reduce the amount of dust and other particulate matter in the city of 22.5 million people. Officials said extra subway trains and buses would be added to handle the additional strain on public transport.

It’s the second time this month that notoriously polluted Beijing has experienced a prolonged bout of smog, sending PM2.5 levels in the suburbs as high as 976 micrograms. Beijing was also shrouded in persistent smog for most of November, when power demand soared due to unusually cold weather.

While pollution in the capital improved slightly in the first 10 months of the year, heavy smog that can be seen from outer space regularly forces Beijing schools to suspend outdoor activities and can even prompt highway closures because of reduced visibility.

“It is a sharp warning to us that we may have too much development at the price of environment and it is time for us to seriously deal with air pollution,” said Fan, the hotel employee.

Convenience stores in Beijing were doing a brisker than usual business in air filtering face masks Monday night as residents began stocking up for the days ahead.

“You have to do whatever you can to protect yourself,” said Li Huiwen, who stopped by a market on her way home from work. “Even when wearing the mask, I feel uncomfortable and don’t have any energy.”

Most of the city’s international schools cancelled Tuesday classes, although it wasn’t clear how many Chinese schools planned to do so.

There previously have been stretches of severe smog in Beijing that lasted more than three days. However, those had initially been forecast to last three days or less, so they did not trigger a red alert. The alert requires a forecast of more than 72 straight hours with PM2.5 levels of 200 micrograms per cubic meter or more.

Polluted air throughout broad swaths of China has had severe health effects. A study led by atmospheric chemist Jos Lelieveld of Germany’s Max Planck Institute and published this year in Nature magazine estimated that 1.4 million people each year die prematurely because of pollution in China.

Most of the pollution is blamed on coal-fired power plants, along with vehicle emissions and construction and factory work. China, the world’s biggest carbon emitter, plans to upgrade coal power plants over the next five years to tackle the problem, and says its emissions will peak by around 2030 before starting to decline.

While emissions standards have been tightened and heavy investments made in solar, wind and other renewable energy, China still depends on coal for more than 60 per cent of its power.

The post Beijing issues first-ever red alert for smog appeared first on Macleans.ca.

To celebrate its 30th anniversary, The Canadian Encyclopedia created 30 lists of 30 things that make us proud to be Canadian, from famous people and historic events, to iconic foods and influential artists. Read more of their lists here.

The concept of community can take various forms. In a basic sense, it embodies the idea of sharing something, such as values, goals or interests. Community can also be a network of social ties, reinforced by a shared vision of self or identity. Finally, it can be defined simply as the neighbourhood, city or geographical area where one lives. Throughout Canada’s history, many men and women have advocated on behalf of their community, whether a city, province, ethnic group, religious community or community of ideas. To celebrate its 30th anniversary, the Encyclopedia drew up a list of 30 leaders (in the broad sense of the term) who have emerged from the diverse communities that make Canada the vibrant place it is.

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The post Canadian Encyclopedia: 30 important community leaders appeared first on Macleans.ca.

WASHINGTON - Hillary Clinton on Wednesday will unveil a proposal for a new "exit tax" aimed at cracking down on corporate inversions, a practice that permits U.S. companies to merge with corporations overseas to lower their tax bill.

A storm is coming to the credit markets.

Matthew Mish and Stephen Caprio, strategists at UBS, put out a bearish note on Thursday, looking at whether lower-quality, high yield and leveraged loan borrowers will be able to refinance their debt. 

Companies have binged on debt following the financial crisis, taking advantage of an extended period of low-interest rates. 

Higher-risk companies have been big beneficiaries. Yield-thirsty investors have paid up for riskier bonds, allowing these companies to raise capital at historically low costs.

The problem will arise the companies look to refinance that debt after interest rates have begun to rise.  

"The key question is: will credit markets be able to absorb the refinancing needs of lower quality high yield and leveraged loan borrowers?" the UBS note said.

No

The short answer is no. According to their calculations, roughly 35% to 40% of the outstanding US high yield and leveraged loan universe "is at risk." 

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: What you need to know before going into business with family

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At the front lines of any company’s battle to win the hearts and minds of customers are the service teams. They become the public face of the company when something goes wrong with the product, and they’re the ones who bear the brunt of the blame. But there are times when these employees can play a reconnaissance role, relaying feedback, suggestions, and the customer’s desires.

Salesforce has recognized this potential and wants to empower customer representatives within its Desk.com platform. The enterprise software provider today introduced a new feature called Opportunity Management, which will empower a company’s service team to have more insightful conversations with customers about what they need in order to have a great experience.

“Service-led sales are becoming an extreme reality, with the representative having a tangible rapport with the customer,” said Leyla Seka, Salesforce’s senior vice president and general manager for Desk.com. “It’s a natural extension to think service representatives have an understanding on what the customer is going to do and what other products or services they’re interested in.”

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From VentureBeat

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The thinking behind this feature is that as a representative begins troubleshooting an issue with a customer, “pearls of wisdom,” such as frustrations or ideas for product improvements, would emerge organically from the conversation. It’s these insights that the service team can jot down within Desk’s platform to either pass along to a salesperson, or to incorporate as value-add marketing themselves.

Salesforce promises that Opportunity Management will let agents “proactively suggest products or services that the customer is likely to need or appreciate.” While available for any company, this approach will likely be particularly beneficial for small to medium-sized businesses. Desk.com chief marketing officer Katy Dormer told VentureBeat: “Small to medium-sized businesses have limited resources and they wear a lot of hats. When dealing with customers and understanding what they need and growing their business, [Opportunity Management] is a feature that will help drive business growth.”

Dormer said that Desk users will find a new tool that lets service agents input details about available opportunities, such as how much a customer might pay, the probability of a sale closing, and any labels/tags that can be associated with the situation. The point is to include enough details so that insights can be gathered and understood, regardless of who’s handling this opportunity.

“We’ve been hearing a lot of frustrations on the support team,” said Seka. “They wished to have Opportunity Management so that the reps could be better involved.”

So why is it important to have this tool available within a service like Desk? Some may be thinking that you can already do the same thing with something like Salesforce’s base CRM platform. However, it boils down to never letting service agents leave that “moment.”

“When you think about the customer service agent that’s living and breathing within the Desk console, the fact that they can click a button and launch an opportunity is incredible,” Seka explained. “When you’re in a moment delivering customer experience, you’re able to access Opportunity Management right there instead of jumping to another system. You want to be able to take action in the moment.”

Salesforce said that with the addition of Opportunity Management, its customers can sync data between Desk, SalesforceIQ, and Salesforce more easily, giving everyone on the team more visibility in terms of what data is being gathered about their end users. It also comes on the heels of a formal integration between Desk and SalesforceIQ that gives both sales and service agents access to each other’s data.

“It’s really important for companies to build relationships with their customers and to tap into new opportunities for growth,” said Dormer.

Opportunity Management will be rolling out in the first half of 2016, along with pricing for the feature.

More information:

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The average business professional sends and receives about 126 emails per day.

For many of you reading this, that may seem like a light morning — but it only goes to further the argument that in order to be successful, one must find a way to stand out in the crowded inbox and make the most of each second in front of a reader.

So, in the world of too many emails, too little time, and too much distraction, how can marketers optimize their email content to ensure they make the most of every opportunity to break through to their audience?

Be relevant

If you’re doing it right, each one of your recipients should read your email and think that you wrote it just for them. By having a firm grasp on your audience, and segmenting your database into tightly related groups, marketers can send hyper-targeted personalized email campaigns that specifically speak to each segment of their audience. A study by The Aberdeen Group found that personalized emails improve click-through rates by 14 percent, and conversion rates by 10 percent. Put simply, send people the emails that matter to them.

Balance the content

The average newsletter only gets read from start to finish by 19% of the people who opened it. This means that on top of providing relevant content, marketers must deliver the content in a way that is focused and attention-grabbing if they want the reader to retain anything from it at all. The most common mistake marketers make is to try to squeeze too much content into a single email. The message then loses focus, readers don’t naturally understand what to do next, and the email loses the battle for attention.

As they say, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” Images in emails are worth at least that when it comes to capturing attention in a limited window. It’s OK to obsess about your email’s featured content; the right image and a perfectly written headline might just buy you those extra few seconds of attention you need to deliver your message or pitch your service.

Stop guessing

Not sure which image, headline, or subject will incite the most action from your subscribers? The beauty of modern email marketing technology is that you don’t need to guess. Split testing allows you to test a couple variations of your email with a sample of your contacts and determine which one generated the best results (more opens, more clicks, etc.). Split test your email campaigns to determine the optimal versions of all of the email’s elements. Common elements to test that can pay huge dividends are:

• Subject line: Shorter or longer? Pitch the discount outright, or be more vague?
• Featured content: Does image A or B work better?
• Call To Action: Do green buttons get more clicks than blue? Does “get the details” do better than “read more”?
• Timing: Morning or afternoon? How often?

Humanize your marketing

With the rise of social media marketing and the personal communication between consumers and brands that it brought, people have become accustomed to putting a “face” on a brand. When it comes to email marketing, recipients are more likely to pay attention to your email if feels genuine and not like some faceless software just pushed out 100,000 emails to a database purchased online.

For starters, make sure the “reply-to” email is a real person, so recipients can continue the conversation if they want to. Instead of the sender being just the name of your company, use a real person to start building relationships. Emails from “Mailify” might be great, but when recipients become accustomed to emails from “Eric at Mailify,” and the quality content that comes with them, we’ve started to leverage human relationships to build brand loyalty.

In the end, email marketing comes down to a game of seconds.

In just a few seconds your email needs to capture your reader’s attention, add value to their lives, and convince them to take action. If you can do that, then email marketing will continue to be one of the most cost-effective marketing channels available to businesses of all sizes and industries.

The dawn of the digital marketer is here. Learn how you can stay ahead by downloading the free Salesforce e-book.

Do your sales and marketing execs still think that sales enablement means ensuring that the latest piece of marketing content is thrown over the wall to the sales team? Are you still trying to convince them that they need to invest in a sales enablement platform and strategy?

Although sales enablement is still an emerging discipline there’s enough evidence to prove that it should rise to strategic importance for B2B companies and merits corporate support and investment. This interactive video highlights some impactful research, stats and best practices.

The video points to four key benefits of investing in a sales enablement strategy.

Motivating Buyers

Demand Gen Report’s buyer behavior survey shows that buyers are highly influenced by sales content. They value high quality, relevant content provided throughout the buying decision process.

Making Sales Conversations Relevant

It’s not just about printed and digital sales collateral. Sales reps’ conversations must be delivered in the context and interests of each individual prospect. Very often sales reps don’t have the training and support they need to sufficiently personalize their conversations. An effective sales content strategy can fill this gap and ensure that this level of support is provided continuously.

Increasing Selling Time

Sales reps spend a ridiculous number of hours on non-selling tasks. If you could convert just a few of those hours each week into selling time and multiply that across the number of your reps in your organization, imagine the impact on sales productivity. It would obviously also have a huge positive effect on morale.

Lowering Content Creation Costs

A well-designed sales content strategy ensures that content is created quickly and efficiently. And because content is created with a specific sales purpose, it results in higher usage rates.

So keep calm and prove your point by sharing the interactive video with your team. You can also download it in PowerPoint format and use the slides in your discussion.

This year has undoubtedly been The Year of Drake, my favorite millennial in the history of millennials. (Though if you ask me, every year since 2003 has been “The Year of Drake.”)

Drake kicked off 2015 by releasing a surprise album, which was unlike anything we’d heard from him before. This summer, we saw his character being put to the test after another rapper attempted to besmirch his name on Twitter. The upshot? Drake slayed the guy with a series of freestyle raps and a hard-hitting PowerPoint presentation. Since this summer, not only has Drake released another album, but he hit a milestone as the fourth artist to ever score 100 Billboard Hot 100 hits; he received amazing reviews for his annual Toronto-based OVOFest; and he allegedly began dating one of the greatest athletes of all time.

Basically, Drake does all of the things, and he does them well. But he’s more than just a rap figure. He’s a brand, and his messaging has remained incredibly consistent over the years. It just works, and it plays a lot into his popularity among the millennial generation.

There’s a thing or two we can all learn from Drake. So, in honor of his stellar year, here are five lessons marketers can adopt from him to win over millennial consumers.

1. Embrace your quirks.

Expressing heartfelt emotion isn’t something that rappers typically embrace. Drake has lots of emotions, and he’s blatantly unapologetic about it. He’s well aware that people make fun of him for agonizing over women who break his heart. But guess what? He laughs at the jokes, and then sings and agonizes some more.

In his recent video for “Hotline Bling,” Drake dances around like a total dad … all by himself. He’s salsa dancing, spinning around and pantomiming. It’s so awkward and odd, but it’s so representative of Drake, that it’s actually amazing. Everyone raved about the video, and a bunch of people even dressed up as “Hotline Bling Drake” for Halloween this year.

One thing to note is that Drake isn’t over the top with all of this. He’s not running around crying every day and dancing like a dad at every show. However, when the opportunity arises every so often to remind the haters that he’s not ashamed to be himself, he takes it.

Brand Application

A company that’s tapped into this just the right way is Dressbarn. People have poked fun at the retailer’s name for ages, so they recently launched a campaign literally telling everyone to get over it because … it’s their name. This has gained the brand a lot of press, and people have responded well to it. Consumers have even been taking photos of Dressbarn’s billboards and uploading them to social channels. The moral of the story: Embrace your quirks, and the people will embrace you.

2. Be transparent and authentic.

Drake loves sharing personal stories with the world. Sometimes he tells us how much money he has in the bank. Other times, he’ll provide us with some background on his family dynamics. He even shares details about his personal relationship struggles.

Drake also enjoys sharing behind-the-scenes photos of his life on Instagram. And I’m not talking Photoshopped stuff like other celebrities are known to share. He posts authentic photos of time spent with his mom in the kitchen, snapshots of him and his buddies in the studio, and images of him and his dad sipping on wine on random nights. It’s genuine content that fans want to see.

Brand Application

When it comes to authenticity and transparency, I love bringing up Everlane. On every product page on its ecommerce site, the brand shares an infographic that details what it cost to make the item. The Everlane ecommerce site and blog also feature photos and videos of their overseas factories, explaining how and where products are manufactured. Millennials love this. They are conscious consumers who take pride in buying items that are made responsibly. It’s crucial that the brands of today recognize this.

3. Tap into your hometown glory.

Drake is incredibly proud to be from Toronto. He vocally and visually supports his local sports teams, restaurants, politicians, models, and more. He even calls himself “6 God,” a colloquialism he derived from the 6s in the Toronto area codes – 416 and 647.

Brand Application

Nearly every person I’ve ever met from Rhode Island has independently expressed some sort of affection for Narragansett Beer. The brand ties itself so much to being a product of New England that people carry the sentiment with them wherever they end up, and they spread the word to others. This hometown glory has a lot to do with the widespread success of the brand, and it’s an awesome thing to see.

4. Express gratitude.

Drake often uses his music to shout out his family and friends for their unconditional love and support throughout the years. His mother, his uncle and his friends all played crucial roles in getting him to where he is now.

Now that he has the means to pay them back, he most certainly does. Whether that entails providing a lavish lifestyle for his family, bailing his friends out of tough situations, or lending his mellifluous voice to other artists’ songs, Drake is on it. He refuses to forget who was there for him on his rise to the top.

Brand Application

The easiest way to do this is to reward your most fervent fans and customers with perks. DSW’s rewards program, for example, presents gift certificates to avid shoppers. Taco Bell sends a bunch of random swag to social media influencers to keep them tweeting about the brand. These are simple ways to give thanks to the people who know and love what you do.

5. Channel Drake.

There’s so much more we can learn from this guy beyond all that’s been listed above. To name a few: Defend the integrity of your product; be loyal; acknowledge your shortcomings when necessary. This young man is a wise, wise soul.

As awesome as he is, Drake is just one small piece of the millennial marketing puzzle.

To learn more about the types of content that resonates with this demographic, download our guide, “Marketing to Millennials: Engaging a Generation of Visual Buyers.”

Books make great holiday gifts for content marketers. Your gifts acknowledge the content marketing efforts and passion that your co-worker, employee, friend, or loved-one has demonstrated during the previous year.

On a practical level, gifts of books that inspire, share ideas, and offer tips can contribute to even greater success during 2016.

The majority of the books that follow were published (or republished) during 2015 – an unusually good year for quality content marketing books; the selection has never been as broad or as deep as it is now.

• If you’re buying for content marketing newcomers and are looking for the best introductory or overview titles, or for books for recent graduates and business owners ready to commit to content marketing, you’ll find new choices as well as updated editions of classics.

• If you’re buying for experienced content marketers, there’s a fresh crop of books that goes deeper into specialized content marketing tasks. These reflect the continuing maturity of content marketing as a discipline with growing opportunities for career advancement in different areas.

As in previous roundups, I have included books from adjacent categories such as information design and psychology. These out-of-field books often offer fresh insights and viewpoints that contribute to content marketing success.

Organization of this list

In my previous recaps of content marketing books, like last year’s Guide to 2014’s Best New Holiday Gift Books for Content Marketers, I organized books alphabetically by the authors’ last names.

This time, however, I organized books alphabetically within the categories as Content Marketing Institute did in its compilation of this summer’s Essential #BestBooks Reading List for Content Marketers. It contains over 50 additional gift suggestions for the content marketers in your life.

Referring to this compilation will help save you time in choosing the perfect book for your friends, co-workers, and loved ones. It will allow you to compare the latest books in each category with books published previously.

Content marketing and content strategy

These books provide excellent overviews of the content marketing field and the types of opportunities it offers business owners, marketing professionals, and self-employed professionals looking for the big-picture perspective.

Buyer Personas: How to Gain Insight into Your Customer’s Expectations, Align Your Marketing Strategies, and Win More Business by Adele Revella

If you’re looking for a next logical step for content marketing newcomers, take a close look at Adele Revella’s Buyer Personas. It’s a deep dive into the heart of content marketing success, i.e., understanding your customer’s needs and expectations so you can align your marketing strategies with what is, rather than what you assume.

The key to understanding the relevance of buyer personas is that they determine the success or failure of every content marketing step that follows. No matter how well you implement the following steps, ultimately, the success of your content marketing is determined by whether you’ve chosen the right targets and addressed their true information needs.

Buyer Personas goes even further by stressing that content needs differ according to the prospect’s location in the buying journey. Newcomers to the field have different information needs than those who are comparing options, who already purchased, or who have been asked for recommendations or referrals.

There are a lot of one-dimensional buyer persona articles and templates available online, but none goes into the topic as deeply as this book. Furthermore, none is based on as much specialized hands-on experience with the practical aspects of creating accurate and actionable buyer personas.

Content Inc.: How Entrepreneurs Use Content to Build Massive Audiences and Create Radically Successful Businesses by Joe Pulizzi

During a recent conversation, Joe, the founder of the Content Marketing Institute, shared a remarkably candid insight: “Content marketing is an iterative process; you’re unlikely to get it perfect the first time around … but, it gets better the more you work at it.” The same can be said about Joe’s writing and publishing career. Content Inc. is Joe’s fourth book and the second he’s written by himself. It’s also the most organized, personal, and readable of his books. It details a six-step content marketing process that any entrepreneur, marketing director, or self-employed professional can use to harness and profit from a content process.

The chapters contained within the eight sections detail the relevance, the challenges, the best practices, the tools, and – most importantly – the accomplishments and rewards that other firms and nonprofits, large and small, have gained from each step.

But, more than the do’s and don’ts of content marketing, Content Inc. offers an inspiring story of change and perseverance – the story of iteration and change. Like many businesses and associations, the Content Marketing Institute’s success is the result of Finding its Sweet Spot (Part 2) and locating its Content Tilt (Part 3). The fundamental steps are described in Discovering Your Content Mission (Chapter 6) and Ways to Unearth Your Content Tilt (Chapter 7).

In the chapters that follow, Joe describes how the Content Marketing Institute, and other businesses have built their base, harvested their audience, diversified, monetized, and prepared for the next level. Joe’s message and voice are clearer in Content Inc. than in his previous books, and he holds nothing back in describing how he assembled his team while refining his message and delivery. In doing so, Content Inc. provides a road map to success that others can easily adapt to their own challenges and resources … if they’re willing to iterate.

The New Rules of Marketing & PR, Fifth Edition: How to Use Social Media, Online Video, Mobile Applications, Blogs, News Releases, and Viral Marketing to Reach Buyers Directly by David Meerman Scott

Take a glance at the bookshelf of your entrepreneur or marketer gift recipient. If you don’t find a copy of David Meerman Scott’s The New Rules of Marketing & PR, this is the book for you. The fifth edition is a perfect complement to Joe’s Content Inc. Both provide an excellent overview of the field with different perspectives, examples, and organization.

Whereas Content Inc. is organized in a six-step process or sequence, The New Rules of Marketing & PR is organized by tools or tactics, such as improving your online newsroom, and exploring mobile marketing, graphics, or podcasting. This makes it easy for you to locate task-specific information, examples, and tips.

David’s perspective has evolved in the last two editions. His voice as a consumer of content marketing is stronger – both in its appreciation of content that is done well, and in his impatience with poorly implemented content. David’s consumer approach is an excellent counterpoint to Joe’s business owner or marketing professional approach.

Writing and content creation

The following books are appropriate for experienced content marketers looking for assistance in fine-tuning their skills in specific areas. The techniques shared in the following books can help content marketers differentiate themselves in coming years.

The Content Strategy Toolkit: Methods, Guidelines, and Templates for Getting Content Right by Meghan Casey

Content Strategy Toolkit is the perfect book for those looking for a behind-the-scenes view of a professional content agency at work. Meghan Casey, lead content strategist at Brain Traffic, describes the content creation process in terms of real-world issues like establishing budgets, obtaining stakeholder support, identifying project objectives, researching the competition, and articulating a content strategy to guide execution.

Living up to its title, the book allows readers to download more than 30 of the word-processing and spreadsheet templates the agency uses when working with its Fortune 500 clients. After viewing examples of the templates in action in the book, you can easily put them to work in your agency or business.

Every Page Is Page One: Topic-Based Writing for Technical Communication and the Web by Mark Baker

Successful content marketing careers are the result of looking beyond today’s best practices and following emerging trends. Every Page Is Page One is a long-tail book for the content marketer, copywriter, or content strategist in your life who has a copy of Scott Abel and Rahel Anne Bailie’s The Language of Content Strategy or has expressed interest in attending next year’s Intelligent Content Conference in Las Vegas.

Mark Baker addresses how the Internet has changed the way people seek information and what it means for content creators. It provides a working vocabulary for understanding the differences between writing a book and writing for the web. It’s also an excellent example of the increasingly popular trend of releasing book contents as blog posts as they’re being written, and building a market for the book while attracting comments and feedback that contribute to a better book.

Although the inclusion of “technical communication” in the title may appear overly specialized, the topics addressed in Every Page Is Page One are likely to become increasingly relevant to more content marketers as more utility and return on investment are expected from the content.

How to Make Sense of Any Mess: Information Architecture for Everybody by Abby Covert

Although information architecture is often thought of as an advanced specialty, in reality, every content marketing project can benefit from the basic principles in this slim, illustrated volume. (It’s the perfect stocking stuffer or gift to bring along to the host of a holiday party.)

As Abby Covert states in the introduction, “Information architecture is a set of concepts that can help anyone making anything to make sense of messes caused by misinformation, disinformation, not enough, or too much information.”

Here’s how she concludes her introduction, “In the time that it takes to fly from New York to Chicago, I will introduce you to the practice of information architecture so you can start to make sense of whatever messes come your way.”

How to Make Sense of Any Mess is based on a seven-step system in a series of one-page chapters. It’s an excellent introduction to the field and concepts that will be especially appreciated by writers and designers. I consider How to Make Sense of Any Mess the “Elements
of Style” for the information age.

Meaningful: The Story of Ideas That Fly by Bernadette Jiwa

Bernadette Jiwa’s Meaningful is her fourth slim, but provocative book. It reflects ideas she germinated working with clients and sharing three days a week in her Story of Telling blog. Her approach to stories goes deeper into the connection between story and product than most, yet her writing style is magnetic in its conciseness and momentum. Meaningful describes a marketing approach based on innovation that goes far beyond features, benefits, and exposure.

Like one of the major themes in Content Inc., Bernadette addresses the inevitable disconnect (i.e., wasted time, effort, and resources) that results from the universal tendency to create products first, then look for customers to sell them to. Customers can’t be persuaded to buy what they don’t want to buy. True innovation is story-based, but it’s not based on your story. Instead, it’s based on listening to the stories of your customers and prospects, and listening for what’s not there.

Innovation, in other words, is empathy-based listening and filling the gap between what customers are settling for now and the stories they would tell their friends if the missing products or services were available. Meaningful inspires fresh thinking by encouraging entrepreneurs and marketers to look beyond the obvious and be more open to exploring opportunities that can enrich the lives of their customers.

Marketing and branding

Content marketers don’t exist in a vacuum. Like business owners, they have to constantly inform, motivate, and persuade audiences, bosses, clients, committees, co-workers, customers, employees, investors, the media, and prospects.

Like businesses, content marketers also have brands; their brands can be the result of their reputation as thought leaders, as well as the way they present themselves in casual conversations, meetings, and behind podiums. In one way or another, these books focus on career-enhancing ideas and tips that build personal credibility and trust.

The Go-Giver: Expanded Edition: A Little Story About a Powerful Business Idea by Bob Burg and John David Mann

At first glance, you may wonder why I’ve included the expanded 2015 edition of the 2007 international best seller, The Go-Giver: A Little Story About a Powerful Business Idea, in the marketing and branding section of a holiday gift guide for content marketers. Bear with me.

The Go-Giver and its five laws of stratospheric success define the heart and soul of content marketing. Told as a short fable, The Go-Giver describes the philosophies that underlie the daily habits of Joe Pulizzi, Robert Rose, and countless CMI bloggers and Content Marketing World presenters. As the two following examples, quoted from the Five Laws of Stratospheric Success show, Go-Giver principles are central to the underlying rhythms of content marketing:

• The law of value – Your true worth is determined by how much more you give in value than you take in payment.

• The law of influence – Your influence is determined by how abundantly you place other people’s interest firsts.

Underlying the five laws is the empathy and understanding that comes from knowing your market and their needs, which makes The Go-Giver an excellent companion gift to Adele Revella’s Buyer Personas.

Over 500,000 copies of The Go-Giver have been sold around the world. When it first appeared eight years ago, I viewed it as a field guide to daily interactions. Having just reread the expanded edition, I now view it as an important addition to any content marketer’s library.

Non Obvious: How to Think Different, Curate Ideas & Predict the Future by Rohit Bhargava

Non Obvious is the perfect holiday gift for content marketers who:

• Focus exclusively on content creation – Non Obvious provides an eye-opening tutorial into the habits and best practices of content curation. As Rohit Bhargava describes, there’s more to content curation than simply passing along previously published content; curation can be as creative as creation by building upon existing content and taking it in new directions. In his words, “Content curation adds meaning to isolated beautiful things.”

• Want to become thought leaders – Non Obvious also could be called an Ultimate Guide to Becoming a Thought Leader in Your Field by Spotting Emerging Trends. He shows how to take content curation and use it to establish a reputation as a trend spotter. After describing the three elements of trends and five questions to ask yourself when quantifying trends, he outlines a process – The Haystack Method – for locating and grouping ideas, identifying themes, naming them, and providing proof.

In section two, he provides an example of the Haystack Method at work, sharing his 2015 Non-Obvious Trend Report. In Part Three, The Trend Action Report, he provides a detailed road map to monetizing the trends you have identified. Like Content Inc.’s description of the goals and structure of the Content Marketing Institute, Rohit shares the big picture as well as the day-to-day monetization options and details.

How the World Sees You: Discover Your Highest Value Through the Science of Fascination by Sally Hogshead

How the World Sees You is an important book for content marketing from several perspectives. By helping you view yourself as others view you, this book will make you better able to market yourself and your message to clients, co-workers, employers, and prospects.

Sally’s work also is an excellent example of how a skilled author and researcher can take a complicated topic and organize and simplify it into three parts and just eight chapters (plus several appendices). The book’s discussion of fascination can help content marketers add engagement to the ideas and examples they create and curate on a day-to-day basis.

Power Cues: The Subtle Science of Leading Groups, Persuading Others, and Maximizing Your Personal Impact by Nick Morgan

If you’ve ever watched David Meerman Scott deliver one of his popular keynote speeches, you undoubtedly noticed his confidence and energy as he approached the podium. If you asked him how he became such a powerful speaker, he’ll probably credit Nick Morgan who has had decades of research-driven experience coaching today’s most successful speakers. He is a frequent political debate television commentator.

Nick’s latest book, Power Cues, discusses the nonverbal cues that influence an audience’s perception of you and their openness to your message before you begin to speak. It shares ways to become aware of the gestures so you can project your desired persona through your emotions. Equally important, Power Cues sensitizes you to the unconscious nonverbal signals of others, permitting you to be better able to evaluate what others are communicating.

Chapter One, Knowing Your Own Power Cues, begins with a riveting story that demonstrates the intimate relationship between mind and body. By changing the way a workshop participant stood and held his hands during an impromptu exercise, the speaker turned a boring recital of facts into an inspiring story that captivated his audience. Power Cues is filled with similar examples, making it an excellent gift for content marketers who aspire to becoming in-demand A-list keynote speakers and thought leaders in their field.

Steal the Show: From Speeches to Job Interviews to Deal-Closing Pitches, How to Guarantee a Standing Ovation for All the Performances in Your Life by Michael Port

Content marketers are constantly on stage, influencing not only audiences, but presenting to clients, C-level executives, managers, and co-workers.  Steal the Show is an excellent complement to Nick Morgan’s Power Cues. Whereas Nick Morgan focuses on speaker presence and mastery of nonverbal cues, Steal the Show’s three-step approach focuses on practical strategy and tactics fine-tuned for specific types of speaking:

• Part One, The Performer’s Mindset, addresses topics like finding your voice, playing the right role, and managing your fear.

• Part Two, Powerful Performance Principles, is fascinating because many of the examples are based on examples from Michael’s own experiences. Topics range from preparing your message, taking risks like raising the stakes (to the point of discomfort), and tactics like saying, “Yes, and …”

• Part Three, A Master Class in Public Speaking, shares recipes, best practices, and tips for crafting captivating pitches, telling stories, rehearsing, and pacing your speeches. Chapter 15, How to Get a Standing Ovation Every Time – Really, is the longest chapter in the book. In it, Michael shares his five keys to a show-stopping performance, which is a collection of suggestions and tips based on his extensive speaking experience.

Creative ideas and business inspiration

The Art of War Visualized: The Sun Tzu Classic in Charts and Graphs by Jessica Hagy

If you’re looking for a book that will expand the vision of the word-oriented copywriters and content creators in your life, The Art of War Visualized would be an ideal gift. Many content marketers tend to overlook the ability of simple visuals to communicate at a glance; the tendency is to think of visuals as something you add at the last minute to increase “likes,” shares, and tweets.

It will take just a few minutes with this book to open their eyes to new possibilities. One of the most influential business books of the year, The Art of War Visualized is an excellent companion to previously reviewed hand-drawn visual books like Dan Roam’s Show & Tell, Sunni Brown’s The Doodle Revolution, and Mike Rohde’s The Sketchnote Handbook.

In today’s complex, information-drenched world, content marketers need to be frequently reminded of the ability of simple hand-drawn illustrations to reduce ideas to their essence. Simple visuals can help content marketers break through the clutter and illuminate ideas that might otherwise require pages of text to describe. Visual communication options are especially useful when creating social media graphics to accompany blog posts and presentation visuals.

Ask. The Counterintuitive Online Formula to Discover Exactly What Your Customers Want to Buy by Ryan Levesque

Ask is the perfect book for the content marketer or subject-matter expert looking for a fresh approach to monetizing their expertise. It describes a step-by-step approach to asking the right questions to identify the specific information your prospects want you to address.

Although rarely acknowledged, except for search engine optimization of headlines and titles and after-the-fact traffic conversion metrics, direct marketing techniques can play a significant role in content marketing.

Like Jeff Walker’s previously reviewed Launch, Ryan Levesque’s Ask assumes the reader has existing content and is looking for a way to market it as efficiently and effectively as possible. However, whereas Launch focuses on building anticipation for a product launch, Ask describes an engagement program that provides readers with a step-by-step survey program that will help them identify the specific needs of different market segments, allowing readers to personalize their offerings to best meet their prospect’s needs.

Whether approached as an excellent example of writing a book to build a business or as an example of creating an orchestrated marketing funnel to engage, qualify, persuade, and follow up with prospects, Ask can be a valuable game-changer for those looking for fresh monetization ideas and guidance.

Experiences: The 7^th Era of Marketing by Robert Rose and Carla Johnson

Experiences: The 7^th Era of Marketing is an inspiring manifesto for change that can be a career catalyst to forward-thinking experienced content marketers. Introduced early this year, it remains one of 2015’s most significant content marketing books. Written by Robert Rose, the Content Marketing Institute’s chief content strategist, and Carla Johnson, one of the top 50 influencers in content marketing, Experiences describes a new role for content marketing professionals.

In most corporations, chief content officers focus on managing the pragmatic traditional tasks associated with message creation, distribution, and tracking. They have little responsibility for the overall customer’s experience – including the development of new products and services. The content marketer of the future, however, is a truly executive-level position responsible for the firm’s ability to live up to the promised products and services.

By previewing a new era of marketing, Experiences provides an exciting career road map for experienced content marketers.

Process and productivity

The following titles provide fresh insights on the psychological issues that advance or hinder a content marketer’s productivity – whether they work alone, or in groups. They build on previously described books, Scott Belsky’s Making Ideas Happen, Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit, and Nancy Ratey’s The Disorganized Mind.

The Marshmallow Effect: Why Self-Control is the Engine of Success by Walter Mischel

Many of the productivity books mentioned in this summer’s Essential #BestBooks Reading List owe their origins to the experiments conducted by Walter Mischel. The Marshmallow Effect is his story of the famous experiments that have influenced a generation of productivity and motivation books.

The Marshmallow Effect discusses willpower; the fundamental personality trait needed for consistency and commitment – topics of core relevance to content marketers. As Joe shared in Content Inc., content marketing success doesn’t take place overnight; its effectiveness typically builds over time. Joe and Robert Rose also discussed the challenges relating to content consistency in a recent This Old Marketing podcast, Consistent Content Is Key (And Most Brands Can’t Do It).

Although the original study of 4- and 5-year-olds referenced in the book happened more than 50 years ago, the participants continued to be tracked throughout their lives. The results conclusively show that children who were willing to defer immediate gratification (i.e., willing to put off eating one marshmallow now in exchange for two marshmallows in 20 minutes) had greater career success, better health, and fewer divorces than those who chose the single marshmallow.

Of even greater importance to content marketers, recent neuroscience research reveals the brain’s amazing plasticity – ability to change. The Marshmallow Test shows it’s possible for individuals to monitor and control their willpower, breaking habits and opening the door to improved health and greater success.

The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload by Daniel J. Levitin

This is the book for the content marketer who frequently feels overwhelmed by a combination of information overload, the increasing need to produce more content, and a lack of time.

Many marketing professionals and commentators talk about the stress and burnout associated with the always-connected, 24/7 world we live in, but few offer practical, neuroscience-based advice on how to deal with it. The Organized Mind is the exception. It offers a three-step approach to reducing stress and increasing productivity:

• Part One focuses on how the brain works and what happens when presented with too much information, i.e., cognitive overload. Understanding how attention and memory work provides a key to exporting or “offloading” tasks so your brain can focus on what’s truly important.

• Part Two applies the information shared in the first part to organizing your home, your social interactions, your time, and information to focus your brain’s resources on what’s truly important. By organizing your business world, you can create higher value.

• Part Three is best captured in Chapter Eight, What to Teach our Children. It provides tips to helping the next generation address the challenge of organization. The last chapter provides tips for dealing with everything else, i.e., what to do with other information that clutters our brain and undermines our productivity.

The Organized Mind will be especially welcomed by readers who have more than one Malcolm Gladwell book, like The Tipping Point or Blink!, on their bookshelves.

Observations and trends

Looking at the books published during 2015, several trends are apparent. In some cases, the trends appear to contradict each other:

• Origins – More content from the books published this year originally appeared as blog posts or podcasts.

• Organization – There is an obvious trend to organizing books into three or more sections. Within the sections, there tend to be several short chapters, each focusing on specific topics.

• Format – Many of this year’s books are smaller and shorter than in previous years but compensate by focusing on specific content marketing challenges, tasks, or trends.

• Higher production levels – More attention appears to be placed on the design of book cover and inside pages.

• Book-website content partnerships – Many books contain links to drive traffic to the authors’ websites to download additional resources, such as checklists, templates, or worksheets.

• Pricing surprises – One of the bonuses of buying print books as gifts is the surprisingly low premium you have to pay for a beautifully produced hardbound book compared to the price of the digital version. As I’m writing this, the Amazon.com price for a beautifully produced hardcover edition of Content Inc. is $14.23, while the price of the Kindle version is $13.52. In other cases, the Kindle versions of several extremely valuable books – like Non Obvious – are available for just 99 cents. What a strange world we live in.

Conclusions and takeaways

I hope that the titles in this list will help you choose an appropriate gift for your content marketing co-workers, employees, friends, family, and clients.

Please let me know if I inadvertently overlooked a recently published book that you feel belongs on this list, or if you’d like to suggest one of your previously published favorites. Likewise, let me know if you found my “alphabetically within categories” approach a helpful way to organize and present the above gift book suggestions.

And, if you’ve read one of the above books, please share your impressions. Do you agree the title contains the seeds of a highly successful content marketing 2016?

As a special holiday treat for our readers, comment on this blog post by December 31, 2015 for a chance to win one of five audiobook copies of Joe Pulizzi’s new book, Content Inc. Winners will be chosen at random.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post 17+ Books to Give Your Favorite Content Marketer This Season appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

The “just checking in” sales email isn’t just ineffective -- it’s also selfish.

Reps who send these types of emails aren’t offering any value. They’re trying to force or persuade buyers into replying to their message and making a purchase on the rep’s preferred timeline.

However, in today’s sales world, providing value to a customer throughout their individual buying process is the only way for a rep to close a deal. Hard selling tactics are bad for the buyer, and bad for the rep.

Modern reps are committed to providing guidance, information, and value to buyers whenever they reach out. They know it’s important the prospect sees just as much return on their time as the rep does.

Here are six easy ideas as to how you can provide value with each sales email you send.

1) Attach a piece of content.

The easiest way to provide value to a buyer in a sales email is to include a piece of helpful content. Remember: The goal of an initial sales email is to not try to convert a buyer into a customer instantly, but to give them something that will truly interest them, and get a conversation going.

Spend some time researching the prospect’s company and observing their behavior on social media. Use this knowledge to offer a piece of content specific enough to their interests that they take the time to read it.

2) Reference a mutual connection.

Having a mutual connection in common with a buyer can go a long way. In fact, a prospect is five times more likely to engage with a seller when they share a connection.

Surfacing a common connection is valuable to the buyer because it fosters trust. The buyer can now check with that mutual connection and determine whether or not this is the right product or service for them.

3) Offer a customer review.

Simply put, customers love reviews. How often do you check out Yelp before you make a decision on where to eat? How deep in the reviews do you go? I know I scan for a while, and I’m willing to bet you do too.

Learning what other people are saying about a product or service plays an important role in buying decisions. In fact, 88% of people take online reviews as seriously as they do personal recommendations, according to a study from Bright Local.

It’s clear that reviews are valuable for prospects, so why not send one along in your next email?

4) Send over a case study.

A case study can add instant value to a sales email. If the prospect is in a difficult spot and unsure how to proceed, sharing a story about a customer in a similar situation that describes how they solved their problem can be incredibly helpful.

5) Provide a tactical suggestion.

If you notice an area of weakness in the buyer's business that you think you can help improve, let the prospect know. Offering insights not only strengthens your relationship, but it builds your credibility in their eyes.

6) Just respond.

Simply responding to a question, voicemail, tweet, or email is the easiest way of all to provide value. And keep in mind that you don’t have to give the final answer right away. A simple “I’m looking into this for you” will assure the prospect that you’re on the case.

The value of responding quickly extends beyond solving specific problems. According to Sprout Social, 26% of customers who don’t hear back from a company take to social media to post negative comments. Remember the importance of good reviews? Responding quickly plays a major role in prospects’ perception of your business.

 

As author Michael Port recently wrote, “Give away so much value that you think you've given too much -- and then give more.”

Sales reps need to understand that the modern buyer is busy and doesn’t have time for “just checking in” emails. Strive to offer buyers an instant ROI with each and every message you send. 

Adam Honig is the cofounder and CEO of Spiro Technologies, Inc.

If you’re creating and selling a product to businesses, having a high profile reference customer can make or break your go-to-market efforts.

My first company, middleware software company Open Environment, grew from zero to $30M in annual sales in four years, went public and was ultimately sold to a larger software company with expansion plans.

So how did we convince key decision makers at so many companies to purchase mission-critical, middleware software from a new start up? It’s surprisingly simple: We had a great customer reference in Freddie Mac, the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Company.

We talked about Freddie Mac’s success with Open Environment at tradeshows and included them as a customer case study in all of our presentations. One of their key employees led our customer advisory board and we made sure the support they received was top notch. There’s no doubt they were a key reason for our success.

As you nail down a reference for your business-to-business product, here are three things to keep in mind.

Work Backwards To Find The Right Type Of Company

When a product launches, it’s easy to get excited about each new user. But the perfect customer reference isn’t just any customer. Start by understanding what a reference customer can do for you. Here are some outcomes the right reference could create:

Industry buzz: Announcing that you work with a notable customer in the press is one of the best ways to generate new leads. The right customer for this will be a “household name” in their industry—a company the media naturally wants to cover. 

For example, grocery delivery service Instacart is frequently covered in the news thanks to high profile customers like Whole Foods and Costco. Just this month, Instacart released data on how many products it has delivered for Whole Foods, complete with a quote from the grocery chain’s co-CEO touting the partnership’s success in improving the customer experience. Find out who the Whole Foods equivalent is in your market, and go after them.

Viral effects: Facebook famously limited its initial user base to Harvard students, then to other elite universities. This created a tight-knit community that helped fuel their explosive growth later. 

This strategy can work for B2B product as well. Imagine you’re launching a new piece of medical technology, and with focus you get the most prestigious hospitals in Boston using it. The buyers at hospitals in the region are all connected, and deep penetration in one area will help you spread to others.

Objection destroyer: This is how we used Freddie Mac at Open Environment. We identified the key concern prospects had about our product—that our platform wasn’t scalable enough—and used the best example we had to counter it.

Use Growth Hacking To Get In The Door

Now that you have a short-list of targets, marketing efforts need to be laser focused on them. The goods news is that there are many inexpensive and effective “growth hacking” approaches you can use to target prospects:

LinkedIn Ads: The odds are high that the people you want to connect with are using LinkedIn, but did you know that you can target ads to specific companies and job titles? Creating ads, landing pages and calls to action referring to a prospect’s company by name will make this approach very effective. 

Twitter: While Twitter might not be as popular as LinkedIn, its openness—any Twitter user can interact with any other—makes it ideal for reaching out to new prospects. There’s a free tool called Happy Cyborg that helps your Twitter account connect with new people, and then encourages them to read your content and come into your marketing funnel. There are many similar social media tools you can use to target people at specific companies and start engaging them.

Old-fashioned networking: Social media can be very effective, but sometimes nothing beats working your real live contacts and connections for an introduction. If you’re an early stage company, the approach of “looking for advice” is often the key to getting in the door with someone influential.

Love Them Like Family

This probably goes without saying, but once you’ve secured the reference that’s going to move the needle, stay deeply connected with them. A real challenge with these types of organizations is that they tend to be early adopters and frequently move on to other ideas or technologies. At Open Environment we created a great reference in the automotive industry, but we grew a bit complacent and our relationship suffered. They eventually burned out as a reference, and because they weren’t getting enough back from us, stopped being as valuable.

The bottom line: You might get lucky and develop an ideal reference customer through traditional marketing efforts, but a better approach is to be proactive. Figure out who will be your best reference, and make it happen.

Have you ever been told that the inbound leads you delivered are junk?

And you responded,

If you’re a marketer (whether at an agency, a contractor, or in-house), it is unlikely that your client or manager will take your side. They’ll be on the side of the sales team, even if they may not be doing a good job closing your leads.

But there is hope…

If you want inbound marketing to work you need to align with your sales team. You have to make sure inbound leads get closed and become customers. And the only way to do it is to become a part of the process. You must track, evaluate, and participate in the entire funnel to prove the value of your leads and there is no way around it.

How do you do it? Start offering sales enablement as a part of your services.

What is Sales Enablement and How Do You Get In?

Sales enablement is a new category that has a bunch of vague descriptions. Demand Metric defines it as “the processes, practices, technologies, and tools that improve the performance and productivity of the sales organization.” To me, sales enablement is as crucial to organizing a sales process as phones, Diet Coke, and salespeople.

Most of sales enablement is owned by the sales leader. He or she is the ultimate decision maker and the best access point when it comes to information about CRM tools, sales rep onboarding, and closing processes. You’ve got to become buddies with the sales leader and understand their motivations and needs for every step of the funnel.

The bottom line is that you need to understand what happens with your leads once they get into a CRM and align on that subsequent process with the head of sales. You must have full visibility into the funnel so that you can have the best possible impact.

Content Dictatorship: Help Create High-Converting Content

The first step of getting into sales enablement is to start owning and managing sales content. Let’s assume you’re a kick-ass inbound marketer and you’ve already built a bunch of wonderful content for a client or even for public marketing use. For example, client testimonials, case studies, white papers, data sheets, infographics, etc. But that content is typically only used on websites to get leads, not to close them.

When it gets to the bottom of the funnel, sales reps send terrible faceless quotes and/or contracts. Plain text-only PDF quotes or contracts are compared side-by-side to comprehensive, media-rich proposals delivered by competitors aaand… the deal is lost. And, of course, sales reps blame the loss on the “low-quality” inbound lead. Sound familiar? Don’t let that happen!

Ask for feedback and suggestions on what information clients request the most, and create polished, high-converting content for the bottom of the funnel. You should be a dictator and require that the salespeople use your content in all their deals, but if you’re doing a good job, it won’t take too much to convince them. If your content produces results and impresses clients, the salespeople will go out of their way to make sure they use your collateral every time. Make it easy for them by building a content library of professional, on-brand client testimonials, case studies, product data sheets, etc. There are a few products on the market that allow you to create content and let the reps just drag and drop relevant content in their proposals, but I’ll only advertise mine because it’s the most comprehensive: PandaDoc :).

At the end of the day, you’ll deliver real value by “forcing” sales to send on-brand, effective proposals instead of plain quotes or dry, legal contracts.

Sales Ops: Provide Quantitative and Operational Value

Now that you have helped optimize sales content, get into sales operations. If your team doesn’t have a sales operations leader, become one or hire one for your company. Sales ops folks are masters at setting up and enhancing CRMs, evaluating tools (like SideKick, CPQ, and contract management applications), and gurus when it comes to optimizing the sales funnel for their reps.

By helping with the implementation of sales automation tools and optimizing the sales funnel, you can help generate additional revenue and make your sales leaders start to take you more seriously (AKA really “like” you). You’ll be providing value and at the same time, familiarizing yourself with the tools, metrics, and processes used by the sales team so that you can easily track how well your leads are actually doing.

Do keep in mind though that sales ops is an area that the sales leaders are supposed to own. Softly advise them on different options, show them the clear financial advantage, build trust, but trust their expertise and overall strategy in order to help them be more successful.

Polishing the Playbook

Once you’ve built some trust and you’re well within the sales leader’s good graces, you should tackle their sales playbook, which you can help to build or polish. Creating and editing a playbook is a half-marketing, half-sales exercise that will help to accomplish two things: align you and client’s sales leader even more, and make sure messaging is consistent from the top to the bottom of the funnel.

I recommend using something like Google Docs for the playbook because things like demo scripts, feature specifications, and onboarding instructions are going to constantly change. Use Google Doc comments, suggestions, and version control to help to save a tremendous amount of time for all involved parties.

Make Money

At the end of the day let’s not forget what this is all about: making money. The more value you create in the form of closed deals, the more they will value your work. They’ll be able to measure your effect in a more tangible way once you are directly involved in revenue making, not “junk leads” making. Getting into the sales enablement game, especially as an agency, will not only increase the length of your contracts but will also increase your average monthly retainer.

Even as an in-house marketer, you’ll become irreplaceable and have less stress dealing with management and the sales team. Try it and share your story in the comments on this post.

For sales and marketing pros, email is both an important tool as well as a distraction. While it is one of the best and most preferred ways of communicating with leads and prospects, email is also a time suck due to overload.

So how can you use email for productivity? Here are five ideas you should try.

1. Don’t send too many emails.

This one’s pretty intuitive: Sending many emails will lead to a full inbox. That’s because if you send many emails, you’ll also receive many replies—adding to the volume of emails you have to go through every day.

Avoid sending emails if you could. Consider using chat services (many, like Google Hangouts and Skype, are free) or better yet, if you need to talk to a colleague, consider a call or a quick face-to-face chat.

2. Turn off most of your notifications. 

Notifications are only useful if they don’t overwhelm your inbox. They’re only helpful if they’re actionable—if you can do something about them.

On Twitter, for instance, I don’t have email notifications for @ mentions anymore since I spend a lot of time on that network anyway. I also noticed that most people who mention me on Twitter aren’t necessarily waiting for a response. Often, they’re simply sharing a blog post or an article I wrote. That said, I do have email notifications for direct messages since those are less frequent and people usually DM because they need a response from me.

If your company is using a project management tool like Basecamp or an internal communications tool, be sure to adjust your notifications so you’re only getting the ones that you absolutely have to.

3. Unsubscribe to email newsletters.

Take the time to look at the newsletters you receive on a regular basis and ask yourself, “when was the last time I gained value from these?” Be brutal. Just because a piece of content is interesting doesn’t mean it can help you sell more.

Also, look out for newsletter frequency. My personal rule is that anything more than once a week is too frequent. Most publications and blogs have a subscription center that allows you to control how often they communicate with you, so be sure to check it out and adjust accordingly.

4. Don’t CC or BCC people…unless you have to. 

I’m sorry to say this, but not everything you do is interesting to your teammates. It’s important to be mindful about copying people on emails. CC or BCC people only if they absolutely must know something.

Use this rule of thumb:

• Use “TO when you’re expecting a response from someone.
• Use “CC” when you’re only copying someone but you want him or her to continue to be included in the thread.
• Use “BCC” if you’re copying someone and you don’t want him or her to be included in the rest of the thread

Overcommunication is just as bad as under-communication. Respect people’s inbox and don’t copy people if an action or a response is not required from them. This helps your colleagues avoid email overload. It also reduces the number of emails you receive since you’re be getting fewer replies from long email threads.

5. Avoid sending huge files.

When you send files that are pretty big (say, anything more than 500 MB), you are increasing the chances of not getting a response. Most people who are viewing emails on mobile will be very hesitant to open big files. Not to mention that sending big files could clog the inboxes of your prospects.

Consider sending your files through the cloud—for instance, through Google Drive, Dropbox or Orangedox. That way, you can just grab the link and send that to your leads and prospects. Some of these tools even give you engagement analytics—helping you gauge whether a follow-up email to your prospect is required.

Conclusion

As a sales pro, you need to make sure that you use email efficiently. Keeping your inbox free of clutter should be a good start.

Did I miss any email productivity tips in this post? Please let me know in the comments.

Picture a race team running a relay, where each member runs a segment before passing the baton to the next runner. But how would it look to only award a gold medal to the runner who crossed the finish line? What if that final runner’s name was the only name that went down in Olympic history for setting a new world relay record?

This is a picture of single-touch attribution in B2B marketing. Unlike B2C marketing, which is more like a 100-meter sprint, B2B marketing is a relay race of epic proportion. For some B2B companies, the relay can last as long as six-months to a year.

Single-touch attribution has its place, don’t get us wrong. However, B2B marketers don’t deal with luxuriously short sales cycles where consumers can make snap, impulse decisions. Only in a quick-purchase-decision environment do single-touch attribution models really make sense.

Furthermore, multiple influencers from the same account are interacting with our landscape of marketing operations during that long time frame. And each of those prospects are creating touchpoints along the way.

When there are multiple important touchpoints along an account’s buying journey, a single-touch attribution model will only assign revenue-credit to one of them. Not only does this misrepresent the customer’s buying journey, but it also kind of screws over the 75% of a marketing team whose contributions to revenue go unrecognized. It shoves all but one relay race member off the podium.

Moreover, the data that those left-out marketers need to optimize their marketing operations is never surfaced. They’re left with only vague top-of-funnel metrics and lead goal numbers to justify their value-add to the company’s revenue stream.

An Overview Of Single-Touch Attribution

Single-touch attribution is the practice of attributing revenue to one specific touchpoint along the entire marketing journey. The specific touchpoint is usually identified by whichever marketing touch is easiest for a marketing team to track with the marketing technology that is readily available to them.

If an organization is mostly focused on activities centered around their CRM, for example, they most often would choose opportunity-creation, also known as last-touch, for their single-touch model.

An organization that relies heavily on their marketing automation software would most likely measure their marketing using a lead-touch model.

A company that has a very large paid search marketing spend would be inclined to use a first-touch model in order to understand how well their top-of-funnel activities are performing.

Each Touchpoint Is Someone’s Responsibility

A paid search manager sets up campaigns, keywords, and ads. A content developer writes blog articles and landing page copies, and they set up email nurturing sequences. A sales rep calls leads to set up demos. An account rep runs demos and sets up trials. And finally, when all is said and done, someone’s responsible for the account’s signature across the dotted line.

Single-touch attribution fails to recognize all but one of these important roles. It gives full revenue credit to one specific person’s responsibilities, while leaving the rest of the team to play a guessing game, wondering if their work is really, truly effective — or if it contributed in any way to the revenue that was ultimately generated.

First-touch rewards those marketers in charge of top-of-the-funnel activities. Lead-touch rewards marketers who pay attention to the middle of the funnel. And last touch rewards marketers who respond to leads and push them through to close.

Why is this an issue? There’s no way for the entire team to know what’s working, and what’s not. There’s no way to confidently measure how much value ALL of the key marketing conversion touches are adding to the bottom line.

It would seem that single-touch anoints one touchpoint as the holy grail of all marketing activities, while belittling the effectiveness of all of the others. And from that perspective, it hardly seems fair.

Use Multi-Touch Models Instead

There are three multi-touch models that can solve this ethical conundrum. The first is U-shaped, which gives credit to both (1) the first marketing touch, and (2) the lead-conversion touch. It still leaves out opportunity-creation, but it’s a step in the right direction.

A more effective model is W-Shaped attribution, which splits revenue credit three-ways between the first-touch, the lead-conversion touch, and the opportunity-creation touch. By handing out the credit equitably, it allows each segment of the marketing team to know where their activities are creating the most impact, and it’s properly distributing the credit to each key touchpoint within the funnel stages.

The MOST effective multi-touch attribution model is ‘full path’ attribution, where revenue credit can be assigned from view-through initiatives all the way to customer-close.

A whole team can confidently discuss their marketing effectiveness as long as all pertinent, helpful data across all funnel stages is being surfaced. Your whole team should get the chance to prove their value and show how their effortful work is adding to the bottom line.

Just as ATMs changed banking and computers took over the home and workplace, robots and artificial intelligence are going to transform a bunch of industries over the next decade.

By 2025, a machine may be putting together your driverless car in a factory with no human oversight. A robot maid could be cleaning up after you at home, and your financial advisor might be a computer investing for you automatically. 

And with at least 90 countries operating unmanned aerial vehicles, the wars of the future may increasingly be fought with "drone" aircraft.

These are just some of the interesting — and sometimes scary — predictions to come from a 300-page report released by Merrill Lynch in November, which estimates the global market for robots and AI will grow from $28 billion to more than $150 billion just five years from now.

There's plenty of disruption bound to happen across the world as drones and much-smarter-than-you AI take over. But we're likely to see the biggest changes across eight industries in China, Japan, the US, and Korea — the countries currently investing the most in these technologies.

Here are the big predictions from Merrill Lynch:

The auto industry is going to change big-time, especially when fully autonomous — aka driverless — cars officially go mainstream.

Over the next five years, the report says most new cars will be smarter "connected" cars, and in 2025, that'll mean about 10% of them are fully autonomous.

While the initial price will be about $10,000 more than regular cars, it will inevitably come down as more people and companies adopt them.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

While it’s it not always important to get what you want, it sure feels good sometimes. This handy cheat sheet explains 11 different ways you can influence others to give yourself a win every once in a while.

Read more...

Bloggers, small business owners, and marketers have been struggling with the same problem for years:how to create compelling content.Why is this such a struggle?Because they’re using the wrong process ,or worse, they don’t use a process at all. Some of them simply create content based on assumptions.

I like to compare that approach to a poker game. Players are throwing money on the table hoping to win, but the truth is, they’re completely depending on luck.

For effective content creation, find a process that works and follow it step-by-step. This way, you exponentially increase your likelihood to “win”.  Below is a 4-step process that you can use to create compelling content for your audience.

Step 1: Create Buyer Personas

The first step to creating great content is: know your audience. You need to learn their language, desires, things that resonate with them, and the things they don’t like. The best way to do that is by creating buyer personas.

Buyer personas are semi-fictional characters that represent your prospective customer (or reader). By creating them, you can better understand your audience’s worldview and develop relevant products, services, and content.

Buyer personas also allow you to find the places where your prospective customers hang out. This will help you to determine which marketing channels to use to promote your content, a topic for another blog post.

Ready to create your buyer personas? Start by reading this step-by-step guide from Hubspot.

Step 2: Find Your Audience’s Pain Points

Once you’ve developed your buyer personas, the next step is to find your audience’s pain points, or problems so you can create the appropriate content.

Remember: The best content is material that your audience can read, understand, and use to solve a specific problem.

There are several ways to find your customers’ pain points. The following three resources are the most effective and least expensive:

Quora

Quora is an advanced forum where professionals constantly post questions about a variety of topics. This site is very useful to find the questions that your audience are asking pertaining to your topic.

Social Networks 

Using your social media accounts like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ etc., you can ask your followers about their struggles. Not everyone will respond, but even a few answers will provide valuable insights and fresh ideas.

Qeryz

Qeryz is a web-based service that allows you to create “mini interviews” and put them on your blog. By using strategic questions for the interviews, you can learn a lot about what your readers are thinking and their struggles.

Step 3: Create a List of Proven Topic Ideas

Compelling content always starts with the right topic. If you choose a suboptimal topic, your content isn’t going to perform well.

Once you’ve gathered insights from your audience using the recommendations in Step 2, you can then proceed to create a list of topics around that information. An Idea Generator spreadsheet is a great place to brainstorm and save topic ideas. Every time you have a new idea, no matter how small or random, head over to your spreadsheet and save it.

Below is a process that you can use to validate your topic ideas:

Let’s say you run a gardening blog, and you discovered that your audience is struggling with plant care and greenhouse construction. Here’s how you can use this knowledge to create content

1) First, head over to BuzzSumo and type in your keywords. For your gardening blog, these might be “plant care” or “greenhouse.” BuzzSumo gives you the most popular content for that keyword, sorted by the number of social shares. This will show you the types of topics that are performing well in your niche.

Then, open your Idea Generator spreadsheet and save all the topic ideas you found in BuzzSumo.

2) Second, go to Topsy and repeat the process. Topsy shows you the most popular content for your specific keywords. Unlike BuzzSumo, Topsy also shows you the most popular social media posts. This gives you a deeper understanding of what your audience likes to read and share.

Again, go to your Idea Generator spreadsheet and save the insights that you found in Topsy.

Now you have a list of PROVEN content ideas, because you focused on content you know people like to read and share. If you create fresh content around these topics, it’s very likely your target audience will read and share your materials too.

I recommend scheduling a meeting with your team to start brainstorming content ideas based on the list that you created. Once you have some topics in place, it’s time to jump to the next step.

Step 4: Use the CURVE Method to Craft Compelling Content

At this point you should have a thorough understanding of your audience and a list of proven topic ideas. Now it’s time to start creating your content. Don’t worry! If you followed the prior steps this will be the easy part.

Whether you’re sharing a video, article, podcast, or image, the CURVE method will make your content stand out.

CURVE stands for:

• C = curiosity
• U = urgency
• R = relevancy
• V = value
• E = emotion

Although this method was originally created to write compelling email subject lines, it also works extremely well when it comes to content creation.

You don’t need all five CURVE elements in every piece of content, however, always try to include the last three – relevancy, value, and emotion. These are the most important elements of content that resonate with readers.

Conclusion

I hope you recognize the value of creating content using a proven process. If you follow the principles, concepts and steps that I’ve laid out, content creation will be easier and much more effective.

Remember, compelling content starts with your audience. When you understand the way your target audience views the world, you’ll be able to create content they want to read.

What other ways do you know to create awesome content?

Original post was published on the Buzzlogix Social Media Marketing Blog.

The scale of attacks on websites and blogs worldwide is increasing on a daily basis, and it’s only going to get worse.

You can safely assume that if you haven’t been hacked yet, then it’s only a matter of time.

On March 11, 2014, technology sites like Cnet.com began reporting that 160,000 legitimate WordPress-powered web sites had been hacked.

Thousands of websites and blogs are hacked every year! Could yours be next?

(Image source: Blog Defender)

According to the Cnet report,

“With some old-fashioned trickery, hackers were able to get more than 162,000 legitimate WordPress-powered Web sites to mount a distributed-denial-of-service attack against another Web site.”

As reported by security firm Sucuri, hackers had leveraged a well-known flaw to attack unsuspecting WP websites and direct a distributed-denial-of-service cyber-attack (DDoS) towards another popular website.

Every website or blog with a vulnerability offers some value to hackers. If you think that the information in your website offers little to no value to hackers, think again. Large, medium and small business sites, personal blogs, government websites…even websites owned by online security experts can and have been targeted.

If hackers can discover a web security flaw that allows them to take over and control your website or blog, your website can then be employed as a “bot” to attack other valuable websites.

The harsh reality is that malicious bots are looking for weaknesses and trying to hack into your website while you are reading this page at this very moment. Whether they can get into your site successfully will depend on how hard or easy you have made things for hackers to continue trying until they either find a way to break in, or give up and decide to look for a more vulnerable target.

How Much Information About Your WordPress Site Are You Broadcasting To Hackers?

Does your website run on WordPress? If so visit Hackertarget.com and run your site through their WordPress security scan…

(WP Security Scan Product image: Hackertarget.com)

You will see that the scan returns a number of results and details about your website …

(WordPress security check results. Screenshot image: Hackertarget.com)

It should be obvious after using the tool shown above that if you are able to access all of this information about your blog, so can hackers.

(Product image: BlogDefender.com)

The ability to see what version of WordPress you are using, which plugins and themes you have installed, and which files have been uploaded to certain directories are all valuable information to hackers, as this informs them about potential security vulnerabilities, especially in older versions.

Fortunately, there is a simple and inexpensive solution to stop broadcasting all of this information about your website and help to protect it against other malicious threats.

Blog Defender WordPress Security Suite

Product Description

The product is a package of WordPress security video tutorials, plugins, and tools, plus a WordPress security PDF/DOC file.

Matt Garrett, the developer of the BlogDefender security suit developed BlogDefender after noticing that a WordPress site he set up for his mother got hacked into and suspended. This particular blog was not being used and so had practically no value to offer, yet it was still targeted by hackers.

Matt only became aware of what had happened after being informed by his host and seeing that a significant amount of unusual activity had taken place inside his server, as well as the addition of a number of phishing files by whoever had broken into his site.

(Image source: Blog Defender)

This example should be enough to convince you that every website has some value to hackers.

Blog Defender shows you where the security weaknesses in your website are…

And lets you fix these quickly…

Blog Defender – WordPress Plugins

The product suite includes 3 plugins:

Pro Plugin # 1 in the Blog Defender product suite provides automated backups…

(Screenshot image: BlogDefender site)

This plugin lets you do secure site and file backups to your server, external servers and leading cloud-based storage solutions using a number of backup methods (including FTP and email backups), automate full or partial backups, exclude tables or files from backups, restore previous backups, replace URLs (useful when migrating websites to different domains or server locations), do bulk text string replacements in your WordPress database, perform malware scans and blacklist checks automatically, and more.

The second plugin provides your site with security…

(Product image source: BlogDefender website)

This plugin provides a range of essential site and file security functions (see “Product Features” section below).

Plugin #3 lets you scan your content and files to detect if your source code has been modified, and fix any problems detected…

(Screenshot: Blog Defender)

Pro Plugin # 3 also scans content to see if any malicious URLs have been inserted into your site, bans bad bots, blocks brute force attacks and detects any content leeching (where others benefit from your content without reciprocating the favor).

Blog Defender – Videos

In addition to plugins, the Blog Defender suite of products also includes 7 video training modules plus downloadable documentation that show you exactly what you need to do to protect your website from hackers and bots …

(Source: BlogDefender site)

Learn more here: Blog Defender Security Plugin For WordPress.

Benefits Of Using Blog Defender

Below we have listed just some of the benefits and advantages of using Blog Defender to make your WordPress site invisible to hackers and botnets on your site:

Ready To Use In Minutes

The plugins included in the Blog Defender product are quite easy to install. Simply upload a zip folder containing the plugins to your Plugins folder via your dashboard and activate.

Really Simple And Easy To Follow Training

Blog Defender is an easy-to-follow do-it-yourself training product that walks you through the website security process and shows you exactly what to do, including how to set things up, and even which plugins you can use for free to get the job done without paying additional or unnecessary expenses.

Additional benefits of using the plugin include:

• Protect Your Website from hackers, spammers, bad bots, data miners and malicious users whose aims is to ruin your business for their own personal and financial gain.
• Protects Intellectual Property From Being Stolen – If your site sells an info product (e.g. downloadable e-books, video tutorials, etc.), your work can be stolen and end up becoming freeware on free downloading sites.
• Avoid Getting Blocked By Search Engines – When a site gets hacked, expect to go through a serious amount of inconvenience and aggravation. It can take days to uncover problems and sort through the issues these have caused. As a result, your, account could get closed by your host, or even blacklisted by search engines. In addition, hackers can spam your contact list and steal your business and financial information, you could be fined or even charged with fraud, and a whole lot more.

Blog Defender Features

Blog Defender provides a number of great features to WP users.

Blog Defender helps you fix the following security areas:

• Hosting Security Advisory
• WP Plugin Security Audits
• WP Theme Security Audits
• Anti Brute Force Security
• Anti Cross-Site Scripting
• WordPress Database Security
• Nefarious Traffic Blocking
• Hiding WordPress ‘Tell Tale’ Signs
• Anti-Comment Spam Blocking
• Monitor Files
• Link Tracking
• Block Known Offenders
• Automating WordPress Updates
• WordPress Security Audit
• Tightening Server Security
• Kick Out Policy
• Online Reputation Checking
• And More…

Blog Defender follows a logical sequence of steps for securing your site, addressing potential hosting security issues, using scanning and detection tools to identify risky WP themes and WordPress plugins, and then helping you implement site-wide security using the tools and plugins provided.

(Blog Defender security process. Screenshot image: BlogDefender website)

User Testimonials

Here are a couple of the testimonials and feedback that plugin users have submitted for Blog Defender:

“You are literally walked through the process!” Nikki Stephens, www.nikkistephens.com

“Just one tip could have prevented my blogs getting hacked!” Richard Legg – www.richard-legg.com

Useful Tips

According to Matt Garrett, the plugin developer, since Blog Defender’s first release, no Blog Defender-protected websites or blogs were hacked.

Matt states on his site…

“With the volume of attacks nowadays…we probably won’t hold forever, so we’ve been busy creating even tougher WordPress security.”

Cybersecurity is an escalating arms race and all security solutions are only as good as the information and technologies that developers can get their hands on. The latest release of Blog Defender provides users with an easier security solution that doesn’t require constant attention, doesn’t cost a fortune and it’s as good if not better than many web security products or services currently being offered at a higher price.

Plugin Support

The product is well-supported, can be used by both Mac and PC users, is compatible with the latest WordPress release and is backed by a no-risk, 30 day, complete money-back guarantee.

Software Pricing

Blog Defender is normally available with a personal license only for use on unlimited sites. When we last checked, however, it was also being sold with Developer rights, allowing users to secure client sites as well.. Cost = $47.00.

Please Note: The cost to purchase Blog Defender depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Currently, the plugin is selling for the pricing shown above. This may or may not be the actual price set by the software developer when you visit the product website and you may be shown additional upsells or one-time offers after purchasing.

Additional Plugin Info

For help documentation and tutorials, FAQs, customer help desk, contact details and more, visit the Blog Defender website.

I Recommend

No matter what type of business you run or plan to run online and how small you think your web presence is, securing your website or blog is something you cannot afford to ignore.

WordPress is a very secure platform, but neglecting essential maintenance tasks like keeping your WP software, plugins and WordPress themes up-to-date, tightening file and data protection and taking other necessary precautions can have disastrous consequences.

Adopting security procedures like the one that Blog Defender provides, will help you understand what’s going on in your site and where the security holes are, what hosting companies can and can’t do if the security on your website is compromised, what security features to look for in a webhost, and how to avoid major security risks without paying a lot of money.

For more information, check out the plugin here: Blog Defender

To business futurist Brian Solis, capturing an audience’s heart, mind, and spirit is mandatory.

I had the pleasure of speaking with Brian Solis, principal analyst at the Altimeter Group, who has written a book that’s not really a book. X: Where Business Meets Design looks more like a sexy app than a business how-do, but it still does a great job explaining why customer experience, more than any other business priority, defines a company’s brand and determines its outlook for the future. Here’s what Brian had to say during our recent phone conversation:

Your definition of customer experience is a little different, and how does X provide a new experience from what business book readers may be used to?

Brian: Depending on who you talk to, you’ll get a different interpretation of what customer experience means. It is sometimes thought of transactionally, and related to CRM, support, or journey mapping. In general, customer experience is misunderstood and underappreciated. My feeling is that customer experience is the sum of all engagements. It’s not about customer experience, but all experience. In this business world, we need to think more holistically because everything is connected.

Of course, it would be ironic to tell people this in a traditional book format, and I think that authors who write about disruption should disrupt themselves. For X, I considered what a high school student would take delight in learning from. I wrote tweetable sentences with lots of visuals and white space, and the result was a cross between an app and a beautiful coffee table book.

You say that having a great product is no longer enough. What happens to great products (and their companies) that don’t have creative marketing and stellar customer service behind them?

It seems obvious to make a great product backed by great marketing and service, but without a conducive culture, it doesn’t always happen. Many incumbent businesses are built on 60-year-old models and are slow to change and in danger of being left behind. Startups are taking over because they get to reimagine everything. When culture, product, and service are aligned, the result is immersive and empowering. You’ll create a living community around your brand that becomes bigger than any one product.

Let’s talk about a few of your UX recommendations. What’s human-centered design? Can you give an example of how Hollywood storytelling might influence product experience?

Human-centered design is a philosophy that explores who people are and who they want to be. In your design, you create value and a desire to change behavior based on people’s deep-seeded motivations. In terms of Hollywood storytelling, Disney was the first to use storyboarding for Snow White. It really brought the story and the characters to life, allowing Disney to test if the movie was believable and brought out the right emotions in the audience.

What’s your favorite example of a company doing UX extremely well?

Apple has analyzed why people love the brand so much and use the story arc in everything it does. There is even a story arc for the iPad’s box. I also like what AirBnB is doing. When CEO Brian Chesky was reading a biography of Walt Disney, he brought in Nick Sung from Pixar to storyboard the process of people who host and rent properties. Nick brought AirBnB’s customer to life through animation character personas. For instance, he portrayed the journey of the casual traveler: how did she get to the property? Did she drive or fly? What could the host do to make her feel welcome? The company used the storyboarding to create a lifestyle brand around a different sort of travel experience.

If you’re part of an old school company, what’s the best way to bring senior leaders around to this way of thinking?

First, get a handle of the experience you are providing now. Find what’s broken and how that will negatively impact your business over time. Create a sense of urgency around the friction. You can leverage research and success stories around transformation to sell your ideas about how things could be better. If you get out of your silo and champion your company’s overall experience, you will see greatness.

But this is easier said than done, no?

Of course. People are looking for an easy fix, or a list of the 10 things they should do. However, when you begin to peel back layers, you see that experience is a complex issue. Instead of trying to copy what other people do, start with a blank canvas. Do your research, put in the work, and you’ll get results. The exciting news is that this is a time of full reinvention. We have the opportunity to write what our future looks like.

For an upside-down experience like nothing you’ve read before, check out X.

Image courtesy of Brian Solis.com

Being a great product manager is hard.

Whether you’re working on an early product at a young startup or you’re in charge of a well-established product at a more mature company, it’s your job to satisfy the needs of both your business and your user.

To help you navigate these challenges (and take your skills to the next level), we’ve rounded up 11 of the best books for product managers. Enjoy!

1. The Product Manager’s Survival Guide: Everything You Need to Know to Succeed as a Product Manager

The Survival Guide is great for anyone who’s just starting out as a PM. Steven Haines, one of today’s leading Product Management thought-leaders, gives a detailed high level overview of what product management is, the critical elements of the role, and why they’re so important to shipping successful products.

He breaks these objectives down into just enough detail for you to get started, and provides worksheet-like templates as a guide. Use this book in conjunction theProducts Managers Desk Reference, also by Steven Haines, which I’ll discuss next.

2. The Product Manager’s Desk Reference

Steven Haines’ Desk Reference is a comprehensive reference guide that covers the product management process and the essential skills and responsibilities of the PM, including market analysis, understanding customer needs, segmentation, owning the product roadmap, and more.

This book is about 700 pages long, but you don’t have to read it from cover to cover to get value from it. It’s meant to be used as a reference, so specific topics can be accessed easily without reading the entire book.

3. Inspired: How to Create Products Customers Love

Inspired is a great introduction to software product management written by Silicon Valley Product Group partner, Marty Cagan.

People who are new to product management will find it especially useful because it covers the primary responsibilities and essential qualities of a good product manager, and includes helpful tips on juggling the conflicting needs of executives, engineers, designers, and marketers.

It’s also a good refresher for people who’ve been in the field for a few years already, bringing you back to the fundamentals.

4. Agile Product Management with Scrum: Creating Products that Customers Love

This book is a concise, digestible, 130-page guide with practical advice for the complicated role of a product manager in an agile environment.

The author, Roman Pichler, assumes that the reader is an experienced traditional product manager learning Scrum, and focuses on the unique challenges that they encounter. He covers relevant topics like, how to take advantage of emergent requirements, creating a minimal marketable product, leveraging early customer feedback, and working closely with the development team.

He also discusses the most common pitfalls that product owners can fall into and how to avoid them.

5. Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products

Hooked by Nir Eyal was one of the best books I read in 2015 and I highly recommend it.

It breaks down the fundamental principles of behavioral psychology and explains how to apply them to software products in order to create what he calls “unprompted user engagement.”

An Amazon reviewer put it well: “If you’re trying to build the next big app, you need user engagement. This book lays down a model building engagement by having users constantly return to your app. In the beginning this is prompted, but eventually it’ll become instinct. This is how viral loops are formed.”

6. The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win

In The Four Steps to the Epiphany, Steve Blank explains his customer development model in thorough detail. He characterizes this model as “a paradox because it is followed by successful startups, yet has been articulated by no one. Its basic propositions as the antithesis of common wisdom yet they are followed by those who achieve success. It is the path that is hidden in plain sight.”

He also suggests that those who survive the first few years “do not follow the traditional product-centric launch model espoused by product managers of the venture capital community.”

Full disclosure: this book was originally designed as a companion to Steve’s class at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. And he would be the first to suggest that it’s “a work in progress.” This book can be a challenging read, but the central concept will give you a step-by-step process to discover and cultivate your core users.

7. The Design of Everyday Things

The Design of Everyday Things is a must-read for PMs (and just about everyone else) looking for a deeper understanding of human-computer interaction. Don Norman, cognitive scientist and co-founder of Nielsen Norman Group, argues that design is about more than just making things that look pretty.

He illustrates why good design matters and provides a broad range of mental models for understanding how a user might think.

It makes you consider the challenges of design and serves as a comprehensive look into the level of intention that goes into well-designed products.

8. Startup Growth Engines: Case Studies of How Today’s Most Successful Startups Unlock Extraordinary Growth

Today’s top tech startups build marketing and growth into the core product itself, rather than trying to bolt it on as an afterthought.

In Startup Growth Engines, Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown present case studies that look at how companies like Uber, Square, Snapchat, Evernote, Hubspot, Github, and Linkedin have grown to millions of users and billions of dollars in value—all without using the traditional marketing playbook.

It’s written by Sean Ellis (founder and CEO of Qualaroo and GrowthHackers.com) and Morgan Brown (COO of Inman News and ex-Head of Growth at Qualaroo).

9. The Mythical Man Month: Essays on Software Engineering 

This classic book on software development by Frederick Brooks is as valuable today as it was when it was written in 1975. If you want to be able to manage products on large teams, this books is mandatory.

Some of the technical issues the books presents are a bit dated, but an Amazon reviewer put it well: “You will certainly have to abstract the methodology to the current technology we have today, but managerial lessons are still relevant, mostly because people haven’t changed that much.”

10. High Management Output

High Management Output chronicles the methods and tactics Intel’s CEO, Andrew Grove, used to take a small memory chip manufacturer and turn it into one of the largest producers of computer chips of our time.

The central thesis of the book is that managers are responsible to increase the output of the work of their teams. And therefore they should focus on accomplishments and outputs, not activities.

While the previous books on this list have been about managing products, this book is about managing people.

11. Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High

Crucial Conversations is about how to effectively communicate in situations when the stakes are high and saying the right thing is important.

(For example, when you’re critiquing a colleague’s work, talking to a team member who isn’t keeping commitments, or approaching a boss who’s breaking his own policies.)

This book will help you understand the interpersonal dynamics involved in these types of conversations, and also helps you develop the skills and abilities you need to handle these situations effectively.

Further Reading:

So many great books have been written that it’s hard to pare things down to such a short list.

This list leaves out amazing contributions to the tech industry such as Crossing the Chasm, Innovator’s Dilemma, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, The Lean Startup,Zero to One, and Founders at Work. And I’m sure I’ve missed some other great ones, too.

The post The 11 Best Books for Product Managers appeared first on OpenView Labs.

Content is the fastest-growing marketing channel. It’s also the most important to get right. But marketers today are up against what the industry is calling content shock. There’s more content than any one person can consume in a lifetime, and that means getting content to target and new audiences for lead generation requires serious strategy. This year, it’s not just about creating content—it’s about knowing how to market the content you create.

Three types of marketing media are used for content today:

• Owned media are channels your brand creates and owns, including websites and micro websites, social media channels, blogs and email subscriber lists.
• Paid media are outlets a brand buys to leverage a specific channel and increase reach.
• Earned media is the online equivalent of word-of-mouth; your brand inspires audiences to willingly share your content.

Likewise, there are three ways to promote content:

• Broadcasting, the traditional approach where information is pushed out to audiences from the original source (owned media) through different channels.
• Distribution focuses on reaching new audiences (usually via paid media).
• Digital PR uses outreach techniques to get third parties to share your content through their own channels (earned media).

Not long ago, brands predominantly relied on owned media and broadcasting to peddle content, organically raise brand awareness and nurture leads. But today, using owned media alone isn’t enough to push content to the right audiences to generate the volume and quality of leads brands are after. And with mounting pressure for marketers to prove ROI in as little as one quarter, lead generation strategies must gestate faster.

Owned media and broadcasting still holds an important place at the content promotion table, but the most successful marketing plans incorporate all three media and content promotion types. Here are some of the top content promotion strategies being used to overcome content shock, expand reach and generate more high-quality leads:

1. Paid Search

Google makes an estimated $44.46 billion on search ads, and for good reason. They work! Also known as pay-per-click (PPC), paid search will expand reach and drive audiences back to your website by ensuring top placement of your ads on search engine results pages (SERPs).

Using tools like Google Analytics and Google Webmaster, identify which keywords inspire the most website visits, and incorporate them into your paid search campaigns. With AdWords, you can also determine the most logical bid amounts given the traffic volume per keyword.

When a prospect uses one of your keywords in a search inquiry, you’ll be awarded temporary ad space on top of the SERPs page. If the prospect clicks on your ad, you pay the pre-agreed bid amount.

PPC isn’t easy. But when implemented correctly, it will increase visibility and (by association) brand awareness, which also bolsters click-through rates and inspires more website visits. Set budgets, and only pay when your ad gets action. With built-in ad features like review extensions, consumer ratings and seller ratings, paid search also increases brand trust.

2. Targeted Social Ads

Facebook and Twitter are projected to account for as much as 33.7 percent of the digital display ad market by 2017. What’s the push behind this trend? Organic reach on social media is nearly extinct, but social channels are still the most popular platforms for sharing content. In other words, if marketers want to tap into the nearly 1.49 billion users on Facebook, 364 million members on LinkedIn, or 304 million Twitter users, they need targeted ads.

Use Facebook’s Custom Audience feature to build specific parameters about the type of people you want to reach, and Facebook will deliver your ad seamlessly into user newsfeeds that match your criteria. This strategy has the potential to lower cost-per-click by about 14 percent, and cost-per-conversion by about 64 percent.

Facebook also offers a Lookalike Audience feature, which allows you to upload a list of existing customers and Facebook will categorize information to find other in-network users with similar characteristics.

LinkedIn is the social media channel responsible for driving more traffic to B2B blogs than all other social media channels combined. It, too, provides targeting options like LinkedIn ads, which allow you to set parameters for who sees your ad, and sponsored updates, which allows you to publish relevant content directly on the feeds of any member (not just followers).

With targeted social media ads, you’re not just creating more exposure for your brand, you’re reaching the individuals most likely to be interested in what you have to offer. This inspires higher quality traffic to your website, a greater number of qualified leads and ultimately, more conversions.

3. Programmatic Marketing and Retargeting

Programmatic marketing involves the use of a platform that brings technology, audience insight and automation together to connect you with the world’s media supply. You set specific parameters (like bid price, goals and audience attributes), integrate CRM data and, in real-time, the platform automatically adjusts based on current performance to bid on and deliver the right display ad to the right person in the right place.

Retargeting is a type of programmatic marketing that allows you to advertise to individuals who have already visited your website and shown interest. There are two types of retargeting strategies:

• Pixel-based: places a small cookie on your website visitor’s browser and (when they leave to visit another site) targets them with a display ad based on which pages they interacted with on your website.
• List-based: (most frequently used to retarget social media ads) involves uploading an existing email list to a retargeting campaign. The platform searches for matching contacts, and serves them with a personalized ad.

Retargeting is ideal for B2B marketing because the buyer’s journey is typically long and laden with independent research. This type of promotion enables you to stay in front of your audience’s field of vision as they move from channel to channel in search of more information.

4. Cross-promote

Identify non-competitive brands within your industry or niche with whom you could partner to cross-promote content. Ask to plug your content into their email newsletters, social media posts and other marketing campaigns to reach new audiences.

For this strategy to work, you must be willing to associate with the partner brand and vice versa. The arrangement must also be of value to both parties. In other words, while your brand gains reach, their audience must benefit in some way from the content you’re promoting.

Outreach resources like BuzzSumo will help you identify who top influencers are in your market by showing you which content pieces are most popular on a particular topic, and who helped make them hits.

5. Syndication

Syndicating your content means getting your blog, website, video or other content featured on a popular site relevant to your industry or niche, like Social Media Today, The Huffington Post, Business Insider and Entrepreneur. [Business 2 Community Editor’s Note: Business 2 Community also offers content syndication.]

One way to get featured on these sites is to utilize content recommendation platforms like Outbrain or Taboola to push your content in front of the most appropriate publishers. Most of these platforms operate on a pay-per-click basis. By exposing your brand to audiences already drawn to larger publications, you’ll increase traffic and ideally, engagement.

A final note: Get visual. Beyond the shrinking attention span of the average person, the human brain is only capable of digesting so much information at once. Studies prove that visual content can be absorbed much easier than blocks of text and about 60,000 times faster. This doesn’t mean do away with text, but it does mean you should experiment with a mixture of both.

Remember, the goal is always to create content that is visually appealing, engaging and valuable to the reader to inspire sharing and establish brand trust. But no matter how useful and alluring your content, if it doesn’t get found, it’s worthless. Tactfully incorporate content promotion strategies into your marketing plans to reach target and new audiences, generate greater, higher quality leads and drive demand for your brand.

If the correct thing to do isn’t obvious or easy enough, we usually do whatever seems best at that moment, even if it violates norms.

When norms are violated multiple times, though, they generate a data set that should prompt change. The repeated violations show that either the norm is no longer relevant or the tools and structures meant to implement it aren’t working correctly.

There Is Nothin’ Like a Dame

Here’s a funny example. Recently, while having dinner at a local French restaurant, I visited the ladies room between the main course and dessert. The door was marked “Dames,” the French word for women. Inside were two stalls, not side-by-side, but with one perpendicular to the other. Both were empty. I took the stall farthest from the outside door, facing the other stall.

After a moment, someone occupied the other stall. I was startled by the sound of the seat being thrown up to hit the tank — perhaps someone wasn’t feeling well? Then I noticed that the shoe placed merely three feet from my own, was pointing toward, rather than away from the toilet, and belonged to a man.

I was surprised, but not frightened. Perhaps the man was confused or drunk, or the men’s room was fully occupied and he couldn’t wait. So long as he didn’t bother me, I felt no need to react. But to avoid creating any more awkwardness for either of us, I paused before exiting my stall. I didn’t want to meet him, uncomfortably, at the sink, since I couldn’t imagine what the appropriate pleasantry would be: “Come here often?”

So, after hearing him wash his hands, and exit, I opened my stall door and almost ran into an alarmed-looking woman who was just then entering the ladies’ room. She seemed quite relieved to see me, and took the stall I was just exiting rather than the empty one with the raised toilet seat.

I washed my hands, returned to my tablemates, and told them the story. Later, a fellow in our party went to use the men’s room, and found that the facility for “Hommes” was, unlike the one for the “Dames,” not visible from the dining room, but down a short hallway.

Lost in Translation

I didn’t report the incident to the restaurant’s management, as I didn’t feel personally threatened, and I certainly didn’t want to cause any trouble for the fellow who might have simply lost his way and didn’t realize it until it was too late. But perhaps I should have spoken up, since the woman who came in after me may not have mentioned it either.

Not everyone asks for directions (especially, at least in popular folklore, men), so if this circumstance happens with any frequency, it could mean that the signage isn’t clear enough. Maybe “Dames” needs an accompanying illustration. Or maybe the bartender needs to cut off some patrons sooner!

Either way, my non-reporting effectively caused the absence of a data point, so the next time I visit this restaurant, I’ll think about saying something. Not even the best hosts can resolve the problems their guests experience — or cause — if no one ever complains.

This guest post was written by Josh Dickson the founder of Syrah, which makes a web content editing tool, and syndicated with permission. The original version is here.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, California — Every year, thousands of employees begin new jobs at technology startups in Silicon Valley.

The transition, even for veteran tech workers, can be stressful and demanding. For employees at mobile messaging startup Tango, or Tango Me as the company is sometimes styled, there were often unexpected surprises.

As a young iOS engineer opened lunch at his desk inside the company's Mountain View headquarters, a middle-aged man with dark, unkempt hair, who had been mulling about the engineering floor, approached. His eyes narrowed sharply.

“Who are you?” the man barked. “Who do you work for?”

The young engineer, only several weeks into his job at Tango, struggled to answer. He paused, then answered slowly, trying to figure out what he'd done to deserve the public lashing. It was his first time speaking to the older man.

“There is no eating at desks,” quipped the older man, loud enough for those around to hear clearly. The unscheduled feedback session continued.

The engineer, dumbfounded, eventually closed up his lunch and went to eat alone in the cafeteria.

“Some first impression,” said a source with knowledge of the incident, speaking for this article on condition of anonymity.

The older man, Uri Raz, is Tango's co-founder and CEO. Along with co-founder and CTO Eric Setton, Mr. Raz founded Tango in 2009 as a voice and video calling mobile application. The duo designed the product, a cross-platform alternative to Apple's Facetime technology, to keep in touch with friends and family around the world. Prior to founding Tango, Mr. Raz was already a successful serial entrepreneur, having founded and sold a number of companies in both the United States and Israel. His largest success came in 2006, with the sale of Appstream to Symantec for $53 million.

At Tango, user growth was meteoric. Tango recorded its millionth user just ten days after launch. The company raised significant amounts of venture capital to expand its product offerings and hire employees. Along with further development of its core messaging product, it experimented with content channels, games, and most recently, e-commerce.

Now well into its seventh year, Tango has raised a staggering $365 million in venture capital in at least five publicly disclosed rounds of financing. The largest portion of that financing came in March of 2014, when Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group invested $215 million as part of a $280 million round.

In a statement announcing the fundraising, Mr. Raz termed it “just the beginning” for Tango. Tango was often included in lists of mobile apps that could be the “next WhatsApp,” a reference to mobile messaging app WhatsApp's $19 billion purchase by Facebook in early 2014.

Not long after the $280 million investment closed, things changed. New business initiatives failed to live up to expectations. A number of executives, many of which had only been with Tango for a short time, left the company.

In late November, just as most in the US were preparing for the Thanksgiving holiday, Techcrunch reported that Tango had laid off 9% of its workforce following a failed move into e-commerce. The story featured comments from Mr. Setton, who addressed challenges in Tango's business. “The initiative didn’t really pan out. We didn’t see the conversations we wanted. [There was a] good amount of traffic but the volume didn’t materialize. [We recently] updated the app to take the e-commerce flow out, but unfortunately couldn’t keep the team working on that initiative.”

Mr. Setton, speaking about the company's revenue growth, told Techcrunch, “this year, [revenue] is an order of magnitude above what we’ve ever seen before.”

Techcrunch described the layoffs as a “reshuffle.”

Yet in dozens of interviews and conversations with both current and former Tango employees, dating from early October up to the publication of this article, a picture emerges of a company in the middle of far more than a reshuffle. One former engineer described the environment as “the most toxic I've ever seen, and I've seen everything.” Another former employee described morale as “ridiculously low.” Random quiet firings have been common since August.

One employee described the information given to Techcrunch, particularly the 9% figure, as “a load of [expletive.]”

“Nobody will say anything because they are deathly afraid of Uri,” said a former employee, speaking on condition of anonymity for this story. “That company is beyond [expletive]ed up.”

Numerous former employees, all of whom had experience at other technology companies in Silicon Valley prior to joining Tango, said they could write a book on how poorly Mr. Raz and his management team ran the company.

On Glassdoor, a platform that allows employees to anonymously review their employers, Tango's reviews are an outlier. 80% of Snapchat reviewers approve of its frat boy turned chief executive Evan Spiegel. At Twitter, new CEO Jack Dorsey nabs 94%. 100% approve of WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum, and 97% approve of Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg.

At Tango, Mr. Raz holds an approval rating under 50%, an unheard of number for a technology CEO.

Several former employees believe that Tango had offered compensation to employees, particularly engineers, to not post negative reviews upon quitting, and had compensated current employees for leaving positive reviews.

One former employee cited Glassdoor as an ongoing issue with recruitment.

Tango, which boasts a valuation of $1 billion, is an example of what is often referred to as a “unicorn” — a privately-held startup with a valuation of at least $1 billion. In the past several years, unicorns have become more common as startups raise vast amounts of capital to fuel their growth. Aileen Lee, founder of Cowboy Ventures, first coined the term in a 2013 article for Techcrunch. In an expanded and revised summary of unicorn valuations for Techcrunch earlier this year, Tango is listed near Tumblr, Eventbrite, and Next Door.

Among companies that have messaging apps as their core product, just three are valued more highly than Tango: consumer focused Snapchat and WhatsApp, and enterprise focused Slack.

A burgeoning global interest over control of mobile messaging apps, a strong engineering team, significant user growth, and founders with a history of successful exits gave Tango all it needed to raise tens of millions of dollars in venture capital. In early 2013, Tango announced that it had reached 100 million users.

Messaging apps, in both user numbers and valuations, boomed.

In late 2013, both Facebook and Google are believed to have shown interest in acquiring ephemeral messaging app Snapchat for as much as $3 to $4 billion. Tencent Holdings, the parent company of WeChat, the dominant mobile messaging app in China, offered to invest in Snapchat at a $4 billion valuation. Japanese messaging app LINE was thought to be considering an overseas IPO at a valuation near $10 billion. In early February of 2014, Japanese internet giant Rakuten bought messaging app Viber for $900 million.

In late February, Facebook bought WhatsApp and its 400 million active users for $19 billion in stock, which would become $22 billion in stock by the time the deal closed.

In China, WeChat's dominance had helped double the public valuation of owner Tencent Holdings. Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, which had its own messaging app called Liawang, had struggled to compete with Tencent and WeChat. Marketing efforts to boost its popularity, which included Alibaba founder and chief executive Jack Ma publicly quitting WeChat in favor of Liawang, were unsuccessful. Alibaba considered pivoting Liawang away from messaging, or closing it down altogether.

By early 2014, though Tango was closing in on 60 million active users, it too felt as though it had missed the opportunity in China. Despite launching in China well before WeChat, Tango had never found a real level of success there. Tango's user numbers lagged behind other messaging app giants, and it was not a clear number one winner in any of its key markets.

Alibaba, flush with cash from its e-commerce operations, began to look at sizable investments in US-based technology companies. With its own chat app a failure, it wanted back into the mobile messaging space. Through Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, who had been instrumental in Yahoo's investment in Alibaba, Tango found an audience in Alibaba chief Jack Ma and its US-focused investment team. In March 2014, just one month after the deals for Viber and WhatsApp, Alibaba led a massive $280 million round of financing for Tango, valuing the messaging app at $1 billion. Alibaba pumped $215 million into the company for a twenty to twenty-five percent stake.

Well before the $280 million round of financing, Tango's management had grown restless with its core messaging product.

While Tango could monetize its messaging app with ads, management lusted for messaging to become just one feature at the heart of something larger. Nearly a year before the Alibaba deal, the company had already pivoted from a messaging app to a “mobile social” network, following similar moves by other messaging apps like LINE. Tango added a number of in-app games, e-cards, and animations, and later added photo filters and in-call activities.

Tango's first major foray outside messaging came with the addition of what it called “content channels.” Channels would serve as a way for brands, like Spotify or 500px, to better interact with users and distribute content to followers that could be shared within Tango's messaging product. A video from June 2014, posted to the company's official YouTube page, outlined the channel functionality, similar to that of a Twitter account or Facebook page.

Channels was later reworked into a concept called “rooms.” According to sources familiar with the company's thinking, Tango believed that people wanted to have “meaningful conversations” around content from a number of high profile brands that it had inked deals with, including Vimeo, WhoSay, Buzzfeed, Spotify, Rhapsody, Soundcloud, AOL, Vevo, Funny or Die, and Hulu. “It's a perfect example of [Tango management] not understanding the users. They only wanted meaningful conversations about smoking weed or sharing naked pics,” said a former employee.

In a November 2015 review of the app, it was not clear whether any of the high-profile channels remained. Rooms remains a core feature of the app.

Games, a mainstay of mobile social apps that Tango was modeling itself after, became another area of focus not long after the channels launch. In July 2014, Tango hired renowned gaming executive Jim Ying, who had previous posts at RealNetworks, GREE, and Xbox, to lead a new in-house gaming development team. Tango, which had previously released a software development kit to help companies build games for its platform, announced forty gaming partners and launched a $25 million gaming fund to invest directly in developers.

Tango struck gold early on with a racing app called Road Riot, a product of its growing in-house game development team. The app was downloaded over 10 million times during its first year in Android's Play Store. For a time, it was the number one racing game by download ranking. It continues to rank well on both iOS and Android.

Other attempts to build similar games were less successful. “It's gaming, it's hit or miss even with a good product. It's expensive,” said a former employee. Some games, like Marine Adventure, were well-reviewed but failed to live up to expectations. Most games, including Jewel Raiders, Pharaoh's War, Super Cake Boss, Toon Squad, and War Inc, were flops.

Less than a year after hiring Mr. Ying, Tango management, led by Mr. Raz, changed course. “The focus was suddenly off gaming and onto e-commerce,” said a former employee. For Tango, the high costs of developing and marketing games that were not commercial successes proved unsustainable. Mr. Ying left the company, and Tango laid off roughly half the gaming division in previously unreported layoffs.

The results of the $25 million gaming fund were not promising.

“They didn't receive any worthwhile submissions,” said a former employee who had knowledge of the company's gaming initiatives. Several employees doubted whether the company had ever planned to invest the $25 million and dismissed the fund announcement as a publicity stunt. No public award was ever announced from the fund. At press time, an advertisement for the fund was still present on Tango's website.

In a November 2015 review of the app, it was not clear if any third party gaming content remained.

A US-based angel investor, who had invested in a company that later became one of Tango's original gaming partners, said that Tango's gaming initiatives never made sense in relation to its scale. The investor declined to be named for this story.

The partnership with Alibaba had opened major new doors for Tango, particularly in China and e-commerce. The company hired Chi-Chao Chang, a well respected technology executive who had spent time at Yahoo, as Vice President of Strategy. Mr. Chang had famously spent just twenty-four hours at stealth mobile payments startup Clinkle in December of 2013, resigning just hours after seeing the state of the company's core technology. Mr. Chang was lauded as a skilled operator and strategist by former Tango employees.

Mr. Chang, along with some other members of Tango management, wanted to refocus the company on messaging.

In a presentation for Alibaba group in July 2014, copies of which were provided for this story, Tango pitched an alliance with Alibaba. The cornerstone of the strategy would be to “neutralize” WeChat in China and the rest of Asia by building a new, simplified messaging app that carried Alibaba branding. Former employees called it “Tango lite.” Tango would bring its years of experience in messaging app design and engineering to the new initiative, while Alibaba would provide marketing and product integration support. Tango sought additional help with Alipay, Alibaba's online mobile payments platform.

According to former employees with knowledge of the Alibaba partnership, Tango lite, Alibaba's Liawang successor, never materialized. Tango management, led by Mr. Raz, were not supporters of refocusing on messaging, and had changed direction once again to refocus on e-commerce.

According to sources familiar with the incident, just three months into the e-commerce initiative, Mr. Raz told the new e-commerce team that messaging was “over” and Tango needed to become a Wish competitor. Wish, which the Wall Street Journal has called a “direct from China shopping app,” was thought to be raising $100 million at a valuation near $1 billion. Mr. Raz demanded a new product strategy that could be differentiated from Wish by the following day, when he would present it at a meeting of the Tango board of directors.

Wish later raised $500 million at a valuation near $3 billion.

Sources familiar with the company's thinking pointed to Tango's management team, led by Mr. Raz, as a core reason for why the company failed to develop a coherant product strategy around data. Many felt as though Mr. Raz, who was notoriously hard-headed and difficult to work with, gave more credence to product suggestions from investors over keys employees with first-hand knowledge. Mr. Raz was not afraid of yelling at employees, sometimes in public, calling one an idiot “who did not know what the [expletive] he was doing” at a meeting. That employee later left the company.

Alibaba, meanwhile, had grown impatient with Tango. Still looking for success in mobile messaging, Alibaba pumped $200 million into Snapchat in March of this year. Former employees called the investment a “major blow” to morale at Tango. Many felt as though it was the beginning of Alibaba giving up on them.

Rather than work to improve morale, former employees say Mr. Raz was often at the heart of the company's problems. After a particularly challenging week in 2014, which saw already overworked employees staying later than normal, Mr. Raz sent an email to the company to say that employees were not working hard enough. The email contributed to what many described as a toxic culture at the company.

One employee, who had been away on vacation, was fired upon his return to the office.

Former employees suspected Tango of stalling on visas to make it more difficult for employees to leave the company. Those incidents could not be independently verified, though reports of the problems are available on the company's Glassdoor profile.

In May, Tango launched its now shuttered e-commerce play, Tango Shop, with participation from Alibaba and Walmart. The launch, which was US-only, was the start of another strategic plan for Tango. Tango would first build a shop where people could buy value-oriented products, getting buyers into the system. Former employees said the company wanted to eventually introduce tools for peer-to-peer selling, to allow buyers and sellers to transact within the Tango application.

Mr. Chang, whose strategic plan for Tango had focused on messaging and a possible relaunch in China, left the company.

Another Vice President, Jonathan Flesher, who had also pushed for a messaging focus along with Mr. Chang, left after only a short time with the company.

Sources with knowledge of the failed e-commerce initiative felt the move was “doomed from the start.” Tango, which skewed nearly 3:1 in favor of Android users over iOS, was more popular with those of lower socioeconomic status. “It was not a customer group that you were going to rapidly build a $1 billion [e-commerce] business on top of,” said a former employee.

The e-commerce flow has been removed from current releases of the app.

Since announcing 60 million active users at the time of the Alibaba investment in early 2014, Tango has repeatedly declined to provide an update on its user numbers. According to sources familiar with Tango's internal metrics, in early 2015 the app still had around 60 million active users.

Earlier this year, Facebook's WhatsApp introduced voice calling. By April, the feature had made its way to the company's iOS application.

According to sources, Tango's MAUs, or monthly active users, have declined from 60 million to near 30 million since April, in parallel with WhatsApp's release of voice calling.

WhatsApp (900 million active), Facebook Messenger (700 million active), WeChat (650 million active), Snapchat (200 million active), LINE (211 million active), and Viber (249 million active) have grown.

According to sources, the board has asked Tango management to cut 20 to 30 percent of its workforce during the current quarter. The company employs around 270 people.

Earlier this year, led by a new Vice President of Product, Tango launched a feature called Discover. Sources familiar with the company's thinking said that the VP wanted to turn Tango into a dating app.

Discover's design shares obvious similarities with hookup app Tinder, including card-based profiles that can be swiped left or right across the screen. “[The new VP] loved cards,” said a former employee with knowledge of the company's product plans.

Tinder's parent company, Match Group, went public in November. A source familiar with product decisions said the product strategy had been to simply “copy Tinder.”

Former employees said that the Discover feature, along with a rework of Tango's chat rooms, led to average users often receiving random hookup requests from strangers. Employees called the chat rooms a “cesspool” full of requests to hook up and trade explicit photos.

In a November 2015 review of the app, the first chat room suggested by the app was inundated with hookup requests, requests for sexually explicit pictures, and requests to chat about masturbation.

Tango, which is not believed to be profitable, earns revenue from both games and ads that it places throughout its apps. A source pegged the split at roughly 50/50.

In conversations with former employees, it was not clear whether a new strategy for the company to either raise additional capital or sell itself had been devised by management.

Data from analytics firm App Annie, which tracks app performance in both Apple's App Store and Google's Play Store, illustrates the downward trend in downloads.

In China, where some Tango executives had once sought a new path forward, download numbers continue to shrink. WeChat continues to dominate mobile messaging in China.

Former employees believe that Tango will likely be able to find an acquirer should it choose to pursue a sale, though at a price far below its last valuation.

Path, another social networking app, was bought by KakaoTalk parent Daum Kakao for what is thought to be under $50 million earlier this year. The company, which had raised more than $75 million in funding, had around 30 million active users, the majority of them in Indonesia. Like Tango, Path was also founded by a successful technology executive in Dave Morin, who had been an early employee at Facebook.

Former employees dismissed the idea of a sale focused on the company's gaming assets in light of Activision's $5.9 billion deal for Candy Crush maker King Digital. Tango has just one game hovering around the 200th spot in the App Store, while King owns two of the top five games on iOS.

Other employees were more hopeful, and wished the company would again refocus on messaging. “Uri is brilliant, but he's never had to do anything like this before,” said a former employee. “Maybe a change of scenery would help...”

The author can also be found on Twitter.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Here's Everything Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Just Said About Alibaba

This story by Kevin Carmichael was first published by Canadian Business.

The Bank of Canada and the U.S. Federal Reserve are about to part ways, a rare separation that will ensure downward pressure on Canada’s currency. Some will cheer that prospect, as Canadian goods and services will have a price advantage in the U.S. market. The tradeoff is that domestic companies will find it more costly to import state-of-the-art equipment to retool, and to invest in growing markets abroad. Exports could thrive, but productivity may suffer.

All of this crystallized amid a cascade of economic data, monetary policy announcement and speeches over the past few days. Fed chair Janet Yellen on December 2 stated as clearly as central bank lexicon will allow that she will recommend raising America’s benchmark interest rate when she convenes the policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee later this month. It would be the first increase in nine years. The day the Fed raises its target lending rate from zero, “is a day that I expect we all are looking forward to,” Yellen told economists in Washington. Key in her remarks was an emphasis on the importance of staying ahead of inflation. The Fed wants to raise borrowing costs, but very slowly, which means it must get started so it can leave a decent interval before the next increase. “Were the FOMC to delay the start of policy normalization for too long, we would likely end up having to tighten policy relatively abruptly to keep the economy from significantly overshooting both of our goals,” of price stability and full employment, Yellen said.

The Bank of Canada is in an entirely different position. It will be staying in the low-for-longer club—likely into 2017, based on current economic forecasts. Before Yellen addressed the Economic Club of Washington, her counterparts in Ottawa released their latest policy statement, in which Canada’s central bank said it was keeping its benchmark interest rate at 0.5%, a quarter-point shy of the lowest level ever. The Canadians described an economy that “continues to undergo a complex and lengthy adjustment” to the collapse of commodity prices.

The good news was the central bank thinks the worst is over. Statistics Canada reported December 1 that gross domestic product expanded at an annual rate of 2.3% in the third quarter after contracting at rates of 0.3% and 0.7%, respectively, in the previous two quarters. Non-energy exports led the rebound, a show of strength that Bank of Canada Governor Stephen Poloz has been waiting on since he started his job more than two years ago. The bad news was that Canada’s other economic engines are sputtering. The value of total household consumption through the first nine months of 2015 is little changed compared with the same period in 2014, according to StatsCan data. And business investment is contracting as commodity companies retreat. The flight of capital might stop, but there is little reason to expect much of it to come back. “We do not see an imminent turning point in commodity prices and thus forecast further negative repercussions on the Canadian economy next year,” Sebastien Lavoie, assistant chief economist at Laurentian Bank Securities in Montreal, said in an analysis of the Bank of Canada’s latest policy statement.

Poloz eschews explicit guidance on where interest rates are headed, but he and his deputies on the Governing Council write their statements in a way that makes deduction possible. In this week’s communication, policy makers highlighted an unusually complicated global landscape. Before the financial crisis, most every economy was doing well, albeit on a bubble of debt and inflated asset prices. After the Great Recession, emerging markets were relatively quick to recover, led by China. Now, the global economy is a patchwork of regions that are doing okay, not so well, and terribly. Each situation will demand different policies, heralding a divergence in interest rates that junior traders on Bay Street never will have seen.

The European Central Bank on December 3 dropped one of its main policy rates to negative 0.3% from negative 0.2% and said it would extend its bond-buying program, under which it creates euros to purchase debt, to at least March 2017. All things being equal, the euro will weaken against the U.S. dollar and perhaps other currencies. (The euro actually rose after the ECB announcement, and stock markets fell, as investors expressed their disappointment with fresh stimulus measures they had bet would be more aggressive.) That is what ECB President Mario Draghi hopes, as he flagged trade as the European economy’s main headwind.

Canada is in a slightly better position than the European Union because it is so closely tied to the U.S., which is growing. Still, the Bank of Canada isn’t taking any chances—it favours a weaker currency. “Policy divergence is expected to remain a prominent theme,” Canadian policy makers said in their December 2 statement, new language that read as a reminder to currency traders that the Bank of Canada sets policy independent of the Fed. And Canada is one of those regions that isn’t doing so well. The Canadian policy statement also reiterated that the central bank expects economic growth has slowed in the fourth quarter, and that the economy won’t regain altitude until sometime in 2016. Yellen is on her own.

The post Why the Bank of Canada and the U.S. Fed are parting ways appeared first on Macleans.ca.

As we move into the final weeks Q4, you are either feeling great about how your sales teams will end up or you’re struggling trying to pull anything you can out of the pipeline. If there is room for improvement, you may have a group of salespeople that are challenged with:

• selling on features rather than business value.
• inability to differentiate from the competition.
• selling too low in an organization.
• discounting in the final stages of the opportunity.

A well-defined sales messaging strategy drives these types of conversations and ultimately results in overall sales productivity and bottom-line revenue impact. Without a framework to implement your sales messaging strategy, you run the risk of lagging sales, quarter after quarter.

Don’t go another year dealing with the same problems. Instead, develop a framework that provides your sales team with the ability to call higher in organizations by effectively articulating value and differentiation. Here are six components that every sales messaging framework should have:

1. Value Drivers

Buyers want to know that their needs are understood and that you can provide them with the best possible solution. An effective messaging framework outlines the driving reasons a customer would choose to purchase your solution and aligns your company behind that value.

2. Differentiators

To truly differentiate your offerings from competitors, your sales reps should be armed with tools that help them clearly speak to your company’s differentiation in a way that maps to the desired buyer outcomes. A framework with well-defined differentiators helps your salespeople clearly articulate how you solve buyer problems better and differently than the competition.

3. Ability to Quantify Business Pain

Opportunities are won or lost on the ability for a salesperson to effectively uncover business pain and impact. When your salespeople ask the right questions, they’ll be able to guide the sales conversation in such a way that the buyer can see how their admitted problems will be addressed. A sales messaging framework gives your entire team a valuable tool to quantify business pains by helping them execute an effective discovery process. This ability will enable them to call higher in prospect organizations.

4. Measurable Outcomes of Your Solutions

For a buyer to be truly convinced that your product or service can alleviate the business pain, he/she needs to be assured of the positive outcomes that come from working with you. If you’re going to articulate to buyers how your solution is better than your competitors, you need to make sure your proof points are solidly in place. A sales messaging framework should include these valuable references and make them consumable for the entire sales team.

5. Useful for the Entire Organization

An effective sales messaging framework should drive message consistency across the organization. . A framework that is customized and built with the right inputs intrinsically aligns your entire organization behind those value drivers. For example, your sales team will leverage marketing more because their collateral is built with the same customer language. Your services department better understands the promises made to the customer in the sales process

6. Reinforcement

The framework is only as strong as the leadership’s ability to reinforce it. An effective sales messaging framework should have a plan for executives to drive adoption and front-line managers to reinforce the concepts.

You can have all the pieces in place – a way to understand buyer pain points, a way to sync problems to solutions, a repeatable process for every member of your sales organization – But, without leaders who are willing to drive adoption of the framework with the sales team, then nothing will stick and any hope for sales results will fall flat.

The distinction between inbound and content marketing is an important one because they are too often considered to be one and the same.

While both disciplines are often misunderstood, the word inbound clearly describes the primary purpose of inbound marketing: Attracting leads.

In other words, the focus of inbound marketing is filling the funnel.

What then is content marketing? According to the Content Marketing Institute:

“Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”

How to Keep the Dogs in The House

As a young salesperson fresh out of college, I could relate to an expression my sales manager often used. He said, “It’s not easy keeping all of the dogs in the house.”

He meant converting leads into buyers and then retaining them as customers is an ongoing challenge. We all know this to be true because prospects and customers will always act in their best interests. For those actions to be mutually beneficial, relationships must be nurtured.

One of the reasons inbound and content marketing are often considered the same is they both use similar tactics at the visible lead attraction stage. What happens after that often differs.

If you doubt this, simply subscribe to any site that offers an ebook or free report and observe. What happens next should feel right, like a sense of belonging that supports your decision to sign up.

Inbound marketing can feel like traditional marketing after lead attraction phase because there is often a noticeable shift to conversion. The messaging may indeed contain valuable content, but its value is progressively diluted by the seemingly endless interruptions.

As a result, the dogs get angry and leave the house (unsubscribe).

In contrast, content marketing seeks to add value to every single stage of the buyer’s journey, with the better content marketers understanding the duration of that journey is buyer dependent.

If attracting leads is important to your small business, both inbound and content marketing can help. Yet, without a strategic content marketing plan, only a fraction of those inbound leads will become longstanding customers.

Instead of ramping up the automation sequence to increase conversions, a better approach is strategically feeding the dogs. Focus on providing more valuable content where it is needed most, and that is throughout the buyer’s journey, and the customer experience that follows.

That’s content marketing.

If, like me, you are the founder or in senior leadership of a B2B organization, there is no doubt that you will have seen the following scenario occur time and time again amongst your sales team.

They’ve built a good rapport with the prospect. They’ve qualified them according to your organization’s rigorous SQL criteria. Perhaps they’ve even got to the stage where an SOW has been signed-off or a contract has been sent over. Then…nada. No response. Their calls are ignored. This previously warm deal has ‘gone cold.’

This unscheduled cold spell doesn’t even have to occur so infuriatingly close to a closed deal.

Harvard Business Review did a superb study (which I’ve cited before) a few years ago that looked at how long it took over two thousand US companies to respond to a web-generated test lead. Although 37% responded to their lead within an hour, and 16% responded within one to 24 hours, 24% took more than 24 hours—and 23% of the companies never responded at all. The average response time, among companies that responded within 30 days, was 42 hours.

In a separate study in the same year, HBR found that firms that tried to contact potential customers within an hour of receiving a query were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead (which HBR defined as “having a meaningful conversation with a key decision maker”) as those that tried to contact the customer even an hour later—and more than 60 times as likely as companies that waited 24 hours or longer.

Fundamentally, regardless of where it happens in the sales engagement process – whether at the start or nearing the finishing line of a closed deal – a warm lead can go cold at any moment.

A cold lead is not the same as a ‘lost’ lead

Although a previously warm lead can show all the signs of having gone cold — that doesn’t mean that they are ‘lost.’

Perhaps your key decision maker is fire-fighting all manner of internal issues or a new strategic priority has emerged. Maybe a competitor has appeared on the scene, and they’ve decided to take more time to consider the alternatives. Or maybe they’ve simply got cold feet about committing to such a considered purchase. Without any more lead insight, it is difficult to know what to do.

Fortunately, this is where your content marketing has a real chance to shine – and reactivate sales conversations.

Using content to ‘reheat’ cold leads

So, how can content be used to reactivate cold leads?

1) The personal Sales reach-out

Whilst many of us struggle to get Sales to use content: there is much value in getting them to use content for a one-to-one reach-out, which is not too sales-y.

In practice, this might mean emailing a cold lead with subject headers such as:

“Just saw this article and thought of you…”

“I think that this new blog post might be of use…”

“Remember when we spoke about this?”

Use the unique understanding of each lead that you’ve garnered from talking and listening to them to inform which piece of content you send to them. We all appreciate help and sending over useful informative content casts you as an advocate for their success rather than just another sales rep trying to close new business.

2) Put them back into a nurture campaign

The advent of marketing automation has meant that cold leads that would have typically been abandoned by Sales can now be nurtured with a constant drip of automated communications by Marketing.Marketing can take a few pieces of valuable content such as case studies, industry recognition, or even just a simple “is now a better time?” personal messages and put them to work in your marketing automation system.

Unlike the 1-2-1 sales reach-out, nurture campaigns enable a longer view of gently touching base with a prospect – perhaps over a 60, 90 or 120 day time horizon. You’d be surprised at the engagement that comes from simply following up over a longer time horizon than this week or this month.

3) Let inbound marketing do its job

Of course, let’s get real. Sometimes a lead might be so unresponsive that even a prolonged nurture campaign with marketing automation will not be enough to reactivate them. At this point, all that is left to do is to ‘kick’ the lead out of the system.

Yet here, too, content plays an important role.

By simply committing to inbound marketing, an abandoned or ‘lost’ lead may well find themselves once again ‘reactivated’; having consumed content on your company blog or social media feed or a piece of native advertising. Each interaction ultimately leading them to becoming a warm lead once again.

Learn how to measure your content marketing to determine if it’s successful. Download the free Salesforce e-book.