Rnordman

Having a wealth of positive reviews on independent websites is the holy grail for many business owners. In fact, good social proof is fast becoming a necessity for any serious marketer.

The benefits are multiple. Here are three huge advantages :

• increased sales
• improved brand perception
• an invaluable marketing tool

This power of online reviews often encourages companies to ‘review build’, hoping to level the playing field with their larger competitors, as well as boosting their profits.

Yet it is far from certain that this eagerness is justified.

In fact, can rushing to enhance your reputation actually harm your bottom line, and potentially bankrupt your company?

Universally positive customer opinions may not be a good thing for your businesses future.

Researchers at the University of Nevada certainly back the idea that online reviews have massive influence. Their study indicated that social influence has a strong effect on consumer buying decisions, much more than pricing factors.
Other academics go further. Ann Schlosser argues that having a highly positive review, is more effective than a review containing both pros and cons.

Of course, there are other variables at play too. The type of products sold are bound to have an impact on the significance paid to reviews.
It’s hard to imagine many people searching for customer opinions on long established products such as bleach, and washing powders.

Target audience is also likely to be a reason why there are conflicting results from different research studies.

An analysis in 2013 showed that a two sided review with pros and cons is looked on favourably by the reader. The same study also found that product perceptions were significantly affected by the credibility of the reviewer.

Those people with intelligent arguments and a history of reviewing products were the most influential.

Herein lies the danger of companies rushing to build reviews. Whether this is through a ‘fake’ strategy or encouraging happy customers to leave a review ,the results can be disastrous.
With reviewing history being so important, a number of profiles with single reviews that sing your praises may have the opposite effect. The evidence points to these opinions being easily dismissed and the profiles (and your companies) credibility being questioned.

This is further backed up by Chinese researchers. Their study showed contextual comments were given more focus by the reader than the product rating. Thus, having a host of positive reviews with very little depth or value for the reader is counter productive.

So what strategy should your company use?

The answer, as ever, lies in knowing your customers and providing great customer service to them.
This approach takes time, but will be rewarded with organic reviews.

It will also protect your company from Google ranking penalties, if you are found to have falsified ratings.

Of course, it never hurts to give your customers a friendly nudge.

A tactic we often employ, is included in the follow up purchase email.
Advise customers of the review platforms your company is listed on and that it would be helpful if they shared their satisfaction. By doing this they are more likely to leave a review on their most used platform, increasing the chance they are already established on the network.

This article was originally published at digitaldock and has been republished with permission.

It would be difficult to find a modern sales organization that does not provide training for their quota-carriers, and yet fewer than half take the additional step of serving up post-training reinforcement to support those lessons learned. Our new Research Report explores the performance results and business competencies of companies who emphasize sales learning not only as an event, but as a lifestyle.

Aberdeen’s annual market research around sales training, most recently published in Let’s Make a Deal: Best-in-Class Coaching Can Shorten Your Sales Cycle, identified that only 44% of survey respondents “provide post-training reinforcement of content presented in initial educational sessions.” By itself, this fact is somewhat surprising, given the virtually unlimited amount of user-generated content, always-on mobile technologies, and competitive threats that inform the day-to-day business of contemporary sales leaders. Is it possible that the majority of organizations perform little more than due diligence around educating their market-facing sellers? Is it believable that they wouldn’t take advantage of communications platforms and tribal knowledge solutions to consistently up-level the competencies of their reps and channel partners? Sadly, yes it is – we’re talking about the average masses here — but when survey respondents are isolated into performance and behavior cohorts, we find that Best-in-Class companies are 15% more likely than All Others, 54% vs. 47%, to follow-up traditional sales training with various methods of educational reinforcement.

Segmenting Out The Serial Trainers

Not only do top-performing companies emphasize ongoing training more than other firms, they also report higher adoption levels of additional knowledge management capabilities:

• A central repository of sales best practices / tools is available to reps and managers (73% vs. 46%)
• Actively seek to capture institutional knowledge from more seasoned sales staff, in order to transfer it to newer generations of sellers (66% vs. 38%)
• User-generated marketing and sales content, including references / testimonials, is available to sales reps and managers (64% vs. 52%)
• Sales managers receive customized training and content, distinct from that offered to sales reps (56% vs. 38%)
• Identify internal subject matter experts (SMEs) whose expertise is available to members of the sales team (51% vs. 48%)

These best practices may all seem like no-brainers to highly evolved, modern sales leaders, but on average, fewer than half of all companies, 45%, deploy these competencies. When, however, we segment out those organizations focusing on post-training reinforcement, and compare them with non-adopters, this average rises to 56%. This means that the 114 companies identified as “post-training reinforcers” are 24% more often deploying these Best-in-Class capabilities. They are also, as seen in Figure 1, achieving measurably better business results:

Figure I: Better Training, Superior Performance Results

The largest performance delta reflected in Figure 1, the percentage of first-year sales reps hitting their number, showcases the fact that post-training reinforcers see 34% more new sales hires (55% vs. 41%) achieving the quota designed for them by their leaders. The impact of this data cannot be over-stated. Indeed, we know from Aberdeen’s Beyond the Commission: Will You Stay Ahead of the SPM Maturity Curve? that replacing a typical B2B sales professional costs over $29,000, and takes 7.3 months away from full productivity in any given sales territory. With these stakes in mind, it only makes sense to take advantage of every opportunity to maximize the percentage of both new and seasoned reps who are realizing their potential, and hopefully earning healthy over-quota override commissions. Now, let’s take a closer look at the core competencies that post-training reinforcers adopt to support the investments they make in their people, and these enviable business results.

Best-In-Class Core Competencies: Aligning Smart Management With Sales Education

In Figure 2, we identify four business processes that top-performing sales leaders adopt more frequently than lesser accomplished organizations, in the context of how post-training reinforcers deploy more aggressively than companies who simply provide up-front training for their sales staff, and nothing more. In fact, three of these processes – all except “analyze customer data” – represent best practices that are used even more frequently by post-training reinforcers than by Best-in-Class organizations. They also represent a great instructional pathway for sales and executive leaders themselves:

Handing a new rep or channel partner a product guide, price list, script, and territory, and then sending them off to sink or swim in the field, is not exactly a best practice for any sales manager. It also does not qualify as a formal sales methodology, a process capability reported by 73% of Best-in-Class firms, compared with 72% and 59% respectively among Industry Average and Laggard organizations. A well-designed sales methodology represents a significant investment by enterprises that take an objective look at the business of selling in their individual market space. They step back from day-to-day deal-making to understand what kind of communications, content, and cadences are most successful on a long-term basis, and build out extensive playbooks that arm their sellers with an always-growing library to support their customer acquisition and management efforts. Post-training reinforcers are 64% more likely (82% vs. 50%) than non-adopters to collect sales lessons learned on-the-fly by the entire team, and continuously incorporate them into their ever-evolving methodology.

Figure 2: Process Capabilities: Taking a Holistic Approach toward Long-Term Sales Knowledge

Everyone loves a big sales deal, and the most successful organizations analyze customer data to maximize up-selling possibilities. Many enterprises employ sales reps who not only bring in new accounts, but service those customers for the duration of their client lifetime. If a company only provides initial, one-time or onboarding training for their sales staff, those individual contributors are less likely to understand how to improve the “share of wallet” for their customers, compared with their counterparts in companies that continuously educate their team members around adding revenue and value to their client relationships over time.

Why are post-training reinforcers 64% more likely than all others (63% vs. 39%) to conduct win / loss analyses on closed deals? Because they more aggressively embrace the spirit of continuous learning at an institutional level, and have learned that the time and resources associated with sales postmortem activity are worthy investments that support long-term institutional knowledge. Indeed, we know from You Win Some, You Lose Some: How Best-in-Class Sales Leaders Learn as They Go that companies consistently performing win / loss analyses performed far better than other organizations. They are also 45% more likely (55% vs. 38%) to indicate to Aberdeen that “our sales leaders collaborate with human resource functions to ensure best-practice utilization for sales hiring, on-boarding, succession planning, or learning and development.” In other words, they get it.

Finally, 57% of Best-in-Class firms report a process for collecting and sharing tribal knowledge, a rate exceeded by post-training reinforcers who understand that today’s millennial sellers are far more willing and comfortable to share with one another, as compared to 20th-century quota-carriers. A generation ago, a sales rep was expected to acquire skills and knowledge predominantly from managers above them in the corporate food chain. Modern enterprise social collaboration platforms are designed to leverage the changing mindset of individual contributors, and help provide companies committed to lifelong sales education with technology platforms that complement their commitment to learning that clearly pays measurable dividends.

Interested in more detail? Here is the report.

A huge economic experiment will begin in Switzerland and Sweden in 2016, and some people are calling it the "war on cash." Both countries have central banks that have imposed negative interest rates on their commercial banks, making it costly for those banks to store cash. The intent is to force the banks to lend out the cash, thus spurring the economy and a small amount of healthy inflation.

But the two countries have very different attitudes to holding actual hard cash. So negative interest rates could have very different effects on the cash-free Swedes and the cash-loving Swiss. That, some right-wing economists are arguing, is why you're not seeing Swiss people complaining about the fact that they are penalised for keeping money in the bank.

The SNB (the Swiss central bank), expects to hold its rates negative until 2017, according to board member Andréa Maechler — so this war seem likely to last at least two years. At least one consumer bank will charge its customers negative rates beginning in 2016.

Sweden, on the other hand, is one of the most cash-free societies on the planet. Many Swedish businesses are cashless, so you need electronic cash in the bank in order to buy anything. If you use too much cash in Sweden, banks call the police because they think you might be a terrorist or a criminal. That means it's a lot more difficult for any Swede encountering a negative interest rate (or increased bank fees that act like negative rates) to just pull cash out of the bank and hide it under the mattress until rates go positive again. 

To sum all that up: In the war on cash, Switzerland is taking the pro-cash position, and Sweden has the anti-cash position.

This is interesting if you believe, as conservative "war on cash" theorists do, that the banks want to abolish cash in order to end your financial privacy and force you into the banking system for all electronic transactions. Those banks can then change the value of cash any time they want, thus making fiat currency even more of sham than it already is, these voices say. (And, by the way, hoard gold!)

Here's a summary of the state of negative interest rates, courtesy of Capital Economics:

"This decision on negative rates is costing us a lot of money."

In Switzerland, one bank is already punishing its customers for keeping their electronic money in its accounts. Alternative Bank Schweiz (ABS) will begin imposing interest charges on deposits in 2016. Current accounts will get a -0.125-percent rate, and deposits over 100,000 Swiss francs ($98,650, 92,420 euros) will see a -0.75-percent penalty. ABS feels it has no choice: "This decision on negative rates is costing us a lot of money -- pretty much the equivalent of our entire annual profit last year," ABS chief Martin Rohner told AFP.

If the Swiss keep their savings in cash, however, they won't be hurt by negative interest rates.

But in Sweden, assuming that negative rates spread into their consumer banking sector, Swedes will be forced to spend their money on assets that maintain their value — thus fuelling the inflation the central bank there so desperately needs. That's a problem because, despite anemic economic growth, bits of Sweden already look like they're in a high debt/asset bubble, according to HSBC.

Fears about negative interest rates "have so far proved unfounded."

The Swiss don't think they're in that bubble. The SNB's Maechler told The Local:

“Fears that the negative interest rate could contribute to imbalances on the mortgage and real estate markets have so far proved unfounded,” she said.

Economic conditions remain “challenging” in Switzerland with GDP likely to grow by around one percent this year, Maechler said.

Negative inflation — to average about minus 1.1 percent this year — should level out next year and should move into “positive territory” by 2017.

Oh, and there is one other wrinkle. The European Central Bank is still trying to spur economic growth in Southern Europe, so it is keeping interest rates really low. It already has a technical negative rate for banks, and if it wants to flush more cash out of the banks and into the economy it may go even more negative. That would put further downward pressure on the Swiss to go even more negative.

The dollar may end the war on cash.

So there may only be one way out of this spiral: America!

Virtually all economists in Europe are hoping that the US Federal Reserve will raise its interest rates thus making the European currencies look cheap by comparison. That ought to have the nice effect of spurring European exports and generally inflating our economies.

In that scenario, the Swedes win because it is a lot easier to end cash if people are happy to keep it in the bank where it earns positive interest.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: JAMES ALTUCHER: This is why owning a home is financial suicide

By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca 

Last week I wrote a piece about the importance, and more specifically, the must have attributes of Next Steps. Had questions around the topic, most were relating to what to do if one of the three attributes were not attained. At that point you have a choice, retrace and see how you can firm up the loose attribute, or, drop it and move on to the next prospect.

When I suggest the latter, people say “ho, I can’t do that.”

Why not?

The answer lies in the state of their pipeline, and in the case of those people who don’t want to drop it and move on, it is usually the anemic state of their pipeline. You can’t force people to give you a next step, some pundits may have some questionable techniques or tricks, but next steps have to be earned. Assuming you did everything you could to earn that next step, and they don’t want to come along, there is only one logical action, move on to the next prospect. The challenge is that some have so few real opportunities in their pipeline that they are afraid to drop one, one less opportunity, real or not, just becomes too depressing and real. So rather than dropping it, they go for another fix, another hit of hopium, and waste more time and effort try to resurrect a dead opportunity.

And there is the rub, sales people spend so much time trying to breathe life into the dead that they don’t get around to prospecting to generate sufficient number of opportunities, Yes Virginia, Sales in a Numbers Game.  if you had a bushel of apples and one was bad, would you care? But if you had two apples, hadn’t eaten in days, and one was bad, you’ll find a way to rationalize taking a bite.

The first option above, also has to be tempered. It does make sense to review with the prospect why they may be reluctant to commit. You may find you overlooked something, which can be easily resolved. You may find that while they agree in principle, yet not enough to initiate a process they don’t see making much of a difference. I would encourage you to summarize points you thought, based on your plan going in, would resonate with the buyer, especially if during the meeting they in fact did. Do this with the prospect, quick concise, closing off each point. Often this will get things back on track. But if not, drop it and move on.

Don’t forget, leads are recyclable, you can always go back. But if you hang on for dear life, you’re just going to waste time, emotion and piss off the prospect risking future opportunities. Better to move on and reenergize and get back on the winning track. Sometimes your personal next step needs to be stepping on to the next prospect.

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Tibor Shanto

Imagine this:

A world where the marketing landscape is constantly changing, and at a rapid pace too.

A world where Google makes over 500-600 updates to their algorithm in one year. A place where new social media sites/apps like Ello, This and Hyper are popping up all the time. And constant advances in marketing software make it possible for practically anyone to develop robust machine-learning-styled algorithms to market like the big boys, a la Amazon or Netflix.

This isn’t a scene that should take much effort to imagine, as this is the current state of the marketing world.

The emergence of the internet has transformed this formerly static industry into an ever-changing landscape that requires constant learning and education for marketers who wish to remain on the cutting edge.

Marketers are also aware of the pace of change. The 2015 State of Inbound reports one of the top common challenges that marketers noted that they faced this year was proper training for their team.

Does this sound familiar? There are many different types of marketing training available to improve your skill-set or the skill-set of your marketing team, and this article dives into one of the more popular methods of training – marketing courses.

Courses are a powerful method for learning. They are usually self-paced and on-demand, making them great if time is an important factor for you and your schedule.  They are often more inexpensive than their live-training counterpart. They can be consumed on the go, and they can easily be turned from a solo personal development activity to be a team development activity.

Fortunately, there has been an explosion in online marketing education in recent years. There are a wealth of different options, both free and paid, which makes selecting the right course quite simple. The following is a guide to help you make that decision.

Free Marketing Courses

1. Inbound Course and Certification

This free, big-picture overview of the world of inbound helps everyone from newcomers to veterans get a holistic view of the role that inbound marketing plays in today’s world.

The self-paced course is comprised of 12 different classes that span the Inbound Methodology. Marketers will learn the fundamentals of how to attract visitors, convert leads, close customers, and delight promoters.

• Taught by: HubSpot Academy
• Length/Time Investment: There are 12 classes that in total equal 4 hours and 25 minutes. If you wish to become certified, there is a 1 hour and 15 minutes exam.
• Format: On-demand video learning. Transcripts and slides are also available for download assist video learning.
• Supplemental Resources: There are additional reading resources, projects to apply your learnings, and a community to learn with/from.
• Certification: Yes.
• Other information:
  • They focus on engagement learning: The videos include quizzes throughout, featured experts in their field (think Rand Fishkin, Gary Vaynerchuck, Mark Roberge and more), and they focus on making them fun and relatable.
  • Want to see if what you’ve learned sunk in? They include post-video quizzes that allow you to see where your newfound knowledge stacks up.

Get started: http://academy.hubspot.com/inbound-certification

2. Introduction to Marketing on Coursera

Over the course of four weeks, you will learn about three major components of marketing including branding, customer-centricity, and go-to-market strategies.

• Taught by: Wharton Business School, University of Pennsylvania on Coursera
• Length/Time Investment: Five weeks, with one lecture released per week.
• Format: Weekly lectures. There are also readings, discussions, and quizzes that include hard deadlines that are all released on the same day. This type of cadence closely mimics the coursework we are accustomed to from our traditional college education. While many learners enjoy the slowed-down learning of weekly coursework, be sure you have set aside the time each week to dedicate to it.
• Supplemental Resources: They offer additional reading and required quizzes.
• Certification: Yes, sort of. While this individual course is free, it is also part of a four-part package titled, Business Foundations Specialization. With an extra fee of $595, you can earn a certificate upon completion of the four courses and a capstone project.
• Other information:
  • This best suits those who are interested in a closely mimicking a traditional type of education including a weekly rhythm, along with the lecture and teaching styles of well-known professors.
  • If you’re looking for some student reviews of the course, there are over 27 of them on Class Central.

Get started: https://www.coursera.org/learn/wharton-marketing

3. Marketing in a Digital World on Coursera

A highly relevant course for those interested in a career or interest in digital marketing. Over the course of four weeks, students will learn about digital tools and how they can help us develop new products, persuade customers to buy, distribute our products and price our products properly.

• Taught by: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on Coursera
• Length/Time Investment: 4 weeks, 6-8 hours/week
• Format: Weekly lectures. There are also readings, discussions, and quizzes that include hard deadlines that are all released on the same day.
• Supplemental Resources: There are additional reading resources, projects to apply your learnings, and a community to learn with/from.
• Support: Subtitles are available in English and Chinese
• Certification: Yes. Similar to the Introduction to Marketing course mentioned above, this course is part of a larger five-course curriculum. By completing five courses and a capstone project, you can earn a certificate for $474.
• Other information:
  • If you’re interested in seeing what the different students have said about their experience in the class, you can see some of the learner stories or testimonials readily available from the sample syllabus overview.

Get started: https://www.coursera.org/learn/marketing-digital
4. Digital Branding and Engagement

While the title of this class may not mention it directly, this course covers the fundamental shift in the way people purchase, connect, live online and how companies must move to a more inbound approach as well.

The course curriculum includes consumer change, content marketing, and the relationships between the different types of media (paid, earned and owned).

• Taught by: Sonia Dickinson on edX
• Format: This is a blended-learning format as each of the four modules consists of videos, readings, activities, and quizzes.
• Length/Time Investment: Four modules over the course of four weeks are provided. However, individuals have six weeks to complete the course.
• Supplemental Resources: There are interactive transcripts that scroll through while the videos play.
• Certification: While the course is free, there is a Verified Certificate available for an additional $49.
• Other information:
  • Read course reviews on CourseTalk here.

Get started: https://www.edx.org/course/digital-branding-engagement-curtinx-mkt1x

5. Google Online Challenge

As part of Google’s Online Marketing challenge, they’ve released a free digital marketing training.

Who better to help educate the future marketers of the world than a major player in the search engine space. Google does, after all, help provide a website with the majority of their organic search results online. Thus, they know a thing or two about how to create a great website that ranks well.

• Taught by: Google
• Format: All of the content is in video or article format, with a few learning activities applied to Google’s tool-set.
• Length/Time Investment: There are nine core topics to learn with varying amounts of videos, reading and activities each.
• Certification: The course is free. Upon completing the course, and the Google Online Marketing Challenge, they recommend taking the certification exams.
• Other information:
  • They offer pre-class preparation work which includes signing up for a Google account and learning about their business solutions.
  • There is supplemental material provided in the format of ‘Course Packs’. This supplementary material is optional and is for introductory, intermediate and advanced students.

Get started: https://www.google.com/onlinechallenge/dmc/index.html

Are you wondering if there will be extra insights from the search algorithm team that may be hard to find anywhere else online? Don’t bank on it. Google’s team structure ensures that their search quality team, aka the folks who create the incredibly complex algorithms that dictate how things rank, isn’t providing their secret formula to others outside of the team.
6. Diploma in Social Media Marketing Course via Alison

Alison was initially created back in 2007 in Galway, Ireland. It was inspired by Article 26 in the UN Declaration on Human Rights which says “Everyone has the right to education.” The mission of Alison is to create a world of free online certified learning.

Now eight years later, their online course catalog includes over 750 courses openly available. Classes vary from business skills to digital literacy to personal development and hobby-like courses such as yoga. In regards to marketing, they offer a diploma in internet marketing.

• Taught by: Alison
• Format: There are 11 modules which include multiple videos each. There are also additional reading opportunities and assessments.
• Length/Time Investment: Alison projects this class to take anywhere between 15 to 20 hours to complete.
• Certification: Yes, upon completion of the exam it can be purchased.
• Reviews: Currently has received 4 stars based on 1097 votes. See reviews here.
• Other information:
  • They offer pre-class preparation work which includes signing up for a Google account and learning about their business solutions.
  • There is supplemental material provided in the format of ‘Course Packs’. This supplementary material is optional and is for introductory, intermediate and advanced students.

Get started: https://alison.com/courses/Diploma-in-Internet-Marketing
7. Content Marketing Course

There are 52 resources that cover all different areas of content marketing and when completed, you’ll be a content marketing expert. It covers all the ins and outs of content in nine different sections including content essentials, strategy, idea creation, content creation, promoting, auditing, and more.

• Taught by: Copyblogger
• Format: 52 articles.
• Length/Time Investment: While the content isn’t intended to be read all at once, if you decided to go that route they said it would take about seven hours over the course of three days.
• Certification: No.
• Other information:
  • This is a great source of content to have a team member that you lead read each week before you meet them for a one-on-one. Use them as a conversation starter and see where it goes.

Get started: http://www.copyblogger.com/content-marketing-codex/
8. Intro to Analytics

As part of the newly launched Analytics Academy, Intro to Analytics is a series of seven lessons that are sent to your email inbox each week.

Their current live course is “Intro to Analytics” providers learners with everything they need to know about analytics including how someone should think about analytics, how to choose metrics to measure, selecting the right tools from the 2,000+ that exist, and how to decide when to up the ante with SQL.

• Taught by: Segment
• Format: Article format sent to your inbox.
• Length/Time Investment: Each of the seven lessons takes about 20-30 minutes to read, totaling about 3 to 4 hours total.
• Certification: No.
• Other information:
  • It is comprehensive, in a good way.

Get started: https://segment.com/academy/intro/

9. Social Media Education

Hootsuite’s social media course and certification are composed of six classes that cover beginner topics such as the fundamentals and optimizing social profiles to more intermediate topics such as community growth and social advertising basics.

• Taught by: HootSuite
• Format: On-demand video learning, including quizzes and downloadable materials.
• Length/Time Investment: Six modules that you work through at your own pace. If you’re a social media expert, you could breeze through the first modules by testing-out of them via their quizzes.
• Certification: Yes, for purchase.
• Other information:
  • They provide you with pre-class quizzes for you to identify which information you can skip or may need to review. If you perform well enough, they’ll encourage you to skip ahead to the next class. That’s great news, especially for a learner that strapped for time.

Get started: https://hootsuite.com/pages/education
10. How to start a startup

This robust startup-focused course is the least typical of all the others mentioned here. The curriculum is comprehensive and is taught mostly by well-known thought leaders in their respective space.

• Taught by: Sam Altman & colleague
• Format: Video lectures
• Length/Time Investment: 20 video lectures, at about 50 minutes each, equalling just under 17 hours to complete.
• Certification: No.
• Other information:
  • Learners have the chance to learn about management from Ben Horowitz, being a founder from Reid Hoffman and sales and marketing from team members at Y Combinator.
  • While there might not be a sexy method to track your progress through the videos, or any quizzes to test your knowledge nor is there a final exam – the content is strong ideal for a dedicated learner wanted to learn about the different elements in starting a startup.

Get started: http://startupclass.samaltman.com

While this isn’t strictly marketing focused, most successful marketers know that marketing doesn’t live in a vacuum. To be a great marketer, you have to understand how this one puzzle piece fits into the overall company strategy. Marketers are often the first touch to a potential buyer, and so understanding – and helping to create – the company’s buyer personas, product, culture are critical components to success.

Paid Marketing Courses

11. Online Marketing Institute

Online marketing institute is a fantastic way to take one-off classes for topics that you’d like to learn more about. A quick search on their website on “social media” and you’ll see that they over 90 video classes, five for email marketing and four for web analytics and testing and so on.

• Taught by: Different experts.
• Format: On-demand video learning
• Length/Time Investment: Depends on if you’re taking one-off classes, versus going through one of their certification course curricula.
• Certifications: Yes.
• Price: You can pay either $27, $47 or $97 a month depending on your package preference. There is also a free trial for fourteen days if you want to test drive the material first.

Get started: http://www.onlinemarketinginstitute.org

12. Content Marketing Boot Camp

The American Marketing Association is one of the more well-known resources in marketing education and training, the American Marketing Association has over 30,000 members (as of 2012). Since merging with another successful marketing association in 1937, they’ve made their mark on the industry by consistently creating high-quality training.

In this course, you’ll learn all about the common phrase, “content is king.” Topics such as SEO, content creation and repurposing, positioning, management and how to use content to further sell online will be covered.

• Taught by: American Marketing Association (AMA)
• Format: Online learning.
• Length/Time Investment: The three online classes are held online, one per week, with three hours each week dedicated to in-class time.
• Certifications: No.
• Price: $1,295.

Get started: http://www.amanet.org/training/seminars/live-online/Content-Marketing-Boot-Camp.aspx

13. High-Impact Email Marketing

With email continuing to be one of the best producers of strong ROI, marketers know that email isn’t going anywhere. After all, your email is one of the main ways in which you’ll continue to connect with your leads and keep your company top-of-mind.

You can expect to learn what a strong email marketing program looks like, how to establish your strategy, and how to create strong email campaigns to better track progress and ROI.

• Taught by: American Marketing Association (AMA)
• Format: Online learning.
• Length/Time Investment: The three online classes are held online in one week, with three hours each week dedicated to in-class time. You can download their course info packet here.
• Certifications: No.
• Price: $1,295 for members and non-members alike.

Get started: http://www.amanet.org/training/seminars/live-online/High-Impact-Email-Marketing.aspx
14. Improve Your Analytical Skills: Making Information Work for You

The number one problem marketers reported two years in a row within the State of Inbound 2015 was determining the ROI of their marketing efforts. With everything being online nowadays, understanding the impact of your marketing actions should be easier than ever. This is also a skill that is required nowadays to ensure your continued success.

The curriculum is comprehensive and will cover everything one would like to know about data such as identifying the skill-set for a marketer, planning your approach to a business, using techniques for problem solving/decision making and then putting it all together. As with the other AMA classes, the four online classes are held online, once per week, with three hours each week dedicated to in-class time.

• Taught by: American Marketing Association (AMA)
• Format: Online learning.
• Length/Time Investment: The four online classes are held online one class per week, for three hours per class.
• Certifications: No but they do offer class credit equal to 1.2 CEU/12 PDU/14 CPE or 12 CPU
• Price: $1,995 for non-members, and $1795 for AMA members.

Get started: http://www.amanet.org/training/seminars/live-online/Improve-Your-Analytical-Skills-Making-Information-Work-for-You.aspx

15. Marketing for Non-Marketers

The title of the course says it all. While this course isn’t for current marketers, it is for those who are interested in understanding the value of marketing, how marketing decisions are made, and those interested in learning the fundamentals for a potential career change.

• Taught by: University of British Columbia on edX
• Format: The course is comprised of videos, reading, case studies and discussions
• Length/Time Investment: It lasts about six weeks with a suggested time commitment of three to four hours/week
• Certifications: No.
• Reviews: Yes. View class reviews here.
• Price: $295

Get started: https://www.edx.org/course/marketing-non-marketers-ubcx-marketing5501x

16. Online Marketing Crash Course on Udemy

This 13-lecture course has emerged to help inspire and educate some small businesses and bloggers who looking for more traffic, leads and customers online.

You will learn SEO, how to write blog posts, marketing automation, building a WordPress website, and more. The course comes with a Quick Action plan you can implement, and asks that learners set aside one hour per day to execute the different tasks in the plan.

• Taught by: Aaron N. Fletcher on Udemy
• Format: The course is comprised of videos and has discussion threads and note-taking capability within the sidebar while watching.
• Length/Time Investment: There are 13 different videos accumulating to four hours in content.
• Certifications: No.
• Reviews: Yes. A little more than 50 people have provided ratings, and it maintains a rating of 4.7 out of five. View class reviews here.
• Price: $297 dollars and includes a 30-day money back guarantee.

Get started: https://www.udemy.com/online-marketing-crash-course/

Have you taken any of the courses or programs mentioned above? What did you think about it? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Building a sales pipeline is instrumental to a company’s longevity. When the sales leads dry up no one wants to go fishing without any bait.

That’s why prospecting is an important component to a healthy sales pipeline. Prospecting comes in many forms: email, social media and cold calling. All of which to be honest isn’t the most fun activity for a sales or marketing professional.

Prospecting is the best! Said no one ever.

To help get over the hump of putting that fishing line in the water, here are 3 sales emails you can use the next time you are out there fishing.

Example Email #1 – That Doesn’t Suck

Have a little bit of fun with it.

I have found the best way to break the ice with prospects is through humor. Humor in a sales email is often effective because it catches the reader off guard. Imagine opening what you think may be another boring sales pitch to discover that it’s actually entertaining.

Sales emails with a touch of humor have a time and place, just know your audience and you will be fine.

Example Email #2 – That Doesn’t Suck

Let’s be honest for a moment.

What does your product do that other products on the market don’t? How can it help your prospects accomplish their goals or meet their deadlines?

Let’s talk about you, you, and you vs. me, me, and me.

I can’t tell you how many times I have received sales emails that are about what the product does, features and benefits, and that’s when I tune out…

Switch the conversation to them, the more specific the better.

Paper plates made with rice folks. I don’t think that’s really a thing or that it would save a manufacturer any money. However, you get my drift.

Example Email #3 – That Doesn’t Suck

The closer. As in the sales email and not the TV show.

Top performing sales professionals know that they need to ask for the sale. Closing is arguably the hardest part of a sales transaction. This is because the human brain has to make an unequivocal decision, do I say “yes” or “no”.

C’mon now make a decision either my product or service is a fit for you or it isn’t! The internal dialogue of many sales professionals.

Prospecting is all about assumptions. You are assuming the person you are prospecting to is your ideal target market. They may (and should) fit some defined criteria: job title, industry, vertical, or company size.

There are variables in this equation though: the prospect isn’t the right person to speak with inside the company, the company doesn’t have a budget for your product or service or they just aren’t interested because it doesn’t fit their sales or marketing goals.

Basically asking is the best method to qualify.

You may not always get a reply. However, asking a qualifying question vs. jumping into a sales pitch is better time spent prospecting.

These are my top 3 favorite sales emails that we use often at ProspectNinja, and it’s not because I have a personal affection for them, it’s because they work. Try them out for yourself and let me know.

They don’t call it Black Friday for nothin’.

This year’s holiday sales are projected to trend four percent higher than last year, according to the latest retail holiday sales forecast from Deloitte. That means there could be as much as $965 billion—that’s ‘billion’ with a ‘b’—spent on shopping between November and January.

So, how’s that holiday appetite? As a retailer, what can you do to take advantage of this seasonal surge and put your books back in the black?

The answer: strategy. Having a strategic sales plan in place before the holidays roll around will enable you to be a top retail player. And it’s why we created these four holiday sales tips to make sure you’re seeing more green than red this holiday season.

Tip #1: Make sure time is on your side.

Holiday messaging before Halloween can spook customers. (Nobody wants to kiss a skeleton under the mistletoe.)

According to Outbrain’s recent holiday content study, most marketers deliver their holiday content during the first half of November, but consumers’ interaction with it doesn’t peak until late November and early December.

Slow down your holiday messaging and use the time leading up to peak season to create a targeted, well-timed plan for the actual holiday rush.

Tip #2: Don’t discount mobile.

Everywhere you look, it’s easy to spot people staring at their phones. But, believe it or not, texting isn’t the only thing causing this phenomenon.

Many shoppers have moved to mobile, making it more important than ever during the holiday season. In a study by Synchrony Financial, 45 percent of all respondents said they used a mobile device to perform a shopping-related task (think researching, sharing, purchasing, or reviewing) in 2015. And there are a growing number of mobile-only shoppers, too: 13 percent of internet users now access retail destinations, whether their sites or apps, using only mobile devices to do so (source: comScore).

With this in mind, make sure your mobile site is easy to find and easy to use. If shoppers encounter a site that’s poorly designed or takes too long to load, you’re going to lose sales.

Tip #3: Use showrooming to your advantage.

‘What’s your web address?’ ‘Can I get Wi-Fi in here?’ ‘Do you have an app?’

You’ve likely heard at least one of these questions before.

Showrooming is huge during the holiday season. According to one report, 75 percent of shoppers use their mobile phone while in the store, with 25 percent of those patrons actually using a mobile device to make a purchase while they’re there.

The good news? Apps win with showroomers. 55 percent of shoppers who responded to Cisco’s fifth annual retail survey said they’ll use a retailer’s app while shopping, and 34 percent claimed to use a third-party app for the same purpose. If you want to provide a convenient and efficient shopping experience that gives you the ability to deliver special offers as customers walk in the store, get in on the app action.

Tip #4: Simplify buying.

Listen, if your unflappable Uncle Larry is stressed out during the holidays, you’d better believe many of your customers are. Is it the hustle? The bustle? The visions of dancing sugar plums? Whatever it is, calm their minds and help them out by making buying extra easy, whenever and wherever the urge strikes.

Employing methods like promotional email offers or just simply giving your employees extra product training will make the holiday purchase process much easier for your customers. In fact, they’re already telling you as much: Outbrain found headlines related to shopping had a 21 percent higher click-through rate than other holiday content. And, let’s face it: a little more product knowledge never hurt anyone. (Your employees are probably stressed too).

Think your business could benefit from these strategies? Share them with your team!

Personal trainers, fresh vegetables, and gym memberships all cost money. Not everyone can afford such luxuries. It’s one reason why being poor is too expensive —a crappy diet and sedentary lifestyle costs more down the line. Don’t worry: While fitness comes at a price, it’s not one you have to pay out of your wallet.

Read more...

There’s already a lot of evidence that coffee is good for certain aspects of your health , but a recent 30-year long study suggests it may actually help you avoid a premature death.

Read more...

It was a year of tunnels and legendary bat flips. It was the year of “manspreading” and “ghosting,” of selfie stick backlash, and that damn dress (for the record, it was blue-and-black!). It was a year in which shame got its 15 minutes of fame, from Ashley Madison to the return of Monica Lewinsky. In North America, it was a year of one election and the ramping-up to another—and two big-name candidates with remarkable hair. On the world stage, it was a year of drama, tragedy—and heroism.

Maclean’s was there through it all, and in our (New and Improved!) annual Newsmakers issue, our writers and columnists take a fond—and opinionated—look back at the year that was. We bring you the people behind the year’s highlights and lowlights:

• Paul Wells on the Maclean’s 2015 Newsmaker of the Year
• Profiles of the year’s biggest newsmakers in entertainment, politics, sports, business and more, by Anne Kingston, Charlie Gillis, Jonathon Gatehouse, Chris Sorensen, Nicholas Köhler and more
• The inimitable Scott Feschuk on how 2015’s biggest Newsmakers would make a sandwich
• Jaime J. Weinman, Brian Bethune, Adrian Lee, Kate Lunau and others spout off on the best and worst moments in TV, movies, books, music, art and science

PLUS:

• The first-ever Maclean’s year-end politics crossword
• A special economy-themed edition of Snakes and Ladders—play along!
• The year’s most surreal moments in real estate.
• The “it” trend on the red carpet, in which nothing is the new something
• An homage to the most controversial tech tool of the year
• The year in hashtags

The 2015 Maclean’s Newsmakers Issue. Now available on tablet and mobile readers on our brand-new Maclean’s app, on Texture by Next Issue, Apple Newsstand and Google Play, and newsstands everywhere.

The post A peek at Maclean’s 2015 Newsmakers issue appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Accountability is something everyone needs every now and then. Whether you’re holding yourself accountable in your sales calls, by backing up your pitch with facts and metrics, or you’re holding prospects accountable in the appointment setting process — every stage requires a measure of accountability to keep the process genuine and productive. In this sales tips video, SalesLoft Account Executives Chris Smith and Taylor Thompson share how they hold true to this advice.

Chris is an infamous (Ginger) storyteller in his sales conversations — constantly giving prospects a memorable experience and positive takeaways from his sales pitches. But the best thing he incorporates in his stories are numbers. Numbers are key to backing up what you have to say to prospects, so that when it gets down to brass tax, you have real metrics and evidence to fall back on. When you’re selling to sales people, it’s easy for prospects to see through the “salesly” fluff. But when you have actual numbers behind your stories, you’re going to make a bigger impact.

Taylor’s advice rings true in so many Sales Development Rep’s day to day conversations with prospects. “Just send me some information later,” is a common phrase used by prospects that basically means: “I just want to get off the phone.” Hold them accountable and don’t let them off that easy. Ask them what kind of information they’d like for you to email them. Case studies? Pricing packages? Feature information? And then follow up with a set appointment to go over said information. If the prospect is truly just trying to get you off the phone, asking these kinds of questions will save both parties time, without the procrastination of “just sending info.”

—

We hope you are enjoying these sales tips from some of our veterans here at SalesLoft. Feel free to reach out to us directly or comment below if you have any feedback on our tips — or if you have any of your own that you’d like to share. We’d love to be your platform for sales development advice!

The post Hold Yourself (and your Prospects) Accountable, A Sales Tips Video appeared first on SalesLoft.

There’s a fine line between online persuasion and manipulation.

In university, most classes, at least in the humanities and social sciences, dealt at least in partial with the morality of the lessons we learned. Especially in marketing and communications classes, there was the line between persuasion and propaganda.

Online, though, for whatever reasons, ethics aren’t discussed as frequently. Of course, we’re all in the business of persuasion, at least to the extent that we’d like people to buy our products. Nir Eyal put it well a while back:

“We build products meant to persuade people to do what we want them to do. We call these people “users” and even if we don’t say it aloud, we secretly wish every one of them would become fiendishly addicted.”

But, in the end, what differentiates persuasion from its more evil cousin?

The Facebook Controversy: A Contemplation of Ethics

Not that ethics in experimentation has ever been very clear cut, but the internet has made things even weirder.

We all (hopefully) remember the Facebook scandal, where Facebook manipulated the content seen by more than 600,000 users in an attempt to see if they could affect their emotional state. They basically skewed the number of positive or negative items on random users’ news feeds and then analyzed these people’s future postings. The result? Facebook can manipulate your emotions.

Image Source

As AV Club put it, “Result: They can! Which is great news for Facebook data scientists hoping to prove a point about modern psychology. It’s less great for the people having their emotions secretly manipulated.”

The publication of these results, of course, led to massive blowback. Though people signed off their permission for Facebook to do such a thing, it still came as a shock that they would test something like emotional manipulation on such a massive level. As such, it became one of the most salient discussions in online manipulation in recent memory.

What is “Skinner Box Marketing”?

You remember B.F. Skinner from psychology 101? He conducted all sorts of messed up studies around ‘operant conditioning‘. Well there are a few voices claiming that we’re entering a new age of Digital Skinner Box Marketing. According to The Atlantic, it’s essentially…

We’re entering the age of Skinnerian Marketing. Future applications making use of big data, location, maps, tracking of a browser’s interests, and data streams coming from mobile and wearable devices, promise to usher in the era of unprecedented power in the hands of marketers, who are no longer merely appealing to our innate desires, but programming our behaviors.

Joseph Bentzel broke the process down into three broad pillars..

Three Pillars of Skinner Box Marketing:

1. Emotional manipulation as ‘strategy’

Accoriding to Bentzel, “the emotional manipulation is always and often rationalized under the flag of ‘serving the customer’.”

2. The new ‘chief marketing technologist’ as that ‘man behind the strategy curtain’.

Bentzel:

“On the surface the ‘chief marketing technologist’ looks like strategic marketing progress in the digital age. But when you combine these powerful technologies with emotional manipulation as strategy—-you’re getting pretty close to something more than a few folks see as unethical.”

3. The ‘big data scientist’ as ‘skinner box management’ provider.

You need big data to fuel these insights. Therefore, Bentzel lists this as the third pillar of Skinner Box Marketing:

“And not just any big data but the kind of big data that provides a 360 degree surround-sound view of the specimen in the digital skinner box, aka the consumer. The big data component of the skinner box data management model is now on the agenda at the big analyst firms. They call it ‘customer context’.”

Digital Market Manipulation

The ascension of Skinner Box Marketing on the internet is backed by an academic concept Digital Market Manipulation.

Market Manipulation, the original theory, supplements and challenges law and economics with the extensive evidence that people do not always behave rationally in their best interest as traditional economic models. Rather, to borrow a phrase from Dan Ariely, humans are “predictably irrational.”

Digital Marketing Manipulation builds onto this theory, focusing on the dramatic capabilities of the digitization of commerce to increase the ability of firms to influence consumers at a personal level.

In other words, M. Ryan Calo posits that emerging technologies and techniques will increasingly allow companies to exploit consumers’ irrationality or vulnerability. Essentially, the internet makes it that much easier to exploit emotions on a personal level and manipulate actions.

Anyway, all of this is to say that companies can and have been manipulating consumers in a variety of ways. On the internet, these are most often referred to as “dark pattens.”

Dark Patterns, Reintroduced

You’ve almost assuredly heard of ‘dark patterns’:

“Normally when you think of “bad design”, you think of the creator as being sloppy or lazy but with no ill intent. This type of bad design is known as a “UI anti-pattern”. Dark Patterns are different – they are not mistakes, they are carefully crafted with a solid understanding of human psychology, and they do not have the user’s interests in mind. We as designers, founders, UX & UI professionals and creators need to take a stance against Dark Patterns.”

The holy grail of dark patterns examples is at darkpatterns.org. Check that out. They list 14 categories of dark patterns:

1. Bait and Switch
2. Disguised Ads
3. Faraway Bill
4. Forced Continuity
5. Forced Disclosure
6. Friend Spam
7. Hidden Costs
8. Misdirection
9. Price Comparison Prevention
10. Privacy Zuckering
11. Roach Motel
12. Road Block
13. Sneak in the Basket
14. Trick Questions

Flip around the site and check out some of their examples. I know you’ll recognize these techniques and probably be able to find tons more examples..

Example: Google’s Disguised Ads

As the SEO Doctor pointed out, even Google isn’t always so righteous in their practices. He gave two examples of their (possible) dark pattern of disguising ads.

Though I think the first one may be a bit exaggerated, the article gives the example of the deceptive background color of Google’s sponsored links. For example…

Image Source

The second example I thought was a little more legitimate, because, well, I’ve definitely fallen for it many times.

SEO Doctor draws attention to the arrow box on adwords – you know, when you’re on a blog and there’s a button that looks as if it will send you to the next page. But, no. It’s a subtle ad.

Image Source

Blackhat Copywriting

Challenges of ethics are not new in advertising. Read any advertising history book to see the messed up tactics they’d use to manipulate readers. But, of course, manipulative copywriting still exists on the internet (and it’s probably easier to get away with it, too).

Instead of scouring the internet for bogus claims (of which there are many – check some out here), here are three very specific, and not often talked about, copywriting manipulations:

1. Testiphonials
2. False Scarcity
3. The Damning Admission

Testiphonials

You know not all testimonials are legit, right?

Of course they aren’t. Testimonials work more often than not in A/B tests (at least the trustworthy ones), but they’re not all done ethically. Take this one for example, where a company pulled a quote from a ConversionXL article to get a fake testimonial from Peep:

Testimonials, when authentic or perceived to be authentic, boost the credibility of your offer by engaging social proof. It’s more common than you’d think for companies to fake or embellish testimonials. Keep an eye out for that.

False Scarcity

False scarcity is a pretty common tactic in online marketing. It’s also infuriating, and it can obviously backfire if the consumer catches onto it.

Peep wrote about this a while ago, giving the example of the following email he received:

Normally scarcity works (a pillar of Cialdini’s 6 persuasion principles), but when it’s deliberately forced like this? It screams sleazy. The email was referring to a digital course that, somehow, had sold out of monthly pay as you go levels, but still had yearly memberships available. Funny how that works.

The Damning Admission

This one is pretty common in infomarketing, but it’s been applied to more than just that field.

Basically, the damning admission is designed to lower the guard of the consumer and make your offer seems more authentic and credible. Here’s how White Hat Crew described it:

“Just before making a claim that you want people to believe, you admit something negative about your product. By demonstrating your willingness to show your product in it’s true light, you gain credibility, and the prospect is more likely to believe your positive claim.

Of course, this technique can be used either to shine a more perfect light on the truth (to help people accept a true but exceptional claim that would usually be received with skepticism), or to manipulate (to trick people into accepting a false claim).

Your intent may guide your decision to use the technique or not, but it’s the truth or falsehood of the claim that determines whether it’s persuasive or manipulative.”

As implied by the above quote, the damning admission isn’t always unethical. Heck, most of the time it’s an example of truly and authentically describing your product. But when one employs the strategy in order to legitimize a false claim that follows, it’s an example of blackhat copywriting.

The Power of Defaults

The power of defaults? That’s something Jakob Nielsen wrote about about a decade ago in relation to search engines. Turns out, users almost always pick the top option (even when the top 1 and 2 switch places). This leads to the idea that users overwhelmingly choose the default option in online decision making. Of course, many companies exploit this.

An example of this online comes from none other than RyanAir (via darkpatterns.org). They offer travel insurance but the free option to decline it.

Not only do you have to look in a list called ‘Insurance – country of residence’, but the free option, ‘Don’t insure me’, distinguished at all for easy access. They’ve placed it alphabetically between Denmark and Finland.

Negative Option features

The power of defaults can be positive, but negatively embodied the tactic becomes known as ‘negative option features.’

These negative option features have been written about extensively by the BBB, Visa, and many others interested in deterring online deception. Here’s Visa’s description of a negative option feature:

“Consumers accept an offer online, often for a “free trial” or “sample.” They provide their card information in order to pay a small amount for shipping. What they may not realize is that there is a pre-checked box at the bottom of the page in fine print or buried in the terms and conditions that authorizes future charges. Consumers are required to un-click or opt-out of a pre-checked terms and conditions or payment authorization box or cancel before the end of the trial period to avoid being billed a recurring monthly charge.

For free trials with a negative option feature, a company takes a consumer’s failure to cancel as permission to continue billing. Cancelling can also be complicated by merchants with poor customer service, slow response times, and untimely refunds.”

Tricking You Out of Tips

For one last real world example, picture yourself purchasing a large latte at your local coffee shop.

When you go to pay, it’s now almost always done on an Ipad. According to Nir Eyal, “digital payment systems use subtle tactics to increase tips, and while it’s certainly good for hard-working service workers, it may not be so good for your wallet.”

Research from Software Advice backs this up. They found that digital point-of-sale terminals, like the one at your coffee shop, increase the frequency and amount of tips left by customers. But how?

Again, the power of defaults.

First, by removing physical cash from the equation, they remove many barriers to tipping. For example, what Dan Ariely coined as the Pain of Paying – that’s no longer applicable. Also, leaving a tip on the digital system is easy – equally as easy as it is not to tip. Here’s how Nir Eyal put it:

Nir Eyal:

“When cash was king, anyone not wanting to give a tip could easily leave the money and dash. “Whoops, my bad!” However, with a digital payment system the transaction isn’t complete until the buyer makes an explicit tipping choice. Clicking on the “No Tip” button is suddenly its own decision. This additional step makes all the difference to those who may have previously avoided taking care of their server.”

Another way they increase our tip amounts is by anchoring. At a coffee shop it may be the worst, because you’re likely to purchase less than a $4 cup of coffee. The three options you’re usually presented for a tip on the screen are $1, $2, and $3 (and a custom amount).

Because of the anchoring effect, we’re drawn to pick the middle option, even though that’s a large amount more than the suggested tip percentage. Nir Eyal gave an example of his taxi ride to explain this:

Nir Eyal:

The vendor knows you likely won’t pick the least expensive amount — only cheapskates would do that. So even though 15 percent is squarely within the normal tipping range, by making it the first option, you’re more likely to chose 20 percent. Picking the middle-of-the-road option is in-line with your self-image of not being a tightwad. Therefore, you tip more and you’re not alone. The New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission reported tips increased from 10 percent to 22 percent on average when the new payment screens were turned on.

Note: this isn’t an example of online manipulation, but rather an illustration of the power of defaults. If anchoring and defaults make it easy to increase physical tips, then think about this example next time you’re confronted with a pricing decision online.

Conclusion: The Blurred Line of Right or Wrong

So online manipulation exists, clearly. What, then, do we do about it?

A common answer might very well be: “Caveat Emptor (let the buyer beware).”

That, however, places a lot of responsibility on the irrational side of the consumer’s mind. That’s where knowledge (via articles like this and archives like darkpatterns.org) comes in handy; if you can detect deception, you’re more likely to avoid it.

Then there’s the question of the difference between manipulation and marketing, which I never really answered. That’s a tough question for anyone to answer. I like Roger Dooley’s answer to it, though:

Roger Dooley:

“My response to the “manipulation” question is always, “If you are being honest, and if you are helping the customer get to a better place, it’s not manipulation and it’s not unethical.”

In today’s age of enforced transparency for business, manipulative tactics that deceive the customer simply won’t work. They will be quickly exposed and, with consumer voices amplified by social media, cause far more damage to the business than any short-term benefit.”

There are certain tactics here that are used prevalently, by large companies, but are by a large majority viewed as unethical. Therefore, dark patterns and online manipulation is a complex ethical decision, one that hinges on the balance between doing what’s right and doing what’s effective.

What are your strengths as a leader? Possibly communication, collaboration or guidance. Few leaders have just one strength. Their skills are a mixture of strengths that allow them to be the coaches, guides, managers they are. This article suggests that some managers might be “one-pitch” leaders, meaning they rely solely on one asset. While baseball pitchers might depend on only one specific pitch, managers simply can’t use one single leadership skill or style to guide their team. Let’s look at the theory behind these “one-pitch” managers…

Article’s opinion Vitru’s opinion

You don’t like coming out of your comfort zone. Let’s be honest, who likes breaking out of their comfort zone? Some people have an easier time than others taking on tasks, projects or situations that push them beyond their boundaries. You have over-relied on a set of leadership behaviors that are not too different from each other and were greatly rewarded for this approach. One set of interrelated traits doesn’t deem you a poor leader, nor does this equate to a limiting leadership style. You greatly over value one aspect of leadership and strongly undervalue the opposite behavior. You can’t value a set of your own skills more than the next. They are key facets of your personality.

The article then goes on to describe how you can fix these personality traits. You can’t. They are parts of your personality that, while you do need to understand, you shouldn’t have to change. These recommendations include everything from a deepened evaluation of a 360-degree performance review to change based on the opinions of other people to balancing potentially poor leadership or even abrasive behavior.

Change the Delivery

You can change, however, the way you present these leadership skills and traits. Unfortunately, only half of employees believe their managers are open and up-front with them. You don’t need to have a specific management style to be somewhat transparent with your team. Your strengths don’t make you “lopsided” as the article suggests – everyone has strengths and weaknesses and these weaknesses are refined with the variance in skills of your team.

The human side of your organization is what leads to the success of your team, so what’s important to be aware of is the delivery of your leadership style depending on their communication preferences. With an employee personality assessment like Vitru, you’ll be able to determine how your team connects and works together so you can pinpoint the best way to interface with your employees. Why is strategic communication with your team so important? Because it increases engagement:

“… Engagement is highest among employees who have some form (face-to-face, phone or digital) of daily communication with their managers. Managers who use a combination of face-to-face, phone and electronic communication are the most successful in engaging employees.”

Targeted communication, not leadership style, is essential in connecting with and engaging your employees so you can form better teams. How you interact with your team should be based on how they best receive information, not necessarily how you give it.

Your skills as a leader, even if they are single-surfaced, are who you are as a leader. You can grow and develop in other traits, but ultimately they are the foundation of your leadership style. You can’t change your personality traits to fit those around you, but you can however, change the delivery of your communication. Target your communication to fit the needs of the team so to engage them in their work and with the team. With an employee assessment tool that combines work traits with personality markers, ahem, like Vitru, you can discover employee values in the workplace so you’re able to communicate on a deeper level. A “one-pitch” manager isn’t always a poor leader.

The post How The Best Leaders Use Dynamic Coaching Styles appeared first on Vitru.

As the world moves into cities, our apartments are increasingly getting smaller.

But our hearts are only getting bigger.

With that in mind, here are eight amazing gifts for the studio dweller in your life.

Get a lamp to custom-fit.

People who live well in small spaces have everything set up just right. 

But it's difficult to find the right lamp for that corner, that table, that desk. 

That's why the Giàcolu lamp from Italian designer Giampaolo Allocco is so genius. Like an erector set, your apartment dweller can fasten (and refasten) the lamp together themselves, ensuring the perfect fit.

Get it for $560 from Lights of Venice. 

If there's a window, there could be a garden.

With Windowfarms, studio apartments finally have room for green thumbs. 

As the name implies, Windowfarms is a hydroponic system where four vertically hanging pots host arugala, basil, or other greens.  A monthly subscription service keeps the freshness coming — with no counter space needed.

It's $179.95 for the entry-level starter kit. 

Two words: vertical storage.

Interior design ninjas know it's about much value out of vertical space as possible. 

So instead of hanging up towels — or tomorrows — in the closet or over a chair, the small but mighty GRUNDTAL towel holder from Ikea gives that special someone an assist.

It's a product they can hang their hat on. Literally.

Grab it for a mere $14.99. 

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

You may think arming yourself with facts and data will help you convert prospects into customers, but it’s more important that prospects believe you truly understand their business, the industry, the company, the LOB’s and the Individuals within the organization. This issue comes up time and time again in our interviews with clients, they want their solution provider to understand their business.

This is hardly surprising, since you can’t add value without having a clear picture of the business and the client’s position in the industry. Once you understand their business you can better understand the core business issue. The three critical components that drive the sale:

1. Demonstrating that you truly understand what their business issue is, and how it negatively impacts the company’s performance (current state)
2. Knowing what their desired outcome will be, and how that will improve their overall success (future state)
3. Knowing the prospects “measurements for success” (not yours)

Understanding and clearly articulating these three key decision criteria with your prospect enables the “why buy”. The ROI is strictly “how” they will buy your solution, which is the “what” they will buy.

People buy based on emotion and justify with fact. You may resist this statement. You may want to shout – but the truth (truth that will help your business grow) is – your client rationalizes the purchase base on facts (ROI), but they make decisions based on emotion or feelings (can you eliminate my business problem and meet my measurement for success?).

The single biggest motivator in buying is not data, nor is it facts; it’s emotional response. Humans buy when they feel comfortable, when they feel they can trust you, when the process feels natural and reassuring, and when they come to believe that buying will make them feel good.

To succeed in selling, you’ve got to speak to the need your customer feels. There are a lot of good reasons, not to mention the entire history of successful selling, to back this up. As you can see from the DDI (Development Dimensions International) study below, ROI analysis is dead last in terms of what the client is looking for. In part, this is true because the ROI analysis is almost always slanted to the supplier’s point of view.

Of course, people have both logical and emotional buying motives. Some recent consumer surveys show that 20 percent of the decision to make a purchase is logical and 80 percent is emotional. What is logic? It’s reason supported by facts. What is emotion? It is a feeling that leads us to act and react.

So, what is more important when persuading people – facts or emotion? We don’t mean to imply that customers never want cold, hard facts. Of course they do. You should always have them prepared and available, and you should present them when the time is right. But it is not facts that convince customers to go with your company. It’s emotion – do I feel you can you solve my problem?

Customers need to feel that you really understand their business issue and how it is negatively impacting their organization. They also need to feel that you will deliver their desired outcome and that you will meet their measurement for success. That measurement may not be the traditional business case ROI but rather what they have established as success. They will then use the ROI facts to “pay for” or rationalize purchasing the solution.

Consumers with high incomes are increasingly making their purchases online. And contrary to popular belief, discount sites like Amazon are very popular among wealthy households.

• 83% of consumers who live in households earning $500,000 or more say "Amazon is better than other stores," according to a 2015 survey conducted by Shulman Research Center. 

Wealthy consumers' preference for Amazon suggests that they place a high value on convenience — an area that Amazon is competing heavily in by offering services like one-hour delivery, online grocery ordering, and product refills. Moreover, the appeal of a good deal cuts across incomes.

In a new report from BI Intelligence, we look at the habits of online shoppers across all incomes and assess how this behavior is driving growth in e-commerce. We also break down the demographics of US online shoppers by age, gender, and education, and take a look at what they're shopping for, and how their behaviors differ. 

 

Here are some of the key takeaways:

• E-commerce shopping and buying has gone mainstream — almost three-quarters of the US population now shops online — but the typical online shopper still looks somewhat different than the average US consumer. There are variations by income, education, gender, and age between those likeliest to buy online and on mobile and those likeliest to buy in-store.
• Online shoppers tend to live in households with higher-than-typical incomes and higher-than-average educations. Putting together a composite based on various demographic trends, the typical US online shopper is a 44 year-old female who holds a college degree and lives in a household earning $110,000 annually, whereas the typical US consumer is a 47 year-old female who has some high school education and lives in a household earning approximately $52,000 a year.
• 38% of e-commerce shoppers in the US live in households with incomes over $100,000, according to Experian, while the median household income in the US is around $50,000, according to the Census. 
• 41% of online shoppers last year had college degrees, compared to 30% of the US adult population.

 

In full, the report:

• Breaks down e-commerce behavior by income, education level, and age.
• Looks at how women’s and men’s shopping behavior differs.
• Examines mobile shopping tendencies by demographic.
• Notes how shopping behavior is changing among younger age cohorts, and explains what that means for brands and retailers.

Disclosure: Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider through his personal investment company Bezos Expeditions.

 

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

1. Purchase & download the full report from our research store. >> Purchase & Download Now
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Our subscribers consider the INSIDER Newsletters a "daily must-read industry snapshot" and "the edge needed to succeed personally and professionally" — just to pick a few highlights from our recent customer survey.

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Online shopping is fast becoming the new way for buyers to browse, but stores in Metro Vancouver and across the country are not keeping up and are losing customers to foreign retailers, according to a Vancity credit union report released today.

China may now be the largest trading partner of the United States, but Canada still has a bigger influence on economic growth in the world’s largest economy.

It was a tough autumn for the Canadian psyche. Global oil prices plateaued around $45 (US) a barrel, crushing the dream of becoming an energy superpower. Canada lost its status as one of the fastest-growing members of the Group of Seven nations; according to the October update of the International Monetary Fund, we now are No. 5, ahead of only Italy and Japan. And then last month, the U.S. Commerce Department released trade data for September. Those figures showed that America and China swapped goods worth $441.6 billion (US) in the first nine months of the year, compared with $438.1 billion between the U.S. and Canada.

Canadian diplomats will need a new reason for Americans to invite them to dinner. Here’s one: U.S. exporters still need Canada more than they need China. Economists at Nomura Securities recently took a look at American exports, which represent a bigger piece of the country’s gross domestic product than they did before the Great Recession. International shipments helped pull the U.S. economy out of the pit left by the financial crisis. Exporters have been less impressive this year. They are behind last year’s pace, while imports from China and elsewhere are flooding in. That makes trade a drag on growth. (Exports add to GDP, while imports subtract from it because money exits the country to buy them.)

Everyone’s favourite explanation for weaker U.S. exports is the dollar, which has appreciated by more than 15% against an index of the U.S.’s biggest trading partners since the middle of 2014. That’s made American goods less competitive and imports cheaper. But Nomura says the strong dollar is only part of the story. Just as important is weak demand in the places abroad where Americans sell their stuff. Nomura’s team of analysts, which included Charles St-Arnaud, a former economist at the Bank of Canada, showed that U.S. exports to countries that are net exporters of commodities dropped sharply this year compared with shipments to nations that are net importers of commodities. St-Arnaud and his colleagues concluded that U.S. exporters are paying the price for being exposed to markets that were devastated by the collapse of commodity prices—places such as Colombia, Brazil and (especially) Canada.

The Nomura crew didn’t stop there. It followed various types of shipments to destination as a proxy for inflation-adjusted exports. (The analysts assumed the price of something made in the U.S. was roughly the same, no matter where it was sold.) Nominal exports of capital goods dropped dramatically this year. That points to Canada as a big part of the U.S.’s export problem, since the country represents 20% of American exports of capital goods. “The importance of the U.S. economy for the Canadian economy is well known,” the Nomura report said. “However, many investors seem to forget that Canada is also a major market for U.S. products.” Almost 20% of total U.S. exports go to Canada, compared with 8% for China and 15% for Mexico, Nomura said. The firm estimates that Canadian factories are the single biggest buyers of U.S. exports.

U.S. exports to China, on the other hand, have remained relatively stable. That’s probably because the country’s economy still is managing decent economic growth and authorities in Beijing prevented the yuan from declining significantly against the dollar. By contrast, economic growth in Canada contracted in the first half of the year and business investment—the most important factor in demand for imports—collapsed along with oil prices.

To be sure, the slowing of China’s economy from double-digit rates a few years ago to 6–7% now has had an outsized effect on commodities. That makes China a secondary culprit in America’s struggle to revive its exports. But Canada is a direct source of the pain. That’s something Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his diplomatic corps can point out the next time they ask for Washington’s help to speed up traffic at the border.

MORE ABOUT INTERNATIONAL TRADE, EXPORTS & COMMODITIES:

• Scotiabank CEO Brian Porter is bullish on Canadian exports
• The global economy is forcing the U.S. Fed’s hand like never before
• Gold is in meltdown as investors look elsewhere to stash value
• Why the future of global trade deals could be small businesses
• How the Trans-Pacific Partnership will grow Canada’s service exports
• Amid the recession gloom, service exports are still going strong

The post Canada’s effect on the U.S. economy might be bigger than you think appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

The pace of change is quickening, and things seem less predictable then they used to be. The US military has an acronym to define this delightful ‘new reality’: VUCA.

• Volatility. Change happens faster. It can appear out of nowhere.
• Uncertainty. Outcomes are less predictable. What once worked might not anymore.
• Complexity. It’s getting harder to see what’s going on and how well it’s working.
• Ambiguity. It’s getting harder to improve outcomes. Best choices on how to respond, and their likely consequences on outcomes, are fuzzier than ever.

VUCA times require new approaches to leading B2B sales teams. Some practical suggestions for improving results at a time when everything seems fuzzier than ever:

1. Pay attention to the ‘big trends’ you’re living through. They’re contexts that affect your chances of success. Some of the key trends we’re seeing:

• Time is precious.
  No one has the time nor patience for distractions. Your sellers don’t. Neither do your buyers. Experiences that make best use of everyone’s time tend to create conversations. At rates far beyond what’s normal.
• Complexities affect everyone.
  The VUCA you and your team are living through is also affecting your buyers. Sales organizations that, in conversations, help their buyers understand and conquer complexities are like gold to their buyers. Precious. Rare. Worth a lot.
• Buyers want better outcomes, not better stuff.
  Conversations about ‘stuff’ reduce the odds of ‘next conversations’. Conversations about outcomes improve the odds of ‘next conversations’. Sales organizations that see this reality, and adjust accordingly, are reaping the rewards. They’re winning more new business. From earning more ‘next conversations’.

2. Be more questioning and curious. Encourage the same from everyone on your team.
Do so in ways that help you sense what’s going on at the speed of your business.
Use what you sense to have more honest dialogues amongst yourselves.
Ones that improve your ability to make sense of what you’re sensing.

3. Get comfortable being uncomfortable. When there’s lots to learn, the learning matters. By definition it means doing things outside your comfort zone. Testing new practices. Discovering some that work, and many that don’t. You’ve got to go there if you’re ever going to discover ways to produce better results from better practices. Create work environments that help everyone on you team go there. They’ll discover the meaning in their work, and the rewards in doing it well.

By following the tenants of VUCA, your sales team can stay productive during tumultuous times.

Learn more about how Salesforce Lightning will transform your sales department. Download the free Salesforce e-book.

WASHINGTON – Americans’ pay is up, fewer people need unemployment aid, more are buying new homes and business spending is rebounding.

A flurry of data released Wednesday signalled that the fundamentals of the U.S. economy remain solid, if unspectacular, three weeks before the Federal Reserve will likely begin raising interest rates.

Consumers appear relatively confident in the economy and may be poised to spend a decent chunk of their rising incomes during the holiday shopping season. In addition, businesses are stepping up their investment in machinery and equipment, removing a persistent drag on the economy.

The steady consumer and business demand in the United States is powering the economy through economic pressures from overseas, which jolted financial markets during August and September and raised doubts about global growth.

With the U.S. job market on solid footing and wages beginning to rise, the Fed is widely expected to raise short-term rates in mid-December for the first time in nine years.

Wages and salaries jumped 0.6 per cent in October, the Commerce Department said Wednesday, and data for the spring and summer was revised substantially higher. U.S. paychecks were 4.9 per cent higher in October than they were a year earlier, a sizable gain. By contrast, in the first four years after the Great Recession ended in 2009, paychecks typically rose only about 2 per cent to 3 per cent.

“The extra growth in wage income is good news for retailers hoping for a strong holiday shopping season,” said Jim O’Sullivan, chief U.S. economist at High Frequency Economics.

O’Sullivan forecasts that the economy’s annual growth rate could reach 2.7 per cent in the final three months of the year, from 2.1 per cent in the third quarter.

Consumer spending rose only 0.1 per cent in October, though that weak showing occurred partly because the month was unusually warm and Americans paid less for heat. In the second and third quarters, consumer spending topped 3 per cent, a historically robust level.

With incomes revised higher, the savings rate jumped last month to 5.6 per cent, the highest since 2012.

“History tells us that a chunk of that savings will eventually get spent,” said Stephen Stanley, chief economist at Amherst Pierpont.

Measures of consumer confidence have been mixed but generally paint an optimistic picture. According to Gallup, Americans plan to spend on average $830 on holiday shopping this winter — the most since 2007, just before the recession officially began.

And consumer sentiment ticked up this month, according to a survey by the University of Michigan. Lower and middle-income Americans were more optimistic about their personal finances in the coming year than higher-income households were, the survey found.

Still, a separate measure of consumer confidence from the Conference Board, a business research group, fell in November to its lowest point in more than a year. It found that fewer Americans expected their incomes to rise.

Even so, Americans are unleashing pent-up demand for big-ticket items such as homes and cars. Sales of new homes jumped last month and have increased 15.7 per cent through the first 10 months of 2015.

Home sales have been bolstered by strong hiring and low mortgage rates. Sales of existing homes are on track to reach their highest level since 2007, even though rising prices are sidelining many potential buyers.

Separately, U.S. factories in October received more orders for long-lasting goods, including steel, machinery and computers. The increase added to other evidence that manufacturing is recovering after a generally brutal year. A higher-valued dollar has made U.S. goods more expensive overseas.

And factory output has also been held back by low oil prices, which forced oil and gas drillers to slash orders for steel pipe and other equipment.

Now, though, those drags appear to be fading.

Consistent hiring has underpinned most of the improvement in the economy this year. Employers added 271,000 jobs in October, the most since last December, and the unemployment rate reached 5 per cent, the lowest level since the spring of 2008.

Solid job gains are likely to continue, at least judging from how few people are losing jobs. The number of people seeking unemployment benefits, which generally mirrors the pace of layoffs, fell to nearly 40-year lows last week.

Year-over-year inflation, which had remained stubbornly below the Fed’s target rate, has now reached 1.7 per cent according to a measure compiled by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. That’s not far from the Fed’s 2 per cent target.

And Americans expect slightly higher inflation in coming months, according to the University of Michigan’s survey. That could bolster the case for the Fed to raise rates at its next meeting.

___

Contact Chris Rugaber at http://Twitter.com/ChrisRugaber

The post Rising pay and healthy job market suggest steady US economy – and maybe solid holiday shopping appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

Most sales voicemail messages lack purpose. They usually express no clear intention for the prospect.

Too many sales reps speak too fast and ramble, filling the message with lots of “um’s” and “ah’s”. Then, potential clients have to listen to the voicemail three to four times, just to write down the callback number.

That’s why messages are deleted, and prospects never return calls.

A good voicemail sparks interest. It’s well-planned and compels the recipient to phone the caller immediately.

Let’s revamp your sales voicemail messages right now.

The typical (terrible) voicemail

As technology continues to advance, people are beginning to dread certain types of communication tools like voicemail. From October 2013 to April 2014, voicemail deposits dropped by 8 percent.

Moreover, Millennials dislike listening to them. And rightfully so!

For a moment, put yourself in the shoes of your potential client:

You receive a voicemail from a sales rep. He leaves a two-minute message talking about a product you should purchase. The rep rushes to describe all the product details and why you would be the perfect fit for their “Manager’s Special Offer.”

Only at the end do you sorta hear the salesperson’s name and phone number. Then, the rep says, “If I don’t hear from you in a day or two, I DEFINITELY will call you back.”

Ugh. What a waste of two minutes!

You basically volunteered to listen to an advertisement on your phone, and most people don’t want their voicemail to be used as a commercial spot. It’s a nuisance.

In this example, the sales rep failed to leave a short message. He decided to sell, rather than inform the recipient.

And how does he know that you’re a great fit for a specific deal if his company doesn’t know your current needs?

The rep didn’t even say his name or number clearly. In addition, he made an explicit decision to call you back, defeating the purpose of you calling him back.

Don’t let your team leave inexcusable voicemail messages. There’s a better way.

How to structure a voicemail

A sales rep leaves on average 70 voicemails per day, requiring 60 seconds each, which adds up to approximately 25 hours per month. If you had a team of 50 sales reps, they would spend 1,277 hours per month leaving voicemails—unless they're using Close.io. Our platform allows you to leave a pre-recorded voicemail message with just one click.

As a sales leader, recognize that your team is vying for a prospect’s attention. And prospects want value, not a sales pitch.

Therefore, short, purposeful messages will always defeat long, selfish monologues. You want the receiver to take action, which requires a compelling reason.

Michael Arrington, founder of TechCrunch says, "Think before you voicemail."

Voicemail is a selling tool that can make a good first impression, start an ongoing relationship, or close your next deal.

The way you present yourself matters. The goal is to leave a voicemail that says: I’m worth engaging with right now.

Co-founder of inventRight, Stephen Key, states that a phone call “requires confidence and courage and allows you to find common ground more quickly.”

Instead of selling within 30 seconds, entice the prospect with insightful ideas. Here’s a sales voicemail template your team can use:

• (Optional) Establish a connection: "I learned about your company from John Doe."
• Introduce yourself: "My name is Steli with Close.io."
• State value: "After researching, my team found that we can shrink your costs up to 25%."
• Share insight: "We’ve accumulated over 100 positive reviews on the same issue."
• Add contact information: "Let’s talk. Contact me at 123-456-7890."
• Give urgency: "Reach out by Nov. 1st, before the holiday rush."
• Repeat your contact information: "My name is Steli. 123-456-7890. Thanks."

5 tips to create a worthwhile voicemail message

Want to give your team some pointers? Here are a few tips to help turn deleted annoyances into callback-friendly messages.

1. Smile

Prospects don’t want to hear a dreary message that will put them to sleep. It won’t grab the person’s attention and it hurts your company’s brand.

To leave an upbeat voicemail, “say your message with a smile on your face.” Show some excitement and engage the individual as if you were talking to him or her in-person.

2. Repeat, please

The purpose of your voicemail is to receive a callback. Make sure the receiver can complete that action. So, repeat your name and phone number at the end.

Pro Tip: To increase your callback chances, leave your message from 6:45 AM to 8:00 AM and from 4:30 PM to 6:30 PM local time.

3. Test multiple versions

Similar to other sales techniques, you should test what works. Create a simple A/B test for your voicemail.

What happens when you say your name and company last? Or should you state your reason for calling first? Track your response rate with each variation.

More conversations equal more closed deals.

4. Create a sense of urgency

Life is busy and people who really want to contact you sometimes forget. To speed up your prospect’s response time, create a little urgency by adding a time constraint.

Don’t be pushy though. Establish urgency, not a state of panic.

5. Follow up

It’s easy to get ignored today. Thanks to caller ID, people generally disregard incoming calls from people they don’t know.

To counter any neglected voicemails, send prospects an email that will pique their interest. Give them a reason to actually check your message.

Make sure you include a simple yet compelling subject line.

Leave a purposeful message

Sales voicemails don’t have to be lame. Leaving a long, boring message for a potential client only leads to wasted time and unreturned phone calls.

To improve your team’s voicemail conversions, give them a reason to respond in 30 seconds or less and test multiple variations of the message until it produces results.

Your sales team deserves the best. So, sign up for our sales course below!

 

I recently met the new sales director of a well-respected technology firm that I’ve known for over five years. This person is the third sales director within the last five years, and the firm has gone through three times as many business developers during that same timeframe. The new sales director said something that made me cringe: “We’re hiring an additional business developer and stopping all of our marketing efforts because our owner says business development is our lead generation.”

I cringed because it was an “old school,” dated way of thinking about lead generation and firm growth. Long gone are the days of getting deals on the golf course, much less knocking on a company’s door to sell them $100,000+ in professional services. And, heavy association sponsorships and networking is not the answer either. A balanced mix of face time (business development) and ongoing education (mostly via content) can generate interest in your firm, ultimately raising visibility and attracting leads.

How do I know this? Research. To be exact, Hinge’s research into why B2B buyers do what they do in selecting professional services firms. We know that professional services firms’ buyers “check out” a firm’s website 80.8% of the time. Also, the average buyer uses 3.2 methods to “check out” a potential firm, which means that firms must be accessible on multiple channels. A one-sided approach will not work in today’s marketplace.

When having a pure business development approach, you lack easy-to-close leads generated by your website. Also, you miss out on the continuity and longevity of content marketing. A single blog post stays on your website and is still searchable on Google years down the road, while buyers forget sponsorships within months, if not within just a few days. Also, as business developers come and go (or retire), the company loses many of those contacts and leads. Even the best CRM diligently cared for won’t keep 100% of the leads because professional services firms are about relationships.

With content marketing, you not only get the lead generation through the web, but you also get the continuity of it. Even if a firm struggles to retain in-house marketers, their content remains intact. The next marketer can pick up where the last one left off, make adjustments, and keep going.

Some would argue that content doesn’t create relationships. Instead, people do. Yes, people create relationships, and people also create content. For many prospective buyers, a blog post a professional writes is the prospect’s first impression of the firm and the expert. As time passes, that prospect reads more blogs, guides, articles, and attends webinars. They feel like they know that expert, even though they’ve never met. Especially with social media today, people can connect with experts on a personal level although they do not know them personally. Experts are rock stars in their niche markets without having to worry about the paparazzi.

Let’s not forget about offline content too. Article writing, presentations, and especially books, can bring more visibility and increase the reputation of an expert, thus creating more relationships and generating more leads. Networking at a conference full of your prospects as the go-to expert provides a much stronger ROI (Return On Investment) than sponsoring or just attending.

I’m not saying let go of your business developers and go 100% to content marketing. That would be rash. You still need your business developers to open doors, close deals, and to train your seller-doers. I’m saying you need a dual approach with a mix of content marketing and business development to maximize your lead generating opportunities.

The past two years, Hinge has done an extensive survey with the AAM (Association for Accounting Marketing), and it has revealed stunning insights into the need for both methodologies, in particular, the need for established firms to start utilizing content marketing tactics along with their current networking.

In the 2015 AAM study, we segmented our findings by growth and looked specifically at what the top 20% high-growth accounting firms did with their marketing in contrast to the 20% low-growth accounting firms. Our research clearly illustrated the juxtaposition of the high-growth companies that grew at an average rate of 24.15% while the low-growth firms actually shrunk an average of -1.65%.

When reviewing the budgets of the high growth firms, the top two expenses included website and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and Networking Events, Tradeshows, and Conferences. An obvious sign that a mix of both content marketing and networking is a must to see double-digit growth. On the other side, the low-growth firms spent less than a quarter of the amount on their website, instead spending their money on Membership Dues, Sponsorships, and Advertising. For all that money, they still say a negative growth rate.

See the chart for yourself. High growth firms spent over 17% of their budget on their website while the low growth firms spent just 4% on the same item. Instead, they spent a third of their budget on paid advertising, memberships, and sponsorships. The high growth firms spent just under 15% of their budget on those items, leaving room in their budgets to maximize their website for lead generation.

These marketing efforts translated into a loss of over $100,000 for the low-growth firms from 2013 to 2014 while high-growth firms grew by $1.28 million.

Even if you’re not in the Accounting sector, I suggest you look at this AAM study. It is insightful to say the least, and we have further analysis and breakdowns between small, medium, and large firms. (Spoiler alert – the small firms make up most of the high-growth firms, and they’re catching up in size quickly.)

Sales and marketing professionals have been known to ask, “What’s your target market?” or “Who is your ideal customer?” These are valuable questions to help provide us with core information we need to be successful in taking our product or service to market. We might be able to zero in on a specific company size (either by revenue or employee count), a particular industry, or even a specific type of business model. But the thing is, we don’t market and sell to companies; rather, we market and sell to people. And that’s why the creation of your buyer personas is one of the most important exercises you can perform for your business.

What Are Buyer Personas?

Buyer Personas are semi-fictional representations of our ideal customer based on real data and some select educated speculation about customer demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals. They’re our people. They’re the reason we exist as an organization. And there’s more to them than a job title, an industry or a region. By better understanding these individuals, we’re able to create better content while also identifying how and where our ideal customers consume that content.

How to Create Your Buyer Personas

Quite simply, your buyer persona process begins by talking to your current customers and prospects, and engaging with sales and customer success professionals who interact regularly with those customers. As part of the interview process, consider questions about the individual’s role, goals, challenges, company, watering holes, personal background and shopping preferences. For example:

Their Role:

• What is their job role? Their job title?
• How is their job measured?
• What is a typical day like for them?
• What skills are required?
• What knowledge and tools do they use?
• Who do they report to? Who reports to them?

Their Goals:

• What are they responsible for?
• What does it mean to be successful in their role?

Their Challenges:

• What are their biggest challenges?
• How do they overcome those challenges?

Their Company:

• What industry or industries does their company work in?
• What is the size of their company (revenue, employees)?

Their Watering Holes:

• How do they learn about new information for their job?
• What publications or blogs do they read?
• What associations and social networks do they belong to?

Their Personal Background:

• Age
• Family (single, married, children)
• Education

Their Shopping Preferences:

• How do they prefer to interact with vendors (email, phone, in person?)
• Do they use the internet to research vendors or products? If yes, how do they search for information? What types of websites do they use?

Aligning Sales & Marketing

It’s imperative that buyer personas are developed by sales and marketing together. Alignment is critical as your final documented buyer personas serve as the roadmap for all content creation — which leads to prospect engagement, and then customers. Prior to developing any piece of marketing content or attending any trade show, ask yourself, “Would any of my buyer personas want to read this blog? Watch this video? Attend this conference?”

Don’t Be Afraid to Be Nimble

While developing your buyer personas is meant to serve as a roadmap of sorts for your sales and marketing teams, sometimes on a journey it’s necessary to course-correct. At least once a year, re-assess your buyer personas. Are they still valid? Perhaps you’ve found that one of your four personas is not as relevant in your sales process as you had originally thought. Or, maybe a new product enhancement has opened up another persona opportunity.

It’s OK to Have Fun

Buyer personas are internal pieces of research, so feel free to have some fun with them. Give them names like “Marketing Maddie” or “Tim the IT Manager.” Find stock photos of your personas and give them a face to go with that name. Bring them up in conversation around the office and make them a regular part of your sales and marketing dialogue: “Our latest ebook was written with ‘Hannah the HR Manager’ in mind, so we’re going to promote it in the Society of Human Resource Manager’s LinkedIn group.”

Keep It Simple

It can be really tempting to make too many buyer personas, but beware — creating more than four or five buyer personas can undo all of your great strategy work. With too many personas, you run the risk of being unable to delineate between them, and the whole idea of buyer personas is to provide you with focus. Start with one main buyer persona and then grow from there. For example, at Allbound, we have three buyer personas … for now.

At the end of the day, buyer personas are all about getting inside the minds of our ideal customers so that we can properly relate to them in a way that simply can’t be done with nameless and faceless figures. The more we know about what makes our ideal customers tick, the better we can not only react to but anticipate their needs in a mutually beneficial exchange.

 

The post A Formula for Aligning Sales & Marketing with Buyer Personas appeared first on Sales Hacker.

Everything can use a good cleaning now and again. Closets, refrigerators, your office desk and even your sales and marketing pipeline. Without routine decluttering, things start piling up, they get outdated, and sometimes gets lost. Small businesses that run lean, streamlined operations can’t afford to have a messy, poorly managed pipeline with their future revenue at stake. Not only does a slow pipeline drag down productivity, it takes the focus off of promising leads and worse, lets them slip through the cracks!

According to our State of Sales report, 80% of sales teams say that acquiring new customers is a top sales objective. Reaching this objective is made much simpler when you have a well-organized pipeline, stocked with fresh opportunities and a more productive sales team ready to go. By making the effort to clean up your sales and marketing pipeline, you’re able to focus on the right deals and create a repeatable cycle of success. Here are a few things you can do immediately to better manage your pipeline. For more tips, read our new e-book, 5 Quick Ways to Clean Up Your Sales and Marketing Pipeline.

Tidy up existing leads

Your existing leads are a good place to begin. Have you ever had a contact go dark or an invoice go unpaid since that person was no longer with the company? Small lapses in your data can turn into costly and time-consuming problems to rectify. Take steps to verify and clean your data so that your CRM is operating at peak performance to drive revenue. Having confidence in your data leads to better productivity by arming your sales team with a complete, accurate picture of leads.

Send messages with a point of view

Customers are looking for personalized, tailored solutions that can solve their problems. If your messages are not relevant to them, they’ll be more likely to ignore you or move on to a competitor, so it’s important that you’re targeting prospects who are high-scoring and will advance steadily through the sales cycle. By sending messages that resonate with specific marketing segments, you’re less likely to wind up with sluggish leads.

Plan for low-scoring leads

Your sales team probably has a plan of action for handling high-scoring leads, but what about the leads that needs a little hand holding? Low-scoring leads don’t need to languish, stuck in the pipeline. Create purposeful nurture tracks for these leads, using automated emails to build journeys that are designed to educate them and trigger responses. Through nurture, these relationships with leads build gradually over time and are great for smaller teams with limited resources.

Ready to roll your sleeves up and get started? Check out our free e-book for 5 Quick Ways to Clean Up Your Sales and Marketing Pipeline.

Though many marketers may feel uncomfortable with this, effective marketing is a numbers game. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a certain amount of art to it, but, at the end of the day, we can’t come to the board meeting with only a bunch of great-looking creative and expect to be taken seriously. Like any other revenue-generating segment of the business, we measure our success in terms of leads, pipeline, and conversions. To make that work, marketers need some way to separate the good leads from the total junk. When it’s done well, behavioral lead scoring can help us improve our key metrics across the board:

• Leads. When we pair leads with relevant demographic data, sales gets only the highest-quality contacts and doesn’t waste time following up on junk leads.
• Pipeline. The more we know about our leads, the more closely we can estimate the value of our pipeline. As we push in more high-quality leads, the overall pipeline value will go up.
• Conversions. By giving sales better leads along with relevant behavioral data, it becomes much easier for sales to have contextual conversations, increasing the rate of conversion and decreasing the sales cycle.

In the past, we’ve put disproportionate emphasis on demographic data — indicators like industry, job title, and company revenue — as a cheap heuristic to tell us which leads were worth pursuing. This data actually told us a lot more about the markets we wanted to attract than it said about the prospects who were most interested in our products. It also meant that, in order to keep the pipeline full, we had to compensate for sub-par conversion rates by cramming more low-quality leads into the top of the machine. It was frustrating for marketing, frustrating for sales, and frustrating for consumers who kept getting hit with broad messaging that didn’t really appeal to them.

We were stuck with demographic data because, historically, lead scoring has been basically useless. An SDR with a list of webinar leads had to prioritize based on two binary decisions about those leads: did they attend, and, if they attended, did they ask a question? People who registered got a low priority, attendees got a higher priority, and the ones who asked a questions got the highest priority. Not only was this “behavior score” overly simplistic and not particularly helpful, it treated all questions as equal (for example, a minor technical question would get the same score as a direct request for a demo).

But that’s all in the past. Today, reliable, high-quality behavioral lead scoring has streamlined our entire lead process — and is driving up those super-important metrics like pipeline and conversions.

With the current generation of webinar platforms, each lead is tagged with a reliable engagement score that lets sales know exactly how to prioritize their follow-up. This score aggregates all the in-event behaviors that let us know how interested a person is. It looks at poll responses, survey responses, additional resources downloaded, slides downloaded, widget interaction, time engaged in webinar, and all the sundry metrics that contribute to a robust attendee profile. That engagement score gets passed directly into our CRM, where the sales rep can use it to have a more contextual engagement with the prospect. The conversation evolves from, “I saw you attended this webinar. What did you think?” to, “I noticed that you answered poll #2 in this way. Let’s use that as a starting point to talk about our feature that solves that problem.”

I’ve said it a million times, but it’s worth saying again: we shouldn’t just be thinking about more leads. We should be thinking about better leads. And that takes behavioral data.

Interested in learning more? Download our white paper, Lead Intelligence: A Better Model for Lead Scoring.

Many Professional Services Firms are just starting to realize the benefits of social media in terms of growing their brand, which in turn means growing their business. For example, social media can help drive traffic to your website and we have seen time and time again that website traffic correlates to revenue and growth.

So the question might then become, how to create effective social media? One answer: imagery — the idea being to tell a story through the use of visuals. Simply put, visual content is just more compelling.

Tell a Story

Often it seems that B2C has got this down. It’s not hard to find examples of well-known consumer brands leveraging creative imagery in their social media campaigns. But what about small to medium-sized professional services firms? What’s the best approach for businesses that are focused on service offerings? How does this type of firm promote its messaging through imagery? How does imagery showcase the brand’s value?

Imagery provides a great opportunity to illustrate and promote your company’s culture, values, and philosophy and to showcase important events. It’s a great way to promote your firm without becoming too sales-y and shows another dimension to your brand to help set you apart from the competition. Business is still about people, the human connection, so by telling your company story with images, you are relating to your clients as people, not just a target audience.

For example, a firm that conducts original research and uses its research-driven approach as a differentiator in the marketplace can use imagery to showcase their findings using infographics, SlideShares, or videos. These pieces of content could include highlights from the report, that would also include a link to download the full report, which of course allows you to capture new leads.

Provide Educational Value

Think about how imagery helps your reader connect the dots with written content by offering more perspective and how, as a tool, it’s helping your audience recall key points of information, while still keeping it fun and interesting.

According to demandgenreport.com, 95% of B2B buyers like short content formats, which is why paying particular attention to the use of imagery is so important – and there are quite a few ways to incorporate images into your firm’s content and social media strategies. Some examples include photos, infographics, graphic quotes, charts, graphs and video. And don’t forget, your employees create some of the best content for you – they are your brand ambassadors! Your employees are in the thick of it and may have interesting front-line commentary or photos they’ve taken that your marketing team couldn’t have dreamed up.

When thinking about developing your visual content you want to keep in mind that it should always be informational – the value you are providing your audience should be focused on helping them learn something they might not have known before; it must have purpose. Think about what presentations you can use to create a SlideShare, or what research you have conducted that would inspire fresh new graphics.

Optimizing Images

Something to keep in mind, you cannot optimize images for social media, but if you are linking back to content on your blog or website you should make sure you are optimizing your images for the web for a couple of reasons: 1) the best user experience possible and 2) SEO.

If you don’t optimize your images (making sure the images are in a web-friendly format) you run the risk of irritating your audience with long page load times, even to the point that the person will abandon your page. According to GTMetrix.com,” Optimizing images for the web can reduce your total page load size by up to 80%.”

But optimizing isn’t just about file size for your image. It also impacts SEO. You want to consider using strong keywords when naming your images for better on-page SEO and to help your site rank highly.

As professional services firms embrace social media more and more as part of their marketing strategy, they will discover that there is a ton of visual content that can be created and used to help promote their brand. The keys are to keep the imagery simple, short, and educational while making sure it relates to the written content it is tied to. You want to tell a story and give your audience information it can absorb quickly and recall easily. Using images will keep your content fresh, interesting and useful.