BEIJING, China – China cut interest rates Thursday on loans by small lenders that finance the country’s entrepreneurs in a new move to shore up lacklustre economic growth.

Beijing has cut its benchmark lending rate six times since last November as economic growth slowed. But those cuts applied to large state-owned banks that lend mostly to government companies, not to entrepreneurs who generate most of China’s new jobs and wealth.

On Thursday, the People’s Bank of China cut the rate on a one-week loan by small banks and credit co-operatives from 5.5 per cent to 3.25 per cent. The rate for an overnight loan was cut from 4.5 per cent to 2.75 per cent.

Communist leaders have affirmed their support for a “new normal” of slower, more self-sustaining growth based on domestic consumption instead of trade and investment. But they are trying to keep a 5-year-old economic downturn from deepening too sharply and causing a politically dangerous spike in job losses.

Growth fell to a six-year low of 6.8 per cent in the latest quarter, less than half the past decade’s peak of 14.2 per cent in 2007.

The International Monetary Fund and private sector forecasters expect growth to fall to 6 per cent or lower over the next two years. President Xi Jinping said Nov. 3 that the country needs at least 6.5 per cent a year through the end of this decade to achieve the ruling Communist Party’s goal of making the population “moderately prosperous.”

Communist leaders have promised to open state-dominated industries wider to private sector competitors, but have yet to cut back the privileges of state companies, which include monopolies and low-cost loans.

The post China cuts interest rates for lenders to small business in new move to shore up growth appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

Big Canadian cities, Surrey and Vancouver among them, are not only incredibly inconsistent in meeting their budget targets, but they muddy their accounting so badly that it is incredibly difficult to nail down just how far off-base their projections are. The best to be said about Surrey is that, when it comes to producing budgets and year-end financial reports that can be straightforwardly compared, it is a bit better than most. And the best to be said about Vancouver is that, when it comes hitting budget targets, it has for a couple of years been better than it used to be. And, if you overlook its dismal long-term record, Vancouver is also better than Surrey and the several other cities that drag the bar very, very low.

(c)iStock.com/TheaDesign

A report from the Cloud Technology Alliance has assessed how independent software vendors (ISVs) take their cloud solutions to market, and found the age old discussion over who owns the customer relationship remains unsolved.

39 companies responded to the survey, 72% of respondents based on North America and 26% in EMEA. Of the respondents, only 36% say they expect channel partners to be self-sufficient in closing business, while 33% of ISVs surveyed expect their channel partners to support and bill their customers. Only one in 10 ISVs expect their partners to close upsell opportunities and renewals.

Yet ISVs are not as rigorous as one may expect in terms of reviewing their channel partners in terms of company fit and performance. Only 60% of ISVs surveyed say they review and cut non-performing partners, with only 14% doing it systematically. The numbers differ by company; 65% of Google ISVs say they review their partners’ performance, compared to only 54% of Microsoft ISVs.

The report was broken down into seven categories: an overview of respondents’ demographics and go to market strategies; how ISVs work with the channel; channel recruiting and program structures best practices; how ISVs work with the channel; channel conflict; future investments; and achieving vendor-channel alignment.

The majority of ISVs surveyed use some sort of free version of their product to go to market; 61% offer free trials and 16% leverage a freemium pricing model. The majority of respondents price on a per-user basis, while others – most notably in the Microsoft ecosystem – price their solutions based on the total number of employees in an organisation.

31% of those polled – mostly Google Apps for Work ISVs – do not work with the channel. “These companies are likely in the early stages of launching their products or have optimised for e-commerce”, the report notes. Of the remainder, 28% have been working in the channel for more than three years, compared to 25% between one and three years and 17% for less than 12 months. 47% of ISVs reported they receive less than a quarter of their revenues through channel partners.

The report’s assessment of the differences between Microsoft and Google houses, as well as the disparity between channel partners and vendors, argues several points to achieve vendor-channel alignment. Sources of friction include an expectation around vendors providing their channel partners with leads, and who holds responsibility for customer renewals. The report argues having proper channel managers in place can address the issues of better business planning, training, and forecasting.

The sales profession is going through a transformation. Social, mobile, and digital media are helping buyers become better informed and raising their expectations. And the purchase process has become longer and more complex.

These forces are making selling more costly, collaborative, and consultative according to Joe Galvin, who is Chief Research Officer of the MHI Research Institute. “Its common knowledge there more people are involved in the decision. But our research shows that more importantly, a rising number of sales resources are now involved in complex opportunities. This results in a creeping increase in cost of sales and makes collaboration even more critical”

How can a sales executive drive growth in this environment? That is the $3 Billion dollar question Mr. Galvin and other sales performance experts in the rapidly growing growth consulting market are trying to answer for their clients. Over the past several years, the leading experts in the sales performance industry seem to have arrived at a general answer. Transforming sales performance will involve a combination of better training, better technology, and better customer content:

• Improving the business awareness of salespeople is critical because selling product features to more sophisticated buyers will not get results. Sales professionals must deliver compelling insights to differentiate themselves and communicate value to close business at premium pricing. So sales operations executives are looking to “value messaging” skills training to help their sales people communicate and influence buyer perceptions of value;
• Executives are looking at technology as a sales productivity lever and a “force multiplier” to supplement shrinking training budgets and reduce expensive face-to-face selling time. Most sales organizations are investing in social, mobile, and targeting technology to solve the problem. These sales enablement technologies make it faster and simpler for salespeople to find the right thing to say, to the right person, at the right time to advance the sale;
• Sales executives are starting to realize they need alot of well designed, targeted and organized selling content to fuel these modern selling systems. Content directly impacts their ability to achieve top line sales results. So sales operations and channel marketing teams are creating content that more directly supports sales conversations including: sales playbooks that assemble content relevant to a particular selling situation and validation content that demonstrates ROI and customer success.

“The way you position yourself at the beginning of a relationship has profound impact on where you end up.” – Ron Karr

Have you ever felt like you were having trouble getting through to your prospects? Like they weren’t really listening to what you have to say?

Of course you have. We’ve all been there.

You’re working hard to show potential customers why they need your offering. You just know that you can help them solve their problems.

But in the end, they don’t listen. They don’t see why they should choose your company over your competition.

It’s frustrating, right? There are so many other voices that are fighting for your prospects’ attention. How do you stand out? How do you earn the trust of your prospects?

The answer lies in how you position your company.

Whenever I’m selling, I’m constantly positioning myself and my brand throughout the conversation. I make a point to remind the customer of who I am and why I matter to them. You have to do the same thing.

In order to gain the trust of your prospects, you have to get them to view you as their ultimate resource. The way you establish yourself in your prospects’ minds will determine how easy it will be to earn and retain their business.

As an entrepreneur who is building your clientele, you have to make sure you know how to introduce your company the right way. If you want to make things easier for yourself, you have to make sure you know exactly how you want your prospects to see you.

This post is will give you some pointers to help you establish a more solid position with your prospects.

Who Are You?

First, you need to establish an identity that is distinct from your competition. You must think about how you want your prospects to see you. What should they think of when they see your company?

In the mind of your prospect, the most important thing about your company is what it can do for them. What benefits can you offer a prospect that your competition can’t? What can you bring to the table?

This means identifying your unique selling proposition. Here’s some questions that can help you figure out what your unique selling proposition is.

• What is it that makes you different?
• Do you do it faster?
• Do you do it better?
• Are you less expensive?
• Do you have special expertise that makes you more helpful to your specific type of clients?

Here’s an example:

Maria owns a marketing firm that specializes in helping law firms generate more leads. She works almost exclusively with law firms and has done so for years.

Her expertise in law firm marketing makes her more attractive to law firms looking for marketing solutions. It makes her stand out from marketing firms that don’t have specialized knowledge of the legal industry.

Here are some other examples of great unique selling propositions.

Become A Valuable Resource

“Stop selling. Start helping.” – Zig Ziglar

Second, you need to stop focusing only on selling your offering and focus more on becoming a helpful resource for your prospects. Differentiating yourself from your competition means bringing value that the others aren’t bringing.

It’s a good idea to think more like a consultant than a salesperson.

Most likely you have more industry knowledge and expertise than your prospect. Use this to your prospect’s advantage. Whenever you can, educate and inform them of things that will help make their lives easier.

When you use your knowledge to benefit your prospects and customers, it shows them that you’re there to help them solve problems. You’re not just after their money.

The amount of influence you have over your prospects and customers is directly tied to how much value you offer. If you want your prospects to value you, be valuable.

Here’s another example:

Larry owns a landscaping company. When servicing a client, he often takes the time to give his clients actionable tips that can make it easier for them to maintain their yards. He also does this with prospects when he’s trying to earn their business.

As a result, prospects want to start using his services. His existing customers want to remain with him. It’s because he has made himself more valuable to them by providing value beyond his services.

Remember Your Brand Purpose

“Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.” – Jeff Bezos

Your position in the minds of your prospects is largely determined by your brand. A strong brand will make you irresistible to potential customers.

One of the key components of a strong brand is identifying a purpose for your business that goes beyond making money. Your business has to stand for something. You have to find a way to articulate it in a way that is clear and persuasive.

For many entrepreneurs, it isn’t easy to identify their brand’s purpose. In some cases, it does require a little bit of soul searching.

If you’re not quite sure what your brand’s purpose is, ask yourself these questions:

• What change does your company want to see in the world? Why?
• What do you believe about the problems you are trying to solve?
• How do you intend to use your business to inspire change?

Answering these questions will help you figure out what your brand truly stands for. This is absolutely critical. Without a strong brand purpose, it will be almost impossible to stand out from your competition.

Conclusion

It’s not easy to make your company stand out from your competition. Establishing a strong position in the minds of your customers and prospects can be a challenge, even for organizations that already have a solid brand.

But it’s critical to your sales efforts.

When you go into a sales interaction with a prospect, you have to focus on positioning yourself effectively. If you don’t define yourself to your prospect, they will define your business for you. This won’t always be favorable to your company. Use the tips in this post, and you will have an easier time getting your prospects to trust you.

Keep moving forward!

Originally published on LinkedIn

The single biggest piece of advice I share during my LinkedIn training sessions is this: Get your prospects or potential clients off of LinkedIn as fast as you can!

It might sound counterintuitive, especially considering I make my living off teaching others how to generate business for themselves using LinkedIn Marketing. But I was reminded again recently why it’s so important to move potential clients and customers away from someone else’s online turf (in this case, LinkedIn) and into your preferred space – be it your website, a webinar, email list, phone call or face-to-face meeting.

LinkedIn Groups + Messages – Big Changes!

Case in point: LinkedIn recently announced some major changes to how its popular professional groups will function moving forward. Hundreds of LinkedIn Group Moderators began howling in protest about the changes. Many Group owners, in fact, had spent years building their Groups a certain way and put in countless hours refining their process, only to have LinkedIn blow the entire thing up without warning. LinkedIn also recently revamped its entire messaging system, again setting off another series of angry rants on the network from users worldwide. I have to admit, the righteous indignation of LinkedIn users makes me laugh. After all, it’s LinkedIn’s sandbox. LinkedIn built itself into the world’s largest social network for professionals – with 400 million members in more than 200 countries – and LinkedIn can do whatever it wants whenever it wants.

The Reality: LinkedIn’s Sandbox, LinkedIn’s Toys

The key thing to remember on any social network is that you’re building your virtual house on someone else’s land. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and all these other social networks can pull the plug or change the rules at any moment. Sure, we might pay to have a Premium LinkedIn Membership, but that’s more like paying rent to a landlord than owning the building. So what should you do about it? Simple. Keep using LinkedIn, because it remains the single best place on the planet to find and engage your ideal clients and prospects at almost no cost. But be strategic about moving those potential customers somewhere where you will have more control.

How to Get Prospects Off LinkedIn and onto Your Turf

For example, you might be repurposing and sharing your existing blog posts, videos and other content on LinkedIn using the site’s native publishing platform. It’s a great way to attract a targeted audience of warm, qualified leads, and I suggest you do it as much as possible on LinkedIn. With that said, make sure you embed a call to action (CTA) or other specific “ask” at the bottom of each post or piece of content you share on LinkedIn. And make sure that CTA or “ask” moves people off of LinkedIn and over to your preferred platform – the phone, your website, your email list, etc.

For example, say your goal is to get people registered for a free training or Linkedin webinar that you host.

Here’s how you can accomplish that using LinkedIn marketing:

• Repurpose an existing piece of content (video, blog post, etc.) that provides value and insight to your ideal audience and publish it on LinkedIn.
• Put a call to action at the bottom of the LinkedIn blog post inviting people to jump off LinkedIn and sign up for your free webinar. Use a clickable, hyperlinked image and/or hyperlinked text that takes people over to your registration page.
• Use an add-on to send hundreds of 1-on-1, personalized messages to your existing LinkedIn contacts that points them to this useful piece of content you just published on the platform. (Note: In this case, you will want to have already pre-tagged and sorted your existing LinkedIn connections by topic, industry or job title so you can send targeted, helpful posts to the right audiences.)
• Monitor the engagement around your LinkedIn blog post and use the site’s powerful analytics to follow up with any new, warm leads you find as a result.
• Send 1-on-1 messages and notes to anyone who engages with your LinkedIn blog post using this type of script: “Thanks (Name) so much for (liking my post / your thoughtful comment) on my post! What was your favorite part? Also, since you enjoyed that piece of content you’d likely love the free webinar we have coming up on (topic of the blog post). You can find out more here: (link to webinar registration page.) Thanks and talk more soon!”

The end result is, you’ll find some great, warm leads and then move those prospects over to your digital turf (your webinar) as opposed to keeping everything on LinkedIn.

Remember: With LinkedIn, You’re on Rented Land!

In addition, you can export all your existing LinkedIn connections anytime you want, and powerful LinkedIn add-ons also allow you to export detailed Excel spreadsheets with key prospect info to your computer. In closing, keep this caveat in mind: LinkedIn Marketing is well worth your time, but don’t build your entire business infrastructure using its land and materials. Make sure any activity you take on the network moves someone closer to your digital home whenever possible!

Want More LinkedIn Tips Like This?

Download my free eBook “8 Secrets to Selling More on LinkedIn” and register for my Free Webinar on using LinkedIn to generate more sales leads, clients and revenue:

When writer Peter C. Newman charted the geography of Canada’s business establishment 40 years ago, he uncovered a cloistered world of elite clubs, elegant mansions and ranches—hushed spaces to which the grocery, mining and industrial magnates retreated to savour the spoils of aristocratic wealth. When he revisited this rarefied world in the 1990s, he discovered a new breed of hustlers, led by men who made their millions by their wits, not their genes. “They live for fun as much as for money,” Newman observed in a 1998 speech, “and pursue both to the end of the universe.”

Twenty years later, that landscape is shifting once again, with a new crop of entrepreneurs elbowing their way into the ranks of Canada’s billionaire class. We’ll call them the next establishment: a generation of audacious global entrepreneurs, who are contemptuous of borders and make their mark by massively disrupting entrenched industries that never saw it coming. They are serial entrepreneurs who care less about the trappings of wealth than the intellectual challenge of reordering our ever-expanding digital universe just a bit faster than the next software genius. “The people who understand those dynamics are the next group of folks that will be reshaping all industries,” says Chamath Palihapitiya, a former Facebook executive from Toronto who founded the Silicon Valley venture capital powerhouse Social + Capital Partners in 2011. “We’re in the very early innings of a massive, 30-year secular change.”

These leaders, some of them scarcely out of their 30s, are building explosive, mould-breaking brands capable of extracting vast wealth from social networks instead of holes in the ground. This emergent club includes Canadians like Uber chairman Garrett Camp, Slack co-founder Stewart Butterfield, Vice Media co-founder Shane Smith, low-key Alibaba executive vice-chairman Joseph Tsai, Shopify’s Tobias Lütke and David Baazov, whose Montreal firm, Amaya, executed a brash $4.9-billion takeover of PokerStars last year, transforming him overnight into one of the global kingpins of online gambling. And while they all have an innate ability to transform failure into fortune (sometimes multiple times), the members of the new new Canadian establishment came of age during the dot-com collapse and have internalized the lessons of BlackBerry’s fate. They understand their fortunes could disappear in the time it takes to delete an app from a smartphone.

Few fit this description better than Butterfield, the 41-year-old B.C.-born founder of Slack with a net worth of $1.64 billion who is intent on killing email as we know it. Butterfield’s ascent involves an abrupt change in the company’s focus that has become the stuff of legend in Silicon Valley. A few years ago, Butterfield, who founded Flickr in 2002, assembled a small team in Vancouver to develop a multi-player computer game. The scheme was a complete bust, but after firing most of the employees, Butterfield, a former philosophy student whose hippie parents named him Dharma, found himself pondering the internal messaging tool the team had created to replace the confusing nested strings of emails such projects generate. In offices, reading and answering email is a time suck. The tool, which organizes messages in “channels” corresponding to projects, could be a game-changer, he thought.

Within a year of launching Slack in 2013, Butterfield was surfing a frothy tidal wave of interest, with the user base growing by a stunning 5.5% per month. He moved the company to San Francisco to partake of what he has described as the city’s “gold rush mentality.” Sand Hill Road venture capital firms, including Social + Capital Partners, anted up US$180 million in equity, bidding up the company’s value to US$2.8 billion in just over a year. Achieving that unworldly valuation in such a short time has Butterfield fielding lots of questions lately about tech bubbles and whether these sudden fortunes are built on solid foundations or merely the giddiness of a moment. “I don’t think it’ll pop and there’s nothing left,” he assured his CNBC interviewer in early November.

As easy as it is to draw parallels to the dot-com bust, it’s an oversimplification that fails to see what this group has accomplished or to acknowledge their tenacity. This cohort is driven not by wealth but by the desire to see their vision succeed.  “I don’t particularly care about money,” Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke told the Globe and Mail last year on the eve of the company’s IPO on the New York Stock Exchange. “I care about working on interesting problems.”

If you want to make a clearer distinction between the heady days of the late 1990s and this breakout group of entrepreneurs, like Uber co-founder Garrett Camp, it’s that they have vision. “They see a world that doesn’t exist yet today,” observes Mike Kirkup, a 10-year BlackBerry veteran who runs Velocity, an accelerator at the University of Waterloo. They eschew traditional corporate hierarchies, which are cumbersome and slow to adapt to change. “Right now, entrepreneurs are creating lean, flat and fast-moving organizations, and that’s their chief advantage,” Kirkup says.

This goes beyond creating a different way to conduct business—it’s a new ideology for people to follow, says Art Mesher, a Waterloo, Ont., tech investor who ran Descartes Systems, a logistics technology firm, for a decade. The new establishment visionaries take their cues from Google and place a very heavy premium on creating and then protecting the intellectually electric, counter-corporate culture that gave rise to their staggering wealth. “I can smell the culture when I walk into the room,” says Mesher, who is now chairman of Nulogy, a rapidly growing Toronto supply chain technology firm.

Few are disrupting that culture inside and outside the boardroom more than Vice Media co-founder Shane Smith. Every generation of businesspeople has its characters (Peter Nygård, the flamboyant fashion mogul, springs to mind); Smith now fills that role. He is one of the progenitors of Brooklyn’s hipster scene—a shaggy, tattooed, larger-than-life titan who, last fall, dropped $300,000 on a lavish Las Vegas meal for 25 friends after winning $1 million at a high-rollers’ blackjack table. He approaches business in the same brash manner, cajoling the likes of Rupert Murdoch and one of Silicon Valley’s top venture capital firms to invest heavily in Vice’s expansion. The company raised $500 million in financing and deals in 2014 alone. “I don’t care about money,” Smith told the New York Times last May. “We have plenty of money. I care about strategic deals.”

This generation doesn’t care about borders and regulations, either. “These people are doing incredibly unreasonable things,” observes Toronto-based venture capitalist Daniel Debow, who founded Rypple, a performance measurement software firm backed by LinkedIn’s Peter Thiel, and sold it in 2012 to Salesforce. “They don’t look at the border as a business model.”

If there is any threat to the longevity of the next generation, it’ll be their ability to keep up with the frenetic pace of business they helped set. Members of the next establishment operate in the howling whirlwind of the post-BlackBerry world, where the technology disruption cycle is measured in months, not years. It’s creating an environment in which business execs in their late 30s are considered to be middle-aged. Slack, scarcely a year past its launch, already faces rivals. “You can’t just sit back and enjoy the moment you have,” says John Ruffolo, CEO of OMERS Ventures, the venture arm one of Canada’s leading pension funds. He describes this generation as one propelled forward by paranoia. “Just when you’ve finished disrupting someone, a new class of entrepreneurs is trying to disrupt you,” he says.

For companies experiencing hyper-growth, the difficulty of finding enough talented people—not just software engineers but also sales, marketing and design staff—in Canada’s largest centres becomes a determining factor in how they grow. For some, the only solution is to move to a place like Silicon Valley, where the talent pool runs deep.

Senior management stability is also critical. In 2010, when Chinese e-commerce and B2B site Alibaba was seeing its own explosive growth, Tsai, the company’s Canadian executive vice chairman, made a key move, altering the company’s corporate structure to a partnership model meant to encourage continuity and collaborative decision-making. Mesher says Tsai’s relationship with Alibaba’s founder, Jack Ma, is reminiscent of some other significant tech industry pairings, notably Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, and BlackBerry’s Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis.

So while lone wolves, like Amaya’s David Baazov, are hardly unusual among the business elite, tech investors also know these kinds of deep and enduring relationships represent a source of advantage and stability in firms experiencing extremely rapid growth, says Kirkup. With visionaries like Butterfield and Smith constantly pushing their companies to change directions rapidly in order to pursue market openings and new partnerships, Ruffolo observes, “you’re really betting on the adaptability of the team.”

What’s far less certain, of course, is whether the go-go members of the next Canadian establishment will be exposed to the sort of tech bubble meltdown that waylaid a generation of dot-com entrepreneurs 15 years ago. Butterfield, for his part, says high valuations don’t necessarily imply a bubble. Still, with multiples soaring, the pace of disruptive entrepreneurs will continue to accelerate: Witness the recent alliance between Uber and Shopify, which will allow the latter’s customers in selected cities to get same-day delivery through a service Camp’s company has branded UberRush. Camp is also launching an app that integrates the online and bricks-and-mortar shopping experiences, a move that sounds like a shot across Amazon’s considerable bow.

Sitting idle isn’t an option. Camp has even set aside US$50 million to start Expa, a startup studio—a company that creates new companies.

For Garrett Camp and Shane Smith and the rest of the next establishment, the best defence against a wealth-destroying correction, it appears, is to take several other industries out at the knees.

The post Meet Canada’s next generation of billion-dollar movers and shakers appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

You might have saw yesterday that we officially launched Sysomos Scout, which allows you to gain valuable knowledge and insight from what people are saying on Facebook, while still keeping those that are saying it anonymous. This great new piece of technology is thanks to Datasift’s Pylon, which gives us access to Facebook Topic Data. We’re honoured today to have a guest from Datasift, Zuzanna Pasierbinska-Wilson, VP Marketing at DataSift, to help explain why you should really care about Facebook Topic Data:

 

Thanks to social media, mobile devices and an always-connected audience, the biggest challenge for marketers today is making sure that their message stands out from the noise. This is never more true than as we hurtle towards Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the festive season. How do you ensure your brand’s marketing campaigns and messages don’t get lost in the frenzy of advertising, social media campaigns, video content and more? Well, to create truly compelling content that is going to resonate with your audience, you need a serious edge.

Until the launch of Facebook topic data earlier this year, marketers had great insights into paid Facebook content and corporate-owned pages, but what about the content that people are sharing and engaging around directly in their news feeds? What about all the likes, posts, and comments that your audience is avidly tapping away on phones, laptops and PCs to share? How can marketers really build effective content and campaigns that’s relevant to their audiences if they don’t have this insight?

In short, they’re missing out. With 1.55 billion monthly active members, Facebook offers marketers an unprecedented scale of insights and thanks to Facebook topic data brands and marketers can now gain valuable insights in a privacy-safe why. Here are the top five benefits of Facebook topic data and why this data source is a game changer for marketers across the globe:

 

1. Facebook is biggest source of public opinion data on Earth: Thanks to its 1.55 billion monthly active members, Facebook is the closest thing to a true representation of the world’s population available. The platform provides brands and marketers with an audience that no other social network comes close to and beyond the wildest dreams of traditional market research. Therefore, the insights marketers are looking at when they access Facebook topic data via services such as Sysomos Scout are representative of the general population and this makes it relevant to a massive range of organizations.
2. Big audience insights thanks to a privacy-first model: Facebook topic data represents the start of a new era of social data. Insights from Facebook topic data are  anonymized and aggregated, which means that no individuals can be identified in the data and the text of posts never leave Facebook. The stories themselves cannot be read by human eyes, but can be processed by PYLON behind Facebook’s firewall. That might sound like a problem, but business decisions are made on trends and comparisons, not on single data points. In fact, the aggregated and anonymized data enables marketers to gain a more in-depth understanding of their audience and the market as a whole.  Using Sysomos Scout, for example, enables marketers to graphically drill down into Facebook topic data and enables them to discover what people are saying about brands, events, subjects, activities and more. The fact that there’s no personally identifiable information (PII) also means Facebook topic data adheres to the EU’s upcoming privacy regulations and keeps consumers’ privacy intact.
3. Unique demographic insights – All Facebook topic data comes with self-declared user demographics that everyone populates when they sign up to Facebook. Facebook topic data comes with information on gender, age range and location. This is a huge step forward for the social analytics industry as demographics data is not readily available on any other social network in part because of privacy concerns when working with raw, identifiable data. As Facebook topic data is aggregated and anonymized it adds extra value to the data, providing insights on specific audiences
4. The opportunities are endless: Companies are already doing a wide variety of things with Facebook topic data. Some organizations have used it for brand analytics – to understand how their audiences engage with their brand, their campaigns and their competitors. Others have used it for content and media analysis. TV studios, for example, are using Facebook topic data to discover the content and issues that are most popular with their core audience and using this information to drive creative decisions and storylines. Another popular area is market research – discovering the audiences that are engaging with an industry, informing campaign design and driving creative.

 

Don’t miss out on the a chance to gain a competitive edge. Find out more about Sysomos Scout now!

The post Four Key Reasons You Should Care About Facebook Topic Data appeared first on Sysomos Blog.

Confessions of an Old-school Sales Professional

When I look back over my sales career, I realize that I mainly operated as a relationship-based seller. I had my share of successes with this approach, but I also saw a number of opportunities vanish just as they should be closing.

In one particular instance, I invested 18 months in building a great relationship with a client. At the eleventh hour, as the deal was set to close, it was pulled out from under me. Why? My main contact wasn’t the one who made the buying decision; it was her boss. I had been so embedded in my relationship that I developed a blind spot about considering other people who might ultimately be the decision-makers.

My biggest mistake was believing in old-school sales training, which taught the value of creating a connection with people, because, “if they like you, they will buy from you.” Today, with the knowledge of hindsight, I offer this addendum: It’s not enough to rely on just your interpersonal skills, staying in the opening phase of the sales process, when establishing relationships are key. Too many things can happen to derail the sale, so don’t put all your eggs in the one basket of relationships.

There are several other baskets of sales approaches and, as I’ve come to learn, those that are too narrowly focused can create undue risk of lost sales.

Charismatic: This is the relationship approach. If you’re a people person, it can be the most rewarding in terms of creating great connections and establishing real rapport. You like your clients and feel liked in return. But, just as in the case of my lost sale, you can easily develop a false sense of security. You may be connecting on an emotional level, but the decision is being made on economics, scalability, or a global master contract. There’s also a risk in trying to make friends if you’re not being authentic. Fake smiles and glad-handing are hallmarks of old-school sales approaches — ones that never really worked, even when they were new, because they were recognized by clients as being forced and disingenuous.

Technical: Knowledge can be power, but it can also be powerfully overwhelming for clients if you launch straight into a data dump. “Hello. How are you? Nice to meet you. Let me tell you everything that you need to know about our products and services.” Sales professionals who stay with a technical approach tend to download all of their information and go straight to the proposal stage. They put everything in front of the client and hope something sticks. The advantage is being seen as knowledgeable and credible. The risks include boring the client with an information overload and missing the opportunity to engage in dialogue and conduct a proper needs analysis.

Aggressor: Some sales professionals take a more aggressive approach, pushing new concepts at the client and moving quickly to try and close deals. When this works, new opportunities are created. When it doesn’t, it’s often because clients are uncomfortable with confrontation or being pushed. There are times when pushing an agenda forward is effective, but it takes a certain skill set to know when and how to push appropriately.

Consultative: A consultative approach can be most effective because it draws on the best traits of many styles while adding a level of depth. It stems from a more evolved understanding of the sales process, with the ability to navigate the sales dialogue to fully understand client needs and opportunities, offer insights, and help shape solutions that clients value.

At this point in my career, I have evolved my approach to be more consultative, adding new skills to my toolkit to delve deeper into the sales dialogue. There’s less risk of being blindsided by lost sales, as when relying solely on relationships, and more likelihood of making on-target recommendations that can accelerate the sales cycle, based on a clear understanding of client needs.

I find that consultative selling to be a more inclusive style, allowing me to blend my relationship-building skills with technical knowledge and, at times, pushing forward new information to clients. In moving beyond my old-school training, I expect my clients to find greater value in my insights while I travel further down the path of becoming a trusted advisor.

Learn more about Richardson’s Consultative Selling Sales Training Solutions.

The post Confessions of an Old-school Sales Professional appeared first on Richardson Sales Enablement Blog.

There’s a lot more than just SEO behind successful business blogs. You have to write about what matters to your audience, draw them in with inspired writing, and blog consistently.

And speaking of blogging consistently, here’s a free
business blog planner you can use to make sure you are producing remarkable blogs for your business regularly (you’re welcome).

From one business blogger to another, here are some inspiring words of wisdom about what it takes to write highly effective business blogs to help you build an audience and position you as a thought leader in your industry.

How To Write Highly Effective Business Blogs Tip#1

Just like everything you do in life (hopefully), writing should have a purpose. The best performing business blogs out there are crafted with clear goals in mind.

And by goals, I DON’T mean “selling.”

Your business blogging goals should revolve around the following:

• Building your authority and thought-leadership in your industry by finding your voice, proactively sharing your expertise, and staying relevant.
• Getting found by your buyer personas and capturing new audiences by discussing industry-relevant topics that matter to them.
• Nurturing prospects and leads through active engagement.

Don’t be afraid to share your expertise and don’t be afraid of alienating certain audiences by zero-ing in on your blog’s purpose. Focus your blog on what matters to your business, and what matters to your business should be what matters to your buyer personas.

How To Write Highly Effective Business Blogs Tip#2

To capture the hearts and minds of your readers, you need to create a “voice” for your business blog. Don’t coat your writing with industry jargons, abstract explanations, or complicated expositions. When it comes to writing, simplicity is the best policy. Your blog is a means of engaging with your audience, and sufficed to say, if you cannot speak to them in a voice they understand or appreciate, then you are failing.

Albert Einstein himself once said,
“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

Find a voice that carries authority without sacrificing enthusiasm and creativity. You can let your hair down and still sound smart. Just because you are writing a business blog doesn’t mean you have to be bland. On the contrary, the top business blogs out there are highly successful and influential because they were written with a memorable voice. This is your chance to connect to your audience and differentiate yourself from your competitors. You are not just another business talking about just another business concept.

You have a powerful voice, you have a memorable personality, and you speak the language of your audience.

How To Write Highly Effective Business Blogs Tip#3

New ideas abound and industry shakeups pop up unexpectedly. One of the best ways to utilize this is to make sure you are tuned in to the goings on in your industry. If there are new ideas or current affairs to be explored that you are not quite familiar with, don’t fret. Take a deep breath, do your research and don’t shy away from taking a jab at it. Blogging about new ideas or breaking news is a great way to expose your blog to a new audience.

You can keep yourself in the know and ahead of the game in your industry by:

• Setting Google Alerts
• Subscribing to industry-specific curated publications
• Taking part in forums and social groups
• Regularly checking out credible industry-related studies
• Follow industry leaders and hear what they have to say
• Attend industry conventions
• Make it a habit to conduct your own experiments, analysis, and tests on your theories

Strike while the iron is hot and submerge yourself into the unknown!

How To Write Highly Effective Business Blogs Tip#4

To perfect your writing and make it more effective, learn from the posts you have published before. Which topics were a hit? Which ones weren’t? What voice got your readers engaged? What got flak? Maybe there were other angles to explore? Maybe some items were left out? Maybe there was some successful trends that can be repeated on your future posts? Learn from what works and what doesn’t.

Don’t forget, mistakes are meant for learning, not repeating.

How To Write Highly Effective Business Blogs Tip#5

“Either write something worth reading, or do something worth writing.”
-Benjamin Franklin

They say the pen is mightier than the sword — this adage is exactly what content marketing is all about. The power to influence is at the tip of your fingertips through blogging. But to wield this power effectively, you must hone your skills in writing. What better way to learn how to write better than by reading?

Successful business blogs have more than just remarkable ideas; they are written well. Writing well in the digital space for your business doesn’t just mean you got good grammar, flawless punctuation and correct spelling. Now, don’t get me wrong. These are all necessary to build a credible blog for your business, but these are not what makes great writing alone.

Writing is an art and a skill that improves over time. The key is to keep writing and to keep reading. Reading regularly does not only improve your mind in general but it teaches you how to write better too. Exposing yourself to great writing enables you to acquire a wide-range of writing styles, helps you generate innovative ideas, and the best part — enables you to get into the mindset of your industry audience and determine what captures their minds and what doesn’t.

How To Write Highly Effective Business Blogs Tip#6

To create a highly effective business blog, you must write it with your buyer personas in mind. Who are the group of people you are looking to target? What are their pain points, their language, and their pleasures?

Don’t write blog articles simply because you want to, write them because they offer some sort of value to your buyer personas. When you know who you are writing for, you can will be able to create content pieces that are a million times more meaningful and effective.

How To Write Highly Effective Business Blogs Tip#7

Don’t be left rotting on the digital shelf because you are stuck on repeat like a broken record. If you want to produce blogs that resonate with your audience, you have to go beyond the old blahs and make it a point to stay current.

How To Write Highly Effective Business Blogs Tip#8

Your business blog should always impart value to your readers. To create compelling blog articles, do your research and incorporate facts, ideas, and other resources that can expand your thoughts and offer value.

Be sure to fact check claims you want to make and attribute them accordingly to the individuals or organizations where they have originated from. The last thing you want to do as a business blogger, is to apologize to your reader for inaccuracies or lack of information. Do your research diligently.

How To Write Highly Effective Business Blogs Tip#9

One of the best tips here, is to just be yourself. If you’re looking to build a following online, let your personality show and people will follow. Just because you are writing a business blog doesn’t mean you cannot express yourself in the manner that is true to who you are.

On the contrary, your personality is one of the greatest assets when it comes to writing business blogs. People want to get to know who’s behind the screen. Your personality sets you apart from the saturated world of online content.

Take your blog as an opportunity to forge a stronger bond between you and your audience. It’s okay to have your own opinions, and it’s okay to sprinkle vivacity and personality into your writing.

How To Write Highly Effective Business Blogs Tip#10

When you find an opportunity to go against the tide, I suggest you take it.

Have ideas that are not exactly the what your industry agrees with? Go for it! Open your laptop and write away. It takes guts and a whole lot of research but when done right, going against the grain on certain industry matters can be your ticket to the hearts and minds of new (and even old) audiences.

You shouldn’t be a digital parrot for the old ideas in your industry tossed around like a wilted salad. Don’t oppose just to be different. Delve into the details of why you think a certain idea is worth the opposite outlook and do ample research to support your argument.

How To Write Highly Effective Business Blogs Tip#11

Writing a good blog consistently requires you getting into the “zone”. Write when you’re feeling enthusiastic and get in the habit of conditioning yourself to certain “flow” times. Find the best times of the day that work for you. When are you feeling the most inspired? When will you have the least amount of interruptions? Writing regularly can be tough if you cannot find your flow. Get in tune with yourself and make writing at optimal times a habit.

How To Write Highly Effective Business Blogs Tip#12

No matter how great your business blogs are, they are only half as effective if you do not amplify them. Share your blogs with world through social media channels, forums, industry-related groups and other channels that are relevant. Keep in mind that there is a fine line between sharing and spamming so make sure you aren’t crossing the line.

Share your work on your personal and business pages, encourage your audience to engage with you, ask them questions and proactively join the chatter about the topics you are writing about. Remember not to share your blogs in social media groups or channels if they are out of context or can be deemed inappropriate or offensive for a particular audience.

How To Write Highly Effective Business Blogs Tip#13

The best way to write effective business blogs? Simple. KEEP AT IT.

Have tips of your own you found helpful with your business blogs? I want to hear them! Share your tips on the comment section below.

We’ve all had it happen. You download an app and suddenly you’re getting hit with what feels like the exact same message over and over. Maybe it’s announcing a discount. Maybe it’s trying to get you to use the app more often. But after a while, the sheer repetition makes the messages feel intrusive, even aggressive.

You don’t want your customers to feel that way–especially when you consider that 78% of people would disable notifications or uninstall an app if they became unhappy with the push notifications they receive. But you still need a way to let your customers know important things about your app and to demonstrate its value. To keep your messaging fresh, give these approaches a try:

Take advantage of pop culture

Pop culture doesn’t always get a lot of respect. Time passes and suddenly that blockbuster movie isn’t being buzzed about, the hit song drops out of everybody’s playlists, and an instantly recognizable meme goes from hilarious, to yesterday’s news. But it’s exactly this ephemeral quality that makes pop culture perfect for marketers.

Imagine your brand has a clothing and lifestyle-focused app, let’s call it Flash & Thread, that struggles with low customer engagement. You’ll send campaigns meant to get formerly active customers to give the app another try. Because pop culture comes and goes quickly, referencing it makes that message feel current, even if its purpose is similar to ones that you’ve sent before.

Some things to keep in mind:

1) Make sure the reference is a good fit for your brand

It’s okay to step a little outside your comfort zone if that’s where your customers are. But be mindful of your brand and what it stands for. Your references should either be universal or make intuitive sense when customers see them.

2) Know your audience (and what they care about)

Pay attention to audience demographics AND how customers interact with your brand. If most of you customers are men under 25, you’ll probably do better referencing college football than playing off a Taylor Swift song–but if you have a music app, the opposite might be true.

3) Keep an eye on patterns

As you send more campaigns that play off pop culture, you may find that referencing memes gets you better results than playing off hit TV shows. These kinds of patterns give you guidance on what your customers respond to and can help suggest future campaigns.

Highlight holidays and seasonal touchstones

Think of holidays and seasons as pop culture’s cyclical cousins: they’re familiar and current in the same way, but every year they come back.

Imagine that Flash & Thread schedules regular sales to highlight new collections. Holidays and seasons stretch across the whole year, so there’s always something you can reference. And because the difference between each holiday and each season is usually pronounced, these references help each message feel different from the last. Plus, successful outreach can be refined year after year, since most customers won’t remember a message they read 52 weeks ago.

When you’re sending campaigns with seasonal and holiday content, be thoughtful about how you’re targeting them. You’ll want to make sure that your Independence Day-themed campaigns aren’t being sent to people outside the U.S. and that you’re not sending messages about the changing leaves to Australian customers when it’s 90 degrees in Sydney.

Let visuals do more of the talking

A great picture is priceless. Images are more effective than text in conveying information and they can also affect how we think about the text they’re paired with. By using varied visuals for different messages conveying a similar call to action, you can make each one feel distinct.

Maybe Flash & Thread has had success driving purchases with simple, straightforward messages advertising flash sales and you’re looking for a way to keep using that type of copy for more sales without making customers feel like they’re getting the same message over and over. By using visuals to highlight each sale’s distinct items, the focus of your outreach shifts from message to message, keeping the experience fresh.

Remember, though, that a picture is only an asset if it supports your call to action. Because images are so powerful, using one that distracts from the purpose of your message can be worse than not using one at all.

Use different messaging channels

One mistake that marketers make is overusing a single outreach channel. Push notifications, for instance, can be a great way to reach your customers. But sending a push notification after push notification with a similar message can contribute to a sense of repetition and message overload. Making use of other outreach channels–like in-app messaging and email–lets you take advantage of the different look and feel of each of these message types to combat audience fatigue.

Imagine that Flash & Thread has a monthly lifestyle event you want customers to attend. While the messages you send each month focus on encouraging attendance, using a combination of push notifications, in-app messages, and emails, can keep you from relying too much on any one channel.

Plus, sending messages in different channels gives your outreach a more varied look and feel. Some channels support rich, immersive content (email and rich in-app messages), and others are at their best when you’re sending brief, direct outreach (push notifications and simple in-app messages). If your brand sends customers an email about the November event at the beginning of the month, and then follows up with a push notification the day of the event, each message will make a distinct impression on recipients, even if what’s being communicated is effectively the same.

Some things to keep in mind:

1) It’s possible to send too many messages, even if they’re sent in different channels

While sending messages in three different channels is less repetitive than sending three straight push notifications, it’s still possible to overdo it. Keep an eye on how many messages you’re sending people and consider scaling back if you start seeing diminishing returns.

2) Multi-channel messaging only varies your outreach for a subset of your customers

If a customer hasn’t shared their email address with you, they’re not going to receive emails from you. The same goes for push notifications for people who have opted out of push and in-app messages for people who no longer visit your app. That means that while multi-channel outreach is a great way to mix things up for some customers, you’ll need other tactics to keep things fresh for everyone else.

Personalize your outreach

When a customer starts to receiving a series of similar messages from one brand, the experience can feel objectifying, like they’re just a generic customer who can be pushed into a conversion. That’s not how you want your audience to feel and it’s not a good way to build the sort of durable customer/brand relationships you need to succeed in the long run.

By personalizing the messages that you send to your customers, you can take advantage of what you know about your audience to treat them as individuals whose interests and preferences you value. That makes it easier to show your customers the value of your brand while also adjusting your pitch based on the way they’re interacting with your app. (Plus, personalizing messages boosts conversions by more than 27%!)

Imagine that Flash & Thread regularly sends outreach to loyal customers promoting its latest shoes. By personalizing those messages to include references to each customer’s favorite shoe brand, they’ll receive outreach that’s targeted to them, but that changes as their preferences do–if someone gets sick of Nike and decides they really prefer Adidas, they’ll get messages that reflect that change.

Add in dynamic content

Dynamic content lets you insert personalized information from your brand’s internal servers or from third-party APIs into your outreach. These messages won’t just feel of-the-moment: they will BE of-the-moment, because they adjust in real time, or close to real-time. That means the message you send today is different than the one you’ll send tomorrow, even if the copy your marketing team has crafted doesn’t change.

If Flash & Thread sends out a winter campaign advertising a sale on bedding, you could use dynamic content to adjust the message based on up-to-the-minute weather data: if a customer receives the message when there’s heavy snow falling, they’ll be encouraged to shop online, but if they receive the same message when it’s nice out, they’ll get the address of your closest store. That way your message feels distinct and relevant every time.

What’s the next step?

None of these approaches will work for every one of the messages you regularly send, but they’re a good place to start. Try different tactics in different campaigns and see which ones lead to results you’re happy with. And don’t be afraid to mix and match different tactics in a single message–sometimes that’s just what you need to take a message to the next level…

• Bestselling author and star podcast host Tim Ferriss had a guidance counselor who told him not to apply to Princeton, which he eventually graduated from.
• Another faculty member taught him to consider the downside of every decision, and Ferriss has maintained the practice ever since.
• The experience taught him to think of a person's motive when they give advice.

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When Tim Ferriss was a senior at St. Paul's, an elite boarding school in New Hampshire, in 1994, he met with his guidance counselor to discuss his future.

Years later, the bestselling author and star podcast host would consider a piece of advice from that counselor to be the worst he'd ever received, he told Business Insider.

It was simply: "You shouldn't apply to Princeton."

Ferriss originally told us what the experience taught him in an interview in 2015, and expanded upon it in a recent interview for our podcast "Success! How I Did It."

Ferriss had transferred to St. Paul's from a public school on Long Island, where he grew up. Neither those credits nor the ones from his year abroad in Japan had carried, and he was making them up over the summer. The guidance counselor found the idea of Ferriss applying to Princeton to be a waste of time for the both of them, especially since the counselor was motivated to play it safe — his success was measured by how many of his students got into their first choice schools.

After the guidance counselor left him feeling discouraged, another member of the faculty, Reverend Richard Greenleaf, told him he had to apply. Months later, Ferriss was accepted to Princeton and eventually graduated in 2000.

Listen to the full episode here:

The experience taught him two things about receiving advice that influenced his entire career.

Understand other people's incentives when they give you advice

Everyone, no matter how selfless, has a personal reason for offering you advice — even if it's as pure as wanting to see you happy or to avoid seeing you hurt.

In Ferriss' example, he says that the guidance counselor's performance was judged by the success rate of his students' college applications. Because Princeton was a reach for Ferriss, the counselor assumed the inevitable denial would make him look like a poor adviser. On the other hand, Rev. Greenleaf told Ferriss to follow his heart because he achieved job satisfaction by seeing his school's students excel.

Consider the downside of taking the advice versus not taking it

Greenleaf told Ferriss, Ferriss told us: "I think you should just apply. What’s the downside?"

"And 'What's the downside?' has become a question that I’ve asked myself ever since," Ferriss said. "Like what's the worse that could happen? I apply and I don't get in. 'What’s the best that could happen?' I spend a few days or a week working on it, and I get in! Well that's a very asymmetrical risk/reward, so I applied."

Ferriss' new book "Tribe of Mentors" is a collection of advice from 140 impressive people, but Ferriss noted  that advice should only be worth pursuing when the person giving the advice had firsthand experience and no selfish or cynical motive.

"It's worth considering their advice if they've gone through it," Ferriss told us.

This is an updated version of a story that ran on November 19, 2015.

SEE ALSO: 'The 4-Hour Workweek' author Tim Ferriss reveals what he's learned after a difficult year of introspection, and how he built a passionate fanbase of millions

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Tim Ferriss explains why bad advice can be as valuable as good advice

After three months without a leader, Twitter recently brought back founder Jack Dorsey as full time CEO. He’s been making loud noises about shaking things up at the rapid-fire social network in response to slow user growth.

Talking recently about the introduction of Moments, Dorsey said it was one piece of the puzzle that will make all of Twitter better, and that “there will be many more pieces to come over the next year”.

CFO Anthony Noto has previously admitted that Twitter users are tech enthusiasts and early adopters, not the mass market that Twitter needs to start breaking into.

He has described the problem honestly, stating “Nonusers can continue to ask: ‘Why should I use Twitter?’”, and if they go to the platform to discover the answer themselves, it remains “too difficult to use”.

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8 Twitter predictions for 2016

1 – Appealing to the mainstream

Twitter has recently introduced Likes and Moments.

Likes have been part of the social landscape since Facebook introduced the omnipresent thumb in 2009, so the change appears designed to adopt a more mainstream language.

Moments makes it easier to find the stories that matter. One of Twitter’s main selling points is the conversation happening around breaking news as the events happen, but for some the constant stream of information means they miss conversations they care about.

2016 will likely see more product updates that attempt to appeal to the mainstream audience.

There is value in the vast amount of content Twitter has, the challenge is to get the right content in front of the right people at the right time.

If they can find a way of doing this, the mainstream might discover why the hardcore are in love with it.

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2 – Accessibility improvements

The changes outlined above relate to another problem Twitter faces; the difficulty new users face when signing up.

Jack Dorsey recently asked developers for their suggestions on improving Twitter. One of the most requested changes was accessibility improvements across the product.

Having announced a revamped Twitter for Mac app, expect Twitter to make improvements to its web client and mobile app in 2016.

Finding what matters to users should be easier. One possibility is to migrate some features from its own client Tweetdeck to assist users in create a more flexible, personalized experience.

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3 – A change to the algorithm

Changing the interface is one option, changing the algorithm is another.

The latter solution would surely be more desirable in the long-term for Twitter. It would allow them to start to curate user timelines, in the way Facebook has done for some time.

Curating a timeline would allow Twitter to tailor the experience of a new user, while allowing huge potential for monetization. It could mean gradually introducing more branded content into a user’s timeline, and later charging advertisers for the privilege.

Twitter would have to tread a careful balance if it chose this route.

The furore this would create would presumably be much bigger on Twitter, where the unedited stream of content is seen as integral to the platform.

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4 – Increasing in-app retention

A common trend among social media sites is improving functionality to keep users in-app.

Facebook introduced its own video hosting to stem the flow of users heading off to YouTube, and has recently introduced Instant Articles to encourage content to be posted directly on the site.

2016 should see long form content available in Twitter in some capacity. In May it was reported that Twitter had been in talks to buy Flipboard, the social magazine, for $1 billion.

Fortune has reported that Twitter is working on other ways to help publishers and media outlets publish content directly to Twitter. Re/code has gone further to suggest Twitter and Google are teaming up to provide an open source platform.

This will affect social referral traffic to brand websites, although this doesn’t mean the content will be read less. The quicker access to content may even lead to a rise in views and engagement.

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5 – Selling through Twitter

After initial tests, the site has announced a function to allow retailers to sell products and digital services within a tweet via a Buy Now button.

This follows some previous monetization experiments including Twitter Offers and Products and Places.

These features are US only at present, but we should see them roll out into other territories in the near future. Twitter has the potential to use geolocation data to create localized content, showing adverts or offers for local businesses.

A user could be shown an ad for a local cafe in the morning and a cinema voucher after work.

2016 should see an increase in the number and types of ads, and the ease in which users can purchase directly from Twitter.

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6 – Raising the character limit?

Earlier this year the 140 character limit was removed on direct messages, and some think this is Twitter’s way of testing the water before making the the same change to regular tweets.

This has been a rumored change that would be a seismic shift for the network.

It was one of the most requested changes when developers were asked for their suggestions.

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7 – The future of Periscope

Twitter’s live-streaming video app Periscope has amassed 10 million users in four months.

This is impressive for a social media baby, but can it grow up? We need to see if it can move beyond a niche interest to grab a bigger share of the market.

It could be brands that end up helping to grow the numbers. Always keen to find new and innovative ways to advertise, brands have found various ways to harness Periscope for marketing, even at this early stage.

2016 will surely see an increase in user numbers on Periscope, which will inevitably attract more brands.

At present Twitter is not directly monetizing the platform, only making money via promoted tweets that advertise a brand’s live stream on Periscope.

Expect brand advertising to increase on the platform as they exploit a new and free avenue.

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8 – The growth of Vine

Bought in 2012 before launch, Vine now has 100 million monthly active users. Twitter has yet to monetize the platform though, instead focusing on improving the product and growing the user base.

Earlier this year the site acquired Niche, a startup that helps advertisers work with influencers on Vine and other platforms.

This may be an early indicator that 2016 will start to see paid adverts in some form.

Now the site has a healthy user base and growth is outpacing Twitter, the temptation to cash in could be realized.

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What do you think of our Twitter predictions for 2016? Have we missed something you’re sure will happen?

Let us know your predicted Twitter trends in the comments below, and don’t forget to check back for more in the series of what to expect from social media in 2016.

BEIJING (AP) — Chinese leaders' ambition to use market forces to make the state-dominated financial system more efficient is colliding with their version of "too big to fail."

The latest reform target is China's sleepy bond market. Until last year, Beijing protected buyers of corporate bonds by bailing out any company that ran short of cash to repay them. Since then, it has allowed a growing number of defaults, hoping investors will be encouraged to look more closely at companies and force risky borrowers to pay more.

Now, that stance is being tested by a credit crunch involving a steel maker that is owned by the Chinese Cabinet and part of an industry the Communist Party says is a pillar of the economy.

SinoSteel Corp. faced the possibility of being required to pay bondholders up to 2 billion yuan ($315 million) in October but says that has been pushed back to Dec. 16. That followed reports the company warned it might lack the cash to pay, prompting China's planning agency to organize talks with creditors in a sign of SinoSteel's elite status.

A SinoSteel spokeswoman, Zhang Zhuo, said the two sides were in negotiations on repayment.

The conflict highlights the tension between the Communist Party's desire for the prosperity that comes from competition and its insistence on protecting state companies that underpin its political and economic plans.

"If a company is too big or too important, even if it loses money, it is difficult for the government to handle a default," said Chen Kang, chief bond analyst at the SWS Research Ltd.

Plans to develop the bond market have been under discussion for a decade. Advocates say shifting away from reliance on state-owned banks will reduce political interference in lending and force borrowers to be more disciplined.

The ruling party has yet to disclose all the details but economic planners suggest some borrowers are too important to fail.

A deputy director of the Cabinet planning agency, the National Development and Reform Commission, said in a June 29 speech its local branches should prevent defaults by state companies, according to business news outlets.

"We cannot allow a credit market default incident to occur, thereby affecting the entire credit environment and financing for state-owned enterprises and national financial stability," said the official, Lian Weiliang, according to Caijing, a business magazine. Lian's agency released no transcript but other outlets attributed similar comments to him.

In September, a state-owned manufacturer of smelting equipment, China National Erzhong Group, said it might miss an interest payment on a 1 billion yuan ($160 million) bond. Its corporate parent averted losses to investors by purchasing their bonds.

Chinese companies are struggling with economic growth that fell to a six-year low of 6.8 percent in the latest quarter. Companies that expected at least 7.5 percent growth this year are scrambling to repay debts out of weakening cash flow.

The number of defaults still is low in a 40 trillion yuan ($6.3 trillion) Chinese bond market with some 3,000 issuers but that is expected to rise as growth of corporate revenue slows.

Especially vulnerable industries include steel, cement and solar panels, where rapid expansion during the past decade's building boom left high debt and a glut of unneeded production capacity, according to financial analysts.

"We certainly will see an increasing number of corporate defaults," said Sun Binbin, chief bond analyst for China Merchants Securities.

In the biggest failure yet, a cement maker, China Shanshui Cement Group, defaulted last week on a 2 billion yuan ($315 million) note.

Investors also have lost money in smaller defaults by a real estate developer, a producer of solar panels and a manufacturer of power equipment.

Regulators want to enforce discipline by letting weak borrowers fail without allowing a wave of defaults that might hurt the ability of healthy companies to raise money, according to Christopher Lee, chief ratings officer for Standard & Poor's Hong Kong office.

"Market discipline is the byword for the government but it is a balancing act," said Lee in an email.

SinoSteel's troubles are a side effect of Beijing's effort to rebalance the economy away from reliance on trade and investment by nurturing growth based on consumer spending and service industries. Controls imposed to cool a debt-fueled construction boom have crushed demand for steel, cement and other building materials.

The tussle with investors stems from a 2010 bond issue that matures in 2017. Investors had the right to ask for early repayment in October but news reports said SinoSteel warned it might not have enough cash.

The company spokeswoman, Zhang, declined to give details of the negotiations, SinoSteel's financial status or the government's role.

"With the agreement of the investors, what we have done doesn't violate China's Securities Law and does not constitute default," said Zhang. "We hope that through negotiation a final agreement can be reached."

___

AP researcher Yu Bing contributed.

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Employee Advocacy in its inception is the idea of providing great products and services as well as a positive work environment to encourage employee to get on their “soapbox” and sing the praises of the brand. We have all seen the evolution of communication unfold before our very eyes. We have seen society turn to social media as the outlet to voice their opinion for any number of topics, one being their employer. Organizations have picked up on this and now see the opportunity to leverage their employees and those connected via social networks.

One of the most common questions I have heard is: “If we adopt an employee advocacy program, how do can we monetize it?” It’s simple, it all start with providing an easy way for employees to access corporate approved content, share, and measure the results. I will get into detail but let’s start with the basics. I like to think of this as a gradual process from employee advocate to social seller. With the proper training and technology they will learn best practices and have the ability to attach real dollars to their social activity.

The most basics of advocacy are all about brand awareness, getting branded content in front of as many eyes as possible while driving thought leadership around what you do. When it comes to technology, there are a multitude of platforms available that can accomplish this task but if you are looking to attach revenue to these efforts you need something that is advanced in functionality.

When it comes to realizing revenue with advocacy and social selling programs, I see three very important pieces to the equation.

1. Content: Providing engaging relevant content is tremendously important. If all your advocates are doing is sharing product driven content they’re networks will stop listening and see them as spammers. We all have that friend on Facebook.
2. Training: I can’t reiterate this enough, without proper guidance your advocates will just turn into an extension of the marketing team. The idea here is to close business as direct result from these social activities, so enable them to be “Social Sellers.” I have seen this happen at numerous organizations and it is a fantastic thing to see the light go off.
3. Technology: Content is in place, employees are trained on best practices, now let’s introduce a technology solution that will make this super easy for marketing to get content into the hands of the advocates and makes it super easy for them to share said content and measure the results.

Essential steps to moving through the employee advocacy to revenue model successfully:

Training – Through proper training they will take one step closer to a “Social Seller.” Teach them to put their ear to the ground and listen for conversations that deal with what they do. My boss uses the analogy:

“What would you do if there was a room full of your prospects talking about a problem that you provide a solution to and you told one of your reps to go into the room and join the conversation and they said no….you would probably fire them right?”

This will help to uncover hidden opportunities that may have been missed, gain insight on competitors and prospects, and better understand the customer’s needs. These conversations are happening every day on social.

Engagement – Now that they are in the right place it is time to execute the daunting task of engaging, its make or break time. Once again, with proper training you can teach your team how to engage in these conversations without being to “salesy.” If you are genuine in your outreach and provide relevant insight in an effort to help your audience will recognize that and it will help to establish credibility.

Contextual Sharing – Moving on to the next “phase” if you will is creating these types of conversations. It’s all about context! Why is this relevant to your audience or a specific individual? With proper context you can attract people to these conversations, add value, nurture and create relationships, and eventually close some business.

Revenue Attribution – Reach and Brand Awareness are important but being able to attach a dollar amount to all of this is much more important. This is where having a platform that integrates at a data level with your CRM is highly beneficial for both sales and marketing. Marketing can now measure a tangible result to their efforts which in turn typically increases there budget. Sales will have insight into the amount of leads generated, revenue attributed to social activity, and also they have a better lens into the buyers journey.

If you have any questions or comments, you can find me on Twitter @JTrFactr.

Over the last couple years, there’s been a rapid shift to buy all sorts of sales technology purchased under the premise that it would help magically unlock sales results. But the pendulum is shifting back a bit towards supporting the basic fundamentals of sales and sales management and settling into what it takes to create a truly “modern”, high growth sales organization.

Companies who got a little too aggressive on buying sales tech are realizing that to scale their company, they can’t forget the basics – improved training of salespeople, enabling front line sales managers to be better coaches, and managing their salespeople around a common set of metrics. No matter what amazing sales tech you use, if your salespeople aren’t consistently prospecting, having client meetings and sending out proposals, your sales numbers will suffer.

Now I’m not saying scrap it all and go old school on selling. That’s a huge mistake, because the world of selling is vastly different today than it was even a couple years ago, let alone 10 to 15 years back. I like to summarize the changing world of sales as a triangle with three parts.

• The Buyer: In the old world, buyers were beholden to salespeople for any and all information. They didn’t really trust salespeople. In the modern world, the buyer is in control. They’ve done their research, read all the customer reviews, have a sense of how much your service costs, etc. They expect a salesperson to be more of an educator that shepherds them through the rest of their buying process.
• The Seller: The seller used to be more of a lone wolf, didn’t like to use technology, and was hyper competitive (to a fault) with their peers. Today’s millennial sales person wants constant feedback, wants a real time view into how they’re doing, adapts to technology faster than their company, and collaborates with their peers so they can all get better together.
• The Sales Manager: The front line sales manager is crucial to allowing a company to effectively navigate through all this change. A team of good salespeople quickly suffers and fails when they have a weak manager. The old school sales leader who was all about steak dinners, closing meetings and a Rolodex of contacts isn’t going to cut it. Today’s sales leader helps their salespeople be good educators for their buyers, is a metrics driven coach, encourages collaboration and shared learning, and enables a culture of performance.

So with that background in mind, here are the keys to ensuring your sales team is really ready to scale in this modern world.

Helping Is the new Selling

This can feel like a bit of a nuance, but it’s vital. Companies need to think of their sales process as an opportunity to educate their prospects, and to help their buyers make the right decisions. Marketing needs to work closely with your sales team to develop content that helps a client move through their phases of discovery and education, and your sales team needs to have that content down cold. Old or new world, your salespeople will be competitive by nature, have a burning desire to win, and can effectively influence and persuade. But the best salespeople do that by educating, not manipulating.

Define Your Fundamental Sales Metrics

This is one that everyone seems to “get” but dramatically over-complicates, and ends up not really doing the right way, which creates significant drag in your ability to grow. With the growth of CRM and an influx of sales and marketing tech, data is coming from everywhere. You can measure and analyze anything, which means you try to measure and analyze everything!

Companies need to work with their sales team to boil down the 3 to 5 critical behaviors and activities they need to be focused on day-in and day-out. These need to be controllable by the salesperson, and serve as the leading indicators to closing business. As mentioned earlier, no matter what your sales tech stack looks like, if salespeople aren’t having conversations with prospects and creating and progressing sales opportunities, sales won’t happen. So figure out the right ones for your company, and be relentless in managing your salespeople around them. This will help you onboard new salespeople faster, identify weak points in your sales process, and get an early view into what could jeopardize next month’s sales targets.

Create Real Time Visibility

Once you have those metrics and behaviors defined, give your salespeople the real time feedback they so deeply crave. Once they understand these key measures, it helps them manage their time effectively, stay focused on what matters, and know who among their peers they can help, or who they should learn from.

The real time view is key for everyone, especially the sales manager and executives because it allows them to see when a key metric is falling off pace so they can take action. Falling behind on prospecting meetings? Even if you’re crushing this quarter’s sales number, if you don’t get that back on track, next quarter could be a challenge. Companies need to put an end to pulling sales data at the end of the quarter only to then discover that a key activity went sideways weeks ago and now it’s too late to do anything about it.

Enable Managers to be Metrics Driven Coaches

A common scenario is that front line sales managers are former top performing salespeople, so they garner quick respect from their direct reports. However, often times it doesn’t last because they just don’t know how to coach and manage people, when and how to have good one-on-ones, and what to discuss other than what’s closing this month. When you’ve defined your fundamental sales metrics and are watching them daily, you are empowering your front line sales managers to manage their people with a common set of measures. It also allows them to see how their sales team is performing, compared to other sales teams in the company. This gets front line managers learning from each other, and funnels up to the VP of Sales who can also be monitoring their sales teams in a common and aligned way.

As you build out your own “modern” sales organization, make sure you keep an eye on the fundamentals and that your sales tech stack is one that aligns with executing on those fundamentals every single day.

The post How to Build a Modern Sales Organization appeared first on OpenView Labs.

Understanding buyers is essential to great marketing. When you are properly aligned, you have confidence in your marketing strategies and your tactics are more effective.

A customer journey map details a representative customer’s experience and includes company interactions from initial contact, through the process of engagement and into a long-term relationship. It can include virtual as well as human interactions.

Customer Match is an exciting new feature that Google recently unveiled that can greatly strengthen your ability to connect with an existing customer base. You now have the option to upload the email addresses of past customers or email subscribers directly to AdWords. You can then target that audience through Google Search, Gmail, or YouTube. Similar features are already available through AdRoll and Facebook. With Google’s newest addition, you can now leverage 1^st-party data across yet another network.

This is fantastic news for all advertisers, particularly those in possession of large lists of customer emails who are looking for new ways to utilize that data to improve marketing efforts. Every marketer I know is looking for a better way to increase marketing efficiency, so this should really benefit all of us.

Google is allowing you to take what you know about your customers and use that to drive messaging across devices and platforms. This, in turn, allows you to build loyalty and repeat purchases among an existing customer base.

Three Main Methods for Leveraging
Customer Match

1) The first, and most obvious, way to use Customer Match is to stay in front of your customers. If someone has made a purchase from your business, these audiences can be used to target existing customers and keep your brand fresh in their mind. This encourages repeat purchases and leads to incremental gains.

2) The second is to re-engage past buyers who haven’t interacted with your brand in an extended period of time. Imagine Jane Doe bought a stereo in January and hasn’t purchased from your brand since. You can now create an audience specifically to target her, and individuals like her, when they’re logged into the Google network.

3) The third method is to create a negative audience. This audience is made from a group of people whom you do not want to see your ads. (Maybe you don’t want to risk overexposure, or you wouldn’t benefit from re-engaging this audience.) Businesses focusing on generating leads fit into this category. Customer Match allows you to create and exclude that audience from your advertising campaigns. As a result, you only capture new leads.

There’s a Low Barrier of Entry

Setup for Customer Match is simple. Upload a .csv file containing hashed email addresses directly into AdWords. The larger the list the better, since audiences with fewer than 1,000 members won’t be targeted through any of Google’s networks for privacy reasons. Once processed, you have a new audience to target across devices and channels like any other remarketing audience.

The one exception here is the Display Network, since this feature is not yet compatible. For YouTube and Gmail, Google also creates a “Similar Audience” when eligible. This can increase overall lead volume by allowing you to target audiences made of new users who exhibit characteristics similar to your Customer Match lists.

Customers Come First

Google goes to great lengths to protect user privacy, and this feature is no different. All data uploaded to AdWords must be 1st-party data. All email addresses must be hashed before uploading. Once they’ve been processed and matched to Google users, all data is discarded. This process ensures that all user information remains safe and protected throughout the entire matching process.

Additionally, advertisers must provide a link to a webpage where users manage email preferences. This link is a requirement, and you won’t be able to use Customer Match without providing it. Failure to comply with Google privacy policy can result in being denied the ability to use the Customer Match feature and in some cases, account suspensions.

To summarize, if you have a large amount of 1st-party data, Customer Match is a feature you should definitely test. It’s simple to implement and can be used in a variety of ways across Search, Gmail, and YouTube. Since Google makes privacy a top priority, you don’t need to worry about putting any of your customer base at risk. Overall, the AdWords team has made a great improvement that makes it easier for businesses to enhance consumer relationships and brand loyalty.

The role of a sales development representative is a challenging one. There is the grind of cold calling day in and day out to consider. As well as the obstacles associated with finding, and continuously improving, the questions needed to uncover pain points and the perfect messaging to resonate with prospects. Without the right people and the right training, sales development can be a daunting task.

According to Marketo, the companies with a sales development team to “pass the baton” to sales convert eight times the number of leads than those that do not have a sales development team. Therefore, we know that the sales development function is absolutely critical to sales reps responsible for closing deals, especially when 67% of salespeople are not reaching their individual quota.

So what is a sales manager to do when their sales development reps are underperforming? We asked our own sales managers about the methods they prefer to put into action when their SDRs need some extra help. Here are their thoughts:

“First and foremost, there is no blanket approach” – Greg Otmaskin

All three managers agreed that there is no single best practice to motivate underperformers. Every rep is different and should be managed accordingly. They agreed that it comes down to the individual SDR and understanding the kind of coaching that they respond to best. Some techniques can include public praise, fostering healthy competition among reps, one-on-one strategy sessions, call shadows, and even tough love.

In addition to finding individual coaching styles that your reps respond to best, persistent underperformance can be remedied by revisiting your sales playbook (if you don’t have one that’s your first mistake.) By incorporating a sales playbook into your SDR’s training, you are ensuring that there is a clearly defined process in place that can be regularly benchmarked and improved. TAS Group found that companies that follow a well-defined sales process are 33% more likely to be high performers”. Set your SDRs up for success from the moment they start prospecting, not when their numbers start to tank.

“Segment issues based on the individual versus large scale problems” – Jimmy Grieve

As previously mentioned, each SDR and their performance issues should be managed differently. However, there is a way to bucket the challenges that your SDRs are facing; whether it be individual or company-wide. By bucketing issues, you can potentially solve more than one problem at once. For example, your SDRs may be struggling to reach KPIs that they normally hit no problem. Ask yourself why this is happening. If they are putting the normal effort in and have solid messaging and technique, the issue could lie in the actual data they have access to rather than lack of training.

Work with other members in your company to make sure that overarching issues such as data and access to appropriate tools and technology does not hinder the performance of your reps. You are their voice, make it a point to make sure they have everything they need to succeed and that you are diagnosing issues appropriately.

“Go above and beyond the normal coaching techniques” – Josh Stevens

There are millions of articles addressing the need for sales training and how to do it right. I’m sure at this point you feel as though you know every trick in the book. It’s time to go above and beyond the normal/average/etc. coaching techniques (like call shadowing, messaging review, call plan revisions, etc). There is absolutely a time and a place where those methods of coaching are what your sales development reps need. But sometimes it’s easy to jump to conclusions and think that slapping an extra hour of call shadowing will fix an issue and get your SDR back on track.

Take the time to note those on your team that are underperforming and reach out to them right away. If you notice an issue forming, put time on your calendar to meet with your rep and get to the bottom of it immediately.

How do you motivate your underperforming B2B sales development reps?

Our recent infographic on the Death of the Sales Funnel spurred many lively conversations with sales leaders.  In our  discussions, we wanted to understand how sales leaders are changing to meet the challenge of more informed buyers who are often engaging late in the sales process, armed with a significant amount of information, and in control of their buying journey. The conversations were dynamic, insightful, and reinforcing.  Overall, we put the approaches being taken into two distinct “buckets.”

Approach 1: More, More and More Content

Many of the sales leaders we spoke to were adamant that the biggest gap they had to solve was getting their marketing organization to increase the visibility of their solutions in the digital and social worlds.  This translates to more, more and more content to increase digital and social presence.  Additionally, these same organizations were pressing marketing for more sales and channel content related to different customer purchase experiences such as trial/evaluation, proof of concept, ROI and direct purchase.

And, while we agree that it is important to have marketing drive effective digital and social engagement of buyers, more is not always the best answer.  It is expensive and potentially confusing – especially if the marketing and sales organization are not tightly connected.  With up to 65% of marketing content never being used by sales, more content isn’t necessarily a solution for more effective sales.

Regardless of the volume of content used, marketing organizations investing in digital and social prospect engagement shouldn’t waste the opportunity to collect insights.  Observing and collecting prospect behavior across your website, social platforms and email can help identify the likelihood and timing of purchase regardless of a prospect’s “path.”  The ability to score prospects and pass along behavior data to sales dramatically increases lead quality and close rates for sales.

Characteristics of this approach:

• More, more and more content for digital and social presence
• More, more and more sales content to anticipate any path a customer may take as they make a final decision
• Leverage content and platforms to develop more sophisticated prospect and lead scoring

Approach 2: Super Heroes via Sales Enablement

The most dynamic conversations we had were with sales leaders who are embracing this shift in customer behavior as an opportunity to create competitive advantage and build a “super hero” sales team.  We use the term “super hero” because the organizational transformation and technology used by these marketing and sales teams to create a more efficient sales experience truly gives these sellers “super human” powers to close deals.

It starts with a stronger connection between the marketing and sales organizations.  Marketing agrees to support the entire buyer journey, not just the top of the funnel.  Marketing, like sales, takes a quota (for marketing-qualified leads) and is just as accountable as Sales for revenue.  Content development is guided by reviewing performance data such as internal usage, prospect engagement and influenced revenue.

But, the real “secret weapon” for these organizations comes from taking advantage of the latest in Sales Enablement technology.  Highspot’s Definitive Guide to Sales Enablement provides a comprehensive and detailed view of the transformational impact applying sales enablement tools can bring to your organization.   It is a must read if you want to understand how sales enablement technology can provide your sellers with the assets they need to make the most out of every interaction.

Here are some of the capabilities you can expect in a modern sales enablement platform:

• Publish any type of content (document, presentations, images, videos, links to web page) a rep might need
• Curate relevant web-based content on customers and serve it up to a rep
• Contextual targeting that presents content a rep needs based on the customer and sales stage within the CRM system
• Content performance reporting from reps and customers that allows marketing to evaluate the effectiveness of content
• Email-based pitches that allows the seller to know when the content has been consumed and logs the history of content consumption in CRM
• Live pitches that allows the seller to pitch the latest material online

There are a number of vendors in the sales enablement space so check out Directory of Sales Enablement Tools based on Scot Brinker’s research at Chiefmartec. Your choice of sales enablement platform is important so take advantage of the Directory of Sales Enablement Analysts to engage independent analysts from organizations like SiriusDecisions and Forrester.

Characteristics of this approach:

• Marketing accountable for content performance
• Marketing takes a “quota” for marketing leads
• Marketing creates targeted, relevant content for each sales motion
• Sellers have insight into content consumed by prospects

Conclusion

Sales Performance Services is based on creating competitive advantage through aligning sales experiences with the customer experience moments of truth.  This requires that sales reps are prepared to have effective conversations with ever more informed and demanding buyers. To make this happen marketing and sales must work together to close the loop between marketing, sales and customers. At every interaction, content and sales pitches must be measured, analyzed and ultimately optimized. With this approach, you too can build a sales team of super heroes.

Interested in more reading about the characteristics of a world-class sales organization and improving sales effectiveness? Download the presentation on The Anatomy of a World Class Sales Organization.

Originally published on Lenati.com
Co-authors: Jen Winter and Jared Dodson

Answer: Yes. There is such a thing as a good lead generation company. A good lead generation company is one who(that) delivers the number of leads agreed on. Period. It is that simple.

We got this question from a Quora member, who heard horrific stories on lead generation agencies that overpromise but fail to deliver. There are quite a lot of that and very few who really understand the business, especially with B2B.

More than delivering the number of leads committed, there are a few more factors to consider. Let’s flesh out the factors one by one.

• Data integrity. Jeff Pulver once said, “You live or die on your database.” Jeff Pulver is an Internet pioneer, who is also a world renowned speaker on a variety of topics including entrepreneurship aside from the more technical such as the Internet . We couldn’t agree more with what he said. Data is the fuel that runs any marketing tactic. Without data, you work on your marketing campaigns based on guesses which will turn off your prospects. A lead generation agency has no business being in this service if they cannot prove their data’s credibility.

• Customer-centric mindset. A lead generation agency is your ally. That is expected because they are paid to find opportunities for you. However, this does not mean they focus on you alone. In this era, it’s all about shifting attention on customers. The agency that you want is someone who pushes to understand your customers, not only your business. How else can they create a strategy to market you if they don’t understand your audience?

• Manages expectations. A lot of us are used to vague statements. In the lead generation business, specifics are key to succeeding. This means ensuring that all deliverables are specified, so no surprises come out because you failed to mention something that seems mundane. If you expect a number, then cite a number; a specific step, then describe it; a certain lead quality, then these should all be written down. What’s important is that the agency leads you towards this process. If not, you might be doing all the work eventually.

• Professionalism calls for a non-disclosure agreement or NDA. Not only does it oblige them to protect your data, but is also a way to establish trust.

• Seeks to define a lead. Sales reject leads because of a lot of reasons. Lead rejection can be prevented with a simple lead definition exercise to keep you and sales on the same page. Lead definition is different from people to people. If you don’t have a universal lead definition or ULD, then your agency should seek to have one agreed on both by sales and marketing. This way, you prevent sales rejections and steer marketing on the right path. This is probably the 2^nd most important factor next to data when evaluating an agency.

Lead Generation is Always Customized

Yes, there are good lead generation agencies out there that take into consideration the 5factors we mentioned. Not to burst your bubbles, but a lead generation tactic might work for one but not for the other because of the factors we have enumerated. Audience type, buyer personas, product, offer, scripts, content and a whole lot more. So if an agency comes to you and says they can do the same with what they did for another client, be discerning and look to the 6 factors before engaging.

This year, TopTen Reviews had made their surveys and released their scores over top lead generators, surely these marketing companies made their checklist on the factors we mentioned above.

With enough perseverance and passion, you can always achieve more that what is just good but the best.

This post originally appeared at Callbox Blog.

To put it mildly, salespeople have a lot to do.

Every day, they have to reach out to new leads, follow up with others, give a number of presentations, negotiate contract terms, and, ultimately, convert a few prospects into customers.

Simply put, time is of the essence. And while most sales folks are good at maintaining their focus, some might fall prey to the “what’s next” mentality.

Instead of focusing on one thing at one time, you’re trying to do 100 things at one time, and it’s getting you nowhere. Instead of worrying about your one call at noon, you’re focused on the next call, and the call after that. And this attitude is dangerous in sales, where it’s essential to be actively engaged in the conversation, and listen to prospects, leads, or clients.

Listening, however, has become surprisingly difficult. In fact, humans listen at a rate of 125 to 250 words per minute, but we think at a rate of 1,000 to 3,000 words per minute.

That’s a lot of words.

And this discrepancy results in breakdowns. According to Keith Rosen, 60% of problems in business spring from faulty communication. In other words, most issues boil down to poor listening.

With this in mind, active listening is the most important sales skill a rep can possess. Actively listening to prospects will improve your connect rates, help you develop better relationships, and ultimately, enable you to sell more.

Here are five ways active listening helps a salesperson become more effective in their roles.

1) Listening optimizes sales follow up.

How do you keep a sales conversation alive? By asking a follow-up question. Unfortunately, sales folks are wired to move quickly. They know what their product does and why it’s beneficial to prospects, and, oftentimes, they’ll dive into their pitch regardless of what the prospect is saying.

For example, if a prospect says, “I just got back from the Bahamas. It was great,” and the rep launches right into, “Nice. Well, our product is unbelievable, and it’s yours for only X amount of dollars,” that’s a pretty crappy conversation.

Listening can help a lot here. This is the perfect opportunity to ask a follow up question about the vacation and build your relationship with this prospect.

Here’s a sample exchange between a prospect and a rep skilled at listening and asking relevant follow up questions:

Prospect: “I just got back from the Bahamas. It was great.”

Sales rep: “How long have you been wanting to go? What was your favorite part? I’m thinking about going -- any restaurants I should check out?”

The prospect can now talk from personal experience and share intimate details with the sales rep, strengthening the relationship. By simply asking follow up questions and listening to the response, the sales rep now has a connection with this prospect.

2) Listening demonstrates genuine interest.

Showing that you care and demonstrating genuine interest in your prospect and their business is huge.

As human beings, we’re wired for social connections. According to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, feeling like we belong is just as important to us as our physical safety.

By listening to our prospects, we can ask the right questions and make the right statements to showcase how interested we are in their business. For example, if a salesperson hears excitement in their prospect’s voice about a certain project, the rep can explore this obvious area of interest. How you lead a conversation based on little cues makes all the difference during the sales process.

Remember: Showing genuine interest might be the difference between losing a prospect and converting them into a customer.  

3) Listening gives you the ability to qualify and clarify.

Listening gives you a chance to identify bad fit prospects before you get too deep in the sales process. You can then make an informed decision on whether or not you want to pursue the relationship.

For example, If a company’s VP of HR talks about how often they’ve been changing their onboarding service (four times in five years) and how they can never seem to find the right one, nightmarish visions of your offering as the next to be bought and dumped might start to dance before your eyes. 

On the other hand, your service might be just what the doctor ordered for their needs, and might stop the incessant switching once and for all.

Simply listening to the facts is the first step. Afterwards, seek to clarify by asking the VP why they’re switching so many times. Depending on what they say, the call might come to an end before the relationship ever really begins, or you could fast track them to a demo.

4) Listening helps you identify need.

Customers have a weird way of telling you their pain point during a conversation. That is to say, sometimes you need to ask, and other times you don’t.

For example, if you’re selling an onboarding service, and your potential buyer talks about how often her team forgets to submit their personal information before they start, you’ve identified the need. You can now boast about how your onboarding software makes it easy for human resource managers to maintain their timelines.

But not all prospects will be so forthcoming.

Sometimes, they won’t share anything with you, which is when methods like the Five Whys game come into play. But when you’re actively listening, determining whether or not a prospect is truly divulging their problem is relatively easy. Do they sound hesitant? Does it seem like they're holding back? Reps who aren't fully tuned in to the conversation might miss these small cues -- and the opening they provide.

5) Listening enables you to maintain the relationship.

More than the features of your product or service, the personal connection you create with your client is what’s going to make the relationship a success. By being totally present in the conversation, asking questions (some work-related and some not), and listening carefully to the answers, you'll deepen the bond. Here’s your chance to learn about how many kids they have, what their partner does for a living, and more. When you follow up in a few weeks, you’ll have an arsenal of information to use to reconnect with this prospect.

By actively listening, sales reps are able to follow up effectively, demonstrate interest, clarify concerns, identify buyers’ need, and maintain a healthy and productive relationship. Remember: We have two ears but only one mouth for a reason. Use them.

Let’s face it. As a marketer, your life is pretty great. You start the day at 10am greeted by a warm latte, a fruit basket, and your team singing ‘this is my fight’ song in acapella. Later in the day, there is a fresh grilled halibut lunch, engaging meetings, and then you are out of the office by 5pm to drink wine, work out, or chill with the fam. Oh, sorry…I guess I was dreaming.

Enter reality. A marketer’s job today is nuts, and complex, and it feels like any moment the wheels could spin off the car because you are moving so quickly. Your goals are growing, you need to illustrate ROI on your programs, support your sales organization, and in many cases you have less time and resources to get the job done. While there are many schools of thought on how best to approach marketing challenges, there is definitely one solution that can provide some order: marketing automation.

Here are 4 ways marketing automation can make your day-to-day marketing job easier, more impactful, and more rewarding (so you actually have time to eat your lunch!):

1. Time-Savings

Instead of building programs from scratch each time, with marketing automation you can clone them. This is very similar to the ‘copy – paste’ function in Microsoft Word. Let’s use an example of creating a webinar program. Using standard tools to build a landing page, your emails, etc. can take around 22 steps and approximately 2 hours. With marketing automation, this same program can be completed by cloning elements of previous programs in about 3 minutes. You can use the extra time to work on improving campaigns and come up with new strategies to engage customers (or have a latte).

2. More Personalized and Meaningful Marketing

Most of us understand the value of segmenting our database when sending emails, so why would you only have one message on your website? Using marketing automation, you can personalize the experience for known and anonymous visitors to your website. By creating a more relevant user experience, you will increase engagement and conversions.

Additionally, because marketing automation helps marketers listen to their customers activities, behaviors and preferences, you can send relevant information to buyers in real-time based on their activities. These capabilities allow you to create more of a dialog with your customers, versus a one-way, mass-message based interaction.

3. Deliver Prioritized Leads to Sales

Marketing automation enables you to utilize key tools to deliver the ‘best bet’ leads to sales. One of these tools is lead scoring. It’s a personal favorite of mine because it helps identify the right people for your sales team to follow up with based on fit, interest, and buying stage. Marketing automation also integrates seamlessly with your customer relationship management platform (CRM), which means your sales team doesn’t have to log into yet another platform, but instead they will see lead information natively.

4. Measurement

Last but not least, marketing automation makes my day easier by making measuring our marketing success simple and scalable. This enables marketers to understand how a particular channel or program has performed at different time points. You’re also able to visualize each touchpoint a buyer took from acquisition to purchase, even if there are multiple people who engaged with programs and content at different times.

These are just my four of the top reasons to consider marketing automation. For more great reasons, check out our eBook on 10 Reasons to Consider Marketing Automation. Do you have a different list of top reasons to consider marketing automation? I’d love to hear what you think in the comments below.

 

When you make mistakes in sales, your propsects likely won't tell you. Instead, they'll let their money do the talking—and close the deal with a competitor.

You don't want this to happen and neither do we.

That's why we’ve identified four of the biggest mistakes that sales professionals make and how you can avoid them.

1. Overselling on the very first point of contact

In sales, it’s very easy to fall in love with the product you’re selling.

This infatuation with your product often leads to obsessing over all the different features, bells and whistles. Unfortunately, while passion is great for conveying confidence in your product, it can often lead to sales professionals overwhelming their prospects with information—and a swift “delete” from prospects' inboxes.

Rather than sending an email that is short and sweet, too many sales professionals are sending emails that look like this:

You might think that giving a prospect all of this information up front is a good thing. In reality, no one cares about your product until you show give them a good reason to care.

Strive to keep your first message short and sweet. Like this:

The email above is very concise and straight to the point.

I’ve sent cold emails using this exact format and have had cold leads respond letting me know how much they appreciate the conciseness of the email.

You want your cold leads to not only read but also respond to your emails. Keeping them concise will help make that a reality. However, it’s not the only thing you can do to increase the likelihood of a response.

2. Giving your cold leads homework after first contact

Every Monday, executives from across the country wonder how they’ll tackle everything on their to-do list. As a sales professional, the last thing you want to do is add more work to a prospect's plate at first contact.

In the first email example we showed you, there are three requests being made.

1. Click here to watch a video tutorial.
2. See attached for a 3 page PDF.
3. What time would work for a call?

A sales pro who uses one call to action in their outreach is a sales pro who understands human behavior. [Tweet this!]

Over the years, I’ve found that fewer calls to action in your cold emails can play a huge role in driving response. One call to action works best, especially when it’s short and the answer can be delivered in less than a sentence.

Here’s an example of a call to action you can use in your emails:

• “Rather than having you read through a lengthy email, how about we lock in a quick 10-minute call?”
• “I’ve reviewed your product and think that we can achieve X if we start moving on this soon. Can I send you a bit more info?”

In both of these cases, the homework for your prospect is limited. The answer can also be delivered in one sentence, which lessens the burden on your prospect. This is a weight off their shoulders and gives you a chance to move quickly and optimize your time.    

3. Being uncomfortable with silence on calls

Silence is one of the most underutilized conversation tool.

It’s underutilized because when people think of silence, they often place the word awkward in front of it and reject the idea of having that experience.

Some of the best sales professionals struggle with this. Rather than listening to understand their prospects needs, they impatiently wait for their turn to speak.

If you ask a prospect a question and they give you a partial or short answer, wait.

Stay silent, stay calm and let them be the one to keep the conversation going. You will find that in this moment of silence, their response will be quickly followed up with a rationalization or solution.

George Ludwig, a trainer on sales strategy and peak performance psychology suggests that salespeople leave intentional breaks of silence in key places of dialog. The silence could be after a question or after a customer responds to something the salesperson said.

The intent of these breaks of silence is to give the customer more time to reflect and respond. As a result, you're giving yourself a greater chance to really understanding what they said as they begin to elaborate further.

And staying silent during a negotiation can be worth a lot of money. In one case, it saved us $225,000.

Embrace silence. It’s a powerful tool.

4. Wasting time following up rather than breaking up

Building rapport by reaching out to a prospect more than twice is a tried and proven approach for closing more deals. The challenge is that some sales professionals are so relentless with their follow-ups that they never have the opportunity to send a break up email.

The break-up email is one of the most effective follow up emails you can send to a prospect who hasn’t been responding to emails. It’s a tactic that has been used for years in the dating world and can be used in business just the same.

It’s the idea that people want what they can’t have. It’s the idea of transferring a bit of guilt so the other person scrambles to speak with you or make things right.

The best break up emails trigger an emotion that drives action. Here’s a great example of a perfect break up email that can be sent after multiple attempts to follow up:

Rather than following up over and over again, use the break up email to end the relationship and test a variety of emails to gauge which drives that final response.

If you haven't read my post on breakup emails that elicit responses from prospects, do this now.

Never stop learning

Now that you understand the mistakes that most salespeople make, you’re armed and ready to avoid them at all cost. You can take these tips into the workforce and be more effective and efficient than ever before.

One of the other mistakes that too many sales professionals make is they stop learning new tricks. So hats off to you for taking the step of reading this blog post. You’re already steps ahead of many of your competitors.

Want to keep closing deals?

Sign up for our free startup sales success email course below!

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EXCLUSIVE:

Artificial intelligence, it seems, is everywhere these days. From depictions of AI and sentient robots in Hollywood, through to the launch of a multitude of seemingly intelligent apps, AI is definitely a trend that isn’t going away fast. Even if Elon Musk warns against it.

And today Fusemachines, a sales technology company, has launched its artificially intelligent assistant for salespeople, called SAM. SAM, according to the makers, assists with a company’s inside sales process. How?

SAM uses machine learning and natural language processing techniques, rapidly sifting through millions of qualified leads and appointments. It then ranks these with a buying intention metric, which it uses to create automated communications, drafting the correct response to the prospect.

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From VentureBeat

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In turn, this frees up the sales development rep’s time for booking appointments and closing deals, rather than manually finding and nurturing the best leads. And if you think “time” is an irrelevant metric, you might be interested to hear that sales force automation solutions, by an order of magnitude, have the highest cost of ownership of all marketing technologies. Time truly is money — sales role salaries and other burdened costs add up fast.

So where does SAM find all this information, and how does it help to identify purchase intent?

“SAM is finding its leads from internal databases as well as external sources,” Sameer Maskey, CEO at Fusemachines, told me. “SAM constantly crawls the Web to take snapshot of leads, companies, and events associated with them. The external sources include many publicly available sources including social media sites, personal web sites, company websites, and job sites.”

That information feeds the algorithms SAM is based on, which have been developed during both an internal project and a private beta phase.

One concern I had was understanding how SAM works in a team. What if you have ten salespeople working inside sales, and they end up competing with each other for the same high-intent leads?

“Yes, ten or more salespeople can use the platform — it is designed to be collaborative,” Maskey said. “But they can’t use the same leads at the same time for multiple campaigns. Whenever someone ties a lead to a campaign, SAM automatically sets a flag that doesn’t allow anyone else to attach the lead to his/her campaign until the original campaign is completed.”

And SAM has a smart approach to understanding, and tying, lead sources with the marketing campaigns sent to those leads.

“Most platforms have no notion of how to optimize sourcing parameters based on marketing/outreach results besides making intuitive guesses,” Maskey said. “Our system optimizes sourcing parameters based on data generated from outreach experiments. We look at the whole process as a data-driven optimization problem that [our] machine helps you perform rather than ‘build me this list, send these emails, and see what happens’ approach.”

Currently, SAM integrates with Gmail to mine all the leads and opportunities in progress.

“Gmail integration allows SAM to not only build the list of previously contacted leads, but also automatically score the new leads based on similarity with old leads that turned into meetings,” Maskey said.

Fusemachines has not connected SAM to any existing CRM solutions yet, although those integrations are in the works. SAM is available today from Fusemachines, for both new and existing customers.

Most sales pros and marketers today know the importance of creating valuable content in attracting leads and accelerating the sales process. But creating remarkable content—content that people will engage with, share with their friends and compel them to take action—isn’t always easy. Indeed, content marketers admit that creating engaging content is one the biggest issue facing them today.

Your sales team is an important source of insight if you’d like to step up your game in content marketing. Here’s a 5-step plan on how sales folks can help your marketing team with your content.

1. Align your goals.

If your sales team isn’t talking to your marketing team, you’re already missing a huge opportunity. For your blog posts, ebooks, white papers, infographics, and webinars to attract prospects, there needs to be a strong alignment between sales and marketing in terms of the target audience, your brand’s positioning and key messages.

Marketing should still call the shots in terms of distribution—it is, after all, their expertise—but sales should have some input on high-level strategy because they talk frequently with prospects and know what buyers want.

2. Consider discoverability.

Great content that doesn’t make its way to your prospects is content wasted. SEO is critical part of content marketing success. Start by ensuring that you’re using the right keywords in your content.

Sales people can help with SEO by giving you insight into the language that your prospects use. Your sales team can tell you what jargon and keywords your prospects use in their industry and their business. More importantly, they can tell you about the topics that are most timely and relevant for your prospects. This is valuable SEO information that you should consider when crafting your content.

3. Constantly listen to your customers.

You need to have a deep understanding of your buyers if you want to attract them with your content. Thankfully, it has never been easier to get customer insight today. You can listen on social media—in particular Twitter—as a starting point to learn about your buyers’ pain points and how your solution can help.

Dig deeper by talking to your customers directly. When you know what makes your buyers tick, you can create killer content that speaks to problems and issues they actually have.

4. Capture the right analytics.

If you’re creating content without measuring your efforts, you may be wasting your time. It’s critical to know if your strategies and tactics are working so you could change course if needed. Use web, social media and PDF analytics to determine which of your content resonates with your target audience. In addition to pageviews and downloads, look at metrics like time spent per page to gauge the true engagement of your audience.

5. Consistently release new content.

Most companies today already do content marketing. The main issue that many brands need to figure out is how to stand out. To produce content that your prospects will love, you have to consistently pump out great content. That’s the only way for you to become top of mind for people. Committing to an editorial calendar with regular cadence of new content is the only way to position your company and your sales team as true thought leaders.

Marketing and sales collaboration is key!

If you want to get more out of your content marketing efforts, getting input from sales is key. When marketing teams use the insight of their sales team, the result is content-marketing magic.

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SPONSORED:

This sponsored post is produced in association with The TAS Group.

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Traditionally, the sales process was envisioned as a funnel. Put raw leads in the top, qualify as you go, and eventually money comes out the bottom (or that’s the hope). The challenge with this approach is that it ignores the relative impact of a whole lot of things that are going on in that funnel.

Fast forward a few years and now sales is being considered in terms of the bottomless ocean of big data at the fingertips of all organizations. This is data that can be hugely valuable, and CRMs can help sort through some of the statistical stuff, but what’s lacking is any meaningful insight that can help sales managers make decisions to increase conversion rates and average value of sale — or shorten sales cycles.

That’s where the Sales Velocity Equation comes in. It’s basically a simple way to calculate the relative impact of the four key metrics of pipeline health: the total number of opportunities, the average value per, your winning percentage, and the length of your sales cycle.

The ideal Sales Velocity Equation blocks out the white noise of big data. Instead, it focuses on key metrics to uncover the truth of what’s happening in your pipeline. It then leverages practical, plain-language insights and suggestions to help sales managers and teams be more successful.

In their ebook, the TAS Group, a smart sales automation company, breaks it down this way:

 

Here’s how the equation works. Let’s say your # of opportunities, average $s per sale, and win % all go up by 10%, and your length of sales cycle, goes down by 10%. What’s the total impact to your sales? Well, in this case, you’ll increase how much you sell by 47 percent (go ahead use this handy calculator to run your own numbers and see).

Knowing this, it suggests sales managers should focus equally on:

• Increasing the # of sales opportunities
• Increasing the average $s per deal
• Increasing the win rate %
• Reducing the length of the sales cycle

The problem is, most sellers still give disproportionate attention to increasing the number of opportunities in the pipeline, and ignore the other three parts of the equation, leading to less than optimal results. That’s just bad math.

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Learn more: Join our upcoming live webinar “The Secrets to Maximizing Sales Performance.” 

Register here for free.

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The X factor: Your sales team

Of course, equations don’t make sales, people do. That’s why good sales managers fight the good fight every day to find new ways to make their teams more effective. But, in many cases, managers are remote from their sales team, and have to rely on phone calls and non-descriptive reports from their CRM systems, making it tough for them to identify, interpret, and influence the data that can predict success or failure, and sales management really shouldn’t be that hard.

To let you interpret data in a meaningful way for your team, top sales performance solutions leverage the data in CRMs, like Salesforce, and use the Sales Velocity Equation to focus your attention on what really matters and offer suggestions for easy-to-implement performance improvements.

We’re not just talking about charts and graphs, but plain language and context that eliminate any possibility of misinterpretation. That’s why it’s so important to source your sales performance solution from someone with deep expertise in sales management– been there, done that, got the happy clients and metrics to prove it.

This goes back to the importance of the X factor in the Sales Velocity Equation: your sales team. Figuring out how to manage sales people to success across different industries, regions, and market conditions takes time and experience. Don’t trust your sales performance to someone who can’t demonstrate that they understand exactly how to do this. Doing so is akin to intentionally taking on more risk than you need to in your pipeline and devaluing the potential impact of each, individual sales opportunity.

Proof is in the results

So how impactful can the Sales Velocity Equation be in understanding how to drive great performance?

Well, by implementing the TAS Group solution, Autodesk was able to increase their win rate by 29 percent and average deal size by a whopping 233 percent, all while shifting from an enterprise to a SaaS sales model – typically a tumultuous time for any software vendor. This speaks to the Sales Velocity Equation’s greatest potential benefit to sales managers: The ability to analyze today and improve your sales organization tomorrow.

Success with the Sales Velocity Equation is about focusing on what matters: don’t get caught up in old sales think, or distracted by meaningless data. Consider the context of each opportunity and use the best of breed tools out there to understand the true meaning of your key metrics, and what they can tell you about how to drive your sales team to greater performance.

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Sponsored posts are content that has been produced by a company that is either paying for the post or has a business relationship with VentureBeat, and they’re always clearly marked. The content of news stories produced by our editorial team is never influenced by advertisers or sponsors in any way. For more information, contact sales@venturebeat.com.