This morning Clutter.io announced they raised $9 million from Sequoia, arguably the best venture capital firm that exists. Congratulations. Sincerely.

Conventional wisdom says I shouldn’t tell you this because I invested in their main competitor, MakeSpace. I know my MakeSpace friends will forgive me because I just don’t believe the conventional wisdom is right. And it’s part of what can go wrong in startup land.

For starters – the co-founder of Clutter.io, Ari Mir, is a friend and 6 years ago I backed the first startup he co-founded with Ophir Tanz, GumGum. Ophir was and is the CEO and is running what is now a spectacularly successful business. Clutter is LA based and many of my friends invested. So why would I want to damage a bunch of friendships for no reason?

But the bigger truth is the competition is important. We will have two well-funded companies educating the market on why this market opportunity for the $24 billion US storage market is ripe for disruption. When we funded Sam, Rahul and team at MakeSpace > 2.5 years it was hard to get other investors to see this unsexy market as ripe for innovation. Fast forward to today, as you can imagine our phone was ringing off the hook with investors wanted to reengage in discussions. Why? Simple. They realize there is some market validation when there are competitors. Not market guarantees, but more like, “Ok, I heard your story 2 years ago, how has it gone?”

But more importantly this same phenomenon will happen market-by-market. More consumers and businesses will hear about our solutions and want to learn more. And our competitors are not really each other but the incumbent businesses that have 99.9% market share today and are stuck with high real-estate costs, shitty customer service, bad value propositions and no ability to respond to competition because they have effectively become real-estate holding companies that store stuff for cashflow.

I’ve seen this play out a million times and usually in self-destructive ways where unhealthy focus on your competitors leads one to take one’s eye off of the customer and market opportunity. Which is why 5 years ago I penned this still important piece on “Why You Should Make Your Competitors Your Frenemies.”

In summary:

1. The competitors are the incumbents
2. Healthy competition keeps you on your toes
3. Competition creates a market with choice and improves consumer awareness, investor awareness and journalist awareness
4. No competitors means you have a relatively small idea that nobody cares to compete on. Competitors backed by great VCs means you’re likely on to something.

What mistakes do people make?

1. Trying to copy every product release
2. Launching artificially in markets to compete on perceived “land grabs”
3. Bad mouthing the competition in public / focusing more on the competition than the customer

What should you do when a competitor announces a big fund raise?

1. Stay focused on your business, your market and your customers
2. Reassure your company that it’s healthy to have competitors (after all – all startups are naked in the mirror in the morning). Pretending the funding didn’t happen is dumb. Everybody reads the tech press
3. Send a quick note to your investors that you read the news, you feel good about your market positioning and your product. If well capitalized (like we are at MakeSpace – remind investors of that)
4. If for some reason you think your business ISN’T competitive then you need to address your shortcomings. But honestly you have have known that before the funding
5. Don’t feel rushed into responding in any way (trying to quickly raise $, trying to do a ton of marketing, changing your product plans or geography plans)
6. Reach out and get to know the other team. My guess is that over time you’ll have more in common (like working with big cos, working with regulators, dealing with inertia in the market) than you do have against that company
7. Quickly get back to your day job

Don’t get me wrong. I still believe in competition. I still believe in winning. I still believe in knowing how your product differentiates to things others in the market can buy in stead of your products. I believe in hustling, using natural advantages and measuring oneself relative to others doing what you do. But that doesn’t need to be unhealthy competition or obsessiveness on the wrong goals.

So rather than selling you on all of the positive attributes of MakeSpace (which I will do from time-to-time because I’m a passionate believer that we’ve figured out the right formula to a billion+ dollar eventual exit and I am as obsessed with MakeSpace’s business such that I talk to the team minimum once / week) – today is a different day. It’s Clutter’s day.

It’s the day to acknowledge the hard work and achievements of Team Clutter. And wish you the very best successes in the market. Congratulations.

Guest author Edith Harbaugh is CEO and cofounder of LaunchDarkly, a firm that specializes in "dark launches” or “canary deployment" for companies, so they can deliver features to some users and gauge their reaction before rolling them out to everyone. 

Today, the smartest companies are releasing software thousands of times a day in an approach called “continuous delivery,” a software-development practice of continuously releasing functionality in small chunks.

See also: Open Source: Billions Upon Billions Of Free

When I first started in the software industry in the 1990s, Microsoft was on a five-year release cycle, SAP three years, and Salesforce was just beginning to get traction. I worked at a Java groundbreaker called Epicentric, whose one-year release cycles were considered "blazing fast.” We even had big “release parties” to celebrate them. Now yearly releases are considered quaint. Now my own company, LaunchDarkly, releases “even on Friday afternoon”—traditionally a no fly zone. 

What’s fueling the spread of continuous delivery is supporting technologies like SaaS, Continuous Integration, as well as business needs like user expectations, lean startups, and most interestingly, employee satisfaction.

User Expectations

It used to be enough to release a new version of Windows every four years. Then companies like Facebook set the bar high with software that continually evolves.

The Facebook of 2015 is different than the Facebook of 2010, and the Facebook of 2020 will be even more different. It’s not enough to ship a piece of software and call it “done.” Acompli, a mobile-first mail app, faced an uphill battle in a very crowded field.

“We had to earn every single user, by building a products that was both ‘loved by users and trusted by IT,” said Kevin Henrikson, partner director of engineering at Microsoft and previously co-founder of Acompli.

Mobile has traditionally been tricky territory for continuous delivery, as Apple requires a review of all apps before they push live to customers. Even so, fast-moving companies like Accompli continuously delivered to beta users, who downloaded builds directly. Now a part of Microsoft, Acompli formed the basis for its Outlook app, which is used by billions worldwide.

Lean Startup

Companies want to break value into smaller and smaller chunks to see if they’re delivering value to their customers. It’s devastating for a company to work for two years on a huge release, only to find they’ve completely missed the market.

Smart companies like Yammer deliberately engineer their process to get as fast feedback as possible. "You’ll always have imperfect information, so you have to move quickly with the facts you have, so that you can get more data,” said Kris Gale, VP of engineering at Yammer and now CTO at Clover Health. "You’ll always know more tomorrow, but that doesn’t mean you can be paralyzed today.”

Employee Satisfaction

Engineers want to see their work out in the world. From their perspective, the worst thing is to spend years on a product that never sees the light of day.

Duke Nukem Forever, the followup to the hit game Duke Nukem 3D, took an extraordinary 15 years to develop value. "If an engineer hears in an interview that it’ll take them months to ship something, they don’t want to join the company,” said Will Aldrich, VP of product at SurveyMonkey.

With continuous delivery, engineers can quickly see their hard work go out to real-life users. What has changed the game is the rise of “Software as a Service” (SaaS), which allows users to access functionality over a web browser or mobile app, rather than downloading software application. That makes deployment faster and simpler; if a user has to physically install software, it’s impossible to do true continuous delivery.

All software used to be physically installed on customers' machines. When I was engineering manager at Vignette, we had a “Supported Platform Matrix” to let us know which databases and application servers our software could be installed on.

It was an ever moving arms race—Oracle would add 10, and we’d have to retest it with BEA WebLogic. Given the complexities, customers generally didn’t want to update more than once a quarter (if even that—some customers clung to Oracle 6 long after even Oracle had shelved it).

Now, with the rise of the cloud, customers no longer feel the pain of installation. They just log into a web browser on their desktops or phone apps, and get the functionality they want.

Continuous Integration

Formerly, developers would code on their local machines, checking code in. When a branch was stable enough, it would be given to Quality Assurance testers to find any issues.

Microsoft had a 2-1 QA to developer ratio, since it was imperative that their software be bulletproof. The back and forth between developers and QA could stretch out, as bugs had to be re-verified on each build.

Now, with continuous integration, unit tests can be run in minutes, to better ensure quality. Companies like Rainforest QA can quickly verify within minutes basic functionality, in real time. If every feature needs a two to one QA to developer ratio with deep thorough manual testing, continuous delivery stretches out.

Continuous delivery is a virtuous circle—by delivering features quicker to end users, both employees and customers are happier.

Lead photo courtesy of Shutterstock

Alignment issues in your go-to-market strategy can wreak havoc on your business, which is why companies today are investing in salesforce automation (SFA) tools. These tools provide important insights into operations and can shed light on why deals are delayed, lost or won — key to the success of your business.

A sure sign that go-to-market alignment issues exist is when too many forecasted opportunities don’t close and when you start hearing excuses like:

• Sales is overselling product capabilities, or worse, products that don’t yet exist
• Product Management is too busy to provide competitive positioning/knock-offs
• Product positioning is missing the target buyer and influencers
• Marketing isn’t providing qualified leads
• Products don’t meet customer needs or are not price competitive

These finger-pointing statements are indicators of poor alignment and communication between the product, marketing and sales organizations.

The simple fact is that gaps exist due to the boundaries between strategic planning (market and product strategy) and tactical execution (marketing communications, sales and customer relationships). These gaps negatively impact the company’s ability to meet revenue and customer acquisition targets.

How Do you Identify Go-to-Market Gaps?

Here are 5 macro level questions to assess and discuss gaps in your go-to-market approach.

1. Is your target market size/opportunity aligned with your revenue and customer acquisition expectations?
2. Is your product/solution aligned with the customer’s need/pain?
3. Is your marketing strategy aligned with the business plan?
4. Is your sales approach aligned with the customer’s purchasing process/preferences?
5. Is your marketing plan aligned with sales requirements and sales cycle?

Each of these questions requires quite a bit of additional thought. You have to drill down into each area to form a definitive answer. Everyone on your go-to-market team has opinions and assumptions for each question. To test and verify them, you need to assemble the team (product, marketing, sales, service, support) to discuss and determine areas of alignment and surface areas where gaps exist. I am certain you will be surprised by some of the answers.

Only the best companies can answer these alignment questions confidently and take the required actions to bridge the gaps. Unfortunately, inconsistent answers to these questions are the norm.

What is Go-to-Market Alignment?

Go-to-market alignment means simply that every customer-facing employee and partner knows:

• Who the company is selling to (…target customer/market)
• What the company has to sell (…including solution differentiation)
• How the product/solution is to be sold (… point of sale, service and support)

Any gaps in defining and internalizing these fundamentals will create friction and uncertainty, which will negatively effect your ability to find and close deals.

Maximizing customer and revenue attainment requires mastering, and continually updating these “who, what, how” fundamentals.

Steps to Ensure Ongoing Alignment

The post Tired of Missing Revenue Targets? Fix Your Go-to-Market Alignment Issues appeared first on OpenView Labs.

Salespeople aren’t the only ones who understand the value of referrals. Marketers get it, too, and they’re ready to help sales teams generate more referrals and follow up on the great leads. Equally important, marketing has the tools to streamline the sales process so that every single client becomes part of your team’s referral network.

Sound too good to be true? It’s not. Referral automation software delivers what marketing promises: qualified leads. It saves salespeople time and connects them with referred prospects—the only type of sales leads with a 50-percent close rate. Referral automation also helps sales teams nurture existing clients, deepen client relationships, and gain even more referral introductions and qualified leads. What sales exec wouldn’t love that?

But this doesn’t mean that your sales team can just sit back and wait for leads to pour in. For referral automation to help salespeople meet the exact prospects they want to meet, marketing needs to know what those “ideal customers” look like.

Help Marketing Help You

Great marketers already understand your target audience. The problem is that everyone in your target market is not your ideal customer. Before marketing can generate qualified referral leads, they need to know how your team defines “qualified.”

Yet, while most formal lead-generation efforts are now owned and managed by marketing, only 51.3 percent of companies have created a formal definition of a “qualified lead.” That’s according to CSO Insights’ “2014 Lead Management & Social Engagement Study.” It’s no wonder 61.7 percent of salespeople say the quality of marketing leads “needs improvement.” They’re not giving their marketing teams enough information to be effective.

The goal: Sales and marketing working together to build qualified pipelines. How? It starts with a joint commitment to build a referral program with the right software and the right integration with your CRM—not just for lead flow, but also to engage sales in the referral process. For example, when a customer provides a referral, the rep gets an email reminder to thank the referral source and to learn about the new referral. Salespeople also receive notifications when referral leads close. Then they can thank their sources and ask for even more referrals. No more dropping the ball on follow-up or “forgetting” to say thank you.

This is great news for sales, but sales isn’t off the hook for generating referral leads! Sales still needs to play a critical role in the referral program, or your team may not get the “qualified leads” they were expecting. Once referral automation is up and running, the process becomes much easier than reps could ever have imagined. But salespeople must help with the heavy lifting up front by clarifying exactly the kind of customer they want to meet. Then marketing can use that criteria to generate great leads via automation, as well as with traditional marketing approaches.

Define Your Ideal Customer

When salespeople know exactly who they want to meet—and communicate that profile to marketing and to their referral sources—they get qualified leads, reach decision-makers, get in early, and close every deal well more than 50 percent of the time.

Your ideal customers are out there. But unless your sales team can articulate the profile of your ideal customer to the marketers running the referral program, your advocates are just taking shots in the dark.

The key is specificity, which seems counterintuitive. Sales pros often think that if they don’t mention everyone they serve, they’ll miss out on introductions. But the opposite is true. The more specific the description, the easier it is for both sales reps and their marketing counterparts to understand your ideal customer. Plus, referral sources will know how to make the right introductions.

People want to make the best introduction possible, and you can choose your clients. But you get what you ask for, so ensure your sales team asks for exactly what they want.

As you and your team begin to create the profile of your ideal customer, review these categories:

• Industry: In what industries is your expertise? Where do you have a track record? In what vertical do you want to expand?
• Geography: Where is your ideal customer located?
• Company Size: What size company is the best fit for your offerings?
• Business Unit or Function: What group of people within the company are your ideal prospects (e.g., CEOs, CIOs, COOs, HR employees, sales or marketing teams)?
• Type of Person: What are the personality traits of your ideal customer?
• Situation/Need: What specific business challenges do you address? What are people complaining about? What problems can your team solve?

When you’re this precise about your ideal customer, no one will be confused about the best leads for you. Your team will elicit remarkable referrals and receive introductions to the clients they want to serve.

Bottom line: Referral automation software is essential to manage a referral program at scale, but make sure it is delivering the right clients—those who produce revenue and profits, and refer you to others just like themselves.

Learn about the future of intelligent selling, powered by data. Download the free Salesforce e-book.

In the world of social media, staying on top and being the best are the main aims I’m sure you all have. Easier said than done, right? In an ever changing arena, with the likes of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn regularly updating and adding new features to their networks, keeping up to date with these changes can be a little tricky to say the least. And that’s not even taking into account the thousands of best practices released every day.

So instead of providing you with a best practice, I thought I’d try something slightly different and share a social media checklist. See how this compares to your current efforts. And when you’re done with that I would suggest completing this social media survey to see for yourself how you compare against competitors. Let’s begin…

✔ I have a personal social media account – check

Why it’s important: I’ve started with an easy one here, but to really stay on top of the ever changing social media space, I would highly recommend signing up to the social networks which specifically are appropriate to your industry. Not only will this ensure you are always monitoring the latest changes, but it also means you can examine what works and what doesn’t. There’s no better way to learn than to try it yourself.

Also if you are sharing industry content, by having your own account you can become a recognised thought leader, and you honestly will be surprised with the amount of interest you will receive.

✔ I share content at certain times – check

Why it’s important: I’m not going to start suggesting appropriate times, days or even how many times you should share your content, because it all depends on your industry. But what I will say is ‘post the least to LinkedIn and the most to Twitter’ (posts are easily lost on Twitter). My best advice for you is to test when the best time is for you. Only then will you know what works and what doesn’t.

✔ Social selling is implemented into my organisation – check

Why it’s important: If you’re not already doing this, well it’s about time you started. It’s a trend many brands have radically benefited from. Whether that be because your sales team can be accountable for the leads they generate through social media or because you have dramatically increased your reach.

There are numerous ways to achieve this, but firstly you need to work on sharing relevant content your audience is going to be interested in. This will increase your potential reach and also drive brand awareness. Many organisations such as Westcon have taken this one step further, and are promoting their offerings through their partners, generating 63,000 clicks on social media. This is through using a social media collaboration software, socialondemand® to share their content. This has allowed their message to remain consistent and also simplifies the task for their partners.

I would highly recommend investing in a social selling program to ensure this transition process is configured in the best possible way. Still not convinced? Register for this webinar to learn the real ROI from social selling, plus tips on how to successfully set this up.

✔ Employee advocacy is encouraged – check
Why it’s important: This is another fantastic way to increase your potential reach. Just have a think about it for a second… nearly all of your employees I am sure will have their own social media account right? Depending on the network, they will probably have a mixture of both personal and professional relationships with their connections.

Just think if your message could be shared with all of these, your content would resonate so much further. This is exactly what another one of our clients F5 successfully implemented. Their posts now reach 2.4 million connections every day. This is just from the simple act of sharing content through employees. Unbelievable, I know!

It’s all very well and good sharing content to your employees, but it’s not as easy as that I can assure you. Training and incentives are pivotal to allow successful adoption to occur.

✔ I localise all my content – check

Why it’s important: If you’re planning to attract consumers in geographical locations other than your own, I would highly recommend you translate all of your content, as well as schedule social media posts to appeal to their time zone. Yes it may be expensive translating all of your content, but it is unlikely they will truly engage with your brand if you don’t. Consumers are also more drawn to companies in the same country as them. It makes them feel more secure with their purchase. If you want to compete in this market and are expecting great results this is just something you will have to do.

So are you up to speed with the latest social media gems, or has this list outlined areas to improve your efforts? There is no better way to really determine how well you are doing against your competitors, than by completing a survey, where the results will be sent to you. Ta dah! Enjoy! Complete now.

Original copy

For many brands, “writing an ebook” is one of those items that is perpetually on the corporate “to do” list. Yes, you know that it’s probably a good way to boost your digital presence and draw in more viewers and conversions, but it seems like so much work, right?

While there’s no denying that an ebook is a major content marketing commitment for organizations of all shapes and sizes, the truth of the matter is that your business is leaving so much on the table in terms of outreach and sales potential by not ebooks as part of your content strategy. With this in mind, here’s a complete look at why you should incorporate an ebook into your future marketing plans, as well as how best to go about this endeavor.

Why Bother With an Ebook in the First Place?

Let’s start with why writing an ebook is almost always the right call for your brand. As Joe Pulizzi (founder of the Content Marketing Institute) explains via a survey of organizations that rely on content marketing to connect with customers, ebooks stand as a top option for making an impact with audiences. In fact, those survey respondents ranked ebooks at the top of the list of effective content marketing options, ahead of in-person events, videos, blogs and newsletters, and tied with webinars/webcasts:

• ebooks (65 percent)
• Webinars/Webcasts (65 percent)
• In-person events (62 percent)
• Videos (61 percent)
• Blogs and Newsletters (tied at 60 percent each)

Moreoever, ebooks are all the rage with Google and other leading search engines.

“Thin online content, such as low-quality guest blog posts, is out this year, thanks to the various Google algorithm updates of the past few years. Experts suggest that in 2015 and beyond, it will be all about ‘fat’ content — such as ebooks.”

These words, from James A. Martin of CIO, point to the fact that readers – and the search engines that put your content in front of them – continue to place an emphasis on “fat” content that is jammed full of quality and value. Few offerings even come close to espousing this mindset in the way that branded ebooks can.

On top of all of this is the fact that an ebook serves as a lasting content marketing asset. Once you’ve created one, you can always go back and break down engaging segments or excerpts for future blog and social posts. It might sound a little funny at first, but these offerings stand as one of the content marketing world’s few truly reusable resources.

In short, ebooks are well worth the time and effort that goes into the creation process if you’re a brand that is serious about building a lasting connection with its target audience.

Crafting the Perfect Ebook for Your Brand

Now that you’re on board with the rising importance of ebooks, it’s time to follow through and actually create one. According to the HubSpot Blog’s Anum Hussain, it’s hard to go wrong with picking a topic and fleshing out the idea via an official outline. Instead of just building content as you go, take the time to really think about the logical progression of whatever concept you’re trying to impart upon your audience.

A coherent and reasoned ebook that is backed up by researched stats, figures and data offers so much more impact and appeal to an audience than a haphazardly crafted alternative. Speaking of stats, figures, and data—the more the better. Readers inherently have more trust with brands that don’t just make a claim, but also prove these statements with undeniable facts and insight.

It’s also important to get the tone of your offering right. Let’s be clear here: ebooks are not purely sales tools. Jamming your ebook full of product and service pitches is a great way to turn your audience off in a hurry. A better course of action is to let your valuable insight speak for itself, all while taking on a tone that imparts your brand’s thought leadership on the subject. You are an expert who can educate the reader, so write authoritatively and leave no doubts about your knowledge and understanding of the issue at hand.

Keeping the Good Vibes Rolling

Unfortunately, simply coming up with a great idea and putting digital pen to paper isn’t enough in today’s competitive marketplace. Spreading your ebook across the web requires a few more advanced tactics that promote and support the quality content held within.

In his look at this process, Brian Honigman of Honigman Media suggests “gating” your content and spreading the word via social media as a means to generate leads and collect data. By turning your ebook into a premium offering that requires joining your email contact list or the completion of a survey, your organization can gather valuable information and forge new connections with future customers.

The key here is to balance your desire to harvest this information with the limits of consumer patience; if you make these viewers jump through too many hoops to gain access to your ebook, don’t be surprised when the campaign falls flat on its face.

As you can see, incorporating an ebook into your content strategy comes with a healthy dose of both work and rewards for those who are willing to take on the challenge.

Some of the richest people in the world were born into their wealth. 

But many of them started with nothing, and through hard work, talent, grit, and a bit of luck, managed to rise to the very top.

These 20 stories remind us that it's possible to overcome just about anything, from parents passing away, to extreme poverty, and more. 

Max Nisen and Eric Goldschein wrote an earlier version of this story. 

SEE ALSO: The incredible rags-to-riches story of Starbucks billionaire Howard Schultz

George Soros survived the Nazi occupation of Hungary to become one of the world's most successful investors.

George Soros survived the Nazi occupation of Hungary after his father paid a government employee, whose Jewish wife he had helped hide in the countryside, to let him pose as his godson. In 1947, he escaped the country, which had come under communist rule after the war, to stay with relatives in London. Soros put himself through the London School of Economics by working as a waiter and railway porter. 

After graduating, Soros sold goods at a souvenir shop, writing countless letters to managing directors at merchant banks in London until he finally got a job. That was the beginning of a long and enormously successful career in finance, including his famous bet against the British pound in 1992, which earned him more than a billion dollars in profit in one swoop. 

Larry Ellison grew up in a poor Chicago neighborhood before co-founding Oracle.

Ellison was born on the Lower East Side of New York City. After he contracted pneumonia as a baby, his mother was unable to care for him, and instead sent him to live with her aunt and uncle on the South Side of Chicago. He has never met his birth father, and didn't even know he was adopted until much later in life.

In 1977, he co-founded a database management company called Software Development Laboratories. They changed the name to Relational Software in 1979, and in 1982, it became Oracle. Today, Oracle has annual revenues of around $38 billion, and Ellison has an estimated net worth of $46.2 billion. He's amassed all of the toys you'd expect from a billionaire — planes, yachts, multiple mansions, and even an entire Hawaiian island. He stepped down from his CEO role in 2014.

John Paul DeJoria lived in his car before John Paul Mitchell Systems took off.

As a first-generation American, DeJoria had it rough from the beginning. His Greek and Italian parents divorced when he was two, and he sold Christmas cards and newspapers to help support his family before he turned 10. He was eventually sent to live in a foster home in Los Angeles.

DeJoria spent some time with an L.A. gang before joining the military. After trying his hand as an employee for Redken Laboratories, he took a $700 dollar loan and created John Paul Mitchell Systems. He hawked the company's shampoo door-to-door, living out of his car while doing so. But the quality of the product could not be denied, and now JPM Systems has annual revenues of nearly $1 billion. He also created Patron Tequila and has a hand in a variety of industries, from diamonds to mobile phones.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

If you're already good, how much better can you get? Is it worth it to even try?

As a life-long learner, I always look for ways to take my skills to the next level. I think it matters. That's why I attended a special masterclass last week that was put on by Michael Port, author of the just-released book, Steal the Show.  

Alexandra Wilkis Wilson, CEO of on-demand beauty business Glamsquad, highly values productivity.

She graduated with a bachelor's degree from Harvard University and a master's from Harvard Business School, learned five languages, and cofounded two companies — Glamsquad and luxury flash sales company Gilt Groupe.  

That's why it comes as little surprise that she tells The New York Times' Adam Bryant her No. 1 pet peeve is the antithesis of productivity: procrastination. 

"I don't like procrastinating. I like people to be organized and punctual," she says.

Wilson says procrastinating can lead to being unprepared — like when employees show up to a meeting without their analysis.

"I get frustrated when people don't follow through," Wilson says. "If I assume that someone's going to be doing something and then I find out that they haven't done it, that's very frustrating to me."

Rather than overestimating your ability to follow through and showing up unprepared, Wilson says you should do the opposite: "I have so much respect for people who underpromise and overdeliver."  

Read the full New York Times interview here.

SEE ALSO: The 17 best icebreakers to use at awkward social events

Join the conversation about this story »

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

With the last couple of versions of Windows, we have seen Microsoft more or less firmly steering us to a login system linked with your Windows Live / Outlook account, and not a “local account” (one unique only to your PC). Microsoft touted the advantages as being able to sync your settings across computers, provided you sign in with the same account, and that the sync options are switched on at each machine. To further encourage us to move to an online account, they seemed to make the “local account” weblink just a little bit difficult to find. With Windows 10, Microsoft has actually made the “local account”...

Read the full article: 5 Tips for Managing Windows User Accounts Like a Pro

Previously, I talked about why it is so important that your business’ website doesn’t just talk all about you and your company.

This is because your audience comes to your site looking for answers to their questions. They want to see how you can help provide them the solution they have been looking for, so don’t waste their time monologging about yourself or beating around the bush.

But beyond not talking about yourself, what does having one of the best B2B websites look like in practice? Here are six great B2B websites that have nailed it by putting the needs of their audience first.

1. Asana

Asana’s website smacks you with a huge, in-your-face call-to-action as soon as you land on the home page. No image sliders, no distractions. Just one quick statement on what they offer, accented by an impactful image to illustrate the collaboration and productivity they provide their users.

But wait, there’s more! While that huge hero image makes their desired call-to-action pop, the rest of their website backs up why Asana is the product that will solve a company’s communication issues.

Don’t waste a website visitor’s time monologging about yourself. Tell them how you can solve their problem. 

In short, Asana articulates a key pain point that businesses face, and their website quickly and (most importantly) plainly explains why they are a solution.

2. Dropbox for Business

The Dropbox for Business page is a little overwhelming at first – there is a lot to look at and not quite enough hierarchy to keep your eyes focused on their main call-to-action.

However, further down the page they simplify things and get to the point.

Icons and diagrams help to emphasize the benefits they’ve listed. Both copy and imagery answer the question, “How will Dropbox help my team?” What’s more, they directly answer the question, “How will Dropbox make my business more successful?” This is the experience. This is how they promise to go above and beyond their clients’ current needs.

They then punctuate this message on each page by providing a quick and easy “Try it free” call-to-action, with the added promise that they will help to “Get your team in sync.”

3. Evernote Business

Evernote Business is a single-page website that showcases a concise call-to-action combined with straightforward pricing right in the hero image.

An animation further down the page quickly shows how easy the app is to use and promises simplification for team projects.

The rest of the page is just as clean and to-the-point, making the message and desired user path clear. Aside from the overall site menu and links in the footer, the only other links will simply take you to get signed up or to contact sales.

Small paragraphs of text list the benefits of Evernote for a business, and ample white space allows creates a better hierarchy and more legibility and comprehension of the points made.

4. Hootsuite

Hootsuite does a great job outlining the overall features, benefits and experience of their product. It’s really all their homepage focuses on, as it should.

Right away, they ask visitors to pick the bucket their business falls into – with Pro level for smaller companies and Enterprise for bigger corporations. Interestingly enough, they have another pricing plan aside from those two, but they keep things simple by providing the two ends of their pricing spectrum and giving visitors a quicker way to learn more about the plan that fits them best.

Many of the other pages on the site go into much further detail on all the apps benefits, so it’s great that their homepage is kept more simplified at the stages before a visitor has self-selected what they want to learn more about.

5. MailChimp

MailChimp’s homepage is short and sweet. (Really, the page isn’t even over 1,000 pixels high!)

The main call to action boldly promises you to “Send Better Email” through their services. A quick animation shows the ease of using MailChimp. A short line explains how many people currently relyon MailChimp’s service.

That’s it. But it works.

Other pages go into further depth on the product itself, pricing plans and how they help to optimize the email process for your business. But really, the site is kept clean and simple, reflecting the value proposition that MailChimp is a means to simplifying email for their clients.

6. Trello

Trello, especially Trello Business Class, gets right to the point by offering to help customers to manage any project with anyone. They show how businesses can benefit from the security and control of the paid subscriptions.

The site is clean and organized, with plenty of white space. Each pricing plan page has a call-to-action for that specific plan, as well as details that follow up on the, “Why Trello?” question.

Whether you are an individual or a team looking for a way to keep better track of project progress, the Trello site communicates they promise to be there to help.

What Can We Learn?

These are just a few examples of B2B companies creating great website copy and a better web presence. But while this short list may not represent the whole of the B2B world, they demonstrate the transition of websites from an inward to an outward focus. B2B clients don’t just want to know all about your business’ accomplishments; they want to know how you will help solve their own company’s problems.

Your website needs to show your audience the benefits you can provide them, whether you do this through short videos, simplified diagrams and images or just quick and straightforward blurbs.

As we are in the final months of 2015, it is a good time to look at your business and decide how successful your year has been so far and what changes you need to make to have continued success in 2016.

1. Are Your Sales Increasing?

It is critical that you compare your sales from year to year, as well as month over year (for example, are your August 2015 sales stronger than your August 2014 sales). This really helps you see overall annual growth as well as if you have any seasonal highs and lows.

I highly recommend you set up a spreadsheet where you enter your sales for each month of the year (in a column) with sales for the previous year’s months in the column to the left. Then in the column to the right of your current sales determine your sales growth, by month and by year, by entering the calculations:

[sales for Month X 2015 – sales for Month X 2014] / sales for Month X 2014

[sales for 2015 – sales for 2014] / sales for 2014

This will arrive at a percentage. Overall sales should never be down from the previous year. If this is the case, then you need to rethink your business in terms of your offerings, your pricing, your costs and whether you need to invest more in marketing.

2. Are Your Costs Increasing?

It is also important to look at your profit, which is Revenue – Costs. Is your profit up over last year and month over year? Again, if profits are down you need to consider raising your prices and/or lowering your costs, especially if your revenues increased. It doesn’t have to be a huge price increase. If profits are down 10%, then you can easily raise your prices 10% and it should have little negative impact on your business. If your costs have increased, then you need to analyze each cost center (be it supplies, fees, shipping) and see which ones increased in price and find alternatives.

3. What Were Your Revenue Leaders?

Look at which products and/or services performed the best for you in 2015 and consider expanding further in this area, slowly eliminating or reinventing products and services that did not sell as well.

4. What Is Working For Your Competitors?

Take a look at your competitors and see what they are selling, what their customers are saying in their reviews and on their social media sites. Try to garner what is working for them in terms of their business offerings and marketing efforts and see which ideas you can steal.

5. Are You Listening To Your Feedback?

Listen to your customers. Read your reviews, comments, feedback, even ask your customers questions. If they feel your prices are too high, consider lowering them if that makes business sense. If they didn’t like the quality of a product, improve upon it. If there is a product or service you don’t have that they want, consider offering it.

6. What Marketing Efforts Are Working?

You need to study your website analytics, even though it will not tell you which traffic sources converted into sales, it is still a way to decide which efforts you should be spending time on and which you should maybe discontinue. For example, if two-thirds of your traffic is coming from Pinterest and very little from Twitter, then stop wasting time on Twitter and dedicate even more time to Pinterest. If your Google ads are not bringing in a lot of traffic, contact a Google Adwords rep and ask how your ads can be improved. If you have been avoiding social media altogether, then maybe now’s the time to give it a chance. Remember, it is futile to do the same thing over and over again and expect different results.

7. Are You Maximizing Your Customer Base?

How many new customers did you get last year? Guess what, they are still potential customers in 2016! Find ways to tap into your already established customer base – either through special offers on your social media sites or a Mail Chimp email campaign – to get additional business from them (as well as referral business) in 2016.

Whether you’re on the frontline or the closing end of the sales process, it’s always helpful to show up to the party prepared for any and all buyer objections. SalesLoft SDR Manager Margaret Weniger and VP of Sales Derek Grant share their tips for combating objections on both ends of the sales spectrum, and how to control the sale from start to finish.

As a manager of a sales development team, Margaret arms her SDRs with call scripts to help prepare them for the common objections or questions they may encounter on a call. By breaking the scripts up into digestible, customizable pieces for SDRs to learn and personalize, Margaret is able to prep her team with the best ways to sell prospects on the next step in the sales process and get them asking for a demo first.

Then Derek’s advice addresses a common closing objection — incentives. It’s normal during the negotiation phase of a close that a buyer ask for a discount. But Account Executives need to be prepared with ways to give those closing incentives in a way that allows them to keep the balance in the transaction. Is the buyer asking for a discount on the smallest pricing package? Offer them a discount if they go up a few seats. Leverage incentives in a way that will both show your negotiation skills, but still hold both parties accountable to their ends of the bargain.

From the beginning to end of the sales process, many objections may come into play. But it’s how you handle them that proves your preparedness going into the call. And the more prepared you are for a call, the more calls you can make.

—

Have any tips for sales preparation that have helped you stay in control of the sales process? Comment below your best practices!

The post Combating Sales Objections From Start to Finish, A Sales Tips Video appeared first on SalesLoft.

Marketers tend to be pretty creative people. We love coming up with new ideas. We’re constantly looking around at our colleagues (and competitors), searching for inspiration and fresh approaches. Part of it is that we always want to be the next big thing. And part of it is that no one want to be that guy. You know, the one who keeps telling the same story about the time he met MC Hammer. At every. Single. Party.

In marketing, we have some especially good reasons to keep our content fresh: to build up a regular audience, we need to keep offering new ideas. And we all know that those all-important SEO spiders give us a little extra juice every time we refresh our content.

But that doesn’t mean it’s always a bad idea to repeat yourself. For example, having a solid, clearly defined message helps you build consistency and trust with your target market. Once you hit on an idea that really sums up the important value of your products or services, you should take every (appropriate) opportunity to hammer that messaging home. In the same way, having a few consistent pieces of anchor content can actually be good for you.

Recycling webinar topics
With so many companies developing regular quarterly, monthly, or even weekly webinar series, we’re starting to see people struggling to come up with new topics for all their webinars.

But here’s something to consider: maybe you don’t always have to come up with a totally new topic. Here at ON24, we’ve discovered that some of our most successful webinars are events that we hold every year. Our Webinar Benchmarks Report event is a hit every spring, and at the end of the year we do a can’t-miss countdown of Webinars that Rocked.

When you’re planning your webinar event calendar, aim for at least one or two topics that you can freshen up with new stats or examples and revisit every year (or every quarter, if you run weekly events). As you build a regular audience, they will look forward to these play-the-hits events.

Reusing webinar content
Webinars are awesome. So awesome, in fact, that it would be a shame to deliver any webinar just once. The easiest way to reuse your webinars is to post them to your on-demand portal as an asset that customers and prospects can visit whenever it’s convenient for them. Personally, I’ve been known to go back and watch the same webinar more than once, just because the information was so good.

But you shouldn’t stop there. You can also export your webinars to video sharing platforms like YouTube and Vimeo. You can take your presentation deck and publish it on a slide sharing site like SlideShare. You can take a full-length webinar and edit it into shorter, single-subject videos or on-demand events and introduce your message to a whole new audience.

In short, there’s nothing wrong with repeating yourself — as long as you’re saying something valuable, in a time and place where it adds something to the conversation.

Revisiting old events is just one idea for sourcing great webinar topics covered by Mark Bornstein in our on-demand webinar, 10 Secrets for Creating Great Webinar Content. If you’re searching for an idea for your next event, be sure to check it out!

Vacation – it’s often an elusive concept for the owners of small and family businesses. Even when owners do take time off, chances are they’re still checking in constantly, which has become increasingly easy to do in this age of the smartphone and near ubiquitous Internet connectivity. The ironic thing is that this constant owner involvement can actually be detrimental in the long run and decrease the value of the business from the perspective of potential investors.

A recent article in Insurance Journal, “Is Taking a Vacation a Good Way to Increase Agency Value?,” highlights just how important it is for owners to step away from their businesses to help increase the value of the business in the long term. As we have discussed in previous blog posts, the attributes of a quality business include:

• Lack of owner dependence
• A strong management team
• Strong balance sheet
• Low customer concentration
• Written processes and procedures
• Stable or ideally improving profit margins and revenues

Reducing owner dependence on the business is extremely important from the perspective of a buyer. The business must be able to run without the daily involvement of the owner, which means owners need to hire and retain key managers who are smart, can garner the respect of the employees, and help ensure business continuity without dependence on the owner.

Business owners that believe they are doing the best for their company and family by handling everything are actually creating a trap for themselves. Too many owners find themselves in and unable to easily extricate themselves from their businesses. They cannot go on an extended vacation, cannot be away from the business without constant communication, and worry that things will fall apart or not be done correctly if they are not there. These owners have created businesses that most likely cannot continue without them. If they were to experience an unexpected event, such as death or disability, their businesses would falter, the values would plummet and their families could be in jeopardy.

Here are some suggestions from the Insurance Journal article on ways to reduce business dependence on the owners:

• You are not your business. It is important to have a life outside of business.
• It is important to hire the right people and train them to do the work, so owners can delegate.
• Owners need to focus on managing the business and not work “in” the business so much.
• A business is more valuable to buyers when it is not solely dependent on the owner(s).

So, the authors of the Insurance Journal article suggest (and we agree): “if an owner wants to improve their business – they should plan an extended vacation! The staff, family and maybe even the clients will be glad they did!” It can also help an owner to see where the gaps are and where improvements need to be made in order to decrease owner dependence and increase business efficiencies and value.

We discuss this frequently: Business owners need to remain vigilant and nurture the company to maximize and protect the value all along the way. A great place to start is to decrease owner dependence and establish professional processes and procedures to ensure the continuity of the business. Owners need to always treat their businesses as an investment, not a lifestyle, and, avoid the trap of letting their personal identities get wrapped up in the company. And besides, after working all these years to start and grow your business, you deserve a vacation!

Email marketing remains one of the most effective tactics in the B2B marketer's arsenal. But what works? Let me share some great B2B email examples and 8 actionable tips. Let me start with the tips: Make it all about them, not you Pack as much unique value into your email as you can Invert the triangle - pack the value in the beginning Use as few words as you can, but as many as you need Build up a case for your call to action throughout Build a series of rapid emails straight after an 'event' Back off to a nurture cadence if you fail to get traction Sign up to two great sites to see masters in action In this blog we review around 20 B2B email examples and explain a lot more about these 8 actionable tips. 

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Yangon (AFP) - Twelve-year-old Myat Noe dashes between tables taking orders and sweeping up cigarette butts, working for around a dollar a day in Myanmar, which has one of the worst records for child labour in the world. 

There are millions like Myat Noe -- child workers are widely accepted in the former junta-ruled nation -- who prop up everything from tea rooms to factories. But pressure is building for a change of attitude and law.

Weeks away from the landmark November 8 election a coalition of campaign groups are seizing the opportunity for debate and urging lawmakers to provide universal, compulsory and free education within five years.

Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy, is expected to make major gains in the election, and has identified education as the cornerstone in reducing poverty, but so far hasn't committed to this demand.

A quick glance along Yangon's streets reveals there is some way to go.

Streetside tea shops -- the busy jumbles of plastic tables and chairs usually patronised by chain-smoking men -- are mostly staffed by children, some as young as seven-years-old.

"I come from the countryside and I have to help my parents, because they don't have enough money," Myat Noe -- whose name has been changed to protect her identity -- told AFP.

Like many of the child workers in Yangon she comes from one of Myanmar's poor ethnic minority groups and has worked for around a dollar a day since she was nine.

Child workers often toil 14 hours a day, seven days a week, sleeping in large dormitories with other children or on makeshift beds made from the plastic tables which they wait on by day.

There is no time for school let alone play, condemning most child workers to a lifetime of manual labour and poverty.

 

- Poverty trap -

 

According to data from the 2014 census, Myat Noe is one of an estimated 4.4 million under-18s who do not attend school in Myanmar.

The impoverished country is the world's seventh worst for child labour, according to risk analysts Verisk Maplecroft, just ahead of India and Liberia.

The rates look set to rise as the economy booms four years after opening up to the world, with new hotels, cafes and factories providing jobs to willing workers, irrespective of age.

A tangle of labour laws do not ban children from work, says Piyamal Pichaiwongse of the International Labour Organization (ILO) in Yangon.

"There's nothing clear on the age at which you can start work and the laws are not applied," she says. 

In 2013, Myanmar joined an ILO convention which outlaws the worst forms of child labour such as forced work, including in the army or sex industry.

The government says it wants to address the situation but until a binding law is crafted, children will remain ever-present in the workforce.

"As parents are poor, they send their kids to tea shops to make money," Win Shein, of Myanmar's labour ministry, told AFP.

 

- Desperate to learn -

 

In an attempt to reach working children, several organisations provide free schooling on the job.

Three nights a week for the last six months, 15-year-old Naing Lin Aung has attended class after a full day working the teashop tables.

"I don't know what will happen to me in the future so I want to learn some English, some computer skills, some knowledge of health in case I get sick," he said, his eyes red with fatigue.

The Myanmar Mobile Education project (myME), teaches 600 children in Yangon and Mandalay, holding classes inside teashops after closing time.

For youngsters working at 24-hour establishments they run an improvised classroom in a converted minibus parked up outside.

Some attend for basic literacy and mathematics while those with a bit of schooling under their belt want to improve their English and computer skills. 

Teaching over-worked youngsters is no easy task. 

"Most of the children work all day long so sometimes they can't focus on the lessons. It's a challenge," teacher Thaw Wai Htoo told AFP.

Another organisation, Scholarships for Street Kids, compensates parents for the income they lose from their child leaving work.

"This country is really poor and the education system destroyed... so it's hard to value education and to persuade the parents to send their kids to school," says John McConnell, the group's founder.

It has provided around 300 scholarships so far, but for every child they reach, many more have little choice but to work in a nation where the education system was ravaged by decades of junta under-funding. 

For Tim Aye-Hardy, founder of myME, a whole generation is being sacrificed by poverty. 

"What kind of jobs will they get, what kind of future is open for them and for the country?"

Join the conversation about this story »

Few organizations have the ability to reach every possible customers themselves. They can’t afford to hire enough sales people to cover the markets, they don’t have enough deep expertise in certain markets, they need to collaborate with others to provide a complete solution to their customers.

Most organizations have found they need to leverage some form of partner or channel to reach all the potential customers, maximizing their ability to sell and grow.

These partners come in all shapes and sizes–they may be strategic technology partners, they may be resellers, systems integrators, distributors, VAR’s, VAD’s, manufacturer’s reps, agencies, outsourced sales partners—or combinations of these various types of partners.

Ironically, while many organizations invest a lot in developing channel relationships–too often, the attitudes within the sales organization are, “They are the enemy.”

It’s manifested in a variety of ways–sometimes as blatant as open hostility and competition between the direct sales teams (inside or field), sometimes more subtly in terms of lack of information flow or failure to embrace the partners as partners.

As a result, open or covert hostility begins. Partners stop listening, they focus their time on other product lines, they openly compete.

Sometimes it isn’t as blatant, a quite–peaceful neglect–on the part of everyone settles in. We tolerate them, communicate with them, they tolerate us, attend our meetings, get our information, pass some information back to us. In the end, through this benign neglect, the channel never quite reaches it’s potential.

Channel partners aren’t the enemy!

We enlist partners to build our mutual businesses–to create revenue and success for each other.

Without these partners, we can’t achieve the growth and market penetration we expect. Rather than treating them as the enemy, we have to treat them as extensions of our company, working with them to build our businesses.

We need to think of our channel partners in very much the same terms as we think of our own sales people–whether they are field direct or inside sales.

We would never think of withholding information our sales people need to be successful in developing business in their territories–it has to be unthinkable to withhold information our partners need to be successful.

We invest in tools, process, methods, programs for our own people. We need to invest in the same for our partners.

We know we need to help our people develop and execute their territory, account, and deal strategies. We know we have to set performance expectations, coach and develop our people to maximize their performance. We need to do the same with our partners.

We want to make it as easy as possible for our people to do their jobs selling–removing barriers, roadblocks and providing resources to help them succeed. Our partners deserve no less.

We know if we don’t provide an environment where our people can be successful and thrive–they’ll go someplace that does. So will our partners!

Together, we must create more value for our customers than we can create individually. But to achieve this, we must first create value for each other.

It seems trite to say win-win. Each of us (on both sides of the discussion) is comfortable with this–but only when we win more, always. But these attitudes create barriers to success.

Successful channel and partner development requires balance on both sides of the relationship. We each need to share in the resources we invest, the risks we undertake and the rewards we reap. Underlying this we are more likely to achieve success in the relationship if we share similar visions and values.

How does your partner and channel strategy and implementation stack up?

It’s the unwavering issue every B2B company’s Sales & Marketing employees face on a day-to-day basis. We’re talking pricing. Though you may be thinking “been there, done that,” the discussion of whether or not your own organization is effectively pricing its products and services is increasingly difficult to avoid. For starters, consider this fact: For the average firm, a 1% increase in price may subsequently raise profits by up to 10-12%!

One of the most talked-up terms in the field is what’s known as value-based pricing.

This pricing strategy is grounded in setting prices based on your product or services perceived value rather than on your actual cost (cost-plus pricing) or those set by your competitors (competitive pricing). Contrary to other approaches, value-based pricing emphasizes being proactive, not reactive.

Selling value means communicating to your customers how your solutions are not only better than your competitors’, but are also bringing that extra something to the table they may not have known that they wanted or needed.

Value-based pricing is permeating the B2C landscape as marketers have realized its many benefits. But pricing practices have just as significant an impact in B2B markets as they do in the B2C world. In this context, buyers want to know how your solutions can impact their bottom line. That is, what you charge should be determined by its true value to your customer, not what’s written on some competitor’s price tag.

The funny thing is, according to research touched upon at the 2013 Intl. Chemical Sales & Marketing Excellence Conference, only 17% of industrial firms utilize value-based pricing. More than likely, this is because completing a pricing culture overhaul in your firm is much easier said than done.

How Your B2B Can Overcome Obstacles and Establish Value-Based Pricing

Five major obstacles must be overcome in order to successfully establish value-based pricing. Knock down these barriers and you’ll have the pricing edge you’re looking for:

1. Transparency – In the B2B sense, demonstrate that your team is comprised of real people who understand the real needs of a business. It’s likely your solution will have a unique cost or shortcoming in comparison to the competitive alternative, so it’s important to openly (yet strategically) acknowledge these differences and then hone in on the positives. Remaining transparent not only allows the customer to decide it is a good fit, but also offers your company the ability to exceed the customer’s expectations.

• Organizational Alignment – B2B Sales and Marketing departments butt heads all too often. Improve the linkages between the two teams, treating them as one entity made up of two intertwined partners. Facilitate alignment by redefining roles and responsibilities, sharing all relevant data from lead creation to conversion and establish a universal understanding of all stages involved in the pricing process.

3. Technology – Though adapting to social media and mobile marketing may seem like a no-brainer, it’s critical to develop more comprehensive integrated marketing campaigns. Though your team may already be tech savvy, your organization must project this image at all times. The fairness of your pricing may be assessed by how well you market through all applicable channels.
4. Value Pricing vs. Value Billing – A cardinal rule of value-based pricing is there should be no surprises. Firms only provide services after price, payment terms, and scope have been prearranged and agreed to by the customer. This creates a better customer experience, with fewer write-downs and write-offs. Calculate a value model or a collection of value drivers that shows how a customer derives value from your solution, and explain it through an all-encompassing value proposition. Hourly rates are old news. Predetermined pricing projects confidence and experience.

5. Sustainable capabilities – It’s important to ensure the longevity of your value. Build customer loyalty, design customized offerings for clients you’ve come to know, pay attention to minute details, and make use of price bundling to fashion unique service packages. Above all, cultivate the relationships you have with your customers. Don’t wait for them to come to you in need. Keep in mind that the customer always has an alternative.

Value is always in the eye of the beholder. For any buy/sell interaction to take place, both parties must profit from the exchange and ultimately receive more value (from their subjective perspective) than what they are giving up. It’s your job as a B2B marketer to clarify, manage, and communicate that value proposition, which gives your organization the je-ne-sais-quoi needed to justify your pricing. Transform these 5 barriers into opportunities and you’ll be well on your way!

When I founded OpenView in 2006, I did so with the specific goal of creating a VC firm that was much more than what Ben Thompson describes as a “middleman” or “moneyman”. You can read more about the value-add approach we ultimately implemented here, but our mission was simple: To create an internal team and system that consistently delivered highly relevant, meaningful value to the companies we invested in.

Today, everyone on our team is involved with adding value in one way or another. This is true with respect to our portfolio (through hands-on, value-add projects like these), but I think it’s also true of the value we aim to provide to the broader tech community through this site and the OpenView Newsletter.

That said, our goal isn’t — and has never been — to just scratch the surface by throwing ideas against a wall and seeing what sticks. Instead, I push our team to follow a process that makes great ideas possible, but also makes them repeatable, sharable, and scalable. When this happens, the value of those projects is amplified significantly.

To expand on that, here are the different levels of value I think can be created from this process, as well as how they can be applied to the way your startup team generates, implements, and documents ideas:

Level 1: Doing something helpful for a customer (in our case, a portfolio company).

This might include addressing a billing issue, fixing a product bug, or providing services that help a customer be more successful. These types of tasks typically happen so often that they’re hard to keep track of, but each task adds value. Even if it fails, it adds value by allowing your team to better understand what not to do. While this aspect of value creation might seem small, the collective power of these actions can be huge over time. Which leads to the next level.

Level 10: Passing ideas on to others around you.

Let’s say you’ve helped a customer address a small problem, or found a fix for a small product bug. While those actions are valuable on their own, sharing what you learned with your direct team makes them significantly more valuable. Doing this helps to develop your team’s skills and improves organizational efficiency by providing a framework when similar issues occur in the future. This process is also valuable because it promotes feedback and encourages group discussion on how to deliver even greater customer value.

Level 100: Documenting ideas and sharing the most important ones with senior leadership.

While it’s great to solve a customer’s problem, what you don’t want to find yourself doing at scale is repeatedly reinventing the wheel to solve that same problem over and over again. This is why documenting ideas, value creation, and other activities — the successful and unsuccessful ones — is critical. Doing this will help educate everyone in the company on the right (and wrong) ways to distribute value, and it will alert senior management about opportunities for important strategic changes.

Level 1000: Implementing a process for repeatedly executing and improving an idea.

As you document ideas and actions, you’ll begin to notice trends and best practices that can be converted into a clear process for adding even more value in a particular area. This will help today’s team become more effective and efficient, but it will also give future team members the roadmap they need to ramp up quicker. Even better, as others use the process you created, they can suggest tweaks and improvements that might make it better. Over time, this step dramatically amplifies the value of your original idea.

Ultimately, the goal of this concept is perpetual improvement and value repeatability.

If one sales manager creates a call script that’s generating huge results for her team, there should be a process in place to make sure it’s shared, documented, and improved upon over time. If a customer service rep uses a particular tactic to successfully solve a key user pain point, make sure that person has a forum for sharing it with the rest of the organization.

There are many small and large examples of this in practice at startups every day, and we continue to use it at OpenView. Our mission has been (and always will be) to progressively build our knowledge base in a way that makes it easier to repeatedly create value for our portfolio, and improve the ways in which that value is delivered. And the same simple approach can be used at any startup to focus attention on good (and bad) ideas, improve efficiency, and significantly amplify customer value.

The post Going Beyond Ad-Hoc: How to Amplify the Value of Ideas by 1000x appeared first on OpenView Labs.

One of the biggest mysteries of the Iran nuclear deal has been solved — but the answer may complicate the efforts of the US and its allies to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. 

On the same day that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was signed between Iran and a US-led group of six countries, Iran reached  a "roadmap" agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency  (IAEA) that would resolve the agency's longstanding concerns over Tehran's nuclear weaponization program.

Under the agreement, the IAEA would investigate Iran's past weaponization work and any possible continuation of those activities prior to the full implementation of the JCPOA. But the details beyond that were murky.

The IAEA's probe into the military dimensions of the program is crucial to establishing an inspection baseline for Iran's nuclear program. The IAEA needs to be able to identify key personnel, facilities, supply chains, and past activities to establish exactly how far along Iran's weaponization activities really are and to recognize whether those activities have been restarted.

But it was immediately unclear what the consequences would be if Iran obstructed the "roadmap" investigation, which concluded in mid-October. Intransigence remains a valid concern, as Iran had ignored nearly a decades' worth of IAEA queries into its weaponization program.

Iranian diplomats repeatedly claimed that the IAEA "roadmap" had no bearing on the implementation of the larger treaty. And the US repeatedly claimed otherwise:

Iran will not be able to receive sanctions relief under deal until PMD issue addressed with IAEA https://t.co/RR6LTJDNvV

— The Iran Deal (@TheIranDeal) August 28, 2015

Now, we have the answer. On October 19th, a Wall Street Journal report cited anonymous US officials who "said the IAEA report would have no bearing on moves by the international community to lift sanctions."

“That final assessment, which the IAEA is aiming to complete by December 15th, is not a prerequisite for implementation day,” a 'senior US official told the Journal. “We are not in a position to evaluate the quality … of the data. That is between Iran and the IAEA.”

As the Journal notes, "Secretary of State John Kerry and other US officials had previously said sanctions wouldn’t be lifted unless Iran substantively cooperated with the UN probe."

Even before the agreement goes into effect, the US is shifting its interpretation of the JCPOA in a way that makes the accord more palatable to Iran.

In the process, the US has essentially decided that the investigation of past nuclear weapons work, and the state of current Iranian weaponization expertise, is nonbinding on a treaty specifically meant to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

The Journal's report comes after a series of provocative moves from the regime in Tehran that have already put a degree of pressure on the agreement.

In September, Iran released five high-value Al Qaeda prisoners, including the interim head of the global organization following Osama bin Laden's death. Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian, who is a US citizen, was convicted of espionage by a secret court earlier this month. Iran reportedly plans to send as many as 2,000 of its own soldiers to Syria, indication of a deepening commitment to the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. 

On October 21st, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei released a list of conditions for the implementation of the nuclear agreement — a curious move, considering it comes a full three months after the negotiations over the JCPOA and its various requirements had actually concluded.

Khamenei insists that the export of Iran's enriched uranium and the reconfiguration of the Arak heavy water reactor will occur on an Iranian timetable and flatly states that any additional non-nuclear sanctions on Iran will be considered a breach of the agreement.

Most provocatively, Iran tested an Emad missile, the country's first precision-guided and nuclear-capable ballistic missile with enough range to strike Israel on October 10th.

Perhaps awkwardly for the US and its partners, the missile test was a violation of a UN resolution that will be repealed as soon as the JCPOA is fully implemented.

Today, it's a clear violation of international law for Iran to test nuclear weapons delivery vehicles like the Emad. But once the JCPOA is in force, strategic weapons tests will be a violation of a non-binding agreement whose status under international law is still ambiguous. 

The US has retreated in connecting the weaponization disclosures to the full implementation fo the deal — at the same time Tehran is acting as if it doesn't really value cooperation with its negotiating partners.

Conseqeuntly, it looks like Iran looking to push the still-to-be implemented JCPOA as far as it possibly can.

SEE ALSO: This Iranian airline is one of the Assad regime's lifelines

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Netanyahu berates UN members for their 'utter silence' on Iran deal

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FEATURE:

Before my daughter got to test out Dash and Dot, our dogs were already getting to know them.

I’d gotten the two kid-friendly robots — Dash, who sits up high on three wheels, and Dot, his more static little partner — up and running less than 10 minutes after opening the box. That included installing five different apps from the Apple App Store and giving them both a quick update over their Bluetooth Smart connections. I guess they brought the kid out of my because, a couple of minutes in, I was running Dash around the living room floor, making him bark at the dogs. They were both kind of puzzled that this little blue thing — most definitely not a dog — had a mind, and a voice, of its own.

But neither Dash or his little partner, Dot, are sentient. You have to teach them to interact with the world (if you’re not taking direct control of them with the Go app). That’s where the more sensible member of my testing team — my 11-year-old daughter — came in, after she got home from school.

Making robotics make sense

Dash and Dot recently got a major new app that makes programming them feel super intuitive. Wonder is the visual programming interface that the Wonder Workshop team has been dreaming of since its $1.4 million Kickstarter success back in 2013.

Dash and Dot’s other apps — Blocky, Go, Path, and Xylo — all have value, but Wonder feels kind of special. It’s an intuitive and kid-friendly way of presenting coding and robotics.

Using Wonder, which Wonder Workshop’s cofounder Vikas Gupta described as a breakthough during a phone call last week, my daughter managed to turn Dot into a disco ball, a security sensor, and a kind of Furby, all by linking lights, sounds, sensors, and actions in different ways by dragging her finger across the iPad. And seeing the robot running through the programming sequences on the screen while it completed its real-world tasks helped form a link between “code” and physical actions that made a whole lot of sense.

Ready-made robots

A lot of robotics projects aimed at kids involve building the robot itself. That’s the approach Wonder Workshop was originally going to take, but the team discovered it’s not necessarily what kids (or parents) want. That we could get both robots going straight away was definitely a positive thing from my point of view. While it’s great to have a family construction project, sometimes interest wanes before it’s completed.

“What we found out very quickly was that kids did not find it a lot of fun to build a robot from the ground up that will take hours to build,” said Gupta. “Kids at a younger age wanted to get much more quickly to point where they felt they were engaged and [having] fun and interacting with the robot. That was one big revelation for us.”

By removing the construction element, Gupta says that Wonder Workshop has made Dash and Dot more powerful while keeping their price relatively low — the pair cost $200, with all their apps free to download.

Recently, Wonder Workshop also made Dot available to buy separately for $50. It’s a much lower price for anyone wanting to give robotics a try.

“We wanted to Dot to be a low enough price point so a lot more people could potentially get started with this,” said Gupta. “What we found from a lot of parents was they wanted to get started but they were looking for something that’s even less expensive to test the waters.”

While you can’t make Dot race around the living room floor, it’s still a powerful tool and has a lot of programming potential. My daughter recorded her own voices for Dot and made it react with lights and sounds to hearing voices, being rocked, and having its various buttons pressed. It felt like she was building the brains of her own Furby toy.

She accomplished all that in the Wonder app’s free play mode, but she also worked through a lot of the built-in challenges for both robots. Both of us were captivated by the activity that had her turn Dot into a dandelion clock. When the program was up and running, we blew repeatedly at the little robot, making his eye lights blink out one at a time. It was super cute.

Gupta said that kids are demanding more challenges as they’ve sped through the new Wonder content. “Now we’re pressed to continue releasing new content so we can keep the kids happy,” he said.

Robotics vs. coding

We’ve seen a renaissance of interest in robotics over the past couple of years as parents and educators look for new ways to teach kids how to code.

Everything to do with robotics involves elements of programming or coding. But Gupta says that robots add an unpredictability to the equation which makes kids think differently than if they’re just working on a screen.

“You don’t know at any point what the robots going to interact with,” he said. “That leads to solving problems in a different way. I would call it a very robot-centric way of thinking because you have to enable to robot to make a decision based on what it senses. That’s a very different way of thinking for coding and problem-solving as opposed to programming a game on a screen where you, as a programmer, have complete control over the environment.”

Dash and Dot both have multiple ways of sensing the world around them. Dash has distance sensors at the front and rear along with three microphones to detect sound direction. Dot can also hear sounds and has an accelerometer to detect  tilting, shaking, movement, and even when you’re tossing him around. And both robots have four buttons you can also use as inputs.

Kids can all use those sensors to make the robots do some pretty clever stuff, as Gupta found out during a recent testing session.

Two kids were playing with the Wonder app in the office, independently of each other. One girl programmed her robot to move around randomly, navigating walls and saying random things. The second kid programmed his robot to respond to a voice, turn around to where it was coming from, and move toward it.

These two kids came together and figured out that they could make one robot follow the other by using sound. “Suddenly, we had these two robots following each other around all over the office,” said Gupta. “That was a very nice, serendipitous, collaborative game that came together in front of us.”

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By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca

While there are a range of relevant topics relating to sales, selling and marketing presented at the CEB Sales and Marketing Summit, the one recurring theme is the power of simplification.

When you step back and see how selling have unfolded over the last for years, what a neutral observer would see is an exercise in layering. People would see an opportunity or a challenge and they would bolt something on to fix or “enhance” their current state as a means of improvement. This could be to their sales process, or their sales enablement technology or platform; the term “There’s an App for that”, was embraced by sales long before all sellers bought iPhones. This wasn’t lost on marketing, they joined the party and loaded on more. This often led one to wonder whether the sale was complex to begin with, or it was complicated by the participants.

Which brings us to the buyers, they further added to the complications, leading to challenges so well presented in CEB’s current book “The Challenger Customer”. As the authors spell out in detail, the dysfunctional buyers and buying process triggers a reaction in sellers, usually in the form of adding more, and just driving the problem further.

Much of discussion at the Summit, speaks to how simplifying the buying process could lead to a number of benefits for buyers and by extension sellers, and the role sales/marketing organizations can play in helping buyer simplify things and progress as a result. “Empowered Customers are Overwhelmed”, turns out “too much information, too many options, and too many people involved in the decision are grinding things to a halt, with 81% or respondents saying their sales cycles have gotten longer over last five years.

The Ease-O-Meter – So how can you make buying easier? You start by focusing on the buying process. This does not mean the traditional approach of imposing you sales process, your time lines, your market view on the buyer, but truly helping them with their purchase as a means of helping them achieve their business goals and objectives.

This is not easy for sales and marketing types, as evidenced by one exercise that had us focus on the buy side of life. Even with all the great knowledge and experience about, this proved to be a real task. Adding to the challenge are two factors detailed in the Challenger Customer”, the combination of the “5.4” and the “good enough”. 5.4 being the number of people/groups involved in a buy decision, hence the dysfunction; “good enough”, the reality of buyers recognizing your value, but not willing to pay for it when there is a “good enough” lower cost alternative.

Another way to simplify things is to minimize options and choices, as stated above, too much choice is not working, as Barry Schwartz, Ph.D author of The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, choice is just killing buying, which is killing sales. While this may seem counter intuitive to many in sales, there were numerous example of why and how too much choice can lead to no choice, not what sellers want when they give choices. As Schwartz pointed out “the best way to avoid regretting a decision is not to make one!”

Not to be glib, but the choice is there, you can keep on the path you’re on, or pick up the book, focus on executing the the concepts and implementing elements to make your buyers’ journey easier and simplify your sales success.

Tibor Shanto    

Have you heard of a “gifographic”? It’s ok if you haven’t – the term is just starting to pick up steam. Gifographics are an evolution of the infographic – using motion to augment the information provided by a traditional infographic.

They are the new kid in town: dynamic, cool and always fun to hang out with. Animation is not only entertaining, but it can speed up learning – while making any dry topic a blast to discover.

So far, gifographics have flown just below the attention of many in the marketing industry. But marketers are starting to catch on, applying high-quality animation and interactivity to their content marketing to see amazing results.

If the term or its application is confusing, keep reading – we’ll cover the five keys to unlocking this new content type, and how marketers can benefit from adding motion to their content.

Gifographic = GIF + Infographic

Neil Patel first used the term “Gifographic” on his QuickSprout blog to identify a new kind of infographic — one that moves. Gifographics build on three of our favorite digital forms: the GIF, the graphic, and the infographic. To understand what a gifographic is you have to understand its parents:

• “GIF” stands for Graphics Interchange Format, and was one of the earliest image formats used on the Internet. Whether or not you know how to pronounce it, you’ve no doubt noticed they still dominate your newsfeed. Buffer notes that GIFs are not around just to make you laugh —NASA uses GIFs of satellite imagery to carry information across space, and Buzzfeed used GIFs to explain the debt crisis in Greece.

• The term “graphic” comes from the Greek word graphikos, referring to visual images and pictorial representations. Graphics include a long list of content types, including photographs, diagrams, symbols, numbers, geometric designs and maps.

• Infographics marry information with graphics — we see them everywhere! They convey statistics and opinion with abbreviated clarify and visual know-how.

Source: Dezzain.com

Gifographics are infographics with motion capacity. Marketers animate visual elements so they move on the screen, entertain audiences, and impart even more knowledge than these other three mediums.

In other words, gifographics are tricked-out infographics that use the power of moving images to engage audiences.

Gifographics Add a New Layer of Visual Communication

Did you know that people do 323% better following directions when they include illustrations? We’re visual creatures — we remember 80% of what we see and do, compared to 30% of what we read and 10% of what we hear. Readers are much more likely to remember and understand information you give them in visual form.

Gifographics work because they illustrate a point with more depth and precision than a static image. Just check out this infographic on cheetahs highlighted by QuickSprout. This information in long form would read like a middle school biology report. But as a gifographic, all this data is mind-blowing, fun, and informative. Small details such as the stride automation give readers a clearer perspective into the Cheetah’s movement. Other components, such as a car barometer with the speed of the cheetah, uses a human reference point to depict an awesome feat of nature.

This gifographic made a huge impact with readers, garnering over 1,170 natural backlinks! Gifographics offer amazing customer experiences and immediate value, not to mention reminding audiences that your company is on trend when it comes to digital production. Instead of bearing down on a tedious idea in a long blog post, give your readers comprehensive look at an issue with a bird’s-eye view.

Gifographics Are a Powerful Repurposing Vehicle

A gifographic is an ace in your back pocket. When you need a boost in numbers, increased authority or brand recognition, they can give you a competitive edge. Because gifographics are still a new content form, integrating them into your content strategy will set you apart in a noisy world.

Gifographics also meet the unique needs of marketers in 2015. According to the B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks released by the Content Marketing Institute, “finding better ways to repurpose content” and “creating visual content” are two of marketers’ top four priorities going into 2016. Gifographics check both boxes, offering new visualizations of evergreen content – so take that old hit from your archive and give it new life.

Marketers can use gifographics any time — especially when you are dealing with a dry topic, big data, or a complicated process. Movement will help you unlock a positive experience with your audience no matter the parameters of the conversation.

5 Key Marketing Benefits of Gifographics

Publishers that feature infographics grow their traffic 12% more than their counterparts. If infographics reap high returns for marketers, gifographics bring those benefits to the next level.

Animated features tug at audiences, increasing engagement times and leading to strong social sharing. With more components to play with, audiences find gifographics to be effortlessly fun, quick reads.

Here are a some awesome rewards for adding gifographics to your content creation plan:

• SEO Benefits – Neil Patel at QuickSprout listed gifographics as one of the top content types to boost your SEO standing in Google rankings. They help you to build authority in rankings and pave your path as a go-to resource for your audience.

• Viral Shares – Gifographics delight readers and make a powerful impact on social media. A recent study cited by Buffer found that blog posts with animated graphics performed better in terms of social shares — just check out this graphic from Socialfresh. Once you have made your first promotional push on social, expect a bump in your numbers.

• High Engagement – Gifographics break down complex and challenging issues into understandable (and engaging) forms. That’s the kind of content readers are looking for, and will keep them coming back for more.

• Mobile User Experience – With more and more B2B and B2C buyers making purchasing decisions on their mobile devices, mobile-friendly content types are the future of marketing. Gifographics offer easy scrolling, perfectly compliment mobile access, and allow for quick but meaningful interactions.

• Content Diversity — B2B marketers, on average, share 12 to 14 different content types — that number will continue to increase as marketers continue to push into new territory. High-performing content like gifographics support broader strategic goals and offer a diversity of options for your favorite readers. Offering a good mix of content formats allows you to appeal to different users who have different content preferences.

Fancy content like gifographics used to require a fair amount of technical work. Graphic designers animated layered frames on Photoshop to create dramatic effects. We’re super excited that the SnapApp platform now includes the ability to set animations on any element in your experience – check out an example here.

Gifographics: Even More Powerful With Interactivity

How do you make a gifographic even more awesome? That’s easy — add interactive elements!

Despite similarities in name and form, interactive infographics and gifographics are two different animals. Gifographics animate content, creating visual movement. Interactive infographics use quiz-style questions to create a two-way conversation.

An interactive, choose-your-own-adventure approach to content allows you to segment users and create unique customer paths based on the answers to your questions. Interactive content, on average, yields 50% plus engagement rates and is 2x more successful at driving conversions. By mixing interactive capabilities and animated content, you double the power of digital innovation, building a super-content bound to dominate the buyer’s journey.

Why not start with interactive gifographics today? Learn more about how to design powerful interactive content with our on-demand webinar.

Vital to any business organization catering B2B interests is lead prospecting. Looking for leads that are sure to end in a sale is a priority that managers should never neglect.

Otherwise, without undertaking the best practices in lead prospecting, B2B enterprises can only do so much as feed their sale pipelines with unwilling prospects and executives that simply do not have the time and budget to buy. This usually results in poor revenue generation, wasted resources, and an exhausted sales arm that may trigger a string of subsequent failures.

Businesses should always remember to complement their lead generation and appointment setting efforts with an effective prospecting program. With such a platform in place, businesses are able to allocate their resources only on personalities that profess a high inclination to purchase their products and services, hence achieving high revenue rates.

For better sales results, marketers can always follow these few simple (yet often neglected) steps for prospecting the right and more efficient way.

Define your goals.

Now, this might seem a little cliché, but time and again, many marketers still fail in achieving better sales prospects because they lack realistic goals. This is a big deal because goals are not necessarily a part of a plan, or a mere end. Rather, they are a means through which you can draft a plan that transports you from point A to point B and makes it easier for you to achieve these goals.

Create a customer profile.

With a goal already set, you then create a profile that details the types of people to whom you want to cater your product or service. In the B2B area, it is essential to target people at the executive or C-suite level as they have the prerogative to make decisions for their companies.

Have the necessary tools.

Whether you want your prospecting to happen online or offline, it’s on your turf. The important thing is always to communicate with prospective audiences through the effective use of communication channels. Traditional methods can be utilized, but this age of business interconnectivity requires you to leverage email send outs and online content marketing to attract people that may qualify for the sales pipeline.

Cleanup your database.

As you prospect for B2B leads, you are often left with information on leads that do not correspond to your customer profile or inaccurate contact data. These warrant a cleanup because a clean lead management database lessens any possibility of tracking and qualifying the wrong leads.

Marketing Metrics – They Will Make You or Break You written by Guest Post read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Your business’ lifeblood is its customers. In order to gain enough customers to keep your business growing, you need to attract people’s attention; this requires a solid marketing campaign. However, we regularly see marketers making the mistake of thinking that a “good” marketing campaign means flooding various channels with clever advertisements. In truth, though, good marketing begins when you look before you leap into any action. In other words, you need to use marketing metrics to guide your marketing campaign’s direction. Here is why how you use — or ignore — marketing metrics can make or break your business:

Why are Marketing Metrics so Important?

While marketing is an invaluable tool for customer acquisition, it is also an investment. Every dollar that you invest into marketing is an expense. If you invest unwisely, then you will waste many of your resources — or even lose ground with consumers. Without marketing metrics, every marketing effort that you made would effectively be a shot in the dark that could succeed or fail. For example, if you try engaging a group of people via Twitter, but they spend most of their social media time on LinkedIn, then you won’t see very strong results. In this case, you can use marketing metrics to identify which channels your target audience uses most often.

Metrics also help you continue doing what works and cut back on what hasn’t been so successful. For example, metrics will allow you to see what types of topics are most engaging on your blog.

What Marketing Metrics Matter the Most for my Campaign?

Cost Per Lead (CPL)

Although your marketing campaign will sometimes create sales directly, this is not its purpose. Marketing exists to create interest in your company so that you have an opportunity to close the sale. This is also known as lead generation. Optimizing your marketing investment means minimizing the average cost for each lead generated. The formula for CPL is simple:

Total Marketing Spend / Leads Generated = CPL

So if you spent $1,000 on marketing and generated 20 leads as a result, then your CPL would be $50. If your typical closed sale generates $100 in revenue in this case, then your CPL is resulting in a profit; if your typical closed sale only generates $40 in revenue, then your marketing campaign is actually costing you money.

Percentage of Customers that Started as Marketing Leads

This shows how often your new customers start out as marketing leads. To figure this out, simply divide the total number of new customers acquired in a given time span by the number of customer generated via marketing. This is important because marketing should play an important part of your business’ growth.

Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)

You don’t want a customer to stop by once. You want them to invest in all of the accessories they need; when their product is used up, you want them to come back to your company for more. How much a person spends over a period of time defines their LTV. In addition to generating new leads, your marketing campaign should be nurturing current customers as leads. If your lead nurturing endeavors are successful, then your average LTV should be high. If it isn’t, then you know that you need to make adjustments in your lead nurturing endeavors (there are metrics that will guide you here as well).

Don’t Approach Marketing with a Blindfold on

You cannot achieve marketing success without knowing what road your campaign is headed down. With the right metrics, you will have all of the information you need to keep your campaign on track and show your marketing return on investment.

Robin Emiliani has been helping companies generate quality leads for almost 20 years. She enjoys teaching companies how to achieve results by utilizing technology. When she’s not marketing, she’s playing with her 3 spirited boys – usually on a court, on a field or on a mountain.

 

Use These 5 Tips to Create a Successful Email Campaign

Despite what you might have heard – email marketing is still alive, well and still a top performer in your marketing toolbox.

However, in an era of powerful spam filters, new rules, and mobile devices this can be more of a challenge than it was years ago. I’ve got you covered though with 5 tips that will show you how to create successful email campaigns.

Knowing your audience (target marketing) will always prevail along with testing and tweaking your results. Email marketing is a process so if you don’t hit it out of the park on the first try, learn from it and try again.

Debunking the Myth

Yes, we have shorter ways in both text and immediacy to communicate now – texting, instant messaging, Twitter, etc. However, according to a study by McKinsey & Company, email marketing still garners more sales and leads than social media:

In order to put together a successful email campaign there are certain pitfalls to avoid. Here are five ways you can creatively reach your subscribers and attract new ones without appearing offensive or unprofessional.

1. Get the focus off of you – While it may be good to include updates, product or service announcements, or other important information about your company it’s important to keep this to a minimum when it comes to drawing your subscribers’ attention. The bulk of your messages need to be about them and how your brand or business can meet their needs.
2. Pay attention to your response rates – What is the most appealing to your subscribers when you send out an email? Is it a free product offer? Or helpful advice on how to solve a problem? Look back at your history in your email client software and you will soon discover which campaigns get the most clicks and views. Depending on your market your leads and customers may prefer receiving a 10-step plan rather than a discount coupon.
3. Stay true to your mission statement – Too often businesses can send mixed messages about what exactly they have to offer, which can lead to a lot of confusion about where to navigate on your website especially. Avoid stuffing your emails with too much information and stay focused on one topic at a time. If necessary, create a series of emails that your subscribers can look forward to on a regular basis.
4. Create a clean and user-friendly design – Most email programs offer professional templates that can be customized for your brand. Eye-catching images and video can work well for certain messages, especially if these involve a product for purchase. Use these sparingly in your emails as you will want to keep in mind the loading time and focus of the topic.
5. Tailor your messages to a specific target market – If you are a B2B offering services then segmenting your subscribers for this market will help you focus on those specifically interested in what you are offering. You don’t want to send out an email to all of your subscribers if you have several different campaigns going. This not only wastes your time, but also increases your bounce rates.

With the right focus and strategy your next email marketing campaign can improve your chances of a sale as well as increasing your website traffic. Take the time to flesh out great copy with a great design that will attract your readers, and track your progress after each mailing to ensure you are receiving the best ROI for years to come.