Rnordman

A tentative agreement reached on a sweeping Pacific Rim trade pact is expected to be a net benefit to British Columbia, which already has extensive trade links with Asia. Most business and industry leaders here said had Canada — and British Columbia — not been part of the 12-country Trans-Pacific Partnership, it would likely have lost market share and faced the threat of becoming marginalized in the growing Asian economy.

Late last month, after the CBC reported that the federal government was prepared to agree to allow more American milk into the Canadian market to help complete the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement, Marcel Groleau reached out to the New Democrats, Liberals and Bloc Québécois. Groleau is the president of the Union des Producteurs Agricoles (UPA), a Quebec farmers’ union. He was previously an executive with the Dairy Farmers of Canada and president of the Quebec Federation of Milk Producers. His father bought a dairy farm in Thetford Mines, Que., in 1945. Groleau and his brother bought the farm in 1988, and he says the third generation will start taking ownership next year.

A few days after his calls, Groleau was able to put a question to the Prime Minister, at least indirectly. “Mr. Harper, Marcel Groleau asked me to ask you the question,” NDP Leader Tom Mulcair explained from the stage at Roy Thomson Hall in Toronto, where he, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau were debating foreign policy. “The president of the Union of Agricultural Producers. He wants to know if you will fully defend our supply management system. I’ll let you answer.”

“Mr. Mulcair, our position has been clear from the beginning,” the Conservative leader responded. “In all our international negotiations, we always defend the supply management system.”

Groleau admits he was “kind of surprised” to hear his name raised at the leaders’ debate.

That his name was invoked might demonstrate Groleau’s stature and the influence of dairy farmers in Quebec, but also, ultimately, to the strange place of supply management in our political discourse—the obscurely named policy that, in this case, would be raised alongside questions of war, diplomacy, climate change and citizenship.

Related: A Maclean’s in-depth primer on the Trans-Pacific Partnership

Supply management is the name given to the systems of tariffs, quotas and price controls that protect the domestic farming industries of dairy, poultry and eggs. Though criticized by economists and fans of the free market—who argue that consumers end up paying more for milk—supply management is supported by every major political party. “Over the years, the political decision has been made [that] this is, pardon the pun, a sacred cow that just can’t be touched because it would be electoral suicide,” says one former government official.

Last week, dairy farmers converged on Parliament Hill to protest the mere possibility that supply management would be significantly affected by TPP negotiations, (Groleau’s UPA helped farmers ensure they had the proper permits.) And the sight of cows in downtown Ottawa and milk running in the streets was the stuff of national news. Any unwelcome move on supply management would likely bring similar scenes. “For sure,” Groleau said in an interview last week, “if the agreement is not good for the dairy farmers, then we will work very hard and we will be very active in the next week.”

Early indications are that the completed Trans-Pacific Partnership might not be met with outrage from the dairy sector. The Canadian government did agree to more access for foreign producers, but is also pledging compensation to domestic farmers. An initial response from the Dairy Farmers of Canada was basically positive.

Three years ago, former Liberal MP Martha Hall Findlay attempted to rebut the idea that ending supply management would come at a substantial political cost. As part of a larger analysis that argued for transitioning out of supply management, she reported that there were “only 13 ridings in Canada with more than 300 dairy farms” (the electoral map has changed since then, but her general point probably still holds). Eight of those ridings, she noted, were won comfortably by the Conservatives, further diminishing the potential impact on the governing party.

But that might oversimplify the political calculus. Of course, in the context of a close election, even a handful of seats could be crucial. And while there may not seem to be a massive number of dairy farmers in Canada—there were 12,010 farms as of 2013—it is not only their votes that could be at stake. “Supply management is important to dairy farmers across Canada, but that’s not all of the people who are affected. Every place in which dairy farming is an integral part of the community and economy relies on stable dairy production and prices, so the impacts of supply management are as much for the communities and the regions as they are for the individuals,” says NDP strategist Brad Lavigne. Explains Groleau: “As producers, we are very involved in our regional economy and regional politics. Each producer has more impact than the average voter, because we buy our supplies from local companies, we sell to local processors, we are at the base of the regional economy.” There might also be the simple symbolic value of protecting the family farm.

Hall Findlay argued that consumers could be rallied by the prospect of cheaper milk; she estimated Canadian families each spend $200 more per year for dairy, eggs and chicken as a result of supply management, with low-income Canadians being hit hardest. Setting aside the debate over price impact, how many votes might actually be won on such a promise? “If you were to run an election on, ‘We’re going to make it so your milk and your cheese and your dairy products are all less expensive by blowing up this system that’s existed for 40 years,’ people would be like, ‘Oh, that’s interesting,’ but it wouldn’t move votes,” suggests the former government official. “It wouldn’t inflame people and make them passionate, as it will if you say to dairy farmers, ‘Your quota, which you’ve borrowed money from the bank against to build your barn, to buy your tractor or to sell for your retirement, that’s going to be worth less now, because we’re going to open your market up to the Americans, Aussies and New Zealanders.’ That’s a lot more of a direct hit on somebody.”

If politicians are supportive of supply management, Groleau says it’s because they have been convinced of the wisdom of the policy.

The post Why the dairy lobby is so powerful appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Earlier today, I was interviewed for an article on “Closing The Sale.” The article is in a publication focused on small business owners. As we concluded the conversation, the interviewer said, “Your answers were completely different than I expected.”

I think too many of us–entrepreneurs and sales people, alike, have mistaken impressions of closing the sale. As a result, we close far fewer deals than we might. Leveraging (and paraphrasing) Adriana’s questions, I thought I’d refresh your thinking about closing the sale.

What are the key components that lead up to closing any sale?

Implicitly, this question focuses on the final few things one might do at the end of the sales cycle, leading to the close. In reality, the most critical elements of the close are in prospecting and qualifying—long before we even close the sale. The two most critical things are:

Is the customer/opportunity squarely in our sweet spot? Our sweet spot is defined by two elements, what problems are we the best in the world at solving, and who has those problems? It’s the intersection of these two elements that maximize our ability to win. We are focusing on those customers in which our solutions are most differentiated and where our value creation is likely to be the greatest. Sticking to our sweet spot is critical if we want to maximize our win rates and our ability to close with a favorable decision. The problem too many organizations or sales people have is they don’t take the time to define these well. Consequently, they tend to cast a very wide net, trying to close any one that shows interest. As a result, however, we find ourselves wasting our time and that of the customers competing for deals we don’t deserve to win.

The second critical thing is: Does the customer have a compelling need to change? Everyone fears change, people tend to avoid change. Consequently, the easiest decision for any customer is to continue doing what they currently are doing, or to do nothing. Most of the time, sales people present a vision of a great future. They talk about how great things might be. But until the customer has said, “Our current state is unacceptable. We can no longer continue doing things the way we have, we must change,” the likelihood of closing the sale is very low. There is too much going against us in getting the customer to make the change and take the risk of changing. Great sales people overcome this by disrupting the customer’s thinking. They do this by focusing on the current state, helping the customer identify the problems preventing them from moving forward, or operating at the highest levels of performance, or the opportunities they may be missing. Any talk of solutions or the future is wasted until the customer is dissatisfied with the current.

How do you instill confidence in the customer that they should be selecting you instead of someone else?

The natural response from most sales people is to demonstrate our superior value, to convince them we have a better product/solution. Under pressure, many sales people would add another element: Offer all that at the cheapest price.

Given that’s the way most of your competitors will work, focusing on their solutions and offerings, trying to outcompete each other on features, functions, feeds, speeds, pricing, the best way to compete is not to. Instead, make all your focus on the customer. What is it they are trying to achieve? What are the risks, challenges? How do they organize themselves to make a decision (remember we are dealing with the famous 5.4)? How do we help them buy, how do we address the personal and group fears about the change and decision process.

Since most sales people tend to fall into bad habits, thinking about what they want to achieve and their goals, distinguishing ourselves with the customer by focusing totally on them. It makes the need to differentiate the solution smaller, because the deal becomes less about the solution the customers choose, but of helping assure they are making the right decision and they will be successful with their project.

How does one overcome customer objections or hesitations?

This is a pretty short response: Listen, probe, understand. Only once you’ve done this, can you begin to address their concerns. The problem with most of your competitors, consequently, the opportunity for you, is they tend to react and respond before they have done this.

Enough said.

Are there different techniques for closing a sales based on the type of business?

There are endless articles, books, courses offering the 15 guaranteed closing techniques, the 27 ways a customer can’t say no, or any other outlandish number of manipulations.

Moving to the close is dependent on two things: How well the opportunity has been set up in qualification, and how successful we’ve been in helping the facilitate the customer buying process. It has nothing to do with anything else.

Remember, a couple of questions ago, I suggested the most important thing in qualification is to get the customer to say, “Our current state is unacceptable, we must change.” If we’ve done this well, the customer has to move to a solution. The costs, risks, problems of doing nothing have become unacceptable, so they must do something. Sometimes in their buying process, they loose track of this, we need to gently remind them. Sometimes, it’s as simple as saying, “Every week you wait, this is costing you $10M in revenue.” (This was the clincher in reminding a client on a project with my company). If they believe they can’t not take action, then we don’t need any closing techniques.

Having said that, it’s easy for them to get derailed on the way. It’s their own ability to organize themselves (the 5.4 again), align agendas, priorities, goals, objectives, and dreams to make a decision. Too often, they get overwhelmed with the complexity of their own organization, so they give up–they make no decision. It’s our job to facilitate the process, to help them help themselves.

After closing the deal, what should be the next steps?

One thing: Make sure they are successful!

The risk to each person involved in the decision is far greater than the risk sales faces. Customer failure has profound impacts on their company, and everyone involved. They will miss opportunities, fail to achieve the savings or improvements they expected. In some cases, it can cause companies to fail. Personally, each person involved is at risk, they fail to achieve their own goals–and may lose their jobs.

We have an obligation to do everything we can, before and after the close, to make sure they can be successful and support them in achieving that success (not necessarily for free). If the customer fails, then we have failed. That means, it is difficult for us to do more, to expand, within the account, to find more opportunities to grow the relationship. We never get the opportunity to leverage the power of referrals.

So the deal is never closed until the customer has achieved success!

Thanks for stimulating my thinking on this, Adriana!

On October 4^th, 1987 negotiators completed the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement. Exactly 28 years plus a day later, 12 countries agreed to form the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP for short). This is a big deal. The TPP will include Australia, Brunei, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, United States, and Vietnam. Together, they account for about 40 per cent of global GDP and over 800 million people. The 12 countries are projected to grow even larger and account for 50 per cent of global GDP by 2050. It’s no exaggeration to call this the largest free trade deal in the world.

So, what’s in the TPP? As there are way (way) too many aspects of the deal to cover in one post, I’ll try to summarize the key changes that may find their way into the current election campaign. For interested readers, though, a technical summary is available here.

What the TPP won’t do

Let me start by saying what is not part of the TPP. There will no doubt be many misleading claims over the coming weeks about this deal, and it is useful to head them off right from the start.

It won’t lead to the privatization of crown corporations like Canada Post or Via Rail. It won’t undermine the ability of the Canadian government to subsidize Canadian cultural industries. In fact, the CBC and Telefilm Canada are specifically exempt from the provisions governing State-Owned Enterprises.

The TPP also won’t constrain governments from tackling environmental challenges. This point deserves more attention. Naomi Klein recently claims that TPP will limit the ability of countries to take action on climate change. This is just silly. Carbon taxes are in no way a violation of anything in the TPP deal. Similar charges are levelled against NAFTA, overlooking the fact that B.C. has a carbon tax which doesn’t violate anything. B.C.’s approach is perhaps the world’s best example of good environmental policy that we should all think carefully about—and one that (hopefully) Alberta will adopt very soon (though again, a topic for another day). TPP does nothing to prevent this.

Related: Maclean’s in-depth primer on the TPP, one of many election issues

Finally, one will also no doubt hear that TPP will increase drug costs. This is false, but there was indeed the potential that this could have been true. One of the main sticking points, primarily between Australia and the United States, was the length of monopoly status afforded to prescription drug companies when they bring out a new drug. For a drug to receive government approval, it must submit a large quantity of data. This data is useful to competitors, such as generic drug companies, when they produce competing drugs. So-called “data protection periods” prevent these competitors from using the original data. (A great Bookings Institute backgrounder on Prescription Drugs and the TPP is here.)

In the United States, this period is 12 years. In Canada, it is 8. In Australia, it is only 5. The US wanted longer periods, while most other countries wanted shorter. The longer the period, the longer the monopoly status of the original drug manufacturer, the longer the drug’s price remains high, and so on. There are some who label the exclusivity periods the “Death Sentence Clause.” That is a little over the top, but it would have certainly increased healthcare costs.

What does TPP do? The countries agreed on a five-year period, as Australia was demanding. As Canada already has a longer period than this, the TPP doesn’t change much at all from our perspective.

What the TPP will do: Lower trade barriers

Let’s get to the heart of the deal: trade liberalization. The TPP will lower tariffs as well as lower non-tariff technical barriers almost across the board. There are far (far) too many changes to list. There are roughly 18,000 tariff lines in the United States that will change for TPP countries. Canada has even more, with about 19,500 tariff lines. (A user-friendly download facility through the WTO is available here.) In time, almost all tariffs on goods and services going in and out of these 12 countries will fall to zero.

Consumers are the big winners here. All too often we focus on lower tariffs for Canadian producers when they export abroad. But we must not forget that lower import tariffs mean lower prices for all of us on the goods and services that we buy. Lower prices means our incomes can go further and our standards of living increase.

How large are the tariff changes likely to be? There is huge variation across products, but in the graph below I plot the simple average tariff rates for TPP countries that we don’t already have a trade agreement with.

For the most part, tariffs are not that high (a huge success of the WTO, and its predecessor the GATT). Two big countries in the TPP group include Malaysia and Vietnam. Overall, it looks like their tariffs on our goods will fall by more than our tariffs on theirs. For Singapore and New Zealand, the reverse is true (both countries are famous free trading nations).

Of course, tariffs are much higher on many specific goods. Tariff on metals and mineral products imports into Vietnam and Malaysia are roughly 40 to 50 per cent. They will be eliminated in 10 years. Petroleum products have a 30 per cent tariff in Vietnam—also scheduled to be eliminated over 10 years. Aircraft engine parts face a 5 per cent tariff in Australia, which will be eliminated once the deal is in force. The list goes on and on. Instead of listing them here, interested readers can see a (very) long list on the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade, and Development website here, or another summary here.

Some non-tariff barriers will also be falling. The most prominent, and one that will feature loudly across various Southern Ontario ridings this election, is the increased access to imported auto parts for Canada’s auto sector. Currently, to receive preferential treatment under NAFTA, motor vehicles must contain no less than 62.5 per cent of their value from within North America. That is, most of the parts can’t come from Europe, Asia, or elsewhere. Under TPP, the threshold will be for autos to have no less than 45 per cent TPP-originating content.

Will this hurt Canada’s auto sector? Some argue it will, while others are more optimistic. In a previous article I argued that this may actually benefit Canada’s auto sector as a whole. With cheaper parts, assembly operations will become more profitable. Their productivity may rise, as will their employment and exports. If you work at a Toyota plant, this is likely good news. Of course, only time will tell, but it is certainly not obvious that lowering the new Rules-of-Origin thresholds is a “concession” or something detrimental to the Canadian auto sector as a whole.

There are also measures to liberalize services (such as banking) and provisions covering the movement of workers. As services accounts for three-quarters of Canada’s GDP and employs the vast majority of Canadian workers, this is potentially big deal. There’s also much room for growth, with services currently only 17 per cent of Canada’s total trade. As for worker mobility, this will allow technicians or other professionals to easily access these Pacific Rim markets. The details are substantially more complicated here, so I’ll leave those for someone far more knowledgeable to discuss.

The winners and losers (broadly speaking)

So what will be the likely effect of these lower trade costs? On average, we can expect higher productivity, higher GDP, and higher incomes. Of course, there will be costs on some that should not be overlooked.

At the press conference announcing the deal, International Trade Minister Ed Fast said that “we do not anticipate that there will be job losses” though some sectors “will have to adapt.” That’s just silly. There will be job losses in some sectors, and job gains in others. Overall, there will be very little if any change in total employment due to the TPP. Economists don’t focus on the number of jobs, what is far more important (in the long-run) is the type of jobs. Shifting employment towards sectors where we have a comparative advantage will increase our economy’s productivity in the long-run.

How will each of Canada’s provinces be affected? Below I plot the share of overall economic activity associated with trade with non-NAFTA TPP countries for each of Canada’s provinces.

Typically, these shares are not very large. Approximately exports from BC are 2 per cent of B.C.’s economy; they have a similar share on the import side. Ontario is a big outlier here, with imports equivalent to nearly 2.5 per cent of its GDP compared to only 0.5 per cent involved in exports. Ontario consumers and businesses that import inputs from abroad are going to win. About one-third of Ontario imports from these countries are in the form of equipment (HS codes 84 and 85, for those interested). Business importing such equipment will face lower costs, and therefore improved competitiveness. Also, Ontario consumers spend over $1 billion in food imports from non-NAFTA TPP countries. Our eventually lower tariffs will be a big boost to their pocketbooks.

Of course, only with time and further detailed reflection and analysis will we know the true consequences of this deal. From my perspective (for what what’s worth), it will be good for Canada’s economy overall. Of course there will be difficult adjustments for some workers in Canada, but our focus and attention should be on designing policies to help those adversely affected, not in blocking the deal outright as some propose.

Supply management and the TPP

Let me end with what might be the most contentious issue for the election: increased imports of dairy, chicken, turkey, and other “supply managed” products. The NDP has, and will likely continue, to demand Canada “protect” its dairy farmers with high tariffs and quotas on production. So, how does TPP affect dairy farmers and the broader Supply Management system? It barely changes a thing. The system as a whole will be retained.

There will be modest changes, however, with slight increases in the amount of certain agricultural good allowed into Canada tariff-free. These quota increases are fairly minor: equivalent to 3.25 per cent of the Canadian market for dairy, 2.3 per cent for eggs, 2.1 per cent for chicken, 2 per cent for turkey, and so on. This benefits Canadian consumers, unambiguously. What about producers? Increased competition will be a challenge, for sure, but the government will provide compensation. Affected farmers will have 100 per cent income protection for a full 10 years after TPP comes into force. The government is also setting aside $1.5 billion to compensate for lost value of quotas. Some estimate this package of compensation to be worth close to $4.3 billion over the next 15 years.

Related: Why the dairy industry is so powerful

What do other countries think about this? Accounting for close to one-third of international dairy trade, New Zealand stood to gain the most from liberalization. It is surely disappointed. The trade minister there points out that, on balance, he’s happy as TPP “establishes in the long run, complete elimination of all tariffs on everything that New Zealand exports,” with two exceptions: (1) beef imported into Japan, and (2) some dairy products into Canada. He points out though that the work is not over. The deal will open up “political space for future generations” to build on. He also wisely notes “the excellent is almost always the enemy of the good”, and is happy where things landed.

We shouldn’t forget, though, that supply management is a terrible policy, especially for low income Canadians. Although TPP does little to change it, we can eliminate it unilaterally—we don’t need a trade deal to do it. In time, hopefully, better policy will prevail.

 

Trevor Tombe is an assistant professor in the department of economics at the University of Calgary. Follow him on Twitter: @trevortombe

The post Why the TPP is such a big—and good—deal for Canada appeared first on Macleans.ca.

We’re well into fall, and that means it’s time to go back to school with some new strategies to optimize your cold calls. If you’re looking to make an A+ on your next discovery call, you’ll need to do some research.  Here are 3 simple steps to get you having better conversations and booking more appointments today.

1. Do Your Homework.

Cold calls are a lot like homework assignments. With on-the-spot objections and limited time to prepare,all SDRs need structure around pre-call preparation. A prospect’s time is limited, and what you say from the moment they take your call is paramount. You have no more than 30 seconds to keep your prospect on the line and intrigue them enough not to drop the call. The key to this is leveraging your pitch in a way that makes you sound knowledgeable around their process and therefore, valuable. You can achieve this by knowing who you’re calling before you do.

Blocking off time to study a prospect isn’t easy for the average SDR. With high prospect volumes, we recommend no more than 3 minutes of research per call. When searching, search smart. Dig into their company websites or LinkedIn profiles for something that shows you’re informed. On LinkedIn, look in the summary section or on their company page. You don’t have to memorize the whole profile, but merely identify something unique and run with it.

A+ material: “Hi Bob, saw you were VP of Business Development and that your translation software primarily targets the education industry. What does your process look like for prospecting such a selective market?”

This shows that A) you know what they do B) you know who they target and C) that you’re not actually cold calling them at all.

Here are a few more profile points to keep an eye out for:

• Mission
• Core values
• Recent Promotions
• Available Positions
• Current Customers
• Funding

2. Use Persuasive Language.

From the moment you get a Prospect on the line, every word becomes crucial to the overall result. Hubspot’s “Want More Sales? Try Using These 13 Influential Words” speaks on the value of using power words in order to influence your prospects. As an SDR, I’ve used these again and again to leverage my leads (on calls and through email).  Check out my personal five favorites and how they can help you have better, more informed conversations:

1. You
2. Free
3. Try
4. Increase
5. Quick

All of these power words project confidence and results. The more you use them, the more they will resonate. Try replacing our, I, we  with you whenever it’s appropriate. For example, “You mentioned that…” verses “I noticed that…” shows that your focus is on understanding before selling. Words such as “free” and “try” implicate low to no risk associated with your products/services. And finally, momentum building words such as “increase” and “quick” associate your solution with instant gratification. The more you use these words, the more control you’ll have over the call. Period.

3. Remember Your Mnemonic Devices: KISS = Keep It Simple, Salesperson.

There’s nothing more defeating than working hard on an assignment only to get an F because you turned it in late. In Sales Development, we’re guilty of this time and time again: we talk ourselves out of appointments and lose the prospect on a technicality. On your next call, save yourself the trouble and always be listening for the value prop. Once you’ve identified their pain point, halt. Stop pitching and reemphasize how you can fix their pain. If you keep it going, you run the risk of talking yourself right out of an appointment and losing control of the call. If your prospect has a need and you have a solution, there’s no reason to oversell. Keep it short, keep it simple.

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Remember: if you’re calling a particular prospect, chances are that prospect is on another rep’s call list, too. But if you do your due diligence and follow the steps above, you’re guaranteed to stand out. Comment below If you’ve found any other cold calling techniques beneficial to your process.

The post Back To School With SalesLoft: Cold Calling appeared first on SalesLoft.

The idea of showrooming as a major threat to brick-and-mortar retailers seems to be fading. Recent research from PayPal suggests that shoppers in high-value verticals prefer researching online and then buying in the store. Other retailers such as Best Buy and Johnston & Murphy use sophisticated data-onboarding technologies to help bridge the gap between the online and in-store customer experience. Recent research

But retailers have good reason to be concerned, even if it isn’t the apocalyptic “end of business as we know it” concern that permeated the retail world in 2013–2014. According to a recent survey conducted by SecureNet, as many as 72% of brick-and-mortar shoppers regularly use mobile devices to research products in-store. (Another survey put the number at 83% for shoppers of electronics.)

Three ways to respond.

There are three basic approaches to showrooming. You can play defense, offense, or both. This fascinating case study from the Harvard Business Review neatly summarizes the difference between the three choices. It takes place in a hypothetical board room, where various stakeholders of the electronics retailer Benjy’s are figuring out what to do about showrooming.

“’I think it’s obvious that we need to play both offense and defense. Offense should include providing more-aggressive discounts through the Benjy’s app and matching online prices. We also need to get more suppliers to impose minimum advertised prices on their online retailers, so that there’s a floor price for every product, online or off.

“’But there are ways to thwart object-recognition software,’ Ben continued. ‘We create display structures within the stores that confuse the apps while still showing off the products. There are consulting firms that specialize in this. The costs are relatively minor and well worth it. Personally, I think this tactic is a no-brainer.’”

Most retailers would recognize that a program to thwart object-recognition software would be a short-term play that would likely further alienate shoppers. Indeed, the experts advised against such a move, and elaborated further:

“[…] All those in-store initiatives would need to be seamlessly integrated with an online strategy so that each experience complements the other. Customers shouldn’t think ‘Benjy’s online’ or ‘Benjy’s brick-and-mortar,’ but just ‘Benjy’s.’”

So what’s the best way to respond to showroomers?

1. Make it easy to pick up in-store.

A big part of Best Buy’s dramatic turnaround story is their investment into becoming a true omnichannel retailer. From a story in the MIT Technology Review:

“The idea in omnichannel is to reach customers wherever they are—in a store, online or via their phones—and use technology to turn costly physical stores into an advantage. One deceptively simple step Best Buy took was to add a ‘Store Pickup’ button to its online shop. It turns out many shoppers like to browse and pay online but prefer to actually pick up that TV themselves—they just had no way of doing that before.”

2. Reward your loyal shoppers.

Your frequent shoppers don’t care if your CRM has omnichannel capabilities—they just want to be recognized as loyal customers every time they shop with you—whether it’s online or in-store.

Premium apparel retailer Johnston & Murphy rewards its most loyal customers using both in-store and online data. When they shop in-store, they receive a personalized experience guided by their highly trained sales associates who can work with them to complete their look based on their past purchases and stated preferences.

For online shoppers, they deliver personalized hero images and navigation choices based on online and offline customer data. They even offer free two-day shipping standard to VIP customers, who were identified through in-store and online data. And they let eligible shoppers know about this perk in a dynamic way, with welcoming light boxes informing customers of the promotion. As we reported in our recent Ecommerce Quarterly report, the campaign has reduced bounce rate for that segment of website visitors by 19%.

3. Compete on experience.

Unless you’re in charge of marketing for a we-sell-everything retailer like Walmart, odds are you’ve accrued some domain-specific knowledge of your unique business. Use your customer knowledge to improve their experience online and in-store. A real-life satisfying in-store experience is something Amazon will never be able to provide, even with a locker in the back of a 7-Eleven.

The good folks at HBR implore us to design for empathic expertise:

“When a shopper uses a physical retail setting as a showroom, what are they looking for? A better look at the merchandise, and the benefits of touch and feel—but even more, for expertise that could guide their choice. You probably have a business you patronize for exactly this reason, whether it’s the boutique that knows what’s on trend, or the specialty grocer who can advise on preparation of a dish, or the wine seller who can recommend the right bottle to go with that meal. Backcountry.com and Zappos, for example, are excellent online retailers, but they haven’t displaced REI or the local shoe store, because people value that hands-on expertise. Especially when the purchase is something we really care about, we’re willing to pay extra for a trusted advisor helping us make the right choice.”

The digital and physical worlds – and their supporting industries – differ widely. When it comes to production and transport, for instance, costs and speeds vary greatly. Digital is immediately more scalable and offers greater potential to abstract and simulate.

The technology of digital also allows for more personal experiences for users. As an example, the resolution of the control circuit that Google uses to manage digital advertising is several times higher than what’s used in the physical world, where a unidirectional medium like television or a billboard sends a static message to an unknown mass of potential customers.

The finely grained control of digital offers huge advantages that make the digital advertising market far more dynamic than the physical one, and for years now, advertising budgets have been moving from the physical to the digital sphere. Digitalization leads to high-resolution management because the cost of measuring and actuating elements is almost zero, while changes can be made with nearly the speed of light.

Digital does require platforms, however, and for brands and businesses to be competitive, it’s essential that they consider platforms carefully and more expansively.

Google serves as a model in this arena. It has put location, context, data, mobility, search, and mobility trends to good use. In fact, it has revolutionized the advertising market. Google analyzes search queries and collects clicks on web pages to measure user behaviors. Based on this high resolution and precise performance data, the company can tailor advertising messages to individual users and optimize its profits.

Google also measures user reactions in real time to determine the effectiveness of its banner ads. It uses these measurements to optimize its allocation model and quantify results for invoicing its advertising customers.

Lego and Philips are two product manufacturers who also created multi layer platforms. They each took two simple physical elements (bricks and light bulbs) and made those objects the foundations of complex platforms that not only serve a need but are, in fact, ecosystems.

This is the true definition of digital transformation – moving beyond an isolated or unique need (gaming for Lego, lighting for Philips) to create well-oiled platforms that serve as multi-layer ecosystems. These ecosystems enlarge the space from local to global, and help businesses improve products and more meaningfully serve customers.

At the end of the day, the digital economy is all about creating scalable platforms with well-designed customer journeys to serve and predict customers’ needs. It becomes really important to focus on how these platforms can serve customers needs and not company stakeholders’ requests. When platforms are ecosystems, in which constant exchanges with users and quick, smart improvements are always in motion, they make the physical objects entirely more useful and satisfying, providing a value that a mere physical object alone cannot.

“I don’t know anyone who planned to be here,” a CEO of a software company remarked during a forum for CEOs. “I think I got here because of a combination of luck, character, and divine design.” It’s true that you can’t plot your course exactly. But here are five unexpected qualities of virtually every great leader I’ve worked with.

1. Go to grow.

If you look at their resumes, successful leaders tend to move around a lot, especially in their twenties and thirties. Every three or four years, they move on to another challenge, often moving from one organization to another, and then back again to the first. “They go to grow,” as one person put it. This growth gives them a wealth of perspective that enables them to manage effectively, no matter what the situation.

2. Leaders are readers.

If you look at their bedside tables, leaders tend to read voraciously. Reading teaches people to process information at multiple levels and dimensions quickly. This helps them bring clarity and sensitivity to a situation. “He thinks in a way that allows me to clear away the underbrush and see the forest,” is how one executive describes his boss.

3. Hire and fire.

Effective leaders know how to take care of other people – but not at the expense of their company. They demonstrate at an early point in their careers that they can handle the responsibility of firing people. As one put it: “I seem blessed with the ability to fire people without them resenting it.” Leaders don’t get caught up in conflicts between personal friendships and the needs of the organization. When someone isn’t adding value, they let them go quickly.

4. Tolerance.

Effective leaders show a high level of tolerance for different political views, religious beliefs, and world views. Typically, they’ve been around enough to understand why people adopt different views, and don’t take it personally when their view differs from someone else’s. As the CEO of a software company put it, “A good leader knows when to engage in a healthy debate, and when the debate is futile.” If the issue relates to personal beliefs or cultural values, effective leaders show respect and appreciation, and thus build trust among people from all sorts of different and diverse backgrounds.

5. The Network.

In comparison to others, effective leaders tend to build large networks of people to whom they can turn for business advice, personal counsel, or simply to learn what’s going on in other parts of the business world. And it doesn’t hurt that this network provides a large number of opportunities for jobs, should the leader decide to grow again.

This post was originally published at Leading-Resources.com.

“Wine is a grocery, not a luxury.” – Richard Betts

Richard Betts (@yobetts) served as the wine director at The Little Nell in Aspen from 2000 to 2008. Much more interesting to me, Richard passed the Court of Master Sommeliers’ Masters Exam on his first attempt, becoming the ninth person in history ever to do so.

I first met Richard through investing wunderkind Chris Sacca, and we immediately hit it off. Richard can help you train your senses for anything, including wine, whiskey, his current love of mezcal, and far beyond.

He’s also done a lot of wild experiments, gotten a lot of tattoos, almost been shot in Mexico, and developed an incredible ability to simplify the complex. We get along.

In this conversation, we talk about nearly everything, ranging from the value of quitting to tricks of the trade, travel tips (he’s traveling 300+ days per year), and “starter” wines.

We also drink a boat-load of whiskey, me tasting and Richard teaching. The pictures below show a sample. Side note and cool rule of thumb: did you know it’s spelled “whiskey” when from countries that have “e” in their names (e.g. America) but “whisky” when from countries that don’t have an “e” in their names (e.g. Scotland, Japan)? Richard taught me that.

Last but not least, Richard is the author of a brand-new book, “The Essential Scratch & Sniff Guide to Becoming a Whiskey Know-It-All,” which is sitting on my kitchen table with whiskey stains all over it. It distils (see what I did there?) a couple of lifetimes worth of study down to 24 pages…then makes them smell good. Definitely check it out. At the very least, it gives you a bunch of rules of thumb (like the whiskey vs. whisky trick), so you can impress your friends and not look like a dumb-ass at the bar. Sweet! Less dumb-ass and more smart-ass is always good. Get ‘er done.

 

• Listen to it on iTunes.
• Stream by clicking here
• Download as an MP3 by right-clicking here and choosing “save as”.

Want to hear another conversation that leaves no topic uncovered? — Listen to my conversation with Chris Sacca. In this episode, we discuss being different and making billions (stream below or right-click here to download):

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This podcast is brought to you by MeUndies. If I’m not going commando, then I’m wearing MeUndies. I’ve been testing out pairs for about 3 or 4 months now, and, as a result, I’ve thrown out my other underwear. They look good, feel good, have options for men and women, and their materials are 2x softer than cotton, as evaluated using the Kawabata method. Not only does MeUndies offer underwear, but they also have incredible lounge pants. I wear them when I record the podcast, and when I’m out and about grabbing coffee.

If by some chance you’re not happy with the first pair you try on, they’ll refund your purchase completely. Check out MeUndies.com/Tim to see my current faves (some are awesomely ridiculous) and, while you’re at it, don’t miss lots of hot ladies wearing MeUndies.

This podcast is also brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time, “If you could only use one supplement, what would it be?” My answer is, inevitably, Athletic Greens. It is my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body and did not get paid to do so. Get 50% off your order at Athletic Greens.com/Tim.

QUESTION(S) OF THE DAY: What is your favorite whiskey or wine? What is it about the brand(s) that make it a favorite? Please let me know in the comments.

Scroll below for links and show notes…

Enjoy!

Selected Links from the Episode

• Learn more about Court of Masters Sommelier Testing
• Check out The Little Nell, one of the best places in the world to drink wine
• Visit world-class San Francisco restaurants, flour + water and Central Kitchen
• Pick up some Kimbal Kimax Beakers (go with 250 ml)
• Learn more about hurling, the fastest field sport in the world
• In Praise of Shadows by Junichiro Tanizaki
• Check out Sombra mezcal
• Preferred tequila:

Siete Leguas | Tequila Ocho | Tequila Astral

• The Crossroads of Should and Must by Elle Luna
• A Fan’s Notes by Frederick Exley
• The Art of Asking by Amanda Palmer
• Learn more about Donors Choose
• Favorite Movies:

The Breakfast Club | Baraka

• Learn more about Dennis Scholl
• Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It by Kamal Ravikant
• The Essential Scratch & Sniff Guide to Whiskey by Richard Betts, Crystal English Sacca and Wendy MacNaughton
• Connect with Richard Betts:

Twitter | Instagram | Facebook | Wine Specific

Wine Mentioned in this Episode:

• Turley Wine Cellars
• Ridge Vineyards
• Rusden Wines
• Mosse
• Sucette 

Whiskey/Whisky Mentioned in this Episode:

• Jack Daniels 
• EH Taylor Rye
• Jameson Irish Whiskey
• Nikka Whisky (17-year-old)
• Edradour Distillery (10-year-old)
• Ardbeg Uigeadail
• Bulleit Bourbon

Show Notes

• Why Richard Betts got into wine? [7:22]
• Characteristics of those who would excel as line cooks [20:15]
• On the decision between culinary school and getting a job [21:40]
• The story of falling in love with wine and becoming a sommelier [22:55]
• Lessons learned as a sommelier [36:55]
• The importance of the observation process [43:50]
• Visual cues for seeing alcohol levels in wine [44:45]
• How to correctly taste wine [36:50]
• Understanding wine flavor characteristics [52:20]
• Favorite zinfandels [45:50]
• Common misconceptions about wine [58:15]
• The sweet spot in terms of cost and value of wine [59:35]
• What is the difference between bourbon and whiskey? [1:11:29]
• Taste testing whisk(e)y [1:18:54]
• The story of the convoy: explaining mezcal [1:52:14]
• Rapid fire questions: Who is successful, when do you lose track of time, most gifted books, and fear of failure [2:00:24]
• If Richard Betts was teaching a 9th-grade class, what would the subject be? [2:05:14]
• Morning rituals for staying healthy while traveling [2:10:24]
• A purchase of $100 or less that had the biggest impact [2:16:24]
• Favorite movies and documentaries [2:18:09]
• Advice for your 25- and 30-year-old self [2:23:54]
• If you could put up a billboard anywhere and write anything on it, where would it be and what would it say? [2:30:39]
• Describing The Essential Scratch & Sniff Guide to Whiskey [2:31:29]
• An ask of the audience [2:35:39]

People Mentioned

• Dennis DeConcini
• Drew Curtis
• Amanda Palmer

LinkedIn's core value proposition for most people is that they create a legitimate excuse for having your best CV online for the world to see. But that's enough of a reason for most of your prospects to keep it up to date. So today I want to explore how to get leads from LinkedIn. I've considered advice from other bloggers and a couple of my own and here's my best advice: Create a great profile and keep it that way Connect to everyone you know and no-one you don't know Monitor all movements and reach out when they move Monitor key roles in key accounts and reach out to any new role holder Commit 20 minutes a day Don't be afraid to start cold Start an information sharing dialogue, not a pitch Don't be afraid to climax Listen to the review and I'll explain why.

read more

The biggest shift in the business landscape since the Internet continues to grow—and established, traditional companies need to act soon in order to compete. That’s one of the key findings in The New Rules of the Collaborative Economy, a report I co-authored with tech researcher Alexandra Samuel, released today. The report is an update to Sharing is the New Buying, a 2014 report that, for the first time ever, mapped the prevalence of the collaborative economy and its impact on the business world.

You can download the full report The New Rules of the Collaborative Economy, at no cost.

What is the collaborative economy?
The collaborative economy is an economic movement where common technologies enable people to get the goods and services they need from each other, peer to peer, instead of buying from established corporations.

You don’t have to look very far to see how disruptive the collaborative economy has become. Today, the world’s largest hospitality brand—Airbnb—owns not a single room or hotel and is worth $25 billion. Uber, valued at over $50 billion, is the world’s largest taxi service—and it doesn’t own a single vehicle. Barely four years old, the online grocery shopping service Instacart is already worth $2 billion.

Overall, the collaborative economy has produced 17 billion-dollar companies and 10 so-called unicorns. Collectively, sharing startups have already received $15 billion in funding—surpassing the social media space that spurred giants like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

How big is the collaborative economy?
In one word: massive. We used Vision Critical’s customer intelligence platform and discovered that at least one in five customers now chooses sharing as their initial preferred option. The past year alone has seen an impressive growth in the collaborative economy. In North America, participation in this space has grown by 25 percent. More than 110 million people in the U.S. and Canada have participated in some form of sharing in the past year.

The collaborative economy encompases many different categories and different forms of sharing. Last year, we looked at 11 categories; this time, we explored 13, adding online learning and Bitcoin to the list. It’s worth noting that all categories that we looked at this year have seen some growth in participation—reiterating the impressive growth of this movement.

The following inforgraphic is a portion of the full report, which you can download at no cost.

 

Is sharing here to stay?
To determine the staying power of the collaborative economy, we asked people who stopped using sharing services in the past 12 months why they did so. In every category of sharing, about 2 to 6 percent of sharers report skipping that form of sharing in the past 12 months even though they had previously tried it, so we asked them why. Is it due to disenchantment with the sharing movement?

What we found is that people who stopped sharing in a certain category are doing so not because of dissatisfaction but because of experimentation. Indeed, 70 percent of people that have used a given form of sharing (but not in the past 12 months) say they’re likely to try that form of sharing again in the future. And, in fact, people who’ve dropped out of one or more categories of sharing are the people most likely to be engaged in other forms of sharing. In other words, people are trying different forms of sharing, sometimes to the detriment of other categories.

Dissatisfaction is not a factor. Where a sharer has given up on a form of sharing in the past year, only two percent of those instances are due to the sharer having a bad experience.

Will the collaborative economy grow even more?
Based on people’s intent to try different sharing services, we’re forecasting that eight in 10 Americans will be part of the collaborative economy by 2017. But the bigger threat for companies is this: as many as three in four traditional buyers have indicated that they might choose sharing instead of buying in the next year. For every person who has participated in a form of sharing in the past 12 months, there’s a new person who intends to try that type of sharing.

Conclusion
The continued, rapid growth of the collaborative economy makes it clear that sharing is not a fad. Figuring out how to compete in this space is an urgent issue for companies today, and it’s one of the main reasons why I founded my company, Crowd Companies. To remain relevant, brands need to get closer to their customers and identify the business models that make the most sense for them.

If you’re not yet feeling the effects of collaborative consumption, it’s only a matter of time. Sharing is disruptive and the companies that win in the collaborative economy recognize that they must change with and for their customers in order to thrive.

Download the full report The New Rules of the Collaborative Economy to learn more.

Related Resources

• WSJ: Why the Sharing Economy Isn’t Such a Boon for the Little Guy
• HBR: What customers want from the sharing economy
• Entrepreneur: What You Need to Know to Compete With the Surging Sharing Economy
• Retail Dive: Survey: Millennials leading the growth of sharing economy
• VentureBeat: 3 Ways Brands can Compete with the Sharing Economy
• Shareable: New Report: Price, Convenience, Trust Are Keys to Sharing Economy
• Entrepreneur: What you Need to Know to Compete with the Surging Sharing Economy 
• Forbes: Jeremiah Owyang: How the Collaborative Economy Impacts the Future of Work 
• Triple Pundit: Report: Collaborative Economy Has Opportunities for All Companies
• Structure 3C: New Industry Report: The New Rules of the Collaborative Economy 
• SHIFT: Convenience and Mobility Power the Collaborative Company
• Amy Bishop:How to Survive & Thrive in the Collaborative Economy
• For Immediate Release: The New Rules of Collaborative Economy (Podcast)
• L’économie collaborative doit faire sa mue
• Scott Monty: New Collaborative Economy Report Shows Importance of Price, Convenience and Brand

Anyone who’s been in the marketing business for a while will probably be familiar with the four “P’s” of marketing: Product, Place, Price, and Promotion.

Whether it stems from the pressure to try wild new ideas or just make more money, we’ve seen brands from all industries fail miserably in their implementations of those four concepts.

Here are some of the most unfortunate examples of the four P’s gone wrong, and what you can learn from them.

Product

No matter how many geniuses work on your marketing team, a bad product is almost certainly going to tank. Consumers have seen plenty of foolish items arrive on shelves (and quickly disappear from them), so there are lots of examples to choose from here.

One of the most famed failures is still one of the most evocative. Yes, it’s the good old Sony Betamax.

Younger readers may not remember this relic of the pre-DVD days, but the Betamax was a rival video format that barely predated VHS. The two formats and their players were incompatible, so consumers had to choose between the product suites. Sony was the only company making Betamax tapes and players, so when more companies hopped on the VHS bandwagon, that side quickly won the fight.

There are several takeaways here. First, when you’re entering a fast-moving product niche, be prepared to adapt. Your revolutionary idea might be surpassed by an even more revolutionary one in months. Second, think about your audience after launch. Consider practicality and ease of use. So even if that means relinquishing your exclusive technology, giving a little now can mean longevity and success for your idea—if it’s a good one to begin with.

Place

It can appear helpful to have an outside source handle the placement and distribution of your marketing materials, such as with a big buy of display ads. It’s less work for you, and your brand gets full coverage across the web. This all seems like a good deal, but relinquishing the detail work can lead to bad placement.

Take the example of an ad for Red Stripe beer that ran in the middle of a news item about an 11-year-old who was caught driving drunk. Even though the company surely didn’t ask to be featured as an ad with this story, it still reflects poorly on Red Stripe for those readers.

After all, when you control the placement of your content, you can get the most ideal response from your target audience. That’s true whether you’re making content for display on other websites or for social sharing.

Online content and sources are taking up larger slices of your audience’s media consumption, and you need to make sure your videos, articles, and links are showing up on their radar. And that radar can get very crowded. Putting your content onto the right channels is a good first step.

Price

It doesn’t matter how cool, unique, or vital your product is—if people can’t afford what you’re selling, your company is out of luck. A prime example of bad pricing in the healthcare industry just hit the headlines in recent weeks.

Turing Pharmaceuticals acquired the rights to infectious disease drug Daraprim in late September and promptly increased its price from $13.50 a tablet to $750.

CEO and founder Martin Shkreli immediately faced fire from the medical and scientific communities for putting a necessary medication out of the reach of many patients and institutions. While Shkreli attempted to spin the hike as a way to fund more drug research, his past work as a hedge fund manager and his cavalier lifestyle created a toxic image for most buyers. Following an intense media firestorm, Turing eventually reversed its pricing scheme for the drug.

What can your company learn about pricing here? First, a large and abrupt spike will almost always cause some sticker shock, even increases that are more moderate than the 5,000% we saw with Daraprim.

But it’s the other context that really made this change such a hot topic. The appearance of corporate greed and entitlement that people saw in Shkreli was a major factor in the outcry. This is an extreme example from a troubled industry, but it shows the degree of visceral backlash a company can face over pricing.

The average person probably understands that companies need to make money, but if the public sees your choices stemming from blatant greed rather than good business, expect to see the pitchforks and torches.

Smart pricing can benefit your business. Finding the sweet spot between your profit margins and your goal buyer’s comfort zone makes everyone happy. Plus it gives you the flexibility to run promotions and deals that can improve your reputation without hurting the bottom line.

Promotion

Sometimes everything can seem to be in order: the product is good, the brand is reputable, and the campaign idea is firing on all cylinders. It seems like smooth sailing. But poor execution on the promotion side can still manage to sink the ship.

Take the example of Nesquik, which decided to craft a campaign around its rabbit mascot. It dubbed a holiday National Bunny Ears Day and launched an app that let users add bunny ears to their photos. A clever idea, but it completely flopped.

Even though some celebrities were helping out by sharing their own photos, the hashtag got less buzz during the campaign than it did afterward in discussions of how poorly the push performed. Nobody was interested.

The campaign failed to connect with its audience, whereas with a better plan for social engagement or a connection to an existing holiday, the idea might have taken off.

Marketing needs to follow through. Simply putting your idea out into the world and hoping it gets traction isn’t enough. Have a plan—and at least one back-up plan—for how you’ll achieve your goals with a campaign. The more troubleshooting you can accomplish in advance, the more time your team will have to work on building positive buzz rather than putting out fires.

As Managing Partners, we all struggle with difficult decisions. Often, only minimal information is available, and the stakes are high. To some extent, that’s just the nature of what we do. Hey, if the decisions were easy, they wouldn’t end up on our desk.

But there is a way to reduce the risk and lower the uncertainty. How? Through the appropriate use of research to guide our decisions.

Now, we’re not talking about the typical consumer research used by packaged goods manufacturers. Many of those methodologies are simply not applicable. Our focus is on research suitable for business-to-business (B2B) situations that are the marketplace for most professional services firms.

B2B Research Defined

People have different definitions of B2B research. Broadly speaking, we consider research to be the process of systematically gathering, analyzing and interpreting data. In the B2B context research serves as the foundation for quality decision making.

You can collect data specifically to meet your firm’s information needs, which is called primary research. Alternatively, you can take advantage of research collected for a broader audience or another purpose, known as secondary research.

Although the research process is sometimes misunderstood and maligned, it can provide the clarity you need to make tough calls. It can also stop you from second-guessing and recycling your decisions.

So, here’s what you need to know about B2B research.

1. B2B Research Helps Your Firm Grow Faster and Be More Profitable

Why are we so bullish on research?

We did research on research and discovered that firms that use it frequently experience higher growth and profits than those that don’t. Firms that conduct research at least once a quarter are nearly twice as profitable and grow almost 12 times as fast as those who fly by the seat of their pants.

Bottom line?  Research isn’t just fun (yes, we must confess, we love it), but it’s rewarding.

2. There Are Good Reasons Why We Need Research

To help our clients who are not frequent researchers understand how they were misreading their customers, we conducted a study with over 1,300 buyers and sellers. We wanted to find out what goes on inside buyers’ brains that sellers are missing.

What did we discover? Buyers and sellers don’t see eye to eye. Not even close. In fact, a firm may see an attribute as a strength while a client views it as weakness.

There’s a reason for this chasm between buyers and sellers. Managing partners tend to forget one critical fact. We’re human. That means, contrary to popular opinion, we’re not entirely rational. Science shows that our emotions drive our perceptions and decision-making.

Also, in the absence of perfect knowledge, we make assumptions. We think we know our clients. They, too, make assumptions about us. But, as discussed in Inside The Buyer’s Brain, buyers and sellers often misjudge each other.

Here’s just one small example.

As experienced professionals, we believe we know which firms compete with us. But when you compare the firms’ lists of competitors versus those compiled by their potential clients, there is typically only an overlap of 20-40%. Now that’s a big gap in perceptions.

3. Research Reduces Risk

 

When you lack solid information about your market, you’re forced to make decisions with blinders on. As a result, you may miss opportunities and waste resources. While it’s important to conduct research for many decisions, it’s especially critical when the stakes are high or emotions are involved. Or both.

Research is valuable when you’re determining pricing, budget priorities, or your strategic direction. By determining how your buyers perceive you, a client study can help you rebrand your firm. And learning about your buyers’ needs offers guidance for new service offerings.

By enabling you to make sound judgments and align your marketing approach to buyer perceptions and needs, research reduces risks. It provides a competitive edge, empowering you to help potential clients choose you. And that’s why frequent researchers make more money and grow faster than those who rely on gut instincts.

4. The Three Types of Research to Consider

It’s often a good idea to start your research by gathering and synthesizing all your firm’s knowledge.

Internal research helps identify what your team knows, the assumptions you need to test, and questions you need to answer. But do not rely on one voice or the drumbeat of those who express their opinions the loudest. Instead, survey all associates who are in a position to offer their perceptions of the market.

Next step? It’s second nature today. If you have a question, Google it.

To gain a better understanding of your market, search online. You may be able to find industry research, either paid or free. Many reports provide the big picture of a market’s size, growth, trends, competition and more. Also, to gain an awareness of your buyers’ concerns, you can listen to their conversations via social media.

But the most valuable insights to answer your firm’s specific questions are likely to come from primary research. Because it’s customized to your needs, it’s the most costly approach. So for the most cost-effective approach, and the best quality decisions, you will do best by combining all three approaches to gathering information.

5. Beware of Bias and Skill Deficits

It’s understandable that Managing Partners are sometimes tempted to cut corners on expenses by trying to administer research themselves. But doing so is unlikely to yield the most accurate depiction of your buyers.

First, your clients may not give you straight answers. Perhaps they don’t want you to know how valuable you are to them. After all, if you knew, you might charge more. Or, maybe they don’t want to hurt your feelings.

Second, successful research requires expertise. Professional researchers understand that the structure and sequence of questions can influence the results. Methodologies serve different purposes too. Should you use in-depth interviews, online surveys or focus groups? Here’s a hint. Forget the focus groups. They are expensive, impractical and full of bias. But other methodologies each play a specific role.

There you have it. Research, whether basic or advanced, can help reduce risk. It can make important decisions easier to make and easier to “sell” to your fellow partners. With advantages like that, B2B research is a tool you should know about.

The content marketing landscape is full of tips and guides to help marketers create quality content for their brands. There is no shortage of information from influencers on how to make content go viral or how to connect with prospective audiences across multiple channels in order to increase potential conversion rates.

However, many of the published insights are based on the experiences from B2C companies that directly target household consumers. The challenge for B2B marketers is to create content that appeals to a company’s decision makers, which is more complex than targeting households.

How do you create a content marketing strategy that is meant to reach businesses rather than consumers? Is there really a divide between B2B and B2C content strategies or is the line blurring between the two? We’ve identified some of the challenges for B2B brands and offered suggestions to increase the authority, engagement, and relevance of content marketing.

What Does Your Audience Want?

Data science and progressive profiling help marketers answer that very question, especially if you work in the B2B industry. Analytics and insights tell you important details about the key decision makers in your target audience and what types of content resonate with those prospects.

In October 2013 McKinsey & Company, a global management consulting firm, published an infographic describing the themes B2B companies use to create new content and the influence those themes have on decision makers.

According to the graphic, many themes that B2B marketers consider critical for building their brand reputations have little to no statistical significance on how prospective buyers judge the strength of the brand. Prospects want to build relationships with brands that are accountable, encourage open dialogues with customers, and have high levels of expertise within specific fields.

Unfortunately, many B2B marketers devote resources towards content that highlights the features or benefits of their products or services. The infographic indicates that these topics usually fall on deaf ears.

Data science allows marketers to construct detailed profiles about their ideal prospects, which marketing teams can use to create content that will influence their target audience. By gathering analytical insights from your data, you can boost your reputation instead of wasting resources on material that doesn’t work.

Where Is The Disconnect In Messaging?

A new report compiled by Forrester Research says not much has changed over the past two years. When asked to express their opinion about the types of content provided by B2B marketers, 65% of respondents said the content was “useless.” Just as the McKinsey report revealed in 2013, prospects felt the content produced by B2B marketers was “not statistically significant” and failed to address their unique needs.

Where is the disconnect occurring? As was reported two years ago, marketers are struggling to create personalized content that connects with target audiences. Forrester’s research suggests that content is heavily focused on selling potential solutions to prospects without first addressing their unique needs or problems. If the content proposes a solution that fails to address a problem then the message fails to compute, the value is lost, and there is little to no chance for engagement or conversion.

How Do You Make Your Message Impactful?

In today’s landscape, marketing is more data-driven than ever. There is so much content floating around the web that you need to create something with real value for your prospects in order to stand out from the clutter.

Marketers are devoting more resources towards content marketing and are investing in data science software to calculate the value of existing content. Think about “quality” and “quantity” as you decide how to manage your content marketing resources. Analytics obtained from your data quantify how people respond to your existing content. Review those numbers; let the data tell you what content is having the most impact, and create more content that has the same qualitative impact.

Polls are a great way to collect data about the people that actually read your content. Ask a question at the bottom of your webpage that asks readers to tell you what they believed to be the most valuable piece of information.

The results obtained from the polls tell you which parts of your content resonate with the people who actually took the time to review your work. Use these responses to optimize your content strategy. Try to focus on the topics that your readers responded positively to in the polls. This is how you build a conversation with your audience and reduce the likelihood that your message fails to connect with your ideal customers.

The Takeaway

Messaging is critical for B2B content marketing. Audiences should view your content as a source of reliable information that is trustworthy, adds real value, and fulfills a need. If you focus on achieving those pillars, you have a much better chance of getting your message out to the right people.

What Do You Think Is Most Important For B2B Content Marketing?

Did you know most of your favorite business social media channels have been around longer than a decade?

It’s hard to believe that much time has passed because social media is such a big part of our personal and professional lives.

LinkedIn was launched in 2002, Facebook in 2004, and Twitter is coming up on its decade anniversary in 2016. As new channels are added, it’s taking less time for businesses to learn how to use them. Instagram was founded in 2010 and now has more users than Twitter.

Social behavior is also evolving right along with the channels. When a new channel is launched, users determine how they will use it, what the atmosphere will be like and what you can talk to them about when you are on the channel.

Most channels now offer some kind of advertising opportunity for businesses – either through promoted posts or traditional advertisements. The specific etiquette to follow when using the new social media channel is forming much more quickly than a decade ago. Where it used to take months, now it takes only days for us to see advice on how to use the channel for business.

So with our legacy channels, like LinkedIn, why are we still seeing bad behavior? If you’re not seeing value with LinkedIn as a business tool, check your behavior against the common mistakes below.

Personalize your requests to connect.

Are you in it for the quantity or quality?

This is the number one tip you will find if you read articles about LinkedIn etiquette. Those using the channel successfully for business will advise you to personalize the connection request. Tell your prospective connection specifically why connecting with you will benefit them. Point out what you have in common. Answer their hidden question, “What’s in it for me?”

Even if you have thousands of connections, how seriously are they going to take your updates and announcements if they don’t truly know who you are?

When a new connection responds to your LinkedIn connection request, write them back.

This is the second biggest culprit I see with LinkedIn misbehavior. I receive LinkedIn connection requests daily. Despite the advice we find in article after article, very few requests seem to come with a personalized invitation. However, when I look over the person’s profile and if I do see an opportunity to help each other and I decide to accept their request, I will try to write a personalized thank-you and begin a professional dialogue. Surprisingly, some people won’t bother to respond.

My thank-you notes don’t include a sales pitch. I seldom talk about my own business or background unless its tied to something we have in common. I focus on their profile, point out what we have in common and any relevant connections we have in common, and thank them for the opportunity to connect.

Can you imagine being at an in-person event, beginning this dialogue and the person you are talking to not responding? Neither can I.

Don’t make a sales pitch until you know your connection.

I received a LinkedIn in-mail last week addressed to “Dear Jo”. Only my family and close friends call me Jo, so there’s the first clue the person does not know me. The note followed with how they can help me with my small business marketing. Interesting… especially since my company is a small business marketing consultancy. Had the person done the slightest bit of research, they could have tailored their note to suggesting we collaborate or they could have found some other way we could work together.

When someone sends you a lead, respond to it immediately!

As a small business owner, if you are not using LinkedIn to generate leads and create awareness about your business, stop using the channel. I can no longer count the times I’ve sent a contact a lead only to not have them respond until far too much time has passed. I can tell you that I have never sent a second lead in these instances.

The most common excuse I receive is that they didn’t see the note from me because it went to their LinkedIn mailbox and they hardly ever check this mailbox. Change that and use the tool to its full benefit. Sync your LinkedIn emails to your primary email account. Make it easy for your connections to send you leads and quickly take action on those leads.

Are you struggling with how to use LinkedIn for business? Contact us for a free 30-minute consultation.

This year’s B2B Lead Generation Report from Holger Schulze of the B2B Technology Marketing Group on LinkedIn was recently published, detailing key trends, best practices, and challenges for B2B marketing professionals.

The reports high-level findings were about as surprising as discovering there really is gambling going on in those casinos:

• • The top two priorities for B2B marketers are increasing lead quality and lead volume.
• • 59% of respondents said generating high quality leads is their biggest B2B lead generation challenge.
• • Lack of resources such as staff, funding and time remains the biggest obstacle to successful B2B lead generation.

So, were there any surprises in the findings? Here are several conclusions from the report that may be at least bit more unexpected and noteworthy.

Quality trumps cost. 68% of respondents identified “increasing lead quality” as their top priority for the coming year; just 14% said the same of “reducing the cost per lead.” Vendors are generally willing to spend more on marketing in 2016 if that results in leads with greater win potential.

Marketing becoming more about sales than PR? 42% of respondents said that converting leads into customers was among their top challenges. For high-value business products like enterprise software, servers, and production equipment, this is the job of sales. But for low-value, frequently purchased, commodity-type products, marketing often is sales. The same is often true for low-cost SaaS applications.

Meanwhile, just 17% indicated that “generating public relations and awareness buzz” was among their most challenging tasks. It isn’t clear if this is because the role of brand buzz is under-appreciated, or if most marketers simply don’t find this to be challenging.

Less signal, more noise. Just 16% of B2B marketing professionals rate their lead generation efforts as “very or extremely effective.” Ironically, the proliferation of new tools and channels for reaching potential buyers hasn’t made lead generation easier, but rather has made it more difficult for marketers to make their brand messages rise above the noise and stand out from the crowd.

High-touch beats high-tech. Conferences and trade shows were rated as the most effective lead generation (which mirrors findings reported here previously), with 88% of respondents using live events and 32% calling these efforts “very effective.” Meanwhile, just 4% of B2B marketers believe mobile marketing is a highly effective tactic—and 59% don’t use this medium at all.

SEO is valuable, but misunderstood. About 80% of B2B marketing pros rank their company website and/or SEO as very or somewhat effective for lead generation. Only about half say the same for tactics like PR, content syndication, blogging, or social media—though those efforts are vital in increasing a brand’s overall web presence, which is vital for improving search engine rankings and ultimately driving more website traffic.

99 problems, but the economy ain’t one. Finally, at least somewhat surprisingly, few marketers view current economic conditions as a significant problem. As noted above, lack of resources is cited as the top challenge in B2B lead generation. About 40% of marketers also identify lack of high-quality data and audience insights as key challenges. Just 12% cite the economic climate or lack of demand.

And there’s much more. Just 15% of respondents said marketing contributes half or more of company revenue. 24% just plain don’t know. Whitepaper and eBook downloads are by far the top producers of leads, according to 59% of respondents; just 4% say the same for podcasts. LinkedIn is viewed as the most effective social platform for lead generation; Vine is the least.

Thought Leader Life is a web series spearheaded by Mitchell Levy, CEO and Thought Leader Architect at THiNKaha and Chief Aha Instigator at the Aha Amplifier, to spotlight today’s thought leaders. Recently Act-On Software’s Director of Digital Marketing, Linda West, and Rachel Rosin, Act-On’s Marketing Programs Manager, were guests on the program, talking about best practices in modern email marketing. Paula Chiocchi, founder and the B2B email marketing diva at Outward Media, guest hosted with Mitchell. This is Part 2 of an edited transcript of the conversation, if you missed part 1, you can read it here; you can catch the entire discussion here:

What technologies can be integrated to serve your strategy?

MITCHELL: What are some of the pieces of technology that you like? What do you like best? Give me a couple favorites that you like to integrate into what you guys do.

LINDA: Marketing automation, of course, is our backbone. It’s the command center.

MITCHELL: For those that are listening versus watching, there’s a nice little poster behind you both that’s very cool. It says Marketing automation for the real world – Act-On.”

LINDA: We also integrate video technology.

RACHEL: We use Oktopost for social posting and that helps a lot with reporting. It shows metrics – not just likes – but how does that translate into leads, and being able to track the leads that you may have on social through the funnel as well.

LINDA: We use a technology called Scratch-It as well, which is really cool. It’s an email tool. It’s basically a system that allows you to create a virtual scratch off ticket for your email. So you can use it for promotions to scratch and win. It’s really a cool piece of technology, so we’ve recently adopted that.

MITCHELL: I’ll have to try that one. That sounds great.

PAULA: I just found out about that myself this week. So you have already tested it?

RACHEL: It works well. It’s really cool. You transfer over to a landing page and you just use your mouse and you scratch it off. There’s some sort of offer underneath. We talk about people’s fear of missing out, the FOMO.

PAULA: Virtually everybody’s curious; I’d scratch it. [LAUGHTER]

Product promotion vs. thought leadership?

MITCHELL: We’re talking about Thought Leader Life here, and I’m curious about this: In your email messages and in your campaigns, what is the differentiation between content that focuses on the product versus content that focuses on the thought leader – either inside or outside of your company?

What do your buyers resonate with more? Do they want to see the product stuff or do they want to see thought leaders. Who is talking about how best to use the products that you’re talking about?

LINDA: The majority of the content that we produce and that gets really good engagement is content that’s about educating our audiences. It’s about best practices, what should I be thinking about, how do I approach this strategy? The product is really secondary to that. We’ll talk about the product in the final stages of a buyer’s journey, but really it’s about building trust with your audience. And that is more valuable than 10 product sheets. So we absolutely focus on thought leadership more than we do on product features and benefits. Thought leadership is really the benefit that the audience gets. It’s the why. So that’s where the money’s at.

RACHEL: At the end of the day, people want to figure out what your product is about. But they want to know how they can use it, how is it going to relate to what they do and what their job entails. So it’s really about focusing on providing the best practices for them.

MITCHELL: I love the conversation. And when we’re talking about thought leadership and you’re talking about sharing content, it really is because your buyer needs somebody to relate to. They don’t necessarily relate to a company or a product, they relate to a person who’s using it. It’s the why. It’s exactly what you mentioned.

LINDA: They’re people at the end of the day, just like I’m a person, Rachel’s a person, we’re all people, we have challenges, we don’t need products, we need a product because we have a challenge. So the challenge comes first. Tackle the challenge first, explain to them why the challenge exists, help them solve it, and then say okay this product is the solution on the back end of that. But that’s secondary.

The new face of marketing: The Team Trifecta

PAULA: Recent information I’ve seen is that the B2B buyer has done pretty much all the work online up to about 90 percent before they ever even contact sales to help them with the purchase. Is that what you guys see as well?

LINDA: That’s very true.

PAULA: That’s the point at which nurturing comes in.

LINDA: That’s exactly it.

RACHEL: And the way you use the Internet. If I’m looking for something, I go to the Internet first and try to find it. If the first link that I click on isn’t what I want, I go on to the second. And as buyers and as people with access to information, you control your journey. You can find what you want and try to answer your own questions so that you can become more educated on solving your own problems. Then you open it up to see suggestions on who can address the need.

PAULA: It’s a whole different ballgame than what it used to be.

LINDA: Yes.

PAULA: In fact I think read recently that in the next 20 years we’ll lose about a million B2B salespeople because everybody’s using the Internet.

LINDA: It’s funny because marketing has taken on that role to a certain extent. Marketing used to be a very fluffy profession. It used to be about creatives and branding and those types of things. But now it’s very technical. It’s very much about knowing your numbers and measurement and optimization and technology. So it’s interesting seeing it evolve. My career has been technology focused, but even five, 10 years ago, what I was doing was just very different. The things that I was focusing on were very different.

MITCHELL: What I find interesting in listening to you– and maybe you can describe it a little bit more in terms of how to be an effective marketer – is that you’re no longer this standalone entity, but rather, you have to integrate with the rest of the company to figure out how to best support a buyer’s journey. How do you do that? Can you talk a little bit about how you guys do that effectively?

LINDA: That’s key. Marketing is not something that can be done in a silo. There used to be this very clear separation. There’s marketing, and they do branding, and they do air cover, and they do ads. And then there’s sales, and they sell. Now marketing is responsible not only for managing the buyer’s journey from the time a customer first hears about a brand but through to the sale, which requires a lot of alignment with sales, agreement with sales. We work very closely with our sales team at Act-On, trying to understand where buyers are getting stuck in the funnel, and then creating nurture programs for those buyers.

Even beyond that, we work really closely with customer success. Because customer success is where you take a customer who’s just bought your product and expand that person into being a loyal repeat buyer who is going to be a promoter for you. This really requires marketing to lead the charge and be responsible for leading the customer experience throughout time. That’s across sales, across customer success. It’s like this trifecta of teams that need to come together. Marketing is the one who typically leads the charge on that because they’re the ones who understand the psychology of the buyer enough to really lead that journey. And they have the technology infrastructure behind them to enable it as well.

You used to have a lot of sales-led organizations, and now it’s evolving to a lot of marketing-led organizations. And so things have certainly shifted quite a bit.

MITCHELL: Well you sort of gave me this aha moment, because in the past the customer advocate who sat in the C-suite actually came from customer service. And even though they were given a C-suite title, they were the low person on the totem pole, they were not funded appropriately. But what you’re saying here is that a future advocate, not a customer, or an existing advocate, all need to be integrated., And that the overall customer experience, with them being a future advocate to be able to sell for you, that’s really important. It’s a new role for marketers. It’s an interesting aha moment. I have to spend more time thinking about that.

Paula, this is a big thing for you too. You have to think about bigger picture focus as well. That’s interesting.

PAULA: Very true.

LINDA: Yes.

MITCHELL: Wow. I love it. I absolutely love it. So the one thing I thought I’d mention on a tactical perspective, for those who have not run a lot of email marketing campaigns, is that whenever I’m doing an email campaign myself, I do a test drive -– I’ll send six or seven messages before we actually do the big blast. Paula, is that the same thing for you guys? I’ve seen what you and your team do, you’re running a number of tests just to make sure it works on multiple platforms. What do you guys see over at Act-On? What do you do to not only create your responsive emails, but how do you make sure they’re good before you send?

RACHEL: We have an A/B testing optimization tool, so it’s really easy. We take the technical guesswork out of it so you are able to do a head-to-head test for different elements in an email. It’s a very simple process. You just set it up within the system. What happens is about 20 percent of who you’re going to send to, 10 percent gets version A of your email, and the other 10 percent gets version B.

Whoever wins, that remaining 80 percent of your email goes to that top performing email. So you don’t have to rely on your gut feeling anymore of what you think is going to work. You can test it out to a smaller percentage of the audience and make sure that you are making the correct decisions.

LINDA: At an event, we did a joint survey, a mini-research report on a marketer’s ability to guess which emails would perform better. And lo and behold, marketers are horrible at guessing which emails are going to actually perform better. It’s great to be able to say for sure, this orange button is going to be better than green button. And I know this because I see it in the numbers.

MITCHELL: Sort of like picking stocks.

[LAUGHTER]

LINDA: I still haven’t gotten that one yet, so…

PAULA: I don’t think any of us have, really. Except Warren Buffet.

MITCHELL: Oh yeah, he’s done an amazing job. This was a phenomenal session. Paula, based on the conversation and what’s happened, is there something you want to add in terms of something we didn’t ask or something that makes sense to share at the end?

PAULA: I think we covered pretty good ground.

LINDA: I think we covered quite a bit. But I would add one more thing, which is that email as discipline is half art and half science. So if you are an email marketer or if you engage in emails, do not be afraid to go and experiment and try and be creative and use both sides of your awesome marketing brain.

RACHEL: I second that.

PAULA: Well said.

MITCHELL: Yeah, that was really nice. It’s a nice aha moment. I’ll take a third on that.

Again, if you missed Modern Email: Still Winning Friends and Influencing People: Part 1, you can find it here.

Emails don’t have to be bland, stale or boring, but most email marketers are only scratching the surface of possibilities. Get ready to try something new with Act-On’s eBook – Email Idea Lab: 6 Futuristic Techniques to Try Today.

Having a booth at tradeshows, expos and conferences can be a great way to develop leads, but all of your efforts will be wasted if you stop working once the party is over.

Here are the 4 things you should be doing when the event is over:

Don’t Waste Leads

Oftentimes, more than half of the contacts that are made at a show are wasted because salespeople don’t follow up, and marketing doesn’t have a plan to stay in front of them. Everything you have done up to this point will not necessarily get you a sale. It’s what you do after the show, when you get back to your office, where you start getting results. While you likely won’t close sales instantly after the show, you can gauge the results of the event by number of booth visits, qualified leads for follow up, and number of total contacts.

Clean Your List Data

You’re gathering contact information from event-goers throughout the show. Whether it’s business cards or badge scanning devices, your booth helps you develop a list of great leads. After you leave the conference, you’ll have a nice list of leads in hand. However, importing of mass lists is a very common cause of duplicate records. In addition, the leads may come in various forms, from excel files to direct imports into your CRM. Nothing will undermine or torpedo your revenue like bad data.

Prevent bad data by using helpful importing applications, such as Unique Upload, to simultaneously prevent the creation of duplicate records while uploading lists into your CRM, such as Salesforce. Applications like these can clean the lists — whether they’re Excel files or other formats — before you import them. Powerful options allow you to control what happens when duplicates or related records are found.

Follow Up

Schedule time on your calendar for the follow-up. Give hot prospects a day to get back to their office and then call them. Create a lead nurturing campaign for the new contacts that are not hot leads. Start the campaign as soon as the event is over. Connect with all of the qualified prospects via social media and send a follow-up email or mailing. Send a “nice to see you at the show” message with a link to a relevant whitepaper, article, or some other useful piece of information to show your value before you try to sell. If you have a special offer as part of the show, remind them that there’s still time to take part, and note the expiration date. No matter the message or how you reach out, it must be planned. Don’t just put them on your mailing list and spam them. Don’t give up. People are busy and purchasing your product may not be their top priority.

Plan to Call 3-6 Times

Call your qualified leads at least three to six times over the next 30 to 60 days. Plan a series of great voicemail messages if you don’t reach them. Make the messages interesting, engaging and about them – not you, your product or your service. Make each message unique, because they don’t want to hear the same message each time.

If you never connect via phone or between calls, send them an email or mail with some useful information, and ask them to opt in to your newsletter or sign up for your blog. Connect on LinkedIn. Going forward, stay connected on social media, and find opportunities to interact with them. They may need your product in the future, at which time they will be more apt to respond.

Here’s a quick checklist to follow after your event:

1. Organize
2. Follow up on hot leads within 3 days
3. Contact all of the people you met
4. Send follow up mail/email
5. Incentivize them to join your email list
6. Stay in touch over time

Learn more about exhibiting at tradeshows with the free ebook below.

As more and more LinkedIn members decide LinkedIn has merit for selling and recruiting, there is an assumption that just because you’re on LinkedIn it’s going to “automagically” work.

I often hear:

I’ve been on LinkedIn a long time, it’s my number one source for leads.

OR

I’ve been on LinkedIn for a long time but haven’t really used it. I’ve heard from others that it’s their best source of leads. I want that.

OR

Ok, I’ve been a hold out but since I can’t find leads anywhere else I am going to try LinkedIn.

Just because you’ve decided to turn on the fire hose doesn’t mean it will be effective or worthy of consideration. Will your community of fellow LinkedIn members find you interesting, compelling, worth even five seconds of their time?

You see, the first statement is clearly someone who understands the inherent value of not only the LinkedIn platform but how to engage on said platform. There’s a sense of a give-to-get mentality, at least. LinkedIn works for them because they’ve learned to add value* to their network. They didn’t just show up to sell or recruit, scream out loud or plead for introductions. They’ve watched the good behaviors and best practices within their network and aptly applied them.

Let’s define how they’ve added value. What is value, anyway?

By definition, value is:

Value adds something to something else.

So how do the best LinkedIn members add value? They are community participants.

They:

• Introduce others
• Know the people in their network
• Like, comment, share and promote their colleagues, clients, prospects, strategic partners, mentors, mentees, friends, students etc.
• Share their particular knowledge by creating their own content and messaging
• Ask how they can be of help to others
• Build a diverse community (network) of interesting people
• At the very least, appear to be interested in what others think and do

One of the most important things they do is stay above the radar as information sharers. I love information, so when others share good content with me, it elevates my interest and connects me with that person; it often starts a conversation.

It also tells me that they understand what LinkedIn does really well. LinkedIn helps us start conversations, which is more important than the transaction. You may land a few transactions but are you building long term referral sources, partners, advocates, ambassadors? Call them what you may, in the end, call them priceless. They will help you build good, long-lasting business for years to come.

At Intero, we continue to receive introductions and referrals from people who participated in a LinkedIn workshop four years ago. Wow, I am humbled and so grateful.

On the other hand, logging in and expecting a group of people, many of whom you don’t actually know, to respond is a bit presumptuous, don’t you think? To me, it’s a bit like my annoyance with answering a call to hear someone trying to sell me something on the other end. Ugh. You haven’t earned the right to blast your community with something because you are not going to hit your quota this quarter.

The second statement (I’ve been on LinkedIn for a long time but haven’t really used it. I’ve heard from others that it’s their best source of leads. I want that.) is more aspirational but I’m not sure that they understand the reason why it has worked for others; because they have worked it. They hear the successes and think, heck, I want that. I’m in. But the LinkedIn playground is far more difficult today than it was three years ago. With two to three people joining per second the network is louder and crowded with status updates and posts, introductions and Groups. Your intention needs to include a generous strategy, a marathon timeline and some heads-down keyboard work. LinkedIn is not a shortcut to sales or recruiting top talent. It is a powerful tool that works for those who are intentional and ready to add value before their ask.

Oh, and the third statement (Ok, I’ve been a hold out but since I can’t find leads anywhere else I am going to try LinkedIn.). I often feel the wonder and desperation woven into their intention. I understand it but it has no place in learning the art and science of good sales, social selling and LinkedIn. The minute (and, it will only be a minute or two) it doesn’t work they rise up and claim they really knew it wouldn’t; they were right after all. They just miss the bigger picture and the need to have a generous strategy, a marathon timeline and some heads-down keyboard work. They don’t value the idea of sharing information, know-how or participating. I’d like to make them understand but it often falls on deaf ears.

They also see others’ content sharing as “garbage” or “nonsense” (granted there will always be an element of that but you control that too). I think there has to be an agreement that we’re borrowing someone else’s platform, it’s not ours.

You can’t show up at the party with a megaphone and expect people to want to stand with you. It’s just too much noise. But if you had shown up, talked a bit with different folks and then decided to make a toast, people would probably listen and enjoy what you had to say because you had taken the time to create context, ask a question or two, and engaged in friendly banter. LinkedIn is no different. I meet amazing people from all over the country. I look forward to seeing what they know, who they know and what it is they are looking for to further their business. Sometimes I can be of help, sometimes not; but the more I welcome it, the more opportunity I have to add conversation, create introductions and inform my current network.

So, rethink your activity or lack thereof. Think about your agenda, put it aside for a month and just engage like you would if you were in-person. See if anything worthwhile emerges. Review the list of how to add value and consider how you can begin to make a difference in your professional network.

Introduction
Your sell sheet is the equivalent of your product’s resume, and it can be a very powerful and profitable marketing tool. The whole purpose behind creating a sell sheet is to tell the world about your product, so it must make an impressive impact. Get the word out as fast and as widely as possible, and before you know it, the sales will start coming in. These five ways are the preeminent places you must start with to get your sell sheet into the right hands.

1. Media Kit
A media kit, often referred to as a press kit, is a set of promotional materials that is distributed to the media for promotional purposes. A sell sheet is an integral part of this media kit. Each and every product that you sell needs to have its own media kit. This kit needs to be very well prepared and complete, and viewable as a pdf. You can typically have one basic media kit for all of your products, with an individualized sell sheet for each product.

2. Website
Your media kit must be accessible from your website as a downloadable pdf. Also include a pdf of the sell sheet for each product that you sell, directly on the webpage for each product. Doing this will allow everyone to be able to easily and quickly find it and view it.

3. Email Marketing
Email marketing is amazingly cheap, quick, and easy to implement. One of the best things about email is that it is trackable. This data can be used to analyze open rates, clicked links, and conversion details. All of this data can help you fine-tune your email content and message. Use email to stay in touch, and share your sell sheet, with all of your leads, and current customers. Email retail store managers, online reviewers, and print and online media about your new product. It will take some work and time to build up your email list.

4. Direct Mail Marketing
Direct mail will get your sell sheet directly into the hands of potential buyers. The very buyers that might not have been able to find you or your product in today’s crowded market in the first place. It is also your chance to lead them to your website, where you must provide more marketing material for your product, and also impress them with information about you.

5. Hand-Out
Whenever you attend a conference, tradeshow, give a class, or presentation, use the sell sheet as a back-of-the-room hand-out. If you have an office that clients visit, leave the sell sheet at the receptionist’s desk where it can easily be seen.

Conclusion
If you stick to these five profitable ways to use your sell sheet, you will make a great impression and increase your chances of selling more products, and bring in new customers.

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GUEST:

Tel Aviv has quickly become one of the most successful startup ecosystems in the world, recently listed as the fifth best startup ecosystem globally, and the number one ecosystem outside of the United States. This relatively young, nonstop city has become a breeding ground for countless successful businesses and a thriving startup ecosystem.

As CEO and founder of Tel Aviv Global, a city-run company whose goal is to turn Tel Aviv into a global hot spot for innovation, I have made building this ecosystem and empowering the entrepreneurs who work within it my top priority. Here are some of the key initiatives we have implemented to cultivate the ecosystem and encourage innovation to take root.

Break out the data

Data is the lifeblood of so many new startups. Municipalities accrue a huge amount of data, to the point that we often aren’t able to process it; but we should still collect it. The cost of sharing this data to programmers and local entrepreneurs is so small but can lead to impressive startups being created. For example, we opened up our transportation databases to the public in the framework of a competition to come up with innovative solutions to traffic issues. We were and continue to be impressed by the solutions and startups that have come off the back of that simple step of sharing our data. This is something any city around the world can implement in order to provide fodder for startups and potentially drive innovative solutions to municipal problems.

Cooperate and collaborate

While competition can be a huge spur for innovation and success, in Tel Aviv we’ve found that often the opposite can be just as true. We’ve tried to enable a city-wide atmosphere of collaboration and cooperation by building three city-funded coworking spaces where entrepreneurs can feed off each other’s energy and ideas. And we’ve seen the ecosystem respond – with a 138 percent growth in accelerators, coworking spaces, and innovation centers over the last three years. The value of fostering cooperation rather than competition lies not only in conversation and idea sharing but, more importantly, in the creation of stronger networks of entrepreneurs who want to help each other. Ultimately, individual entrepreneurs looking to help each other out will lead to faster growth and more success for the overall ecosystem.

Incentivize

City life, while beneficial and exciting in many ways, often comes with a price. High rents or even something like a lack of easy parking can act as a deterrent to entrepreneurs looking to set up businesses in a particular location, while the high cost of living can prevent young talent from settling in a city.

In order to combat this problem, Tel Aviv offers various municipal tax reductions to entrepreneurs and startups looking to open up shop – such as a reduction of taxes on certain offices. In addition, the city has pursued several initiatives to make city life attractive to young people, from city-wide free WiFi to a bike sharing system and regular free cultural events. Making it easier and more comfortable for young people to live in the city hub is critical, since young talent is the lifeblood of innovation and growth.

Diversify

In order to further the growth of any ecosystem, it is important to have a diverse range of ideas, cultures, backgrounds, and experiences to broaden the scope of potential startups and to create a more fruitful ecosystem. One major hurdle we are trying to overcome currently in Tel Aviv is that 98 percent of the workers in the startup sector are Israeli. This is in comparison to Silicon Valley, where 50 percent of the startup population are foreigners.

Our response to this has been to start city-to-city collaborations with places like Berlin, London, Paris, and New York, where entrepreneurs from one city will be empowered to work and conduct business in another participating city.  Entrepreneurs using this initiative will be able to get a free desk at a coworking space, a mentor from the community, and even get connected to startup companies from their fields – which are resources any city could make available to visiting entrepreneurs. Another effective initiative to consider is a special “startup visa,” which can help to encourage foreign talent to move to your city and work there.

Ultimately, our greatest success in Tel Aviv has come from our commitment to listening to our residents and community of entrepreneurs to leverage their insight, skill, and innovative ideas to help us improve urban life on every level. Building a successful startup ecosystem is only the first step to creating a mutually beneficial relationship where city and tech hub can constantly contribute to the improvement of each other.

Hila Oren is founder and CEO of Tel Aviv Global.

Canadian politics haven’t been kind in recent times to men with solid establishment credentials. Paul Martin epitomized the breed, with his impeccable Liberal pedigree, University of Toronto (U of T) law degree, and a stellar business career launched under the mentorship of none other than Paul Desmarais. But Martin’s prime-ministership was, of course, cut short by Stephen Harper, who had decamped for the wild West after fleeting exposure to the U of T’s incubator of elites, eventually to find his way upward along the decidedly un-established path of Reform politics and lobbying for the right-wing National Citizens Coalition.

For nearly a decade now, Harper has reigned over what’s left of the former establishment’s parade. But the sense that something in the Canadian power structure has changed runs deeper than his particular story. There’s been the economy’s westward shift, which, undoubtedly, diminishes the relative clout of the old Toronto-Montreal axis. There’s the underrated factor of political financing reform, begun under Jean Chrétien and continued by Harper, which has made it impossible for banks and law firms and other moneyed entities to essentially buy, as they used to do, an attentive hearing from Liberals and Tories alike.

For these and other reasons, today’s most interesting political figures tend not to have the once-indispensable backgrounds in big law firms, major corporations or the senior branches of government. Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne, for instance, rose through local activism and school board politics. Naheed Nenshi, Calgary’s admired mayor, has some plush Harvard and McKinsey & Co. credentials, to be sure, but his pre-politics consulting career doesn’t much resemble the resumé of an old-school Canadian establishment type.

Related: Evan Solomon interviews Naheed Nenshi

Even Justin Trudeau, who, by dint of his last name alone, rates, by some measures, as a pinnacle establishment figure, doesn’t conform to past norms. Before politics, as most Canadians know by now, he worked as a teacher. There was a time, it seems, when he aspired to a more predictable trajectory into the ranks of those who had always run things. In his autobiography, Common Ground, he writes of having dreamt as a teenager of entering McGill University’s law school straight out of CEGEP (Quebec’s distinctive junior college level), since that “was what the best and the brightest did.”

Related: What Justin Trudeau gained by losing his cool

Failing an experimental psychology course closed off the McGill law fast-track for Trudeau. But, as it happens, there is another federal party leader who went that prestigious, reliable route: Tom Mulcair was accepted, at age 18, right out of CEGEP. He became president of the McGill law students’ association. His first job after graduating was in the Quebec government’s justice department. He went on to hold a series of senior pubic administration jobs, then joined the Quebec Liberal party, where he became a cabinet minister. On the campaign trail now as federal NDP leader, he often mentions his 35 years of upwardly mobile experience and his stolid background in “responsible public administration.” He cites the influence of his mentor, the late Claude Ryan, who taught him the value of a rigorous management style.

Related: Mulcair is everyone’s target. Here’s how he plans to win.

These are not the credentials of an outsider. Early this year, when Mulcair shook up his staff in what turned out to be a successful bid to jolt the NDP out of a prolonged stretch in the polling doldrums, he brought in as his chief of staff Alain Gaul, who previously headed the financial restructuring and insolvency practice in Montreal for the national corporate law firm Davies Ward Phillips and Vineberg. This is the sort of guy Mulcair turns to—not your classic social-democrat rabble-rouser. Gaul had worked as Mulcair’s top aide back when he was Jean Charest’s environment minister in Quebec’s Liberal government.

All this is not to suggest, not for a moment, that Mulcair is some sort of blue-suited, corner-office-seeking stereotype. I’ve written before that his formative influences position him, intriguingly, in Quebec’s now-largely-vanished Catholic-left tradition. Throwing his lot in with the NDP in 2007, when the party was the furthest thing from a safe bet in Quebec, has to be seen as a move based mainly on conviction, not status-conscious ambition. Still, his education, his career, the mentors he’s emulated, the associates he relies on—all these look more like hallmarks of the establishment way than the parallel elements in the bios of Harper and Trudeau.

From the archives: The definitive portrait of Thomas Mulcair

And finally, there’s his mien on the campaign trail. Mulcair just comes off as a guy used to running the show, and by “show,” I mean big institutions with which he seems to feel entirely at ease. Harper has never presented himself that way, projecting ambivalence toward government without showing any sign of gravitating toward corporations. As for Trudeau, before taking over the Liberal party, he never held anything approaching a senior job in an identifiable institutional structure, so it’s impossible to situate him that way.

That leaves Mulcair as the nearest facsimile, among the major party leaders in this campaign, of the establishment figures we used to envision as the only possible prime ministers. That’s an odd thing for an NDP leader, although, arguably, an advantageous counterbalance to the party’s anti-establishment brand. The question now is whether those reassuringly retro qualities, which have helped to make Mulcair eminently plausible as a prime minister, might also subtly undermine his bid to be identified in the imaginations of voters—under prolonged scrutiny through this long campaign—with change.

The post Thomas Mulcair: This election’s establishment man? appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Barcelona was honored as the world's smartest city this year, beating out London, Singapore, and New York in connected infrastructure, citizen engagement, technological capability, and use of open data sources.

Barcelona's pilot program, which launched in 2011, has since developed into 22 different programs encompassing more than 200 projects and implementations under the umbrella of the city’s Municipal Institute of Information Technology, the department that handles the city's IT environment. Many cities are already connecting their infrastructure to IoT devices like sensors and smart meters. But few cities are as far along in that effort as Barcelona. 

In a new report, BI Intelligence examines how other municipalities can learn from Barcelona’s development into a smart city, how cities’ investments in IoT technologies will grow over time, and how those investments will impact urban economies worldwide.

Access The Reports By Signing Up For A Full-Access Trial Today >>

Here are some of the key findings from the report:

• IoT deployments will create $421 billion in economic value for cities worldwide in 2019. That economic value will be derived from revenues from IoT device installations and sales and savings from efficiency gains in city services.
• Globally, cities’ investments in IoT technologies will increase by $97 billion between 2015-2019. This will make up the bulk of government investment in IoT technologies, dwarfing the amount of money spent on other government IoT use cases like military drones and robots. 
• The number of IoT devices installed in cities will will increase by more than 5 billion in the next four years, creating a massive opportunity for IoT hardware manufacturers and software vendors.
• IoT technologies will deliver a broad range of benefits for cities including reducing traffic congestion and air pollution, improving public safety, and providing new ways for governments to interact with their citizens.

In this report we will also:

• Define the difference between connected vs smart cities.
• Identify key challenges for municipalities in developing smart cities and illustrate how some cities are already solving those obstacles.
• Provide key takeaways from Barcelona’s IoT strategy, which has earned it recognition as the world’s smartest city. 
• Illustrate how the benefits of connecting legacy infrastructure can be magnified through data aggregation and analysis.

To access the full report from BI Intelligence, sign up for a full-access 14-day trial here. Full-access members also gain access to new in-depth reports and hundreds of charts on the digital industry.

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This past quarter has been terrible for investment banks' fixed income, currencies and commodities trading arms. 

The so-called FICC business has been a key driver of investment banking revenues in recent years, but a new note from Huw Van Steenis and his team at Morgan Stanley shows the extent to which that business is now struggling.

Morgan Stanley estimates FICC revenues "may be down 10-25%" year-on-year in the third quarter for European banks, led down by volatility in the credit markets.

While one bad quarter alone might not worry managing directors at investment banks, the medium term trend will.

Morgan Stanley has a chart showing the steady decline of the FICC business from a $157 billion (£104 billion) powerhouse in 2009 t0 almost half that by 2017:

Credit trading – which includes bonds, distressed debt and derivatives such as credit default swaps – is the main culprit for the decline in FICC.

The value of corporate bonds have dropped, and credit spreads have widened, as investors have grown increasingly concerned about companies paying back their debt piles amid sluggish global growth, a Chinese slowdown and the prospect of an interest rate hike from the US Federal Reserve.

As my US colleague Matt Turner reported earlier, credit traders themselves are trying to get out of the business. Around 43% of those working in credit sales and trading said they would choose a different occupation. That's according to a survey of traders above vice-president level at US banks, carried out by recruitment-firm Options Group between August 18 and September 10.

Overall, Morgan Stanley sees trading revenues diving at the major investment banks this year, with only Barclays growing slightly. Might be time to save, rather than spend, that bonus come 2016:

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For those of us who lived through the 2000 dot com bubble — and the crash that followed — this chart will bring a chill of recognition: The value of software investment deals in Q2 2015 surpassed the peak of Q2 2000, according to PwC, which has a web site that tracks these things. Fifteen years ago, that peak of $7 billion in deals was followed directly by a crash and the post-2000 recession.

And now we're back:

Now, before you freak out, there are some important caveats to be mentioned.

The data here only includes software deals. If you slice the data into different tech segments, like devices or media & entertainment, then we still remain below the 2000 peak. But no matter how you cut the data, it's clear that 2015 is shaping up to be a very big year indeed. Q2 2015 is already bigger than any quarter in 2014, for instance, and any quarter since 2000.

It's not clear whether PwC's numbers account for inflation. If the numbers were adjusted, the the current peak may not be bigger than previous peak.

The number of deals done is smaller than the 2000 peak. There were 491 software deals in Q2 2015 and 601 in Q2 2000.

The tech industry today is very different from the bubble of 2000. Back then, companies were staging IPOs even though they had no revenue. Today, the largest new tech companies all have some revenue or obvious future revenue models that can be switched on at any time.

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Why have you chosen cost-plus pricing? You may have good reasons, but this single descision could be holding you back.

Bold words maybe, but pricing is a powerful profit lever in the B2B toolbox. Use it well and your margins will grow; follow the herd and you can limit your growth. All too often I see B2B companies choosing the cost-plus model for fear of competition, or believing the market is controlling the price.

Business offerings vary of course – you may provide cloud-based services, business consulting or sell medical swabs. But while the product is different, the concept’s the same: to maximise your margins, you must think value, not cost.

Extreme value leads to extreme profits

How much would you pay, for example, for eating a meal? $20, $200..? How about $2000 per plate?

Ibiza-based concept restaurant Sublimotion charges this price. Their 20-serving taster menu by Spanish Michelin Star chef Paco Roncerobiza is enhanced by projections and musical compositions for an ever-changing sensory experience. Despite – or because of – the astounding price tag, there’s no doubt that this dining experience will be one of a kind.

How you’d spend $2000 doesn’t matter. The point is that someone will pay, because of the irresistible value of what is being sold. Twelve lucky diners will feel privileged to pay for their place.

When prices reach this level, you could not believe that they’re driven by cost. This is Value, and it works.

The market doesn’t set the boundaries – your pricing model does

Logic says that raising your prices will exclude buyers, but cost-plus pricing loses customers, too. Except that when you limit your value by driving costs down, you’re rejecting the customers who would gladly pay more.

Value propositions drive prices so often that we hardly notice anymore. If Oracle strikes a multi-million dollar software license deal, that’s not what it costs – the costs for additional licences are virtually none – but nobody questions its worth.

B2B companies have far more pricing flexibility than they believe. If you let the market dictate what you charge, you’re missing a major opportunity. To charge market rate suggests that your service is the same as the rest (after all, how else are comparisons made?) Value-based pricing, on the other hand, highlights what sets you apart.

This not only makes your business more rewarding – cost-cutting exercises gnaw away at the soul – but creates room for movement and opportunities for growth.

Almost without exception, cost-plus pricing leaves money on the table that could have been yours.

We’re always trying to better understand the customer lifecycle. That’s a collective “we” — anyone that has a service or good they’re trying to sell to someone else. The goal is to understand the psychology behind purchasing decisions, the research process, and, most importantly, what makes buyers tick. But despite all of our efforts, there’s still a disconnect between buyers and sales.

Salesforce recently uncovered some key info on the buying disconnect:

• Prospects struggle to find the right information during the research process, and they’re afraid to make an uneducated purchase.
• Sellers/vendors don’t understand how to reach an anonymous buyer throughout the purchasing journey.
• Sales reps don’t understand their prospects’ needs or they take too long to figure them out.

It’s the seller’s responsibility to facilitate an easy buying experience. Keeping it simple reduces the sales lifecycle and ensures happier customers in the long-run. But most people don’t buy without at least some knowledge ahead of time… so what can you do to ensure that your prospects are better prepared to buy?

Make It Easy

One of the biggest challenges that prospects face is information-gathering. This is where content provided by the seller is key. General product information is an obvious must, but customer stories and overall satisfaction scores are a great way to show how and why your product is the best. Make this content easy to read and find. What’s the point of having good content if prospects have to search for it?

Understand Your Prospects’ Needs

Use customer information to get to know your prospects. Don’t be afraid to ask for feedback from existing clients. Revealing how they work and what made them buy will strengthen your current marketing and content projects. The more detailed the information, the more comfortable your prospects will be committing to your product.