In the wake of the Umpqua Community College Shooting, President Obama asked the press to compare how many people die from gun violence compared to terrorism, and place the charts against each other. We did just that.
Story by Tony Manfred, editing by Stephen Parkhurst
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This is not a new flag. No.
But it does attempt to show diversity being embraced.
Relationships are formed when there’s connection.
That happens when we try to enter each other’s world.
In the last post, I discussed how LinkedIn allow the use of secondary profiles in 24 different major languages. I’ve had great feedback but 2 common questions surfaced and I’ll address those here.
We saw that to connect with your online audience (or web visitors) at a deeper level, you need to demonstrate that you can identify with them. One way to do that is to connect using their language.
Literally, use their native language and not just the terms and phrases that they use.
To that that, you make use of secondary LinkedIn profiles. If you are multi-lingual this feature works wonders.
No worries. You can always make use of LinkedIn’s a media rich platform.
Showcase publications and visually attractive presentations, infographs and YouTube videos on your home page. And connect through these faculties.
LinkedIn accepts photos, images, presentations, and videos at the section level so lots of room for you to work with.
Executives and professions are used to consuming information in the form of presentation slides and white papers. Use these to enhance interaction and engagement.
This is their “language”.
Slideshare is part of the LinkedIn eco-system now. The next time you upload a deck of slides to Slideshare, consider including that onto your LinkedIn profile.
This is an example of a presentation uploaded to Slideshare.net.
LinkedIn Publishing: Why You Should Be On The Platform
Incidentally, publishing long form articles on LinkedIn is another powerful tip that has been discussed in this post so I won’t repeat it here.
Re-organizing blog posts into the presentation mode suits executives on LinkedIn. Increasingly, inforgraphs are used more widely and you can now upload those to Slideshare as well, together with videos and pdfs.
If you choose not to use visuals, which will put you at a great disadvantage, there’s still the universal language of authentic care.
Can sincerity and a genuine concern for your visitors shine through your online presence? I think so.
You can pretty much tell the profiles you want to avoid from the ones you are open to explore in a split second.
The key is authenticity. Be real.
That includes not exaggerating or being vague in your profile write up and using your photo, one that visibly shows your face.
I don’t see how being vague and using the company’s building as a profile picture would help. People don’t connect with buildings.
The LinkedIn profile is your online presence. It needs to be you, the real deal. If you want to feature your company, there’s the LinkedIn company page.
But the profile is for the face behind the brand.
If web visitors can’t sense the genuineness of the profile account giving them genuine information about who you are, what you do and how you can help, they are not going to connect – even if you have the secondary profile set up.
Present accurate and helpful information on your profile and attract real engagement. Authenticity is not mysterious.
This video shows how to use LinkedIn in your preferred language. It also shows you how to view a profile in its secondary language.
Watch it till the end and give it a like and share it with someone who will benefit from knowing this.
If you want to know more about the secondary LinkedIn profile, this post discussed it in more details.
If you have any more questions just leave them in the comment section below or on YouTube.
Despite budget cuts and a reduction in size, the US has maintained its position as the world's strongest military, according to a report on globalization from Credit Suisse.
While the US is still far and away the world's top military superpower, Russia and China are its closest rivals. Canada, however, is the weakest of the twenty countries on the list.
Credit Suisse acknowledged the difficulties of determining comparative military strength in its report. To provide a benchmark, the report assigns weighted values for six variables before tabulating a final score.
The factors under consideration for military strength and their total weights are: number of active personnel (5% of total score), tanks (10%), attack helicopters (15%), aircraft (20%), aircraft carriers (25%), and submarines (25%).
The ranking defines military might in purely quantitative terms and does not account for the actual quality of the arms and training that the militaries may have. As such, the placement of some countries on the list may come as a surprise.
The world's 20 strongest militaries are below.
SEE ALSO: The most powerful militaries in the Middle East [ranked]
Budget: $15.7 billion
Active frontline personnel: 92,000
Tanks: 181
Total aircraft: 420
Submarines: 4
Canada ended up at the bottom of the list due to the country's small number of active personnel, its lack of aircraft carriers and attack helicopters, and its small number of tanks and submarines. However, Canada has still taken part in US operations in Afghanistan and Iraq and it is a member of the NATO military alliance.
Canada is also a partner in the US F-35 program, although it may decline the purchase of F-35s depending upon the outcome of elections in October.
Budget: $6.9 billion
Active frontline personnel: 476,000
Tanks: 468
Total aircraft: 405
Submarines: 2
The Indonesian military placed above Canada due its high numbers of active personnel and its relatively large number of tanks. The military, however, suffers from a lack of carriers and aircraft, as well as a minute number of submarines.
Budget: $40.2 billion
Active frontline personnel: 179,046
Tanks: 408
Total aircraft: 663
Submarines: 4
The German military ended up low on the list due to their lack of power projection platforms. Germany does not have an aircraft carrier and has relatively few submarines which, according to the Credit Suisse methodology, drops its ranking.
But Germany does have a fair number of attack helicopters. Recently, the country has started considering offering military support to eastern European NATO members.
NOW WATCH: The Coast Guard seized this submarine and 16,000 pounds of cocaine — then it sank
Maybe chalk this up to young people never wanting to turn into their mothers and fathers.
According to a survey by Fidelity Investments, millennial parents are already saving more for their kids' college education than the generation before them, Generation X.
Where 58% of Generation X parents 30 to 34 were saving for their kids' college in 2007, 74% of parents of the same age group in 2015 are already doing so.
Those savers are Millennials born between 1981 and 1985.
"Millennials have weathered challenging economic conditions for much of their adulthood. Many have channeled that experience into setting college-savings goals early, and taking steps to make savings a regular habit," said Keith Bernhardt, vice president of retirement and college products at Fidelity.
They're wiping the floor with Generation X across the board, from the amount they've saved to the percentage who've worked with a financial professional to work all of this out.
Check out how it breaks down in the table below:
It's not hard to understand why this is happening. Millennials went into the worst job market since the Great Depression, loaded with more student debt than any other generation. They don't want their kids to have the same experience.
The reason why debt has grown so much is because the cost of higher education has exploded in the US. That has led to a rise in student-loan delinquencies. Most people who don't pay back their student loans attended community or for-profit colleges and didn't finish their programs.
Susan Dynarski, a University of Michigan education professor, explained this problem in an op-ed for The New York Times last month.
"Graduation rates are low in part because community colleges can't exclude poorly prepared students. Unlike selective schools, they are required to take anyone who walks in the door, and they have to work harder to get those students to graduation," Dynarski wrote.
Another issue with accumulating student debt is that officials are starting to look at how the system is working for people, and they don't like what they see.
In other words, some colleges (especially in the for-profit space) and student debt servicers aren't doing the best job.
Here's one example: When for-profit college Corinthian College Inc. went bust last month, the US Department of Education announced that it would forgive $40 million in debt taken out by the college's students.
It also said that it would accept claims for forgiveness based on "defense to repayment." Legally, that's only possible for students when a school commits fraud or breaks the law, Business Insider's Abby Jackson reported.
At the same time, the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau released a report calling for new regulations for student-debt servicers. The agency found that many weren't helping students find the right loans or get their debt on track. They were throwing in surprise fees.
"With 1 out of 4 student-loan borrowers struggling to repay their loans or already in default, cleaning up the servicing market is critical," CFPB Director Richard Cordray said in a statement.
Who would want their kids to go into the workforce dealing with that?
Join the conversation about this story »
NOW WATCH: Hillary Clinton's student debt plan has two huge problems
In "The Martian," the film based on Andy Weir's bestselling novel that hit theaters Friday, Matt Damon plays an astronaut stranded on Mars.
From the extreme cold to the deadly radiation, there are many traits about Mars that make it inhospitable.
Here are some of the main obstacles to surviving — and colonizing — the fourth rock from the sun.
CHECK OUT: 9 tripped-out sci-fi technologies in 'The Martian' that NASA really uses
SEE ALSO: NASA’s top planetary scientist told us what he thinks of the science in 'The Martian'
NOW WATCH: The Dalai Lama says a female Dalai Lama must be attractive, "otherwise not much use"
Sandra Arias.
A federal campaign has rolled into its ninth full week for its first time since the 1970s, en route to the longest campaign since the 1870s. A multi-partisan array of candidates have quit or been pushed out because their past remarks or actions spurred micro-tempests for parties that didn’t need larger storms. But last week was the first case where one tapped out mid-race because of burnout.
“Simply put, the financial strain of a historically long election has been just too much to bear for myself and my family,” Sandra Arias wrote on her Facebook page. She was running for the NDP in Saskatchewan’s Battlefords–Lloydminster against Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz.
Running a serious campaign can be more demanding than most full-time jobs, in energy and in time. Candidates must be willing to hold up their lives to unprecedented scrutiny, both in every word they say during the race but, increasingly, in everything typed or Facebook-liked in the past. (After she withdrew, some upstart Facebook-trawlers posted some of Arias’s social-media comments dating back to 2007.) A candidate also has to be shameless enough to solicit money both from everyone she knows and from strangers, preferably in small increments adding up to at least $50,000, without which it’s hard to contend.
Perhaps a bigger barrier is the personal financial cost of entry: having a flexible enough employer or career to take off the election period, or being able to afford an income drought in pursuit of an MP’s $167,400-a-year salary. Experienced candidates will bemoan the personal and financial toll of a typical five-week writ period. For current candidates, going all-in has meant forgoing income for more than one-fifth of the year.
Asked about the long slog she’s had, Tracy Calogheros, who is running for the Liberals in B.C., recalled watching CBC’s Power and Politics recently, and the host proclaimed the election race was at its halfway mark. “I had this feeling wash over me: ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe we’re only halfway and only come this far. I’ve got to do it all again?’ It’s exhausting,” says the first-time candidate in Cariboo–Prince George, a riding where the Liberals finished in fourth place in 2011.
“The advantage I had is that I didn’t know any better. I got into it before I realized how long a marathon I was getting into.”
Calogheros, the CEO of Prince George’s largest museum, says she couldn’t have done it without three months of banked vacation time she’s amassed over several years. “It would have been impossible. There’s no way I could have been off work for—we’re going to be at three months before election time?”
Her husband also used banked time, which a fellow political spouse encouraged. “She said: ‘You take time off work, too, and you don’t let her drive, because she’s going to have way too much on her mind and she’s going to be way too tired,’ ” the Liberal candidate recalls. “And that’s the best advice I’ve gotten yet.” The riding is as big as the Czech Republic, Calogheros says.
Maclean’s was unable to reach Arias about her withdrawal, but did speak with Eleanore Sunchild, whose law firm she works for. Sunchild says she offered her operations director plenty of flexibility. Arias reduced her shifts to three-quarters time, travelling the rural constituency when she could. Campaign donations proved so scarce for the long-shot candidate, Arias wound up trying to pay her campaign manager out of her own pocket— money that may have otherwise gone to her fledgling bread-distribution business. “They have a two-income family, but they still need their full income to get their business off the ground,” Sunchild says. “So she had no choice but to step aside. It was too taxing on her and her family.”
This is yet another reason incumbents enjoy an advantage: MPs get paid up to, and including, election day. Look through challengers’ biographies. Many don’t have salaried jobs they must take leave from: They’re lawyers, self-employed or consultants more free to set their own work schedules.
The NDP’s Saskatchewan director noted there’s a special party fund to support women candidates. The Liberals have one, as well. Both provide a pittance, compared to the tens of thousands of dollars a credible riding campaign costs. New election rules mean a well-financed candidate can spend more than $200,000 for this long run, exacerbating potential imbalances.
The average Canadian doesn’t likely realize the major demands of running for office, says Alison Loat, co-author of Tragedy in the Commons, which surveyed dozens of former MPs about Canadian democracy’s woes.
“I’m in favour of (doing) as much as we can to equalize the front-door entry to politics,” she says. “The truth is, it does limit the type of person who can make a run that does have a legitimate chance at winning in our current system. But that is the price of the admission at present, and I think the cost of the alternative in our current system is probably prohibitive.”
For the May 2011 election, Conservative Ryan Hastman had been campaigning more than full-time in Edmonton–Strathcona by January, though he’d lose in Alberta’s lone opposition-held riding. The fragility of a minority government meant he’d been on war footing since his 2009 nomination, but kept working for his own web company and another firm, “just kind of making ends meet where I could,” he says.
“We didn’t have kids at the time yet, so it was a little bit easier. If I had to do it now, I don’t know if it would be possible.”
Hastman has qualified sympathy for Arias: “It is a sacrifice, but it also isn’t a surprise to anyone, either. She did know what she was getting into,” he says.
“I knew I was making a commitment,” Calogheros says. “When I have my moments when I’m very tired, there are so many other people who supported me to get to this point. I owe it to them and I owe it to the area.”
The post Price of admission: The true cost of running for election appeared first on Macleans.ca.
Is your business in need of a logo? Whether you’re planning to give it a refresh or creating a new one from scratch, a logo that catches the attention of your customers is essential for building brand presence.
Wondering how you’ll begin? Here are six steps to follow to get you started:
1. Define your brand visually
When you think of your brand, what do you imagine? Take out a piece of paper and make notes. Write down the words and images that you believe represent your brand. It might also be useful to ask other employees or a close friend for their help with this exercise as they’ll likely see the brand differently than you.
Once you’ve created personas for your brand, you’ll be able to think about the kind of logo that would fit the company and attract those types of customers.
2. Research, don’t copy
During the process of creating your logo, you’ll probably study a ton of them online for inspiration. You should look at logos that you like and save them on your laptop. Make a list of things you like about these logos. Do you like the font? The use of white space? Pick out a few defining characteristics that are appealing to you.
Next, look at logos from other businesses in your industry. It’s important to know what your competitors offer so you can stand out.
However, while you can draw inspiration from others, it’s important to remember that your logo is your own. It should be unique. You should certainly do research before you create a logo, but you don’t want to be a copycat. You are your own brand.
3. Colors matter
What color should your logo be? Just because your favorite color is green, this does not mean it’s the best choice for your logo. Colors have meaning. There’s an entire psychology behind the use of colors and the emotions they evoke for shoppers.
When you’re thinking about your logo’s color scheme, consider the message each color sends:
Red: bold, loud, sexy, edgy
Orange: creative, cheery, fun, youthful
Yellow: cheery, sunny, optimism
Green: growth, organic, instructional, environmental, health
Blue: professional, calming, trustworthy, dependable
Purple: wise, blissful, spiritual
Black: powerful, strong, masculine
White: pure, innocent, clean, simple, crisp
Pink: flirty, youthful
Brown: rural, historic
Grey: neutral, calm
4. Pick the right font
In the same way that colors send a message, so do fonts. If you plan to include your business name in your logo, which most companies choose to do, you’ll want to pick the right font. Here’s a quick breakdown of fonts and their implied meaning. For more information, check out this infographic.
Script fonts: elegant, affectionate, creative
Serif fonts: traditional, reliable
Sans serif: stability, clean
Modern: strong, stylish
Display: friendly, unique
See a font online that you like? Use an online tool like WhatTheFont to identify it. Just upload an image and you’ll find out the fonts that are used. Plus, you’ll see a list of fonts that are similar to it.
When it comes to fonts, there are more to choose from than what Microsoft Word offers. Don’t be fooled into thinking you have to pick a common font like Times New Roman. You can even download new fonts right to your laptop. Check out 1001 Free Fonts to find a typography you like.
5. Keep it simple
A logo should be clean, crisp and not leave your customers puzzled about what it means. Don’t use more than two fonts or two colors. Keep the imagery basic. That’s not to say you can’t be creative, but if you want to appeal to customers, a logo can’t be overwhelming. You aren’t creating a work of art for a gallery; you’re creating an easy-to-identify logo.
6. Use a professional to design your logo
Once you have some solid direction, take your ideas to a professional. While there are numerous crowdsourcing options, be cautious of this route. The number of samples and pricing may be enticing, but these sites may not offer access to expert designers with the years of branding experience necessary to create a logo that’s right for you. Deluxe offers top-of-game in-house designers and economical logo packages starting at $245. They’ve designed for more than 75,000 clients worldwide. You can check out some samples here.
Conclusion: The most important part of deciding on a logo is to make sure that you feel it represents what you want to convey about your brand to customers. Remember, there will be many times when your logo will be the voice of your business before people even consider your products – make it work in your favor.
If most managers have the best of intentions when supporting their salespeople, then why do they keep asking them questions that result in lost sales?
It’s not uncommon to hear that companies are developing KPI’s and measurable objectives around coaching. While encouraging, sadly, it is doomed from the start unless the manager is actually observing their people perform on a consistent basis.
Why is it doomed, you wonder? Here’s how some managers have responded.
“Okay, I’m supposed to coach each person on my team for one hour each week, based on a list of core competencies and best practices that the company has identified. Let’s see, I actually spoke to each of my salespeople for at least two hours this week, and probably an hour or so last week, since we’ve been doing a bunch of deal reviews and forecasting sessions in order to close this quarter strong. I guess that time can count towards the mandated coaching hours for each direct report. Check!”
A fine example of “Check-box Management.”
Of course, I’m simplifying this to make the lesson clear. Management cannot assume that the quantity of coaching equates to its quality!
It’s counter-intuitive. Managers believe that in order to achieve your goals and attain quota, keep focusing on the results. “If you stay focused on the results, keep your eyes on the prize and on our sales targets, we will get there faster.” Paradoxically, focusing on the result actually gets in the way of achieving the results you want.
Why?
Because if you’re always focusing on the result; you’re not focusing on your people.
Think about the questions you ask during a conversation. Do your questions focus on how your people do things or focus more on what’s been done or getting done? How consistently do you actively observe your people when engaging with customers and prospects on the phone, in person, even how they communicate via email? Are you truly certain of the processes they use, how they communicate and how they perform or are you assuming that based on the reports, results and data?
Think about any coach of a sports team. Without consistent observation of their players, they will miss out on a myriad of authentic coaching opportunities that would build a strong bench of champions.
But it’s not enough just to become more mindful of the “how,” or the process, while focusing on the “what” or the goal that you want to achieve. It has to manifest in how you communicate and engage with people, especially your direct reports.
What does the word ‘process’ means to you? Do you think about your HR process, sales process, onboarding process, and project management? Basically, most people would perceive a process as a series of consistent steps you take to produce a somewhat consistent result.
Now, think beyond defining the word, “process” as some measurable steps, path or strategy you follow.
When I suggest becoming more process driven, I’m referring to moving beyond your strategy and into your thinking. Think about how this line of thinking would impact how you communicate. If you become someone who is more process driven, it affects the type and quality of the questions you ask.
Here’s an example of the type of questions that are continually being asked by managers who have a result driven mindset. These questions focus on one thing and one thing only; the outcome.
1. What are you working on that’s currently in your pipeline?
2. How many meetings did you schedule this week?
3. You’re putting everything we need into the CRM, right?
4. Is your sales forecast accurate?
5. Did you get in touch with the decision makers, as well as influencers in the company?
6. How many calls did you make today?
7. You qualified the prospect to ensure there’s a fit, this is a priority for them and they had budget, right?
8. If we’re going to put a pilot in place, did you confirm that we are their vender of choice?
9. Did you demonstrate a solid value proposition that’s aligned with the customer’s needs?
Are these questions important? They most certainly are! However, these questions enable managers to facilitate only half of the conversation you need to have with your salespeople. While these questions certainly focus on results, they are also, for the most part, all closed-ended questions, providing no additional insight into the situations, facts, behavior or what was discussed.
Review these nine questions I listed. What are you really learning when you ask your salespeople these questions? You only succeed in uncovering their opinion around what’s been done (yes or no) and not necessarily how it’s been done.
Here’s the real cost incurred when asking these closed ended, result driven questions. The manager assumes their salespeople are emulating the best practices, knowledge and the behavior of world-class sales champions – and so do their salespeople!
Where in this conversation are the questions that focus on who they are, what they know, their current skill-set, what their communication sounds like and how they actually do things?
Besides, how would you feel if you were asked these questions? In many cases, you are probably being asked them by your boss! Does it feel empowering or conversely, do some of these questions sound condescending?
Notice what happens when you become more of a process driven thinker. While these questions are in no particular order, be mindful of the spirit behind each question. Here are some examples of open-ended questions that are truly open ended. That is, they don’t have your judgment, agenda or solution baked into them!
These are the questions that salespeople appreciate being asked. While they challenge people to assess and improve how they do things, they do so in a positive, rather than a confrontational way. These questions demonstrate that you actually have an interest in them. It shows that you’re not only focused on the results but on them, as well.
As you can see, beliefs certainly precede experiences. When you become someone who is more process driven, notice what happens to the quality of the questions you ask. Now, you have the power to positively impact the outcome of every conversation.
Sure, you manage data, however you develop people. Besides, if you keep focusing on the result, then nothing changes, including your people.
Alternatively, if you focus on change and growth, the byproduct is, you achieve what you want most; your business objectives, a strong bench of champions and future leaders, and your new competitive edge.
Arming your sales team with the right tools is key to making sure they’re successful. Check out how SalesforceIQ puts the poweer of relationship intelligence in the palm of your salesperson’s hand. Download the free Salesforce e-book.
Welcome emails get some of the highest rates of engagement of any emails. They offer the perfect chance to strike while the iron is hot to engage new subscribers and convince them to take action.
Several recent studies have shown why welcome emails deserve our attention. Welcome emails have an average read rate of 34%. That’s 42% higher than the average read rate of 24% for all other types of emails according to a recent study by Return Path.
We recently wrote about how to use a welcome email to engage your subscribers from the start and today, we’ll break down 10 elements every effective welcome email should have, so each one you send can get the results you desire.
Sending welcome emails promptly makes a difference. A big difference. The whole reason welcome emails work so well is they arrive when a subscriber’s interest in your content is at its peak. Wait even a few days and their enthusiasm may wane, resulting in lower engagement rates.
To give you an idea of how important timing is, consider the chart below from Return Path’s study, The Email Subscriber Experience. It shows how many days after someone subscribes, that most marketers choose to send their welcome email.
As you can see, 75% sent welcome emails on the same day subscribers signed up. Time is of the essence when it comes to sending out your welcome email to give your subscribers the information they desire from the get-go. You can automate this process using or Automation feature, so each time someone new joins your list, a welcome email will automatically be sent to them.
Welcome emails perform best when they are clearly identified, but make sure you also add a spark of interest to grab attention. To make welcome emails easy to identify in crowded inboxes, many marketers use the word “Welcome” right up front in the subject line.
Here’s a sampling of some welcome subject lines from our inbox:
To get additional tips to improve your subject lines, see our recent post, 8 subject line formulas to get your emails opened.
If you asked for your subscriber’s name or other information when they signed up, now is the ideal time to use it. And whether you use their name or not, it’s always nice to simply welcome new subscribers.
Of course, adding personalization can help any email. Emails with personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened.
Notice how in this example the first and last name are pushed together? Remember to set up your sign up forms so people know what information to enter in each field. For example, if you want the first name, label the field “First Name”, not just “Name” or you might end up with both first names and last names together.
Don’t make new subscribers wait for your next newsletter. Instead, use your welcome email to recommend your very best content.
For example, if you’re a SaaS (Software as a Service) business, you probably want to get new subscribers to start using your software right away. So give them a clear idea of how to get started. That might mean a getting started guide. Or you could kick it up a notch with an explainer video like Noteagraphy has done:
If you’re an e-commerce business, your goal might be to get subscribers to make a purchase. So don’t be shy about offering products or services in your welcome email.
Welcome emails are an ideal place to slip new subscribers something special. Usually, that’s a discount on their first order or some especially good free content. Here’s how RedBubble offers both a discount code and recommends some of their best products:
Including a few links to your social media networks in your welcome email is a good start, but it can be even better if you come out and ask new subscribers to follow your business. Here’s how Food52 does it:
This is a great opportunity to maintain your deliverability rates and make it easier for subscribers to find your emails in the future. Here’s how the Farnam Street blog asks people to whitelist them:
It might seem crazy, but even as you onboard and welcome subscribers, you always have to make it easy for them to unsubscribe at any time. Most email service providers – Campaign Monitor included – will automatically include an unsubscribe link. This is a requirement of CAN-SPAM.
This example from the San Diego Chargers welcome email incorporates a few of the tips we’ve shared. Notice the personalization in the first line, then the whitelist request in the second line. The discount code and call to action are right below in the third line. Then down in the footer there’s that one-click unsubscribe link.
This can be a powerful email list builder. Just as referred clients and customers tend to be high-value, referred email subscribers tend to be far more engaged than subscribers from other sources. When someone we know recommends something, that recommendation usually carries far more credibility than an online ad or content we may have stumbled across online.
You may not get huge amounts of new subscribers from your referral requests, but the ones you do get will likely be high value. As you know, a small list of highly engaged subscribers is just as good – if not better – than a large list of less engaged subscribers.
Even Google uses this refer-a-friend technique. The example below is for their “Let’s Put Our Cities on the Map” program. They ask new subscribers to help just one business they think deserves it. Notice how Google tells you exactly how long it will take. Who doesn’t have 30 seconds for a great local business?
Sometimes information is priceless. To that end, you can use your new subscribers’ enthusiasm to find out what they want. You can get this information by using a survey like the ones offered by GetFeedback embedded right in your welcome email, or by asking a question in your welcome email.
You can also try progressive profiling. It’s sounds super-techy, but it’s not too hard. When a visitor comes to your site and carries out multiple actions (e.g., downloads multiple guides), they’re presented with different fields on each form. This enables you to get say, six pieces of information while only asking your visitor for two at any given time. You end up with a better user experience and more information you can use in the future. Most CRM systems allow you to do some level of progressive profiling.
Here’s how IKEA asked for more information:
This is actually the second email IKEA sent. They waited a day or two before they asked for this extra information. They also made their request in a way that feels helpful, not intrusive. By asking us to complete our profile and showing a percent complete measure, they encourage you to provide them more information.
Your welcome email can include all these elements, or just a few, depending on your business needs. The most important thing is to send an engaging welcome email to every new subscriber.
A friend called me for advice today. He’s a great sales person, a big deal hunter.
He wanted to review a deal strategy and call plan he was making on a CTO at a very large, fast growing prospect. His colleagues had been working with the CTO’s team. By far, they were the front runners for their first piece of business with this customer. By itself, it was a big order, but his colleagues saw a lot more potential in the account. That’s why they got my friend, let’s call him “John,” involved.
Reviewing the account, their growth, their requirements, John saw the possibility of much more business. He was preparing his deal strategy and for his first call on the CTO. He viewed it as a “Discovery Call,” and was seeking to understand the key business drivers, getting the CTO’s vision, his perspective on the key issues the broader organization faced, as well as the ability of the IT organization to effectively support the rest of the business.
As I reviewed John’s deal and call plans, it was very good. Yeah, guys like me always have to find a reason to nit pick or get people to stretch a little, but John had done a good job in putting together the discovery call.
My “nitpicking” ended up being, “John, great plan–but it’s the wrong thing to do, forget discovery, ask for the order!” Over the phone, I could almost hear John falling off his chair. For years, I’d been drumming into him the importance of high quality discovery calls. John had mastered these and leveraged them to produce stunning results. He couldn’t believe I was telling him not to do it, and to go for the order.
As good as John’s plan was, it was totally inappropriate for where the customer was in their buying process. The work that John’s colleagues had done had gotten the customer to the purchase decision stage of their buying cycle. They had just about made the decision for John’s company, but John and his colleagues saw a far greater opportunity to help the customer, as well as greater revenue from the customer.
Had the team changed their approach, moving back into discovery, they would have been way out of step with the where the customer was in their process. Forcing the customer back into discovery mode could have adversely impacted the customer and their perception of John and his solution.
It’s critical we are aligned with the customer and where they are in their buying process. While our research is a little old, a number of years ago, we analyzed over 700 deals across a number of customers and suppliers. We found for every stage of misalignment between the buying and selling process, the probability of winning the business decreased by 10-20%. (See the figure below) In John’s case, he was about 2 stages behind the customer. As a result, his probability of winning would be significantly decreased.
Without going into the research, it’s easy to understand how this disconnect happens. Think of those calls you used to get around dinner time. It’s always someone wanting to you to buy something (usually switching telephone/cable plans) that you didn’t want to buy. The call would be an offer at some amazing price, with heavy attempts at closing from the salesperson. But we didn’t have a need to buy! So here the sales person was trying to close us on a problem/need we didn’t have. They were way out of sync with where we were in our buying processes, as a result, the success of those calls was very low.
Sometimes, it manifests itself in a different way. You probably know what I’m talking about. It’s the 57-70 (or 92%–depending on the survey you believe) of the way customers are through their buying process when they first contact sales. It’s that RFP that suddenly hits your desk, the one you know nothing about.
The customer has narrowed their needs, they are looking for a specific solution or a proposal. Yet we are several stages behind, we haven’t even qualified or done discovery on the opportunity. As a result, our probability of winning plummets. We are out of sync with where the customer is in their process (which is why I make the statement that I never respond to a RFP that I didn’t write.).
Sometimes, I liken this to being late to a party. You know, you’re hours late to a party, all the little conversation groups have formed, people are well involved in discussions about all sorts of things and you try to join–but you’ve missed all the early conversation, you have none of the context. You stand uncomfortably at the fringe of the group, listening, kind of getting it, but not quite, afraid to join in because you’ve missed so much of what’s gone on before.
Now here’s where it gets really complicated and confusing.
If we are to maximize our ability to win, we have to be in sync with the customer and where they are in their buying process. Clearly, we’re smart enough not to try to close the deal too fast (at least the regular readers of this blog–the people that should be reading—well that’s a different story).
But what happens when we are late? What happens when the customer has done their research, they’ve outlined their needs and requirements and want a response?
Are we supposed to skip all the stages of our selling process (i.e. Qualifying, Discover) and rush to a proposal?
Actually, it’s the wrong thing to do. Qualifying and discovery give us critical pieces of information, deep understanding of what the customer is trying to achieve, why, how they have gotten to where they are in their buying process. Without understanding this, our ability to be responsive, to create the maximum value and differentiation for our customers is seriously compromised.
Consequently, we have to go through our qualifying and discovery. We have to recognize the customer may become frustrated and impatient. They want to buy, they want to move on, we’re slowing them down. Great sensitivity is required, we have to help the customer understand why we are backtracking and slowing them down, but why it’s important to them that we do this.
In reality some customers may be too impatient and unwilling to do this. We may choose to disqualify and not compete in those circumstances. If we can get the customer to take the time, we have to move quickly, but we do have to do a complete job of discovery. Again, making sure they understand why we are doing this and the value they get from this is critical to our shared success.
Clearly, the best solution is to avoid being “late to the party.” Getting engaged early, making sure we are in sync with the customer–in fact helping to guide and facilitate their buying process. As much as we may want to accelerate our selling process, doing so puts us out of sync with the customer. The only way we accelerate our sales process, without compromising our ability to win, it to help the customer accelerate their buying process.
Some of you are reflecting back to my advice to John. You’re probably thinking, “Dave, you’ve really confused us. John was late to the party, but you said we still have to do qualifying and discovery. But you told John to go for the close. What’s up?”
John’s situation is a little different (as everyone’s situation is–that’s why we have to pay attention). John’s team had been engaged with the customer through their buying process. They had reached the closing point, when they realized there was a far greater opportunity, bringing John into the situation. In this case, it would have been inappropriate to backtrack for the bigger deal. What John ended up doing is accepting the order and initiating a conversation about the next thing his company and the customer might do to improve their performance.
If we are to maximize both our customer and our success, we always have to align our selling process with where the customer is in their buying process. The easiest way to do this is to start with them at the beginning, working with them through the cycle.
For someone who coined and promoted sociobiology, E. O. Wilson certainly understands how we developed complex evolutionary mechanics to guide our decision-making process.
To play the game the human way requires a complicated mix of closely calibrated altruism, cooperation, competition, domination, reciprocity, defection and deceit. -E.O.Wilson
Sure, smart marketers also know to utilize human behavior triggers that drive conversion, but rarely do they take advantage of how our brains are actually hard-wired.
Aside from our fear of failure, most of our decision-making mechanisms take root in reciprocity (I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine), which branches out into more complex back-scratching scenarios, including: kin selection (We’re close, so I’ll scratch your back without expecting anything in return); escalation (I’ll scratch your back a little and hope you’ll scratch my back a lot); tribal reciprocity (groups that do back-scratching fare better than those who don’t); and limits on reciprocity (there are so many backs you can scratch at a time).
As humans, we tend to want to return favors, pay back our debts and treat others as we ourselves would like to be treated. This gives way to a powerful, even uncomfortable feeling that’s difficult to shake off called obligation. When most people hear the word “obligation”, this is what comes to mind:
A state of being morally or legally bound; a duty or commitment
Sounds a little grim, doesn’t it? What if we gave the definition a positive spin:
A feeling of gratitude and desire to return the favor
Successful content marketers are masters of playing on their audience’s feelings of obligation. They know how to skillfully invoke reciprocity with the amount of value they pack in their content, all while giving it away in large quantities.
When a need gets established for your product or service, your audience will act on that need without any additional marketing material or sales strategies on your part. The power of obligation and value of your content is all you need to get started.
Many work at a restaurant at one point in their lives. Not many have the opportunity to see what’s behind the scenes of an expensive, busy, five-star restaurant. During my college years, I bussed tables at the top steakhouse in the city because my friend was close to the owner. It was exhausting, competitive, ego-driven and repetitive. Did I mention it was exhausting?
It was at this restaurant that I learned what good food should taste like, what real escargot should smell like and how great salad dressing should pour like (we made ours from scratch). It’s also the place where I learned the definition of customer service. It was about attentiveness, listening and catering to a customer’s every need. It’s a policy of giving: free bread, sorbet, snacks – even a complimentary drink if a table wasn’t immediately ready for the customer.
It can be said that my former restaurant practiced reciprocity on the basis of kin selection. Customers that are inconvenienced by waiting are elevated to a higher status and are treated better by default.
This is a clever marketing technique as free snacks or drinks boost make you feel welcome and boost your appetite. You’ll now be in a better mood and likely to spend more than you originally planned for.
Dennis Regan, a professor at Cornell University performed an experiment to demonstrate how escalation in reciprocity is a foolproof strategy to increase sales.
Research subjects were seated in a room and asked to evaluate painting. In the test case, the researcher (identified as another research subject), would leave the room and return with drinks for the subject. In the base case, the researcher would also leave the room and return with nothing.
After some time, the researcher would turn to the subjects and ask them if they’d like to buy a raffle ticket, leading to a primer that if enough tickets were sold, a $50 prize was on the table.
After the experiment was run on a number of people, it was revealed that research subjects who received a drink were not only more likely to buy raffle tickets – they bought many more tickets than subjects who received no drink.
These findings demonstrate that when you give something away, you’ll get it back plus more. How much more depends on what actions you take after the fact.
Humans are believed to have evolved a number of psychological adaptations that incline them to be more cooperative in reciprocity with members of their tribal in-group.
In prehistoric times, how quickly you learnt from the tribe was the difference between survival and death: How to find food, how to protect yourself from the harsh environment. Customers always use their social circles to find answers: Where to find the right shoes? Who makes the best tacos in town? So if a brand provides answers that customers want, then it’s a brand worth remembering.
Michael Bayler, co-author of “Promiscuous Customers” says that we use the web to “filter, resist and reject uninteresting messages, so that the tribal consumer is quite happy, amusing himself in his own digital sandpit”. Once your content ends up in the digital sandpit (the individual’s social network or community forum) it will be seen, interacted with and propagated within that circle.
The web is limitless but our good side is a finite resource. There are only so many hours in the day, so many bytes of data we can broadcast and so many relationships we can maintain without burning out.
In 1992, Robin Dunbar came up with a number completely by accident while correlating primate social groups with social group sizes in humans. Calling it the “Dunbar Number”, he argued that humans can comfortably maintain 150 stable relationships. Larger numbers would require restrictive measures such as communication limitations, time spent with each other and… that tingling sense of indifference that would come about occasionally.
What’s remarkable about this experiment is how it connects personal relationships with limitations that human brains place on these relationships. Relationships, whether they’re face-to-face or online, focus on the act of sharing experiences.
Since relationships are reciprocative by nature, they are bound by the context in which they occur. Our social media, we’re limited to liking, sharing and noticing when our friends watched a certain cat video on YouTube. For example, if you watch a video with a friend in your presence, you’d likely respond differently (such as laugh louder) than if you shared it on your friend’s wall on Facebook.
We see reciprocity in action all around us. It’s free cups of coffee at a book signing event, food samples at the grocery store & free notepads to everyone that walks into the local bank branch.
At its basic level, reciprocity is all about making your customer feel special. The timing, the personal touch and usefulness of whatever it is that you’re offering all tie into the customer experience.
At InsightSquared, we do everything we can to understand what sets top-performing staffing and recruiting firms apart from the rest of the field.
We read blogs. We look at industry research. We talk to customers. We talk to prospects. We listen to gurus and ninjas and mavens of every kind. But being a bunch of numbers geeks, that still isn’t enough. We wanted to see the cold, hard data that answered our question: how do some firms outgrow their competition?
So we rolled up our sleeves and conducted a study of our own.
And guess what? In spite of all that time spent reading and researching and listening, many of the results still came as a surprise. The characteristics of top-performing staffing and recruiting firms were, in some cases, the polar opposite of what we expected to see.
Here’s the story of how we uncovered the secrets to staffing success.
Since InsightSquared aggregates data from a number of ATS systems, we have reams of data from hundreds of different firms at our fingertips. With express permission from our clients, we set about answering our question by anonymizing that data and digging into it to search for the traits that set high-growth firms apart from the rest of the field.
To get the most actionable results possible, we divided our study into two broad recruitment types — permanent and contract placement. Most firms included in the study make a mix of contract and permanent placements, so they were placed into the permanent bucket if more than 50% of their placements were for permanent positions, and in the contract bucket if more than 50% were contract.
From there, we divided the two buckets into four quartiles based on Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) to estimate revenue growth. The first quartile encompassed the firms with the lowest CAGR, and the fourth quartile was the group with the highest CAGR.
Once all the setup work was complete, we could finally get down to the real business of finding out what firms in the fourth quartile were doing differently from the first quartile.
In spite of all the research we did prior to conducting the study, the results still surprised us.
The usual assumption is high-growth in the contract space is driven by a high-volume of placements and quick turnaround time, while success on permanent placement openings depends more on quality and speed of service.
The reality is essentially the converse of that assumption. To cut to the chase, here’s a high-level breakdown of what we found for contract and permanent placement firms:
The more we dug into the data, the more nuances we found between the firms that just get by and the firms that rake in revenue every year.
To learn what else we uncovered about best practices for staffing and recruiting management, take a minute to download our full 2015 Staffing Sales Benchmarking Report.
Brian Solis is a digital analyst, anthropologist, futurist and author of X, What’s the Future of Business (WTF), Engage! and The End of Business As Usual.
So many companies entrust customer engagement to marketing. At the same time, many customers blame marketing’s inability to engage them in relevant and meaningful ways as one of the top roadblocks for referring brands or becoming loyal. If companies don’t change how they engage customers, including people, tools and practices, customers will simply go elsewhere.
This is what blows my mind about customer engagement today. Customers are the lifeblood of any organization, yet engagement is relegated to departments that run disengaged and disparate strategies, such as email marketing, social media broadcasting, product registration programs, and net-promoter-score surveys, among others. Companies really don’t invest the time or resources in technology or initiatives that engage people in ways that are contextually relevant, useful and meaningful.
This has to change.
In part 1 of this series, I shared the promise of “in-product communication” as a new channel for customer engagement. I noted that as products are increasingly connected to the Internet (wearables, smart devices, intelligent appliances, etc.) as part of the Internet of Things movement, companies now have the ability to communicate with users directly through products.
Companies can also understand the context of product usage to anticipate customer needs, better support customers, and more effectively personalize engagement.
If customer experience is defined as the sum of all interactions a customer has with your brand throughout the customer lifecycle, improving engagement becomes a significant competitive advantage.
In everything from marketing and messaging, to service and support, to loyalty and rewards, and customer advocacy, companies that activate the Internet of Things as a channel for relationship building and enhancing the customer experience introduce a new standard of business.
Yet, according to a 2013 Econsultancy report, 89% of companies said they planned to compete on the basis of customer experience while only 8% of companies said they currently provide a "very integrated" customer experience.
This is why I see in-product engagement as the next big thing for customer experience. Traditional programs are limited. They are inhibiting the ability for any company to foster dialogue and relationships with the very people using their products.
For example, any company that sells through retail does not receive a complete roster of those using the products unless customers register them and create an account or contact support. With email marketing, companies can only reach out to customers who have provided their email addresses.
With in-product engagement—something now possible with modern, connected devices—companies can communicate based on device ID or serial number, essentially reaching 100% of customers' devices that go online.
Right now, only 15% of customers typically register a device, thus providing means for future contact. Even still, email marketing sucks. Only 20% of those registered customers might open an email and only 5% might click through with a lackluster 1% likely to convert.
This emergent platform of in-product engagement is also important through later stages of the product lifecycle, like repair or replacement. Often product managers struggle to understand which customer-support issues need to be resolved in a product update and also how to be more competitive in providing differentiated, value-added features.
In-product communication opens new doors. Short, context-based surveys, broken down by the specific serial number, lot, location, and so on can be very revealing. And delivering a survey through the device, as opposed to a channel like phone calls, direct mail, or email, yields substantially higher completion rates.
As I wrote this post, Apple was just issuing a hardware repair notice for owners of the iPhone 6 Plus. Turns out that an early version of the smartphone included potentially faulty camera lenses, mine included, which caused blurry images.
As a user, if you didn’t hear about it in the news, you most likely wouldn’t have known there was a solution. iPhones have push notifications—Apple wrote the software and runs the service that delivers them! Why didn't I hear about the problem this way?
Apple could have alerted known users of the affected devices one by one, in a direct, personal, highly engaging manner to:
Right now, Apple still doesn't fully control its relationship with all of its customers, since phone-company retail stores sell many of its smartphones for it. But as it adds more cloud-based services and new services like the iPhone Upgrade Program, it will have more direct access to those customers—and fewer excuses for not communicating directly about problems.
While new, in-product communication also introduces a new opportunity for customer engagement and ultimately sets the stage for a new genre of customer experience. Because it’s new, we must also rethink what it takes to manage it effectively. Using an entirely new channel for customer relationship management the way we use old channels only equates to mediumism at best.
See, no matter how ambitious we get with new technology, it doesn’t matter. Without aligning with a bigger mission or vision with what we are trying to do—something that is going to matter to your customers—we are just communicating the way we always have. We are not moving in any new direction.
We may talk about the "Internet of Things," but really what matters to you is the network of humans who pay money to use your products. It’s time to move in a new direction. It’s past time to invest in customer experiences in ways that improve relationships, cultivate loyalty and advocacy, and take advantage of this new, connected world.
It’s the part of the sales process we all love. It’s when we’re finally able to tell the prospect why they should buy our product or service. It’s when we can talk about how wonderful our company is.
It’s the pitch!
And yet, so many entrepreneurs fall short when it’s time for them to pitch. They realize that presenting an effective solution isn’t easy.
It can be maddening.
You’re positive that you’re presenting your solution in the most persuasive way possible. You’ve given the most riveting case for the prospect to become a paying customer.
And you get rejected.
It feels like giving the speech of your life only to have your prospect brush it off like an annoying housefly. You ask yourself why your prospects just aren’t able to see the value in what you’re offering.
Why does this happen?
Because many entrepreneurs don’t know how to make a proper sales pitch. They haven’t yet learned how to deliver a pitch that really speaks to their prospect’s needs. They mistakenly believe that just telling the prospect how awesome their product is will suffice.
However, giving a good sales pitch doesn’t have to be difficult. If you follow the proper steps, you will find it much easier to build a compelling case for your offering.
If you master these steps, not only will you be able to get more prospects to say “yes,” you will also be able to make them feel happy about it!
Wait, hold on. We’re not talking about the pitch yet…
Why?
Because your pitch is going to fall flat if you don’t do your due diligence beforehand. Before you even think about pitching your offer, you must make sure you understand your prospect.
If you don’t have a full understanding of your prospects needs, you won’t be able to give an effective pitch. After all, you can’t tell them how your product meets their needs if you don’t know what their needs are, right?
Take your time and ask effective questions that will help you figure out what their needs are. Make sure you listen carefully so you will know how to tailor your pitch later on.
No prospect is the same, so it would be a bad idea to use the same pitch for each one. This is why you need to make sure you understand them before pitching.
Make sure you pitch according to the pain points your prospect has told you about. Even if you know there are other benefits the prospect might enjoy, focus first on what their stated needs are. This is what your prospect really cares about.
It’s even helpful to bring up the pain points they brought up earlier. You want them to feel the pain again while you’re telling them how you will alleviate that pain.
Find out how they want to feel. Do they want to feel secure? Prestigious? Less stressed? Listen carefully for any indication of emotion. You will want to address it when it’s time to present your solution.
After showing them how your product will address their pain points, then you can talk about other areas that will make their lives easier.
When you’re discussing your offering, there is one overriding factor that you must focus on in order to persuade your prospect. It’s the outcome.
What do I mean when I say “outcome?”
Simply this: you need to show your prospect what things will look like after they accept your offering. How will their life be different? What will it look like?
Many people make the mistake of assuming that their prospect will already envision the outcome just by hearing about the offering itself. It’s not true. You need to paint the picture for them. You have to show them what your offering will actually do for them.
Here’s an example:
You’re a wedding planner trying to convince a couple to hire you. Don’t focus primarily on the features that make up the service you will provide. Yes, it’s important to talk about handling the catering, decor, etc.
But what you really want to focus on is the experience you are going to provide.
In this case, your prospects want to hear about how memorable their wedding will be. They want you to tell them how great of a time their guests will have. They need to hear about how magical this event will be because of the services you will provide.
After that, you can tell them how you are going to do it. But even when you’re going into detail about your services, always bring it back to the outcome. When you’re speaking, tie each service to the outcome the customer wants.
If you want to get the sale, find out what your prospect wants to feel, then make them feel that way.
Along with showing your prospect the outcome of doing business with you, it’s also important to provide proof of your claims. You have to establish a certain level of credibility, or the prospect won’t have any reason to believe you will provide the outcomes you say you will.
If you can back up what you say, then it will be easier to get your prospect to trust you. This doesn’t sound easy, but it really doesn’t have to be difficult.
There are a few things you can do to build credibility:
When you give proof of your claims, your prospect will feel much more comfortable with the idea of doing business with you.
One of the best ways to lose a prospect is to confuse them. It’s very important to make sure that your presentation is as clear as possible.
It’s tempting to tell your prospect everything about your offer. After all, you want to make sure that they know exactly what they’re buying, right?
The problem is that if you tell your prospect too much, you run the risk of drowning them in a sea of information. That’s why being concise is so imperative.
When possible, try to limit the information to what is most relevant to your prospect’s specific situation. Frame your offering in terms of their needs are. Doing this will help you avoid overloading your prospect with too much information.
After your prospect understands how your offering addresses their pain points, then you can gradually talk about the other aspects of your offering if you want.
Believe it or not, one of the most common mistakes people make when they’re learning how to sell is forgetting to ask for the business. The go through their whole pitch and expect the prospect to buy.
When selling, you’re in the driver’s seat. You’re the one who needs to lead the interaction to its conclusion. After presenting your offering, you have to remember to ask for their order.
Before asking for the business, make sure that you address any questions or concerns. After your presentation, ask them if they have any questions. If they don’t, then go ahead and close.
Learning how to deliver a great sales pitch takes time. For entrepreneurs who are not used to selling, it can be a challenge. However, if you practice these steps, it will help you become better at persuading prospects to become customers.
Need help creating your own sales pitch? Download my free checklist to get some guidance.
During the last 12 months, I participated in three inspiring workshops–I enjoyed all of them:
All of those agile workshops used LEGO® more or less heavily as a training ground to build a “product”, for example, to practice basic Scrum techniques such as organizing and running a sprint.
So, I was building airports…
…and ski resorts:
The picture is courtesy of agile42.com
I also built a duck—the most memorable artifact in my eyes:
The duck was an amazing experience, given that the six identical pieces provided to each participant never resulted in the same duck being built twice.
I guess this approach has something to do with the huge success surrounding the LEGO® Serious Play® concept, “an innovative process designed to enhance innovation and business performance. Based on research which shows that this kind of hands-on, minds-on learning produces a deeper, more meaningful understanding of the world and its possibilities…”.
LEGO® Serious Play® has gained a lot of traction. There is by now even a certification for facilitators available – the obvious sign that corporate customers are driving the demand.
Don’t get me wrong, I think LEGO® Serious Play® is a brilliant diversification move for a toy manufacturer, particularly given the service concept included. Not just selling a kit once, but renting it repeatedly to corporate clients instead is a much more favorable business. Additionally, it is a valuable touch-point to Christmas budgets decision-makers, aka moms and dads.
However, what is bothering me utilizing LEGO® to practice agile software development processes is the following:
If an organization starts venturing out into the Agile world, the biggest challenge is always trust. To my experience, very few stakeholders are willing to entrust their personal careers to other people for the benefit of the doubt, given the magnitude of their perceived loss of control. If an organization wants be successful at the Agile transition, it all starts with the stakeholders’ belief that there will be a (also personal) return on investment for them.
And my gut feeling is that, no matter what LEGO® artifact you’ll be building during a workshop, it will always generate less trust than any clickable prototype of a new app. (See also: Gamification Is Either Infantile Or Manipulative by Steve Fenton.)
All those issues are the reason, that I won’t use LEGO® in workshops anymore. Instead, workshop participants will be building a simple, yet clickable and hence user-test ready prototype of an app with Marvel, one of the most advanced prototyping tools.
There is a good introductory video by Pablo Stanley on Marvel, that shows how easily you can build something meaningful while practicing Agile processes:
What is your opinion on LEGO®? Why would you choose it over building hands-on, clickable prototypes? Please let me know, I am curious to learn from your experience.
Trademark notice: LEGO®, the LEGO® logo, the Brick, DUPLO®, and MINDSTORMS® are trademarks of the LEGO® Group. ©2012 The LEGO® Group. (You can find further copyright information here.)
Seduction, persuading a person to yield to your advances, isn't used only in the pursuit of a love interest. Influencing others is how we get jobs and promotions, win negotiations, sell products, and gain notoriety.
In "The Art of Seduction," popular author Robert Greene explores the ruthless tactics of some of history's greatest seducers, from Cleopatra to Casanova.
We've summarized Greene's 24 rules of seduction below.
SEE ALSO: 14 habits of the most likable people
Your target should be someone "for whom you can fill a void," Greene says. Don't try to get the most out of those who are too eager to please you, because they are usually looking to get something in return; instead, find those who give subtle hints, like shyness in your presence, that they are open to your influence.
If you want to initiate a relationship with someone who would be of value to you, you risk forcing them to raise their guard if you approach them and immediately ask for something. Before making a proposal, reach out to them via a third party, or develop a neutral or friendly relationship before making it about business.
Once you've got someone hooked, give yourself an air of mystery to keep that person's interest. Don't reveal too much about your background or your intentions.
NOW WATCH: 'Shark Tank' investor reveals Mark Cuban's strategy on the show and the real drama behind the scenes
Niger is a country at peace. But a World Food Program distribution site in Torouf — a village about an hour’s drive from the city of Tahoa — seemed lifted out of a conflict zone.
Sacks of millet emblazoned with the logo of the United States Agency for International Development awaited villagers clutching yellow ration cards. Staffers from a Nigerien relief organization wrapped measuring tape around the forearms of young children, to check if their limbs were thin enough to indicate malnutrition. Food distributions like these are common sights in refugee camps. But there isn't a camp, or an active conflict, for hundreds of miles around.
Situated in the border zone between Niger's agricultural south and desert north, Torouf is a dusty collection of rectangular buildings fashioned out of tan-colored mud; its sturdiest structure is a mosque built by a Qatari charity. It’s a long 10 kilometers to the nearest secondary school. Animals wander dusty streets, and though power lines cross over the village, Torouf is virtually electricity-free.
And while it’s next to a major highway connecting Tahoa to the desert trading hub of Agadez — the so-called "uranium highway" through which the country's top mineral export is transited — there’s no market or even any roadside commerce. Vehicles rarely stop there.
Extreme hunger caused by erratic rainfallThe town and the surrounding area runs an 80% food deficit, according to the WFP. That means its inhabitants can only produce or purchase 20% of the amount needed for the population to be considered food secure. On a national level, 2.5 million of Niger’s 16 million citizens are classified as chronically food insecure.
The village, like just about all of Niger, is landlocked, semi-isolated, and dry.
"The cause of the hunger is mainly erratic and uneven rain,” Vigno Hounkanli, the spokesperson for the WFP in Niger, told Business Insider. “There’s one rainy season for the year. If it fails, that’s it. "
Over the past five decades, the three- to four-month-long rains have failed an average of once every two years in Torouf, and once out of five years nationally. And when the rains don’t fail, they can be dangerously inconsistent, coming in days-long torrents that wash away fields and villages — before disappearing for weeks or even months at a time.
"The country is always on the precipice of a failed harvest," Aaron Ashoff, the West Africa regional director for the American aid organization Samaritan's Purse, told Business Insider.
Rainfall margins are so thin that any interruption to a local water system can have alarming consequences: For instance, some of the fields near Torouf are usually fed by a seasonal stream during the rainy season, which is connected to a simple irrigation system. Villagers told Business Insider that this year, a nearby community had diverted the flow of water, threatening some of the villagers’ crops.
Irrigation is rudimentary or nonexistent. On a stretch of highway about 20 minutes down the road from Torouf, dying millet stalks yellowed by dehydration sat within eyesight of a year-round lake.
Villagers in Torouf, and in Sahiya, which Business Insider also visited with the World Food Program this past September, give an idea of how the poorest people in one of the poorest places on Earth get by. These villages are a glimpse into what markets, infrastructural investment, and targeted aid can accomplish against some of the structural causes of hunger — as well as where they fall short.
In Torouf I asked residents, all of them recipients of some form of WFP aid, what happens in the village when the rains fail.
Atiku, a 24-year-old mother of two, said that people engage in petty commerce, in the hope of earning enough money to purchase food at a market town up the road. “People will just go and look for a menial job," she said. "They’ll build mud bricks, for instance.”
Zairoua, a mother of seven, says that she’ll collect firewood for sale — a response to hunger that might explain where there are gaps of hundreds of feet between the few remaining trees in Torouf. She might need the extra income this year, as she’s worried her two hectares of crops could fail.
“Millet is dying in the field, before we can harvest it,” she said.
A place like Torouf often can’t support even a basic consumer economy — sometimes there just aren’t buyers for firewood or bricks. So villagers will migrate. They’ll go to Tahoua or Agadez to find domestic jobs, or to more prosperous neighboring communities. Libya was even a migration option, before that country’s collapse.
Mass internal migration could cause social and economic turbulence in areas unprepared for new arrivals — which is one reason the WFP emphasizes migration prevention as one of the benefits of its work. In lean times, the people who stay sometimes have to go into debt to obtain the cash needed to buy food. Households who own animals may be forced to sell them. In dire situations, villagers told Business Insider they gather leaves or berries from the wild.
WFP studies has found that it takes communities three years of sustained assistance to make it back to the conditions preceding a food shock. An 80% food deficit qualifies as such a shock. Torouf will need years of outside aid just to avoid slipping into an even more serious crisis.
Sahiya, a village which Business Insider also toured with the World Food Program, is far from the nearest paved road. It's an hour down a broad, clay highway, then another hour down a dirt track about the width of a four-by-four. Most people traverse these roads in beaten-down pickup trucks overstuffed with cargo and passengers, on donkey carts, or even on camel-back.
From the air, places like Sahiya are suggested only by faint, sandpaper-green rectangles of millet crop, or the convergence of dusty cattle paths. From ground-level, teardrop-domed millet silos trace the outline of low hills.
By September, their supplies start to run low. "This is the rainy season. It is also called ‘hunger season,’” says Hounkanli. “Silos are going empty. People have finished their stocks."
Despite its distance from the nearest paved road or power line, Sahiya’s 40% food deficit is less severe than in Torouf, which sits along a major highway. The town has a huge built-in advantage: It’s right next to a sizable year-round lake.
The community supports herds of dozens of heads of cattle and has even set up irrigation systems with the help of international donors. It’s in a wetter area than Torouf. The air is sauna-like even on a breezy and slightly overcast day. But water alone isn’t enough to solve food insecurity issues.
The WFP gives cash and food assistance to 413 households in Sahiya, reaching some 23% of the area’s population. The UN agency also runs a program called Cash for Assets, where villagers receive food or monetary assistance in exchange for clearing land for agricultural use.
In a field outside Sayiha, millet plants grow out of hundreds of semi-circular trenches, dotting an area that used to be a rocky wasteland. Rain collects at the bottom of the shallow, fertilizer-lined pods, which the WFP calls “half-moons.”
The half-moons allow the village to grow out its agricultural capacity. There are 100 acres of them in Sayiha alone. But the margins of daily life are so precarious that without WFP-provided cash or food to compensate for the time and energy lost on infrastructural upgrades, the villagers would sooner migrate than dedicate hundreds of hours to rehabilitating land.
As in Torouf, migration is on a lot of people’s minds. When asked what she would do in the event of a failed harvest, one woman told Business Insider that she would take her five children and leave town by foot, naming another village some 60 miles away as her destination. Alassane Saidou of the Nigerien NGO Action Le Bein Etra told Business Insider that a majority of Sahiya's population left during a particularly bad 2010 drought.
A villager named Zaina explained how difficult life could be in Sayiha even in years where the rains don’t fail. She pays a landlord 20,000 West African Francs, or $38 to rent a hectare of land for one six-month agricultural season. She’s had this leasing arrangement for 11 years. With unpredictable rains and eight children to support, she’s had to take out a loan to pay her landlord in four of them. Insects are devouring her crop this year, so she thinks she’ll have to go into debt again.
Sayiha’s distance from major roads has a distorting effect on the area’s fragile economy. The nearest marketplace is 25 kilometers away, a far enough distance by foot or donkey cart that vegetables and even livestock can degrade in quality during the trip.
“Market access is the first issue people will raise with us,” Saidou told Business Insider. “Even if you have produce like tomatoes or cabbage, there’s no means to take it to the market to sell.”
Wholesalers sometimes make it to Sayiha, but they sell at inflated prices. If residents can’t grow enough to feed their household, they have to have money on hand, which means they need some level of participation in a cash economy in a place with no electricity or paved roads, and where a typical farm is a subsistence-sized two or three hectares.
Herders, or farmers who happen to own animals, have it a little better off. Sahiya’s cattle market is directly behind a school compound where the WFP distributions take place. Herders and buyers carry on lively negotiations next to baying sheep tethered to wooden stakes. A sheep can go for around 50,000 CFA, or $90 — which is three times the rent that a subsistence farmer might pay to a landlord for a single hectare during an entire six-month agricultural season.
But as one local relief agency staffer explained to me, a single sheep doesn’t carry the same equivalent value as a season’s worth of crops from three hectares. When someone sells an animal, they’re liquidating assets for a one-time payoff, and reducing their ability to breed additional livestock.
The realities of survival negate any prospect of a real market economy. That’s the way it is country-wide. As researcher and West Africa expert Tommy Miles told Business Insider, “Niger is not fully integrated into the capitalist world, and is thus incredibly vulnerable.” Most people in Sahiya don't have a reliable monthly income. If their crops fail, there's no labor market to create alternative jobs for them.
Niger has an export trade in ground nuts, onions, petroleum, and uranium. But most people in the country are permanently mired in a subsistence economy that’s in constant danger of collapse. And the root problems could get more complicated as the population climbs. At the current birth rate of over 7 children per woman, the country is projected to have over 50 million citizens by mid-century.
There have been some notable improvements in development in recent decades, including a dramatic drop in the infant mortality rate over the last 20 years, Aaron Ashoff of Samaritan's Purse notes. Even with things gradually getting better, the country still faces a huge, fundamental question.
"How do you build a sustainable economy here that can support people through perennial droughts?" Ashoff asks.
A very small fraction of the population can afford to accumulate or invest in the long-term when there are such steep structural factors — water, geography, and population growth chief among them — getting in the way of basic survival.
Even assuming there isn’t a security crisis that dominates the government’s attention and resources, it might take decades to build the roads, schools, power plants, irrigation systems, and telecommunications networks needed to really change things. And by then, Niger will be a thirstier and more populous country — and its problems could be even more urgent and difficult to solve.
Armin Rosen reported from Niger on a fellowship from the International Reporting Project.
SEE ALSO: An oil dispute in Niger exposes big problems with Chinese investment in Africa
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NOW WATCH: This animated map shows how humans migrated across the globe
After nine years of working with companies on sales messaging, I have found the number one inhibitor to salespeople articulating value is they don’t create enough contrast between the ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures of owning their product. And when salespeople fail to make the contrast feel concrete, customers can’t see the value, so it just feels like magic.
Salespeople, for instance, fail to create contrast when they only offer superficial reasons to change such as the customer’s current system lacks timeliness or is prone to error. And, when you ask salespeople what they mean by the customer’s system lacks timeliness, they push back, because they don’t have an explanation. You discover they may have product knowledge, but only limited knowledge of their customers.
Without clearly articulating ‘the hell if the customer doesn’t buy their product,’ the salesperson hasn’t set up the need for ‘the heaven if the customer does buy their product.’ Without setting up a clear contrast, salespeople are just trying to rescue customers who are only ankle deep in problems. As a result, customers stick with the status quo or they buy at a discount, because they don’t see the value of change. With 42% of B2B sales opportunities ending in no decision, selling change is a big part of articulating value.
Customers are not ready to believe in the viability of the salesperson’s product until they realise they are out in the middle of the lake drowning in problems. This will only happen when the salesperson makes the contrast feel tangible by making it concrete. Otherwise, the contrast is abstract; it doesn’t feel real. The salesperson is just asking the customer to take his or her word that the product creates value. It’s like magic in a fairy tale.
To sell change, the salesperson must specifically show how the customer’s current system/platform/product isn’t working optimally today. Once the customer can see this, it’s easy for them to understand how they can improve their results with the salesperson’s product. What was once imaginary becomes reality, because the customer can picture it in their head.
Naturally, salespeople first try to make their message general because they believe it will then appeal to a wider audience. What they find is it appeals to no one, because it’s abstract. However, when the before word picture is specific and concrete, the customer may say their situation is slightly different, but at least they get it. It’s counterintuitive that the universality of the salesperson’s message is found in the specificity of the “before” picture.
For example, I was working with a salesperson who wanted to encourage a client to move their Learning Management System from their ERP system to the cloud. The salesperson first attempt at articulating the ‘hell if they don’t move to the cloud’ was: “innovation had made Ellen’s corporate Learning Management System out of step with how employees expected to consume information, because she only received quarterly updates three times a decade when the ERP system was updated.” But I couldn’t picture in in my head how the Learning Management System was out of step with how employees expect to consume information. So I asked the salesperson to be more concrete by providing a specific example, and she said: “To access a course, for example, employees had to click on a link that would then take them to the homepage for learning, only to then be forced to search through a maze of information for the required course. No wonder drop offs were so high.” Although this specific example may be different for the targeted customer, at least they can now visualize the problem, and retrieve their own example of how their current system hinders their results today.
So, if you want your salespeople to make the value of your product feel real, instead of like magic, ask them to share a customer story highlighting one of your unique capabilities. Because a customer story presents a clear before and after picture of owning your product, if it is out of focus, the knowledge gaps of your salespeople will be exposed. The picture, for example, will be vague: 1) when they gloss over the before picture, and then prematurely rush to rescue the customer with your product, or 2) when they fail to make the before picture real by specifically showing how the customer’s current system/platform/product isn’t working today. If you can’t picture it clearly in your head, it will feel like magic to the customer.
This narrative approach avoids flabby thinking. The CEO of Amazon adopted it “because the narrative structure… forces better thought and better understanding… Power point style presentations somehow give permission to gloss over ideas, flatten out any sense of relative importance, and ignore the interconnectedness of ideas.”
If your salespeople are not providing context, then aren’t they just presenting your product and hoping that the customer can figure out how they will use it, or even worse, care?
Imagine if selling was so simple that all you had to do was create five to ten top stories, and then have your salespeople deliver them to engage customers better and drive more sales. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work for the following three reasons: 1) every customer is slightly different, so the salesperson must adapt the stories to suit the customer’s unique situation; 2) salespeople are more likely to adopt new sales messaging if they are involved in creating it, and; 3) salespeople need to know what a bad story is before they can appreciate a good story.
To help your salespeople better articulate value, we suggest you split your salespeople up into five to eight groups to create and then deliver customer stories. The group can then hear a story that pops, one that flops, and a few in the middle. Once your salespeople learn how to brainstorm on how they can improve each other’s stories, the quality of the edited stories will improve by at least two times. But more important, when one flops, you will see the group physically recoil in disgust, because they have internalized what good feels like.
So imagine what would happen if you could double the ability of your salespeople to articulate value? Could you then increase sales? According to a survey by SiriusDecision, sales leaders for the past four years in a row have said that the number one barrier preventing salespeople from achieving quota is their inability to articulate value. And, according to a recent survey of executive buyers by Gartner, customers agree. Only 34% of executive buyers, for example, feel that salespeople can articulate value, because most of them talk too much about their product. The survey concludes that salespeople will better articulate value when they talk less about their product and instead share customer stories. Seventy percent of these executive buyers, for example, felt that “customer stories and case studies are the best way that providers can communicate differentiation that I trust.” These customer scenarios also help counteract customer biases (see article “The Status Quo- Why Customers Deviate From Rational Economic Behaviour).
With so much riding on your sales team’s ability to articulate value, ask yourself if your salespeople can make the value of your product feel real, or does it sound like magic to the customer?
Arm your salespeople with relationship intelligence so they can close more deals. Learn more about SalesforceIQ by downloading the free e-book.
REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch
Since the federal election campaign began, the Conservatives have emphasized the strength of Canada’s job market—particularly, how it’s performed since the end of the recession relative to other countries—as a key element of their re-election pitch to voters.
But talking about the job market in aggregate, whether it’s the unemployment rate, job growth or wage gains, fails to capture all the moving parts. Some did wildly better than others, both in job gains and what they got paid. Here’s what the past nine or so years under the Harper government looked like. (On mobile, tap to open in a new window, then zoom in to explore.)
(Update: The occupations in the chart reflect the broad occupational classifications used by Statistics Canada in reporting wages and employment. Not all specific occupations are listed. For instance, journalists are a sub-category of culture, recreation and sport.)
Hands-down, the hardest-hit occupation was senior managers, with the number of jobs in that occupation down a whopping 43 per cent, while real (inflation-adjusted) average weekly wages were down three per cent. (Don’t pity them too much; they’re still the highest-paid, with an average weekly wage that’s twice the average of all other occupations.) We looked at the phenomenon of the disappearing boss in Canada earlier this year. As battered as that group was, though, the pain was contained: It is the smallest occupation category of the lot, accounting for around 40,000 jobs.
On the other end of the spectrum, contractors and supervisors in trades and transportation absolutely crushed it, enjoying the highest employment gains and finding themselves among the top three increases in paycheques.
A few other thoughts. The strongest real wage gains were in “occupations unique to the primary industry” (natural resources). That shouldn’t come as a surprise, given the oil and gas boom in Alberta that lasted through much of the Harper years. However, the number of people employed in that occupation was up just two per cent. That reflects the steep declines the industry suffered during Harper Recession I, as well as the fresh round of layoffs that occurred in Harper Recession II.
As for the other track of Canada’s two-track economy, the manufacturing sector, its pain shows up in the decline in the number of jobs and the tiny wage gains.
Which occupations were closest to the average?
In wage gains, which increased by an average of nine per cent, four occupations hit that bang-on: professional occupations in health, retail salespersons, clerical occupations and chefs/cooks.
When it came to employment growth, transport and equipment operators matched the average increase of 11 per cent.
In case you’re wondering, here is the latest count for the number of jobs in each occupation (with their full classification title).
| Number of jobs (000s) | Average weekly wage ($) | |
| Clerical occupations, including supervisors | 1,597.7 | 751.15 |
| Sales and service occupations not elsewhere classified, including occupations in travel and accommodation, attendants in recreation and sport, as well as supervisors | 1,400.9 | 484.98 |
| Natural and applied sciences and related occupations | 1,279.2 | 1,357.83 |
| Retail salespersons, sales clerks, cashiers, including retail trade supervisors | 1,106.6 | 466.37 |
| Other management occupations | 924.2 | 1,576.07 |
| Other trades occupations | 832.5 | 1,085.09 |
| Occupations in social science, government service and religion | 781.6 | 988.77 |
| Financial, secretarial and administrative occupations | 774.8 | 865.68 |
| Machine operators and assemblers in manufacturing, including supervisors | 646.1 | 858.57 |
| Technical, assisting and related occupations in health | 639.6 | 810.98 |
| Teachers and professors | 626.1 | 1,243.2 |
| Chefs and cooks, and occupations in food and beverage service, including supervisors | 620.2 | 457.46 |
| Transport and equipment operators | 549.5 | 1,014.12 |
| Professional occupations in health, nurse supervisors and registered nurses | 506.6 | 1,238.56 |
| Professional occupations in business and finance | 488.2 | 1,356.37 |
| Occupations in art, culture, recreation and sport | 453.8 | 810.42 |
| Trades helpers, construction, and transportation labourers and related occupations | 405.2 | 763.88 |
| Wholesale, technical, insurance, real estate sales specialists, and retail, wholesale and grain buyers | 394.6 | 1,069.43 |
| Occupations unique to primary industry | 351.3 | 949.91 |
| Construction trades | 324.6 | 1,049.84 |
| Occupation in protective services | 276.7 | 1,038.28 |
| Contractors and supervisors in trades and transportation | 168.9 | 1,365.7 |
| Labourers in processing, manufacturing and utilities | 153.2 | 672.82 |
| Childcare and home support workers | 129.1 | 522.55 |
| Senior management occupations | 37.7 | 1,609.87 |
The post The jobs that won—and lost—in the Harper years appeared first on Macleans.ca.
Mobile e-commerce is a huge part of our lives now. From Etsy to eBay to Amazon to Groupon, you can bet that there is an app for that. You can buy pretty much anything from the comfort of your own couch. Generally, when we talk about mobile e-commerce, the focus is on retail. Today I’d like to turn the spotlight onto B2B, with the help of this handy infographic from Usablenet.
The numbers for B2B e-commerce market may be a little bigger than you thought; it’s estimated to hit $780 billion this year, rising to $1.1 trillion by 2020. Those are definitely some attention-grabbing digits. So it’s no wonder that so many B2B businesses are investing in e-commerce technology to try to grab a piece of that pie. By 2019, wholesalers and manufacturers will account for 30% of the total spending on this technology, while online retailers trail behind at 28%. This is a big change from 2013, when retailers and B2B companies stood at 41% and 20%, respectively. The money spent on mobile marketing has risen too. Over half of B2B marketers have mobile marketing strategies, and almost all planned to spend as much or more this year.
Clearly, B2B marketers are buying-in. But how do the numbers look on the sales side?
94% of B2B buyers do at least a little research online before taking the plunge on business purchases. Of those aged 18-25, 55% use their phones to research. So do 36% of those aged 45. It’s important to make sure that your B2B sites are optimized for mobile use. In fact, over half of B2B e-commerce executives say that there are some customers that can only be profitably supported online.
Are you making more room for mobile marketing and e-commerce technologies in your budget? Can we find your mobile purchasing app in the App Store, or are you holding back and wondering about the ROI? Let us know in the comments.
Sales proposals that is.
A great proposal won’t win you the business on its own. But a poor proposal can undo a lot of the work done up to that point, or even cost you the deal. Here are four considerations to make sure your proposal ends in “yes”.
1. Prove you understand
People view major buying decisions with anxiety.You can reduce anxiety and minimize any perception of risk by demonstrating that you understand their problems, issues, needs, opportunities, objectives, or values. Whatever is driving the client’s interest, show that you understand it and have based your solution on it. After all, you wouldn’t suggest marriage after just the first date; it’s likely there have been conversations around shared goals and common plans – you both have an understanding of what a future union would entail.
2. Have a Plan
Where will you live? Are kids in the future? If those future plans aren’t clear, there may be some hesitation to say “yes”. Yet, surprisingly most sales proposals don’t contain a solution recommendation at all, and merely just describe products or services. Instead, offer a recommendation that explicitly links the features of your product or service to the client’s needs to show how the client will obtain positive results.
3. Be Uniquely You.
This is your value proposition. Remember you may write a proposal that is completely compliant with the customer’s requirements, that recommends the right solution, that even offers the lowest price, and still lose. Why? Because a competitor made a stronger case that their approach offered something that happened to matter more to the customer. Would you want to enter a marriage with the feeling that there are plenty of other fish in the sea? It’s unlikely; make sure your sales proposal stands apart with your unique value.
4. Trust.
You want to show the substantiating evidence that answers the question: “Can they really do this?” Stay focused on the areas the customer cares about with evidence like case studies, references, testimonials, and CV’s of key personnel. Just like in marriage, there must be mutual trust in the other for a happy, fruitful relationship – make sure your proactive proposal achieves that.
The role of the sales proposal in today’s buyer-centric world has become increasingly important. Proposals, as with all sales documents, must align with buyers’ decision making criteria as well as differentiate you from the ever growing competitors. You may be convinced of a happy marriage in the future, but first, get your proposal to end in “yes”.
The best time to send an email depends on your recipient. Do generalization about the time of day, or the day of the week affect how many recipients open emails? Absolutely.
There are quite a few reports claiming that emails sent Monday-Friday have higher open rates. However, this largely applies to business-related content, whereas consumer content does considerably better on the weekends.
When deciding the best time to send an email, it has less to do with your content and more to do with who is receiving your content. Business related content will do well before recipients go to work, but if you’re targeting college students it’s most likely to be read during class!
If you’re looking to optimize a batch email campaign, such as a newsletter, then here are some reports you’ll find interesting:
Email remarketing campaigns adjust to each recipient individually. If you’re able to send one-to-one remarketing emails, you’re guaranteed to see your open rates go through the roof. Rather than applying the same send time to every one in a specific demographic or segment, email remarketing campaigns identify the best time to send an email for each specific person.
Different Types of ReMarketing Emails
Before we discuss the best time to send an email to an individual, it’s important to understand the different circumstances that allow an individual user to be targeted.
Potential customers that abandon during checkout are the best candidates to receive a remarketing email. They have shown major interest; they have not only added the product into their cart, but began the checkout process. If checkout abandonment is a new term to you, check out our article ‘Checkout Abandonment is Not Shopping Cart Abandonment.‘
Sending remarketing emails to checkout abandoners is highly effective. Offering checkout abandoners discounts and promotions can be the motivating factor that wins the conversion to with already interested shopper.
You can reconnect with these potential customers by utilizing a real-time lead collection tool. Upsellit’s PreCapture technology gathers email information, without requiring a submit page.
Say you run a brick and mortar store: you recognize a shopper who had previously visited and you let them know about current promotions and deals. This would strengthen your relationship with the customer. Treat your E-commerce relationship with the same kindness! Recognizing and emailing a returning shopper who left without purchasing can strengthen trust while reinforcing your brand.
Upsellit’s Visitor ID® technology will identify this returning shopper who provided an email address in the past. Upon abandonment, the shopper will receive personalized email messages with targeted incentives and relevant information. Establishing a connection in an email relationship with your customer is beneficial and will increase conversions.
There is no better potential conversion than somebody that knows and loves your brand. Targeting these customers is highly beneficial, keeping your brand top of mind and connected with your customer.
The Best Time for Your 1st ReMarketing Email
The best time to send your first remarketing email is within the first hour. Some marketers say, ‘the sooner the better,’ however, if your user is still browsing – and wants to return to your website – a premature email can do more harm than good.
Studies show that 90% of ecommerce leads go stale after the first hour. A remarketing email sent within an hour of abandonment is optimal; the user is likely still browsing online, maybe doing some price comparison with your competitors, so reaching out to this potential customer while they are still considering making a purchase will reap strong rewards.
Your 2nd ReMarketing Email
If your first email message doesn’t land a conversion, it doesn’t hurt to try again. The best time to send a second email is 24 or 48 hours after abandonment. 72% of buyers who do convert after abandoning their cart, do so after 24 hours.
Sending your second remarketing email exactly 24 or 48 hours after abandonment aligns with a customer’s browsing pattern. Targeting the customer around the same time that they had been online, viewing your product, the day before is excellent. You know that they were browsing online that same time- so likely, a promotion sent at the same time of day will trigger a conversion response.
The second remarketing email is a great time to include incentives. Including incentives earlier than this can nurture a sense of discount expectancy and is more likely to give something away before it’s really needed.
Your 3rd ReMarketing Email
The last email of a typical 3 email series is optimally sent 72 or 96 hours after the initial abandon. This time frame is enough time – but not too much time – to remind the potential customer of your brand. Escalating incentives is strongly advised here; reel your customer back in with an exclusive offer! Time-sensitive and exclusive language is a strong strategy for the last email of a remarketing email series. This is the last chance (final opportunity!) for your potential customer to get this great, exclusive deal.
Sending the 4th Email – And Beyond
While exceeding 3 remarketing emails isn’t for everyone, some marketers suggest sending an email up to SIX weeks after abandonment! Different products have different purchase cycles; it’s important to know who your audience is, but even more so if you are going to send more than three emails.
However, with remarketing emails, the best time to send an email is when the customer is most interested. A dynamically tailored series of emails starting within an hour after abandonment and continues in 24 hour increments is the strongest approach. It could be any day or time of the week: the series of emails will be triggered by that customer’s personal browsing habits.
Is your website fading into oblivion? It could be because of your poor content marketing strategy. There are countless examples of legendary marketing fails and more often than not, content is to be blamed.
From ad placement fails to grammar and spelling errors, an ineffective content strategy can kill your business in more than one way, often by damaging the flow of traffic to your website as well as sales conversions.
Even B2B and service-based industries are often found guilty of making grim content marketing mistakes, although they commit a different kind of crime. When it comes to content marketing strategies, B2B tend to underdo it. Most businesses don’t have a content strategy, and those few who have one in place, often do it wrong.
The Internet is filled with examples of content marketing faux-pas. And some of them will simply ruin your reputation and affect your website traffic and conversion rates negatively, which in turn can harm your business.
In order to be successful, you need to gain new clients and expand your relationship with existing ones. And content is often the way to do it. What you need is valuable, consistent, and relevant content that can influence buyer behavior in a positive way.
But to do so, you need to first avoid making common content marketing mistakes. Instead, use your content to gain credibility, paving the way to new business.
The following are 5 content marketing faux-pas you need to avoid.
Keywords are important, especially when it comes to being visibility in search engine results. But you can no longer stuff keywords unnecessarily and illogically into your content. In fact, Google has a strict policy and a ‘zero tolerance’ about keyword-stuffing and severely penalize websites following such practices.
So instead of stuffing your content with irrelevant keywords, you need to use keywords or keyword phrases that are directly relevant to the topic. The goal is not to overuse them as they must appear naturally within the content and not in a promotional manner.
When it comes to content marketing, one of the rules of thumb is to create high quality, interesting content. Whatever you are posting, be it a blog, article, video, image or infographic, it must be useful to the target audience and deliver engaging information. In short, your content must be compelling.
But creating content can be time-consuming. One solution to this problem? Repurpose your content. Done correctly, repurposing content can ease the strain on your resources. The problem is that many firms don’t execute on this technique effectively.
It can be difficult to disguise repackaged content as a fresh and unique piece, unless you have something really valuable to add.
For example, it is acceptable to refer to a post that has been published previously and build your case in favor or against the statement. In this case, you are adding something valuable (your opinion) and a fresh approach, making the content your own.
Incorporate a fresh outlook to your blog posts and articles to become an industry leader. Discuss the latest trends, the market pushes and pulls, and things that interest people. Use proper data and facts to support your points and arguments. Become a thought leader, an influencer in your domain.
Your content should be a combination of research, reporting, presentation and editorial woven together seamlessly.
Do you have a stagnant company blog? You aren’t alone. This is a continual problem for firms of all sizes. While a good rule of thumb to follow is updating your blog with fresh content at least once a week, the key here is consistency.
While Google and other major search engine penalize websites for plagiarism and other black-hat SEO practices, they also reward sites that regularly post new and relevant information with better and higher ranking on SERPs.
Fresh educational blog content is a great way to gain organic searches and get traffic from search engines, social media and other sources.
What are the goals of your content marketing efforts? Do you want to educate people about your services or increase brand awareness? Is it aimed to drive more traffic and generate sales leads? Or to improve your client retention and drive upsell?
The goals of content marketing are far reaching and therefore, it is essential for you to have a clear understanding of your objectives.
We really can’t believe anyone is actually committing this faux-pas, but unfortunately, many firms are. You need to integrate social media into your content marketing strategies.
Social media networks are your pool for resources to find compeling ideas as well as to create an engaged community. Professional services firms should, at a minimum, be building their LinkedIn and Twitter presence.
Your content marketing goals must be aligned with your social media strategies. Add social media buttons on your website and manage and share your posts via social media management dashboards.
You need to pay attention to create high-quality content that is interesting, insightful and engaging. And of course, it must be free of grammar and spelling errors as they can ruin your reputation and credibility in the long haul. All piece of content that you put out is an extension and representation of your firm’s brand — so make it count.
In 2000, I attended my first sales kickoff at Yahoo!. Our company (broadcast.com) had been purchased by them, and I had just moved to California to lead a sales-enablement/swat team. Little did I know at the time, but this kickoff event would change my life.
Usually, you'd think that the kickoff's purpose was to introduce new products, arm us with new tools and motivate us to hit the phones or bricks when we got home. But in this case, a single piece of advice changed everything. "Make some friends in unusual places," our Chief Sales & Marketing Officer Anil Singh told me. "Make our international managing directors feel at home. Huddle with the content development guests we've invited -- get outside of your circle." He explained that these relationships I'd force at sales conference would later be important as I worked with global brands on big deals where they needed all of Yahoo!'s capabilities brought to the table.
From the moment I stepped on the kickoff hotel's property, I shook hands and made friends. My new contacts included managing directors from Yahoo Japan, Italy, Korea, Brazil, Canada and United Kingdom. They were easy to engage with, and told me about promotions and products they'd built for their clients. Many of them were news to me! I sought out our non-sales guests, especially those we frequently relied on for post-contract delivery. I told them I wanted to understand more about how their groups worked, so I could pursue revenue but not create problems for them. At first, they filled my ear with concerns about various programs we were selling, but by the end of conference, they were suggesting new ways we could help our advertisers without compromising the user experience.
Over the next few years, these relationships were rocket fuel for our deals with global brands such as Sony, HSBC and Toyota. Because I'd developed relationships with international and non-sales leads at kickoff, I knew more about how they could drive a global relationship. Our post-conference conversations built up enough trust so that we could bring them into the sales process early, so they could help us tailor the global deal to each regions unique way of doing business. When I was promoted to Chief Solutions Officer, I looked back at the 2000 sales conference as my launch point.
If you are in business-to-business sales, you'll likely attend a kickoff early next year or Spring. Don't miss out on the opportunity to network and create a solutions web for future clients. The more you know about your company's total capabilities and the unique facets of each market it serves, the better you'll do at creating winning recipes for your customers. Here are some rules of the road for sales kickoff networking:
1. Set A Goal - I decided that I would connect with at least 10 new people during the 3 day kickoff. Having that goal kept me focused on adding at least three people to my network each day. Create your goal based on the unique strategy of your sales organization. If you are focused on global selling, focus on connecting with international attendees. If improving delivery is the goal, focus on connecting with non-sales leads. If sales collaboration is the priority, meet account execs and managers in other markets or product categories.
2. Go Outside Of Your Work Group - You see these colleagues every day, so don't be lazy and hang with them for convenience at kickoff. When you eat, find a new group to join. During breaks, look for friendly but unfamiliar faces. Think wide.
3. Establish Common Ground - During your encounters, seek out connection points. The best ones are common customers, common sales challenges (product/industry) or common sales opportunities. Don't be afraid to connect at the personal interest level either. I've connected over my love of World Cup or electronic music to open up the discussion...usually leading to frank work related conversations.
4. Contract - Strike up some agreement for post-kickoff follow up. It could be information sharing or a conference call based on the business common ground you've established. Don't let new contacts end with the conference. (Now that we all carry smart phones, it's easy to share contacts or simply take a picture of someone's badge or business card for follow up later.)
5. Follow Up - Send a note after you get home, keep any promises you've made and schedule a future time to reconnect. Putting a process around internal networking ensures that you keep the first burning and establish credibility. If you've been told about a concern that needs support or attention, be the messenger and marshal resources ... especially if you work at headquarters and have access to internal influencers and power brokers.
6. Expand From This Base Of New Contacts Over the Coming Year - Ask your new contacts, "Who else should I meet and spend time with?" You'd be surprised at how many introductions they will make, sometimes over email or conference calls. Whatever goal you set for kickoff, add a zero to that number for the networking you'll do over the coming year. The more you grow this circle, the better you'll be able to serve your customers.
The sales kickoff is important beyond any education or product introductions that happen there. They can be the social operating system of a sales driven organization, where loose ends are tied and a company truly comes together as a customer-focused team. Don't waste the opportunity to expand your network ... because it drives your company's net worth!
In 1839, a young photographer by the name of Robert Cornelius took a portrait of himself outside of the family store. It was the first known photographic portrait of a human and it would later be dubbed as the first known selfie.
Fast forward to 2013. Several advancements in photography (Polaroids, digital cameras, and front-facing camera phones) combined with social media and the ease of sharing your beautiful mugshot with the world has spawned a new obsession. In 2013, the Oxford English dictionary officially defined a selfie as “a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website.” In the same year, selfies had become so popular that the word itself wasn’t just recognized as a new word in the English language, it was also named Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year.
While posing for a quick snapshot of yourself from flattering angles, with pouty lips and flexed muscles, then sharing it with a nonchalant caption like “Just waitin’ in line for my smoothie” is fun (uh…from what I’ve heard), the novelty may have worn off for those on the receiving end of selfies – friends, family, and colleagues. Studies show that sharing too many selfies can damage relationships, but it doesn’t take much science to see that people are annoyed by selfies. Simply do a Google search for something like “selfies are…” and see what Google suggests next. The suggestions I got were “stupid”, “vain”, and “narcissistic.”
The fact is simply this: egotistical selfies are off-putting.
I give this brief history of selfies to propose an analogy. Consider the marketing messages you send to prospects and customers every day such as emails, cold calls, advertisements, etc. Just like my (uh…I mean my friends’) duck-faced photos of narcissism annoy most people, could it be that consumers are annoyed by brands who are essentially doing the same thing with their products or services?
A brand selfie is an off-putting advertisement or marketing message that completely ignores the target audience’s needs or interests. In an attempt to sell, sell, sell, brands often talk at their audience with messages that essentially say “look how good our products are” – which can be offputting. Why? Because consumers are probably not interested in your products or services (or at least not yet). Before evaluating brands and their solutions, consumers go through a process of defining the problems they have, considering various ways they could solve those problems and over time the process eventually leads up to product or service comparison. A company’s in-your-face “brand selfie” about products or services will often be ignored by those that aren’t ready to evaluate solutions yet. It interrupts their process and can annoy them if it comes across as a desperate attempt for attention – especially when several other competing brands are doing the same thing in a crowded industry. Wouldn’t it be better to cut through the noise and stand out as a brand that values a relationship with its customers?
A brandshare study by Edelman, the world’s largest PR firm, showed that nearly 90% of consumers want more meaningful relationships with brands, yet 70% of consumers feel that brands have a self-centered desire to increase profits. Brands that use inbound marketing to reach their audience, instead of interruption marketing, start building relationships with their potential customers early on in the buyer journey by focusing on them. They take the time to identify prospects’ needs. They help prospects thoroughly understand the problems they face and the types of solutions that are out there for them by providing educational content such as blog articles, tip sheets, whitepapers, case studies, etc. As a result, they do a better job of connecting with their audience and guiding them through the buyer’s journey until they’re ready to speak with a sales rep.
Sure, touting solutions to a database of cold contacts could drive some business (just like some selfies will get attention) but wouldn’t it be better (in both scenarios) to build genuine relationships by providing things people actually care about or are interested in? Wouldn’t a lead that values your content and trusts your brand be more valuable to your sales team, than a lead who’s just comparing product features?
Of course, sooner or later, there’s a good time for discussing product features, giving a sales pitch, and taking the occasional selfie – just not too often and probably not when starting a conversation. When it comes to your marketing keep your audience in mind, consider the message you want your brand to send to new prospects and ask yourself, “Am I sending a brand selfie?”
Have you ever noticed that the hardest working salespeople don’t always put up the best numbers?
At my first sales job, I was always the first in the door and usually the last out. As a Sales Development Rep (making cold calls), I brought in the most leads every single month. After a promotion to Account Executive, I worked even harder. I worked longer hours and had a better win rate than the other AE, but somehow he consistently brought in 50% more revenue than me.
After two months of struggling to meet quota, the other AE pulled me aside and explained exactly what I was doing wrong. I’m paraphrasing here:
“Salespeople are hunters. A lion that chases every animal she sees will starve. If you split your time evenly between every deal in your pipeline, you’ll starve, too. You have to learn to prioritize.”
But what’s the best way to prioritize?
The answer is simple: Do the math.
A bit of arithmetic will help you decide how much time to invest in each deal. The math is slightly different for everyone—depending on quota structure, sales cycle, and contract value—but this equation is a good starting point.
Protip: There is no need to prioritize if you have enough time for all the deals in your pipeline. Also, the math is different if your quota is monthly but your sales cycle is longer than a month or two.
Here’s what you’ll need to know to do the math (with example numbers added for clarity):
Once you have this information, you can estimate the number of hours to spend on each deal. Here are a couple of examples:
TCV: $10,000
Chance of Closing: 60%
Projected Value: $6,000 (TCV x Win Rate)
Value of 1 Hour: $400
Budgeted Hours: 15
TCV: $15,000
Chance of Closing: 30%
Projected Value: $5,000 (TCV x Win Rate)
Value of 1 Hour: $400
Budgeted Hours: 12.5
Conclusion: Do not go over the number of budgeted hours you’ve calculated for each deal. Don’t chase every animal you see!
Doing the math is easy. Having the discipline to consistently prioritize according to the data is not. One thing that all great salespeople have in common is strong time management and the ability to accurately prioritize their pipeline.
Next time you are unsure where to focus your time and energy, this simple exercise can mean the difference between spinning your wheels and smashing your quota.
Every decision your customer makes consists of many conscious and subconscious emotions. The key to success in any business is an understanding of psychology and human behaviour.
We all have the same basic mental triggers and needs that drive action. If we understand these psychological triggers, we can craft more effective marketing messages and increase sales.
Below is an introduction to 7 important psychological and emotional triggers that can increase your sales, backed up with examples and further reading.
Human nature gives most people a strong desire to belong to something; a group, a clan, a gang, a family, or a social network. Call it what you will, but very often customers purchase goods and services to show and feel a sense of belonging to their chosen ‘thing’…be it real, or fabricated.
They even carry out some highly illogical activities just to feel accepted.
We are not rational beings. That is for sure.
And yes, this post could likely be littered with Fight Club quotes, but I’ll leave it at just this ‘meme’.
Sport is a great place to see the psychology of belonging in action.
Image source: Celso FLORES, flickr
From the World Cup to local sporting events. Fans come together in union, waving banners and flags, dressed in their team colours.
Today’s fans are driven by an emotional connection to their team through deep-seated personal motivators. That connection (whether you call it a “desire to belong” or even “purpose”) is equal parts a reflection of self and team.
The importance of a sense of belonging can be traced back to infancy, where researchers have studied skin-to-skin contact between babies and their parents. What researchers found is that when combined with a strong emotional engagement, a baby’s developmental growth and recognition of self increases significantly. This in turn, decreases the chances of experiencing loneliness and depression in future life.
Throughout the rest of our developmental years and life cycle, a sense of belonging also targets a positive increase in many other areas of our lives. Intellectual levels, social skills, mental health, physical health and motivation are just some of the many areas that are improved when we live with a sense of belonging.
Queueing for the iPhone 5, West Mall, Bullring via Geograph
Regardless of your tech preferences, there’s no denying that Apple have built an epic following of people who will support and worship virtually everything they do.
Today, technology, connectivity and the social web have given marketers unprecedented opportunities to meet the need of belonging. Brands such as Apple, Harley Davidson and Vans have clearly demonstrated the power and profit of creating a sense of belonging.
We see the need to belong most in social networks and this opens great opportunities for companies to create community connections and satisfy these needs. Creating a feeling of belonging with customers satisfies core psychological needs. Companies should seek to build brand communities that allow customers to feel like they belong to something, are heard and can contribute.
Fear is a powerfull emotion that often override thought processes and produce reactions without conscious thought. Fear can be used as a marketing tool to make consumers loyal to a brand, product or a service.
Using fear as a marketing tactic is not a particularly popular topic and in many cases it’s not the safest route to take. But if implemented ethically, its use can be highly effective.
Fear appeal is a message that attempts to manipulate behaviour by arousing fear. Rogers’ Protection Motivation Theory(1975) states that people are motivated to protect themselves from physical, psychological and social threats.
When faced with a new threat this initiates a coping appraisal based on four variables;
The Carlsberg brand Tuborg capitalizes on the ‘fear of missing out’ (FoMO) trend with its ad campaign ‘Always Say Yes’.
There are countless examples of fear marketing around pricing and availability. How many Groupon or Living social deals have you purchased due to fear or missing out…only to never use the voucher?
In study from the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business, UBC’s Lea Dunn and JoAndrea Hoegg demonstrated that consumers experiencing fear while watching a film feel a greater affiliation with a present brand than those who watch films evoking happiness, sadness or excitement.
“People cope with fear by bonding with other people. When watching a scary movie they look at each other and say ‘Oh my god!’ and their connection is enhanced,” says Sauder PhD student Lea Dunn. “But, in the absence of friends, our study shows that consumers will create heightened emotional attachment with a brand that happens to be on hand.” she toldUBC regarding their 2014 study “The Impact of Fear on Emotional Brand Attachment “
In a nutshell, the report concludes that fear can stimulate people to have a greater brand attachment than other high activation emotions.
Robert Plutchik introduced the idea that emotions are an evolutionary feature introduced to maximize survival of our species. With it, he identified 4 sets of opposite emotions for a total of 8 elemental emotions: Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, Trust, Disgust, Surprise, and Anticipation. They are plotted on Plutchik’s famous wheel of emotions .
His model uses the idea of an emotion circle and a color wheel. The primary emotions can be expressed just like colors at different intensities and you can mix with one with the other to form different emotions and feelings. It is this model thatToneapi , Adoreboard’s emotional content optimisation and analysis tool, is based on. As you can see, fear is deemed to be a medium activation emotion – with terror being more intense.
Image source: wikipedia
Human feelings are the result of emotions
Image source: Stephen Janaway, Slideshare
As explained by Martin Lindstrom on Branding Strategy Insider , “Forget about depression, fear, angst, anxiety or night sweats. Guilt, that most puritanical of all our human emotions, has resurfaced to become a 21st century emotional social and consumer pandemic. Parents who in lieu of spending time with their adolescent children leave them with a rented DVD or on Facebook; shoppers who care about buying organic, but who can’t afford the higher prices, and then feel immoral afterwards; consumers who splurge on wine or truffle oil, then a day later feel gross and wasteful for spending so much money during a recession; the list goes on.”
Marketing messages that successfully make consumers feel guilty can be very effective and also very off-putting. As such, they are also often subject to heated debate. Charities use this tactic in their ad campaigns frequently with campaigns that guilt you over a cup of coffee, glass of beer or evening meal.
The above is a recent example of guilt used for a charity. Although, in my opinion, this series of ads is much more thought provoking and effective than many others that attempt to play on feelings of guilt and shame.
It’s not just charities and non-profits who play on guilt, brands in other industries are just as guilty…
Image Source: aytm
Whilst feelings of guilt (and shame) are a part of everyday human life, they are also closely related to many deep psychological issues that result in high levels of self-condemnation. Guilt is a complex, compounding of emotions, strongly associated with depression and can quite literally be a killer.
Use guilt in your marketing ethically, use it wisely and if in doubt lighten things up with a dash of humour.
If you’re in it for the long game, trust is what you’re aiming for. Once customers truly trust you, they will buy from you repeatedly, with minimal cognitive effort. Before that, you need to persuade them you can be trusted.
The trust versus mistrust stage is the first stage of Erik Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development. This stage occurs between birth and approximately 18 months of age, and according to Erikson, is the most important period in a person’s life. It is during this initial stage of development that children learn whether or not they can trust the world.
Years of economic uncertainty have caused consumers to become more discerning about spending their money. Focus on how you can demonstrate to customers that you can be trusted. This isn’t something you can fake. You must sincerely mean what you say and do.
You could be subtle or you could take a leaf out of Ford’s book who have taken trust marketing to the Nth degree.
So how can you build trust into your marketing? Here are 7 ways to get you started…
As Napoleon Hill once said “Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve.” To really drive long term sales, your company needs to be seen to be a leader.
What exactly makes a great leader? According to Great Man theories, the capacity for leadership is inherent – great leaders are born, not made.
These theories often portray great leaders as mythic, heroic and destined to rise to leadership when needed. Here are some examples:
Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, suggests the following for anyone who wishes to become a market leader:
Several years ago Simon Sinek made a discovery. All the great inspiring leaders and organizations in the world, whether it’s Apple or Martin Luther King or the Wright brothers, think, act and communicate in the exact same way. And it’s the complete opposite to everyone else.
Simon developed the golden circle: Why? How? What?Every single person, every single organization on the planet knows what they do, 100 percent. Some know how they do it. But very, very few people or organizations know why they do what they do.And by “why” he does not mean “to make a profit.” That’s a result. It’s always a result. By “why,” he means: What’s your purpose? What’s your cause? What’s your belief? Why does your organization exist? Why do you get out of bed in the morning? And why should anyone care?
Simon’s idea explains why some organizations and some leaders are able to inspire where others aren’t.
Values are judgments about how important something is to us. Values are often subjective judgments – we make a judgment of how important something is relative to something else. For example, one may judge that helping others is more important than becoming famous, one bottle of wine in a bar is worth more than a couple of bottles in the house, a day off work is worth more than a day of getting ahead.
Values may also be principles that help us make important personal decisions. These would be considered personal values. For example, if a person highly values creativity, the person may strive to find a career that will allow him or her to be creative; with monetary wealth further down the list of priorities.
Values tie together personal perceptions and judgments, motives and actions.
People make buying decisions every day based on values and judgements; sometimes conscious, sometimes not. Either way, it’s all about getting the best deal – whatever the “best” means to you.
Customer Value = Perceived Benefit – Perceived Cost
One of the easiest to understand is price vs time; there is very little perception involved. Take household cleaning as an example. As a consultant earning £50/hr why would you spend 4 hours a week cleaning your house, when someone would do it for £60?
Using the above formula;
£140 = £200 (assuming you consult during those 4 hours) – £60 (cost of cleaner)
By having a cleaner you have potentially earned an extra £140 per week, or £600 per month – a monetary value. Alternatively this ‘value’ could be translated into ’12 hours off’ per month; a long weekend with treats; more time with the family; a darn good holiday every six months.
Many promotions appeal to perceived value and the emotional trigger of getting a good deal.
“If you find a better price for the same product, we’ll match it” is a tone that is effective in evoking feelings related to monetary value. These value-focused ads are often blended with a degree of fear – FoMO (fear of missing out).
Value is very often subjective and brands use various tactics to increase the perceived value of their product or service relative to similar offerings.
Whilst monetary values are easier to use as examples, it’s important to remember that it’s not always about the money. Understanding the values of your customer, or ideal customer, will allow you to craft a more compelling and targeted offering.
With purchase opportunities just a click away we are armed and ready to spend. But we never want to wait. We don’t even want to wait until we can afford to pay. We’ll use a credit card if we need to, or find some other means of getting what we want.
We live in a world where instant gratification has become the norm. Delayed gratification is all but gone – we want it, and we want it now. From the jaw-dropping days of the ‘magic’ Polaroid camera to Amazon Prime, Amazon Lockers and movies on demand, instant gratification has come a long way.
Unlike the generations before us, we are a society tuned to expect instant gratification in virtually all areas of our lives. Injecting urgency into your marketing language such as now, today, instant access, within 24 hours will appeal to the emotional trigger of instant gratification.
In most psychological models, humans are believed to act upon the “ pleasure principle .” The pleasure principle is the driving force that compels human beings to gratify their needs, wants, and urges. These needs, wants, and urges can be as basic as the need to breathe, eat, or drink. But they can be as complex as the “need” to purchase a particular commodity or service. A “need” that is often driven by advertising and a desire to keep up with the Jones’s. Resists strong urge to insert Fight Club quote.
When we don’t get fulfilment, our psychological response is anxiety or tension.
Technology has made us faster. Instant gratification is not only a desire, but an expected norm in many circumstances; we get real-time feedback from the apps we use, messages can be sent back and forth in nano-seconds and we can simultaneously work on our Google Docs.
Sales triggers are often most associated with the last touch points; the final push that gets the sale over the line; landing page elements that increase conversions or a fine-tuned product page that closes the sale.
However the reality is that emotional triggers need to be woven into the very fabric of your brand; from your social media and email, to ad copy, blog posts and web content.
Fear, belonging, guilt, gratification and trust are triggers that resonate with the majority of consumers.
But to become a global leader you need to know the ‘why’ behind your brand and the values of your target audience.
Thanks to Carley for sharing their advice and opinions in this post. Carley Morrow is digital marketing and product manager for Adoreboard and their latest product Toneapi, a tool that enables marketers and researchers to analyse and understand content based on emotion, sentiment and activation. You can connect with her on Twitter or Linkedin.The social media revolution, which has been sweeping the world since the middle of the last decade has slowly been transforming the way businesses and customers interact. Combined, the number of users of the Big Six social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Google+, and Pinterest) exceeds 2.4 billion people. The largest of which, Facebook, would be the second most populous country on the planet, after China.
Reconsidering Assumptions
As a strategy, engaging and winning customers on social networks is often incorrectly described as ‘free’ marketing. This isn’t really the case, not after considering the fact that implementing a social media strategy requires time, content and staff to take the lead online.
Another incorrect assumption is that social media marketing often generates the idea that an ROI should be near instantaneous and easy to measure. Tweets do not, by themselves, generate sales. Likes do not mean that a customer is about to make a purchase. Measuring a positive impact of your activities will take time so anticipate a cumulative effect from what you do, not instant.
Almost all social networks now offer advertising and paid-for targeting as an option. The different ways you can target customers across the various social networks is outlined below.
Pay-per click (PPC) advertising is a simple way to get started on social networks since ROI can be measured directly from a marketing spend. The challenge when it comes to creating your social media presence comes down to four factors: strategy, voice, implementation and measuring. Here is how you can tackle each of these challenges:
1. Define Your Social Media Strategy
Launching a social media campaign, whether organic (interacting with people online, creating and sharing interesting content) or through advertising, without a clear strategy is a common mistake that can lead to poor ROI.
Before you start on social, decide what your objectives are. Ask yourself what are you offering to your audience and how does it benefit them? How does social tie into your overall campaign goals? Which network(s) are right for you? Who is your audience and how you are going to target them? And most importantly, how are you going to dedicate the right resources / team members who can implement a suitable strategy?
2. Identify Your Unique Voice
Online, there is more value in less. Every word counts. Your tone and the crucial elements of your brand’s voice, need to be conveyed in a short, friendly, engaging and consistent manner. Each Tweet, status update and image is a reflection of your brand values, which is why special attention has to be paid to how your voice is conveyed online.
4. Make an Investment
Determining your readiness for social media is based on a simple question: how much can I invest in this strategy? Who will implement this? Do we have the skills? Like with anything, you get what you pay for. Creating engaging content is an investment, as is tasking staff or external agencies to manage a social media strategy strategy. It will pay off. It takes time, as the results are cumulative, which means it is worth expecting to play the waiting game when it comes to launching a social media strategy.
5. Measure Your Efforts
Taking the above into consideration means knowing what to measure and how to modify tactics as you move forward. The individual impact of certain metrics, like the number of followers, likes, re-tweets, carry different weights depending on who you speak to. Some so-called ‘experts’ will give these metrics great importance, whereas some will focus on the quality of your followers and engagements over quantity.
Ultimately, it depends on your goals and objectives: what do you want to accomplish and when do you want to achieve that? Create suitable metrics which matter to your business around the answers to these questions.
A comprehensive breakdown of 26 daily sales goals worth measuring (or at least considering to measure) on your sales force.
Do your sales performance appraisals and discussions about sales process sound like the first 90 seconds of this clip?
If so, you’re not alone – and to be fair, some sales leaders do thrive on gut instinct and shooting from the hip. They’re also a dwindling minority.
In this day and age where widespread availability of sales analytics software is at our disposal, sales leaders have every reason to go the Billy Beane route in terms of performance management.
The Hustler’s Index constitutes the foundation upon which you can build your ultimate Moneyball sales analytics, starting with daily sales goals.
Truth be told, the scope of what sales leaders can do with performance analytics extends well beyond what will be covered here.
But nailing this first, critical step will give you the path to future success.
The 26 daily sales goals in the Hustler’s Index of Daily Sales Goals may or may not apply to your particular sales team.
They work best in inside sales teams, metric-driven sales forces or any other sales organization with a repetitive daily sales process that involves a few core activities.
Listed below are 26 unique sales metrics that may warrant daily goals in your sales force. Some skew more towards business development, while others are more appropriate for closing.
Either way, all 26 daily sales goals are worth your consideration. Select the ones most appropriate to your team and start creating your Moneyball sales strategy.
As straightforward as it gets — the number of calls you made that day. If you want to segment cold calls from other business calls, a good way to do so is limiting these to “New Prospect Calls.”
Track via: Phone system or CRM.
This one gets overlooked but is much more telling as to performance.
Example: Two Account Executives each make 50 cold calls in the same day. Account Exec #1 sets 5 meetings while Account Exec #2 sets only 3.
Account Exec #1 obviously performed better, right?
Not if Account Exec #2 only connected with 15 of his prospects, while Account Exec #1 connected with 30.
Whether or not a prospect picks up a rep’s cold call is largely beyond the rep’s control, provided the call is during normal business hours.
To more accurately guage performance, you can control for that by measuring outbound connections.
If your reps frequently call into gatekeepers, this metric comes in handy.
Getting past the gatekeeper is an art in itself, and connect rate will help you identify the Picassos on your sales force.
Hearkening back to Outbound Connections, this metric illuminates rep performance in converting prospect connections into first meetings.
This is where Moneyball comes into play.
The beautiful thing about metrics like these is that, used in the appropriate context, they give all sorts of insights into not just your reps, but your messaging.
Top performers typically will have found the key pain points and path of discussion that create the highest likelihood of success.
If your sales force incorporates voicemails into its outbound process, this is another metric worth tracking.
A stat worth tracking since it helps reveal the ROI from the voicemails themselves.
The number of positive responses from voicemails will offer indications about effective voicemail messaging and duration.
Voicemail messaging is tricky, so this is a stat that can help delineate who seems to have found a groove, and if/how it can be scaled across the entire sales team.
Same as outbound calls. Again, if you want to zero in on cold emails, only, segment and define “New Prospect Emails” in your CRM.
Track via: CRM, Sales Automation Platform or Email Tracking Software.
This metric applies best to sales development reps that use email correspondence as the primary means to move prospects through their pipeline.
Email open rate can offer good insights on messaging, subject line effectiveness and so forth, provided you the right controls are in place.
Namely, limiting focus to cold emails sent prior to the prospect’s initial response.
If you’re getting clicks, something’s working. Maybe it’s the body of the email, or perhaps the links and/or media you’re including.
Whatever the case, if one of your rep’s email templates is performing head and shoulders above everyone else’s – it’s worth investigating.
Same as the above, except better. For these, you’ll definitely want to control for negative responses, by the way.
A rep might get 20 replies in a given week, but 4 of those could be, “Go the f*** away.”
Like connection conversion rate, this is the rate a rep is converting outbound emails converted into meetings.
Pretty straightforward. LinkedIn messages can help you test out social selling and see how response rates compare to emails, voicemails and so forth.
Helpful for when you want to mix social selling into your outbound process.
Again, cut and dry. Should be treated just like email replies.
Just get this number and you’ve done enough – too many potential variations for LinkedIn conversion rate, and well, it’s still LinkedIn. You’ve done enough.
Used appropriately, this sales metric can give boatloads of insight into the ideal conversation length of a cold call, time until disqualification and so forth.
Talk time is also good for getting insights on an individual level.
Example: Let’s say you have a team of 20 business development reps.
The team leader in talk time ranks 7th in connect conversion rate, while the connect conversion rate leader ranks 2nd in talk time.
You now know that
Again, straightforward. A helpful metric but to a large extent mitigated by conversion rates of meetings to qualified leads, proposals sent and so forth.
An interesting number that could say a lot about individual efficiency and hustle.
You’ve been part of a sales team where one guy works 45 hours a week and not a moment over, while another guy racks up 60 but still lags behind in revenue.
Leads worked is your control to test true hustle and efficiency.
Mr. 45-Hour-Week put the blinders on, crushed the phones and worked 150 leads that week, while Mr.60-Hour-Week only worked 120, due to time spent reading LinkedIn articles and overthinking his emails.
Track leads worked and you won’t get fooled.
How many 1st, 2nd, 3rd or 4th meetings (later ones too) sales meetings did you have with a decision maker today?
Some industries (mine included) measure daily marketing qualified leads. These are prospects who inbound to your company.
The corollary to MQLs are sales qualified leads. These are prospects who become leads due to sales outreach.
How many proposals did your Account Executives give out today that are just a signature away from becoming closed deals?
We only count each proposal the first time it’s delivered, not in subsequent swaps back and forth during contract negotiations.
How many new contracts were signed, sealed and delivered?
The viability of deals won as a daily sales benchmark is predicated upon volume.
If you’re selling premium enterprise software that costs tens of thousands of dollars to adopt and implement, chances are you’re not closing a deal per day.
(And if you are, email me and explain what your process is so I can write about it in a future post).
How many worked leads bit the dust due to signing with a competitor, losing interest or some other reason?
Many deals lost are judgment calls, so it’s important to be as objective as possible in making your assessment (i.e. don’t cling to a prospect you know to be D.O.A.)
Avoid denial and overcome the burning desire to keep your pipeline looking as full as possible.
Total revenue generated from the day’s deals. Whatever all the numbers on the newly signed contracts are, added together.
If they’re agreeing to pay it, it’s revenue, even if it’s a service fee.
Total revenue minus costs of goods sold.
The term costs of goods sold will vary depend on industry and it’s up to your best judgment to figure out what factors in to this equation.
Daily sales goals can become the cornerstone of your organization’s sales process, analytics and performance management.
For the best long-term results, Datanyze stresses a commitment to continuous auditing, experimentation and evolution.
Your daily sales goals, like the sales reps they apply to, should be dynamic, living, breathing parts of your organization.
To ensure that happens, we recommend finding ways to strikingly visualize daily sales goals and sales personnel’s progress towards them.
With strong codification and compelling visibility, your daily sales goals can become a powerful force for good in your sales team for the indefinite future.
