Rnordman

Since Jeff Booth left his work in home construction to co-found BuildDirect, a tech start-up in Vancouver, he has survived market downturns that have swept through the sector, wiping out fledgling and established companies alike.

The first came when the dot-com bubble burst, shortly after the company started. Then came the financial downturn of 2009. So for BuildDirect, stock market volatility and talk of a chill settling over the North American initial public offering market, is nothing more than, well, business as usual.

His what-doesn’t-kill-you-can-only-make-you-stronger attitude could serve Vancouver’s tech sector well at a time of volatile markets.

“I think the best companies are forged in times of crisis,” said Booth, BuildDirect’s chief executive. “If the company looks at a crisis as an opportunity to do things differently and it drives creativity instead of blaming what the market is doing, some of your most brilliant insights come out of your most constrained times.

“It forces you to create real value faster, and that has been true in each downturn for us. You actually find out what you are made of, what your team is made of.”

Stock markets around the globe have been anything but stable.

On last month’s “Black Monday,” markets around the globe plunged when Shanghai suffered its biggest one-day drop since 2007. In a little over two months leading to the Aug. 24 meltdown, the Shanghai Composite Index had dropped 38 per cent and while there have been rallies and drops in global markets since then, the one consistent theme is uncertainty. Friday, global stock markets took another dip when the U.S. Federal Reserve left its benchmark interest rate unchanged at near zero Thursday, fuelling investor concern over prospects for the global economy.

“In my world, you hear much more the word caution now,” said Boris Wertz, co-founder of AbeBooks which was sold to Amazon in 2008. Wertz is an early stage tech investor, a founding partner of the venture capital firm Version One and a board partner in the Silicon Valley VC firm Andreessen Horowitz. “It’s about burn rates and controlling costs.

“I think people are starting to realize money is not as freely available as it was before. It’s not a panic, it’s a tightening of budgets.”

Wertz said last month’s Black Monday is a reminder, “an indication that something like that can happen overnight.”

Despite market fluctuations, Wertz shares Booth’s optimism.

“I think tech and venture capital have always gone through cycles, and people sometimes forget that,” he said. “The reality is also that great companies have been started in up cycles and down cycles.

“Some of the companies we are talking about now, Airbnb and Dropbox, were started in 2008.”

Wertz said in a downturn, “we’ll have serious talks with portfolio companies.

“We look at their burn rates and look at what they need to do to adjust,” he said. “Companies usually survive these downturns even stronger than before.”

Most affected in a downturn, Wertz said, are companies in late-stage and pre-IPO financing.

Canada has a handful of tech companies in that stage, many in Vancouver, including BuildDirect — a technology company that specializes in home improvement products — Hootsuite, Vision Critical and others.

Unlike the dot-com bubble, many tech companies now have a sustainable business model and deep enough pockets — thanks to venture capital — to survive without having to go to the public markets.

“Hootsuite, BuildDirect … they are super well financed. They are building real businesses,” Wertz said.

“If there is no IPO window for the next year, it’s not going to be such a bad thing for these companies,” Wertz added. “They are just going to wait until the IPO window opens again. It might be a year. It might be in two years.

“I think ultimately these companies all see the IPO as one step in their company’s development. It doesn’t have to happen now.”

BuildDirect’s CEO isn’t worried about windows closing. He sees it differently.

“Everybody talks about the IPO window, it’s not a window, it’s a screen and the best companies can go through any hole in that screen,” said Booth. “Sometimes it’s a wider screen and any company can through, sometimes the holes are smaller — but the best companies can go through. The screen never closes completely.”

Mike Wollatt, CEO of the Canadian Venture Capital and Private Equity Association, said private markets aren’t as affected by “short-term blips,” as publicly traded companies.

“The nice thing entrepreneurs find with venture capital or even private equity for that matter, it is a lot more patient,” he said. “Everyone from Porter Airlines to Shopify will tell you the nice part about having private partners is that you are not beholden to these short-term ups and downs.

“Your investors by definition are not short-term. These funds have 10-year horizons. They’re looking for long-term strategic partnerships,” he said. “It’s not based on the latest economic data out of China.”

Bill Tam, president and CEO of the B.C. Technology Industry Association, said while volatility in the North American market could mean some IPOs will be delayed, “if anything, the volatility has lessened,” since last month’s crash.

“The uncertainty around the IPO market is less than it once was,” he said.

“The ability for companies like Hootsuite and Vision Critical and BuildDirect and others to raise private equity is still very much in the works, which means the capitalization profile for companies at the later stage continues I think to be quite healthy,” he said. “The fact they have those alternatives is a real asset, especially given those conditions around the public market side.

“I think the fundamentals of a lot of the tech companies remain strong. There’s no question we will return to a stage when there is some normalcy in the market and people will still look for yield and they’ll still look for growth, and the tech sector represents opportunity around that.”

The stock market swings have cast a chill over some companies’ plans to go public. As markets plummeted in August, Massachusetts-based biotech company Raindance Technologies announced it was withdrawing its initial public offering because of market conditions.

Ottawa’s Shopify raised $131 million in an IPO that was heavily oversubscribed last spring, selling 7.7 million shares at $17 each. Shopify is trading around $28, above its IPO price, but some companies don’t fare so well.

During the August market turmoil, Twitter dropped below its IPO price of $26 US, although it has recovered to now trade at more than $27. And when it went public, Facebook surprised many buyers who got in at its $40 IPO price, only to have their shares drop to $16 within a couple of months, not recovering for over a year.

But Booth points out an early stock decline didn’t slow Facebook down: “They used all that money from the public offering to buy a mobile strategy and came out the other side.”

Booth said at times like this, there are naysayers and there are those who see opportunities.

“Some people go into a mode like this in fear and say the world’s going to fall down and some people say, ‘On the other side of this it’s going to create incredible winners,’” he said.

Brent Holliday of Garibaldi Capital Advisors’ Narwhal Club

Brent Holliday, founder and chief executive of Garibaldi Capital Advisors, is on the lookout for those types of incredible winners. Inspired by the so-called unicorns — a buzzword in venture capital circles referring to companies with a valuation of $1 billion US or more — Holliday has put together a list of high-ceiling Canadian firms he dubs narwhals.

From Holliday’s narwhal list, Shopify and Vancouver’s Avigilon are both now public, with Avigilon completing its IPO in 2011. Others on the list include Hootsuite, Slack and the mobile messaging app Kik, with Kik most recently reaching the billion-dollar valuation when China’s Tencent, maker of WeChat, invested $50 million in the Waterloo, Ont.-based company. Slack — the maker of a workplace collaboration tool that was co-founded by Stewart Butterfield, who is best known as a Flickr co-founder — raised $120 million US in new venture capital funding with a valuation that put the company into the narwhal club.

Holliday said the current market gyrations will have the biggest effect on angel investing and on those companies looking to go public.

“The least impact would be on venture investing, growth equity investing, later stage, because they have such a long view,” he said. “They go into these companies for five to seven years, so especially the back-and-forth gyrations of the last couple of months wouldn’t matter at all to the longer-term investors,” Holliday said.

Holliday recalls how, in the days of the dot-com crash, venture funds continued to raise money.

“I marvelled at how venture funds in late 2000, early 2001, when the whole tech world was melting, venture funds were still raising money,” he said. “In reality they were saying, ‘Perfect. Let’s get in now. Let’s get venture capital investors investing in 2002, 2003, and we’ll make out like bandits when this market comes back.’”

As I was consulting with a corporate sales team this week on the best LinkedIn features for finding prospects, I added a new one to the list. It’s the People Also Viewed box in the right column of your profile.

This tells you who else people are looking at besides you–and it’s probably people who have similar characteristics to you.

Now, LinkedIn doesn’t share exactly how it works (other than this interview with a LinkedIn data guy), and you have no control over who appears on your profile. However, you can take it off your profile. More on that later.

So, why is this such a great prospecting tool? Well, if you look at a client’s or prospective client’s profile and scroll down to People Also Viewed, the list could be a target list of people very similar to the person whose profile you are viewing.

An additional benefit for those of us who are not on one of the most expensive premium accounts: If you click the name of someone on that list and that person is more than three degrees away from you, you will be able to see his/her full profile. Typically you can’t look at full profiles of people who are more than three degrees way unless you upgrade your account.
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Action Steps

1.  Decide whether you want People Also Viewed to show up on your profile. The default setting will put the list on your profile.

Personally, since I was tired of my competitors showing up on my profile, I unchecked the box. I feel pretty good about my decision because it doesn’t stop me from seeing the People Also Viewed list on other people’s profiles (unless they’ve also unchecked the box). And if my competitors haven’t unchecked the box, I can still show up in the People Also Viewed list on their profile.

It seems like a no-brainer to me. Click here to learn how to change your setting.

Over time, if more and more people do what I’m suggesting, this feature will become less helpful. But, trust me, LinkedIn will probably change something before we get to that point. Take advantage of it while you can.

2.  Check this list out often on your clients’ and prospective clients’ profiles, and add some of these names to your master prospect list. And, hey, why not try to connect with the ones you are not connected with using a custom five-star invitation.

To learn more simple ways to find new customers and grow your bottom line, check out my very popular online course Explode Your Revenues Using LinkedIn. Use the promo code SALES to save $50 and steal this comprehensive course for only $97.

The post Here’s a LinkedIn Setting You Better Think Twice About appeared first on Wayne Breitbarth.

You just sent a cold email to a prospect and you’re excited. The prospect is a perfect fit and you crafted a personalized email sure to pique their interest.

But as the days pass to no response, your enthusiasm turns to worry. Why haven't they answered? Could it be that they never got your email in the first place?

And then you draft a second message with perhaps the most annoying email question of all time: "Did you get my email?"

The buyer now perceives you as pushy, needy, and obnoxious. Not exactly the beginning of a great relationship.

Sales reps send countless emails every day that seemingly evaporate into thin air. How do you know if your buyer opened your message? And if they opened it, how do you know if they clicked on your proposal? How do you know if you should follow up?

Unless you use email tracking, you won’t know.

But how does email tracking work? Is it like big brother watching over your email?

Far from it. You simply get notifications when a prospect (or client) opens your emails or clicks on a link in your email. Using this information, you know whether or not they’re interested in your proposal and when to follow up. And most importantly, you'll never have to ask that incredibly annoying email question ever again. 

Click through the presentation below to discover how email tracking works and how one professional used it to close a $100,000 deal.

A successful career in sales is dependent on your ability to ask good sales discovery questions. To develop that skill, you must know when it's time to dig deeper with probing questions. You know the kind: the type of questions necessary to uncover your prospect's core needs … fast.

In these cases, simply asking, "Tell me about your biggest challenges with your current solution," and moving on isn't enough. You must probe with follow-up questions that will give your prospect the confidence to share the real hurdles they're facing.

Here's a comprehensive list of probing sales qualifying questions you can ask buyers to get intimately familiar with their situation and formulate potential solutions. If you'd like my complete list of 450 sales questions for every situation, download this ebook.

And, don't forget: probing questions are as much about listening as they are about speaking. Make sure you're really listening to your prospect's responses, so you know just which question to ask next.

Sales Probing Questions

Use these questions at the beginning of your sales process to identify key information about your prospect. Elaboration is the first step in gaining clarity and context around your prospects' struggles. Once your prospect gives you specific details, you will have more context that will help your client.

1. "How can we help?"
2. "Could you please give me some background to this?"
3. "Can you tell me more about the present situation/problem?"
4. "Tell me more about it."
5. "How long have you been thinking about this?"
6. "Why do you think it is happening?"
7. "What goals and objectives do you have for this?"
8. "What is your biggest challenge with this?"
9. "What are your key objectives with this?"
10. "What do you like about your current supplier?"
11. "What are you using/doing now?"
12. "Do you have any preference with regards to the solution?"
13. "What three key outcomes do you want from this?"
14. "Can you please tell me about that?"
15. "Can you give me an example?"
16. "Can you be more specific?"
17. "How does this look/sound/feel to you?"
18. "Why are you seeking to do this work/project/engagement?"

Questions For Identifying Symptoms For Big-Picture Problems

The following sales questions are designed to help you identify the barriers your prospect is facing. Understanding what, how, and how long these issues have been present will help you get to the root of the problem.

The root of these barriers are more than likely showing up in other areas in their business or personal development. These questions will help you to identify which issues need to be addressed first.

1. "Why isn’t this particular service/product/situation/issue working for you right now?"
2. "How long has it been an issue/problem?"
3. "Why do you think the issue/problem has been going on for so long?"
4. "How much longer can you afford to have the problem go unresolved?"
5. "How is it impacting your organization/customers/staff?"
6. "How severe is the problem?"
7. "When do you need the issue/problem fixed by?"
8. "Why have you been dealing with this for so long?"
9. "What bothers you the most about this situation/issue/problem?"
10. "What has prevented you from fixing this in the past?"
11. "What kind of timeframe are you working in to fix this?"
12. "How long have you been thinking about it?"
13. "Is this problem causing other problems?"
14. "Does your competition have these problems?"
15. "What is the biggest problem that you are facing with this?"
16. "What other problems are you experiencing?"
17. "What alternatives have you considered?"
18. "What are the intangible effects of the problem?"
19. "Does the issue cause problems with employee morale?"
20. "Does the issue cause problems that negatively affect the motivation of your staff?"
21. "Can this problem affect productivity?"
22. "Is this problem unique to your organization?"
23. "Is this an industry-wide problem?"
24. "Is it regional or geographical?"
25. "When you went to your existing supplier and shared your frustrations about this problem, what reassurances did they give you that it wouldn’t be repeated?"
26. "How did these problems/issues first come about? What were the original causes?"
27. "What have you done in the past to address the problem?"
28. "Does this affect other parts of the business?"
29. "What kind of pressure is this causing you and the business?"
30. "What options have you tried?"
31. "What are the long-term effects of the problem?"
32. "How does the problem ultimately affect your current customers?"
33. "How does the problem ultimately affect your prospective customers?"
34. "How does the problem ultimately affect your sales teams?"
35. "How does the problem ultimately affect your other employees?"
36. "How does the problem ultimately affect your sales process?"
37. "How does the problem ultimately affect your reputation/goodwill/brand?"
38. "Do you feel this problem/issue has given your competition a competitive advantage? If so, how?"
39. "Who did you work with last time and why?"
40. "How often do you think the problem has come up when you weren’t aware of it?"
41. "What are the long-term effects of the problem? If you were in your competitors’ shoes, how would you take advantage of this?"
42. "Do you know what your competition is thinking/planning about this?"
43. "Do they suffer from the same problem?"
44. "Does this affect other parts of the business?"

Action-Oriented Probing Questions

Once you have context of your prospect’s barriers, knowing what action your prospect should take is key. These questions will help your prospect see the pathway to improving their business and will also establish trust between you and them. Each question helps your prospect identify action steps that will help the two of you formulate the right solutions.

1. "What number would you put on this issue in terms of prioritization?"
2. "How much more productive could your people be if the problem did not exist?"
3. "If you were your competition, what would you do right now?"
4. "If you could design the perfect solution, what would it look like, how much would you spend, and how long would it go for?"
5. "What sense of urgency do you have here?"
6. "What three key outcomes do you want from solving the problem?"
7. "What are your top three requirements that this solution just has to have?"
8. "If you could have things the way you wanted, what would it look like?"
9. "What are you using/doing now?"
10. "How important is this need (on a scale of 1-10)?"
11. "What options are you currently looking at?"
12. "In a perfect world, what would you like to see happen with this?"
13. "What is your strategy to fix this problem?"
14. "What are you currently doing to address the problem?"

Financial Probing Questions

Revenue drives decisions for most businesses. These questions will give you a deeper understanding of where your prospect may be hesitant to move forward or why they have been making certain choices around money.

Asking these questions will deepen your analysis on what financial barriers your prospect is facing. Since money is a more sensitive topic, you should transition into these questions once you feel like you’ve established a sense of trust with your prospect.

1. "What is it costing you?"
2. "Do you know in what other areas the problem is costing you money?"
3. "Can you put an amount on the problem in terms of cost: Weekly, monthly, annually?"
4. "Can you see how much money you/your organization loses every day by not solving this issue?"
5. "How does the problem ultimately affect your pricing/selling costs?"
6. "How much does this problem cost you in man hours/time?"
7. "Looking at this from a point of lost sales, how much is just one sale worth to the company?"
8. "How much is the issue/problem costing you in time/money/resources/staff/energy?"
9. "Can you make an educated guess as to how much it costs you?"
10. "What kind of return or payoff will you be looking for if you get a successful resolution of the problem?"
11. "What are you working with at the moment?  Just a ball park... "
12. "How do you handle budget considerations?"

Accountability and Clarity Probing Questions

These questions solidify your understanding of your prospect’s position by delving further into the details. This also helps your prospect get clear on all the issues that will be addressed while they work with you. These questions will be good to wrap up your sales session and finalize your scope of work.

1. "Who is ultimately responsible for this?"
2. "Why are you seeking to do this work/project/engagement?"
3. "Who else is aware of it?"
4. "What has made you want to look into this now?"
5. "What kind of timeframe are you working within?"
6. "Is there anything I have overlooked?"
7. "Have I covered everything?"
8. "What alternatives have you considered?"
9. "Do you have any questions you’d like to ask me?"
10. "What other factors have we not discussed that are important to you?"
11. "Are there any other areas I haven’t asked you about that are important?"
12. "What else should I know?"
13. "Have I asked you about every detail that’s important to you?"
14. "How soon would you like to move with this?"
15. "Does this affect other parts of the business?"
16. "What’s your role in this situation/issue/problem?"
17. "Who supports this action?"

An Effective Sale Strategy Means Asking The Right Questions

If you want to make your sales process effective for you and your prospect, this list of probing questions is guaranteed to help. Asking questions that aid your understanding of your prospect will increase the chances of closing the sale. Demonstrating the will to listen to pain points, barriers, and deadlines are crucial for an effective sales meeting.

These probing questions are designed to help you get the right information. They will prompt your prospect to take action and help them visualize how to close the gap between where they are and where they want to be.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in September 2015 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Image via BigStockPhoto.com

Let’s face it: You’re not Neil Patel or Gary Vaynerchuck. I’m not saying you completely suck at blogging, but there’s always room for improvement.

But nobody likes to hear that they’re doing it wrong—even if they are actually doing it wrong. So instead of telling you everything you’re doing wrong, I thought I would sweeten the deal.

Here are a few obscure foreign idioms that will help you remember everything you need to improve in your blog posts—and help you start up conversation with that cute foreigner you’ve had your eye on but never really knew how to approach. With these idioms, you will always remember how you can improve your blog.

Don’t “Pedal in the Sauerkraut”

This French idiom means you’re spinning your wheels. This one is especially meaningful when it comes to blogging well. Your blog needs to have a clear purpose with goals and landmarks set along the way. You must be clear about what your goals are and how you intend to achieve them. Otherwise, you are very unlikely to get there.

“Failure Makes Smart”

No need to translate this one from German. Trial and error is still the best way to find the right strategy for your blog. However, before you go down this route, expert material from those that have done it before can provide a base on which to build your own strategy. Remember, if your goal is to achieve positive ROI in the long and short term, you must choose a revenue model that is based on your traffic, the type of content you publish, your ability to track and produce user insights, and your ability to attract a niche audience.

Don’t Tell Your Readers to “Go Pick Mushrooms”

This is a Latvian idiom for “Go away.” A blog needs to convert first, but you also need to create a design that’s both inviting and makes readers want to come back. Writing great content is key, but here are a few more points to consider:

• Use a large font, so mobile users can easily digest your content.
• Don’t overload the page with visuals and content. A good design is one that takes into consideration your monetization and engagement goals but also provides a comfortable reading experience.
• Your content needs to be easily scannable. Structure your posts to convey a clear hierarchy in the text using font size, bold, italics, indentation, and bullet points.

Another special someone you don’t want to “go pick mushrooms” is Google. Structure your blog posts to allow Google bots to easily scan and understand your post’s topic and main points. For more information, Kissmetrics offers a good article on creating SEO enhancing structure.

“You’re Jumping from the Cock to the Donkey”

This French proverb means you’re changing topics mid-conversation. If you find it hard to stay on topic, start with the following steps. First, decide on a word count limit for your post. Don’t go over it no matter what. Second, if you just can’t manage to stay within your word count limit, split your blog post into two, three, or more blog posts, depending on the various topics you’re discussing. Later, you can create an eBook out of related posts.

“Stop Walking Around Hot Porridge”

This Czech idiom means, “Don’t beat around the bush.” Online readers have an increasingly short attention span. You need to cut to the chase and provide a clear conclusion. One writing tactic I like to use is reverse engineering a blog post. Using this tactic, you start with your final conclusion and work your way back. This helps the post stay on target.

“He Who Doesn’t Have a Dog Hunts With a Cat”

That’s Portuguese for, “You make the best of what you got.” No excuses! You want to start blogging but don’t have the time? You want to repurpose your content but can’t find the capacity? You want to start a podcast but are worried because you’ve never done one before? The best piece of advice I can offer is, “Do it anyway.” Even in the worst case, “failure makes smart,” right?

“There’s No Cow on the Ice as Long as the Bottom Is on Land”

This is Swedish idiom meaning, “There is no hurry.” With all the tools available nowadays (like the Hemingway app, Grammarly, and good old fashioned spellcheck), you can easily ensure your post has no grammatical errors.

That doesn’t mean that every post that clears these apps and gets a high score is a quality post. When you’ve been staring at a page full of words for a few days, you can easily fail to notice that it’s actually subpar. Before you hit the publish button, take at least a day away from the text, and come back with a fresh perspective. (highlight to tweet)

“No One Can Reach Him the Water”

This German proverb means, “There are no equals to him.” Your blog posts should be uniquely your own, but don’t stop there. Your posts need also need to be better than anything that is currently published on the topic. Make your post the go-to source for anyone who wants to read about or research your topic.

“Don’t Hang Spaghetti on Their Ears”

If a Russian tells you to stop hanging spaghetti on his ears, he means you need to get to the point. Blog about what you know. If you’ve been designing your own dresses all your life, write a blog about how to make your own dress. If you’re a great tennis player, let us know how you got there and what we need to do to be as successful as you. Prove to your audience that you do actually know what you’re talking about by supporting your claims with data, case studies, and unique insights.

“When a Man Takes Out His Sword, He Must at Least Cut the Radish”

This Korean idiom means, “If you’re going to take the initiative, you must follow it through.” For bloggers, this means that if you’ve decided to write a post about a certain topic, you need to not only make sure that “no one can reach you the water,” but also that you take a stance. Choose sides, and make your point clear.

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It’s common for leaders to measure their sales pipelines by the probability of the deal closing. And, a common mistake. Probability of close is a subjective measurement that requires the sales rep to make a judgment about their chances of making a sale. It requires interpretation, bias and is ripe for abuse. Instead, you should be measuring the progress of a prospect through your sales pipeline, with each stage representing the percentage of the way through the pipeline the opportunity has reached. A complete sale is defined as one that’s either closed or lost.

This seven-stage pipeline is a good example of how measuring the percentage of progress through the pipeline can assist with sales forecast accuracy. In this pipeline, we have several phases: We start with Opportunity Creation and then move into Qualification — checking on a prospect’s budget, timeframe and the decision makers for the process.

A fully qualified prospect reaches the Presentation stage to discuss pricing, goes through Negotiation, and then enters Verbal Approval and, finally, the Closed stage. Whether the deal is won or lost, it’s still — in the end — closed.

Measuring an opportunity in terms of the percentage of the pipeline completed, instead of the probability of the sale itself happening, helps emphasize that sales pipelines and forecasts are objective, scientific tools that require sales reps to follow a very specific process.

When a seller thinks that moving an opportunity through the pipeline increases its probability of closing, they’re less likely to use that pipeline accurately. They’ll hold back on moving deals into fully-qualified stages until they’re convinced that they’ll close. This then limits the opportunities they put into the pipeline in the initial stages because they don’t want to use the pipeline to manage deals they might lose. They arbitrarily change the probability percentage to match how they “feel” about the opportunity.

However, when the measurement is changed from probability of close to percentage complete, sellers will use the pipeline to track all opportunities and you’ll have an accurate measure of how opportunities convert from inception to close.

This change requires a shift in thinking, of course. Saying that a negotiation is 90 percent complete no longer means that it’s necessarily 90 percent likely to close. You may only close 60 or 75 percent of the deals you negotiate, which is something that you’ll know based on past data and history.

In rethinking the sales process this way, every step of the process represents a set of tasks or activities that have to be completed in order to move the deal through the pipeline. It’s no longer about the probability of closing — a subjective opinion from the sales rep — but the percentage completed in the sales cycle, which is an objective statistic based on facts.

If the sales team is properly using the pipeline, then sales leaders can get a truly accurate view of the conversion ratios between one stage and the next. After watching these conversion ratios for a few quarters, you’ll be able to create an accurate forecast based on historical facts. From there, you can develop a forecast that’s within five percent accuracy every time. One of our clients in the industrial supply industry even manages to get within three percent of the quarterly forecast!

By applying this fundamental change of measuring percentage complete, as opposed to probability of close to your sales process, not only will you gain accuracy in your forecast…You’ll encourage your sales team to utilize the sales pipeline the way it’s supposed to be used and you’ll have the most visibility into your opportunities.

How to Build a Sales Enablement Process in Your Business

Define sales enablement’s role in your organization in order to maximize profit and integrate tools into the sales process with this handbook that includes KPIs to track, a worksheet to complete, and a new definition of sales enablement.

The collaboration of sales and marketing departments is becoming imperative for businesses of any size. A survey conducted by Demand Metric revealed that 80% of respondents with highly integrated sales and marketing systems achieved their revenue goals, compared to only 36% of those without integration. What’s more, highly-aligned organizations achieve an average revenue growth of 20%, whereas poorly-aligned organizations experience a 4% decline, according to the Aberdeen Group. Despite these statistics, a separate study done by Forrester reports that only 8% of companies have tight alignment between their sales and marketing departments.

Before attempting to align your sales and marketing departments, it’s important to recognize that they each uphold a different business philosophy. Marketing places a focus on the needs and wants of target consumers. Organizations with an especially strong marketing orientation may even detect the needs and wants of consumers before competitors are able to. Sales, on the other hand, pushes offerings out to consumers with aggressive tactics. Strategies are often price-focused. Nevertheless, both entities share a common goal of increasing revenue for their organization.

Some preliminary steps must be taken to begin aligning sales and marketing departments. First and foremost, both parties must have a willingness to work together. Next, there needs to be agreement upon organizational goals and expectations, writes Lisa Cannon in a post from the Marketing Action Blog. She urges for a conversation between both departments so that there is a mutual understanding of objectives. If there is resistance, try to emphasize the value that will be generated when both teams cooperate with each other. Educate both departments by having them listen in on each others’ meetings or observing workday tasks. You could also arrange a time for both departments to get together outside of work to help foster camaraderie amongst employees.

After taking these initial steps, Cannon advises that it is essential for there to be universal knowledge of who the target buyer is. This is critical for both sales and marketing functions, as the two parties should be targeting the same personas. Following this step, Cannon explains that a definition of what a qualified lead is needs to exist. Have both teams reach a decision about what qualifies a good lead so as to prevent dispute down the road. Both sides should also agree upon when a marketing lead is ready to be passed along to sales. Additionally, a discussion needs to happen about what the sales team will do with the leads they receive.

Next in the alignment process comes metrics. Results should be measured based on predetermined goals that are either cross-departmental or organizational. Tracking metrics creates accountability and ensures that both parties are meeting their commitments. Cannon recommends developing service-level agreements (SLAs), which are written and signed documents about performance metrics that sales and marketing teams will deliver. She also advocates for regular meetings between the two departments to review metrics and SLA compliance, as well as to provide feedback to each other. Types of feedback that should be administered include lead quality, content quality, and integration progress.

Another important factor to consider during the alignment process is how both departments will manage current and potential customers. Sales force automation is made up of the tools, techniques, and technologies that businesses use to make their sales operations as efficient as possible. This includes back-end systems that manage data to be used in the sales process, such as customer lists, lead details, product catalogs, configuration guides, pricing, and territory assignments. It is also comprised of mobile solutions that make this data available to field sales representatives so they can utilize it in their sales activities. Cannon writes that, ideally, organizations would leverage automation technology to segment customer groups and make tracking and reporting on metrics easier.

Although it may seem like a daunting task, sales and marketing alignment is crucial for any company looking to meet or exceed their revenue goals in today’s business world. In order for alignment to be successful, both departments must establish and stick to a common language for describing their activities. The two parties should also have visibility into the other department’s efforts, according to Tania Rohan, Marketing Communications Specialist at Bulldog Solutions. Keep these steps in mind when beginning the alignment process; doing so will help prevent headaches in the future.

If you currently run an online business, take out your most recent credit card processing statement. If you’re still in the market for building an online business, put all your focus on this article, because this could mean the difference between you cutting costs efficiently or draining your resources way too quick.

Merchant account pricing models, a topic that sounds super boring, is actually rather simple once you take a moment to think about it. Not only that, but a quick understanding of the desirable, and not-so-desirable, options could be mean success or failure for you. Your best bet is the ever-so detailed, yet transparent, interchange-plus pricing model.

Is your credit card processor using the interchange-plus pricing model, or are they relying on the more costly (to you) and simplified tiered pricing model?

That’s what we’re here to find out, and once we do, I will explain how the interchange-plus pricing model works, and why it’s your best friend in terms of online business.

What is the Interchange-plus Pricing Model?

To start, it’s important to figure out what an interchange fee is. When a customer makes a purchase on your website, a few banks are involved with that transaction. One is the credit card issuing bank, or the one bank that issued the card to your customer. The other is the bank, or credit card processor, that handles the payment for you, the merchant.

When the payment goes through, the card issuing bank deducts an interchange fee from the amount it is sending to the bank working through your merchant account. As always, this fee, or part of the fee gets passed to the merchant, and this is what shows up on your statement.

Now, when you get that statement, the fees are organized with a pricing model. The interchange pricing model, or interchange pass through model, works so that you, the merchant, is charged a simple transaction fee, then the exact interchange and assessment costs are passed onto the merchant as well.

In short, they only charge you a quick transaction fee, then all of the interchange costs are clearly laid out for you, so that no extra fees are implemented and you can analyze it yourself.

How Does it Differ from the Tiered Pricing Model?

The tiered pricing model is the most popular option for your credit card processing bank, because they generally make more money off of it. However, that money comes from the merchant, so you typically end up paying more.

How can this happen with a simple modification of how the fees are reported on your statement? Instead of displaying the interchange fees individually on your statement, all of these fees or bundled into tiers, each of which have varying rates.

Some of the tiers have awful rates for you, while others are not all that bad. The only benefit to the tiered pricing model is that your billing statement doesn’t look as intimidating, because you only have a handful of tiers, or bundles to look at. Unfortunately, you have no idea as to how the interchange fees were allocated into these tiers, so an interchange fee that would generally have a better rate for you could have been placed in a bundle that has a bad rate.

Not only that, but the tiered model opens up ways for the credit card processing companies to scam you, and since there is little transparency in the statement, you have nothing to back up a complaint.

What are the Main Benefits of the Interchange-Plus Pricing Model?

Although interchange-plus cuts profits for your credit card processors, it’s still the fairest model out there, since they still hit their margins, and the merchants aren’t being slammed with fees that they have no knowledge of. Take a look at the list below to truly understand the benefits of the interchange-plus pricing model.

• It’s the most transparent pricing model, since all of your interchange fees are clearly laid out for you to view and analyze.
• It’s the most cost-effective pricing model, because you pay for the exact interchange fees, instead of possibly seeing some of those fees get dropped into a tiered bundle with a crappy rate.
• The interchange-plus pricing model separates processing costs, allowing for the utmost optimization of interchange costs.
• Hidden fees and surcharges are mostly eliminated, due to the model passing interchange fees directly to merchants, along with a fixed markup.
• The cost of the interchange-plus pricing model depends on what your markup is, but in the long-run, you should see substantial savings compared to bundled pricing models.

What Does an Interchange-Plus Pricing Model Look Like?

It’s tough to nail down an exact statement template that represents what the interchange-plus pricing model looks like; however it’s best to keep in mind that your statement is going to look more intimidating and complex.

However, this is a good thing, since you know exactly what you’re being charged for. There are over 125 different interchange fee categories, so you can expect a giant list of these fees, instead of broad categories. If you have broad tiers, or bundles, you usually only have from three to twelve of them on your statement.

What to do if You’re Not on the Interchange-Plus Pricing Model

If you’re seeing groups of vague charges, often categorized as qualified, mid-qualified and non-qualified, your credit card processor is using the tiered pricing model.

Since every credit card processor gets to choose how they charge merchants, it takes a little research and time to figure out which of the banks is worth working with. Talk to your current processor to see if you could switch to an interchange-plus pricing model.

If this is not an option, start looking for another company to work with. The time and money you spend on the research is far less than the extra surcharges and fees you are incurring with the tiered pricing model.

That’s it for learning why the interchange-plus pricing model is your best friend. Let us know in the comments section below if you have any questions about this somewhat confusing topic.

Featured image curtsey of Jed Bridges

Link building used to be one of the core elements of SEO as marketers sought quality links to add authority to their own websites. However, the evolution of content marketing’s relationship with SEO has changed traditional link building strategies. In today’s media landscape, marketers insert meaningful links that help them tell their story, as opposed to stuffing as many links as possible onto a webpage.

Google’s algorithm has been updated to review the quality of content on a website in order to properly rank that page in search engine results. Under this new ranking formula, webmasters embraced the concept that “content is king” and “link building is dead.” Yet even under the new marketing world order, the relationship between content marketing and link building is strong and complex to this day.

How does link building fit into today’s world where brands are becoming publishers of quality content? We’ve compiled a short list of tips that can help you use link building in your own content marketing plans.

Tip #1: Focus on Quality vs. Quantity

One of the reasons that Google strikes fear into the hearts of online marketers is because their algorithm is consistently updated over time. The search engine recognizes when websites are attempting to scale SEO tactics by overdoing it with spammy links, keyword stuffing, duplicate content, and other tactics that make websites pariahs in the online community. Marketers that go overboard with “black-hat” SEO are punished with lower rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs).

Google’s own experts, such as webmaster trends analyst John Mueller, encourage marketers to avoid over relying on links within content. During a Google hangout published earlier this year, Mueller told listeners that relying solely on link building will actually penalize online marketing strategies. He advises marketers to publish fresh, unique content that stands out from the clutter, and to only use links that support the key message contained within that piece of content.

Links do affect Google’s algorithm, but it’s the quality of those links that will help a piece of content rank higher in SERPs. Content that is stuffed with low quality or irrelevant links will be disregarded by search engines and removed from results pages for relevant search terms.

Tip #2: Relevant Links Have More Authority

When you enter a query into a search engine, some of the most common websites that appear at the top of SERPs are larger domains with powerful brand influences. These larger brands held the top spots for many years even if there was a smaller, more relevant site that was pertinent to the keyword or phrase.

Google has overhauled their algorithm to feature relevant websites for a specific query, regardless of the site’s size or brand authority. This new algorithm improves the quality of sites presented to you as a searcher, and are more likely to answer your questions or provide relevant information. It also means that smaller sites that are better equipped to provide answers for related search queries are more valuable for link building than large, generic brands.

While you develop your content strategy, conduct your own research by reviewing the types of sites that appear on Page 1 for the keywords you intend to target. Review the content on those ranking pages, determine whether the information is relevant to your own work, and include a link to increase the value of the material on your own website. Remember to avoid keyword stuffing and to insert the link on a phrase or sentence that directly relates to the content published on the ranking web page.

Tip #3: Optimize Your Content so Other Marketers Link to You

If your site is small or relatively unknown in the online community, heed the experts’ advice. Devote your time and resources towards publishing quality content that adds value to your site and builds a reputation for your brand as a reliable source of information.

Optimization is a natural part of the content marketing lifecycle. If you are a content marketer, ensure your plan includes time for the measurement stage of the cycle to improve the effectiveness of your content.

Your analytics will give you insights into your content’s performance so you can focus more energy on material that adds real value.

Improving the quality of your own content boosts your brand’s reputation, increases your SERP rankings, and also entices other marketers to link to you. Inbound links to your content will make your work, and by extension you, an authority within the field. As you publish more content that receives ranking signals and generates inbound links, you can include fewer external links to new content and link to your own work instead. In the long term, this strategy will help you become the top authority in your field so that other marketers always want to link to you.

Tip #4: Include Links to Your Content in Guest Posts

Guest blogging is an excellent way for content marketers to get featured on multiple outlets. Guest posts also allow you to direct new, quality links back to content published on your own website, potentially increasing the ranking authority of your own brand.

Rand Fishkin, creator and star of Moz’s Whiteboard Friday series, provides another guest posting tip. According to Fishkin, if your primary goal with a piece of content is to make it rank, you should decide whether to publish that content on your own website or on a site that you guest post. This is important if your own brand has low ranking authority but the site where you guest post already appears on SERPs for targeted keywords.

You may also publish a guest post that supports a piece of content uploaded onto your own website, and include a link on the featured post back to your own brand’s content. This strategy allows you to avoid any duplicate content penalties, while also building ranking authority for your own branded material with a quality inbound link.

The Relationship is Strong

The correlation between link building and content adds significant value to an online marketing strategy. However, to fully realize the value that lies within link building, follow some of the best practices published throughout the web and execute accordingly.

Remember that your goal with content marketing is to tell a story or communicate data to educate or entertain your audience. Links should help you tell that story and organically add more value to the content rather than existing solely for the purpose of hyperlinking a targeted keyword. Search engines recognize when links are misused for black-hat SEO tactics and will punish you for it.

As social media marketing has become ubiquitous (88% of marketers say social media is important for their businesses), hundreds of new tools have developed just in the past few years: tools for social media management, monitoring, measurement, automation, identifying influencers, creating graphical content, and more.

Image credit: Buddy Media

No one has time to put every one of those tools through its paces. Which are most worth investigating and investing in?

In the posts highlighted below, 20 (or so) social media marketing pros review more than 200 tools, ranging from popular, widely used tools like Buffer, Hootsuite and Feedly to intriguing but lesser-known apps.

12 Tools to Help You Optimize Your Social Media Marketing Results by TopRank Online Marketing Blog
***** 5 STARS

Noting that 26% “of marketers spend 6-10 hours a week on social media,” Debbie Friez proceeds to “explore twelve possible problems and the tools that can help solve those problems and make you more productive,” among them Directr, which lets you “easily create videos” and “includes tons of storyboards to help you organize your video”; Nuzzle “for Facebook and Twitter, tells you when your friends are sharing a piece of content and emails you with the details of the latest posts”; and Uprise.io for competitive research.

7 Social Media Tools to Boost Your Effectiveness in a Noisy World by Seriously Social

Based on one of his conference presentations, Ian Anderson Gray showcases seven tools “that can help you be more effective and efficient” at managing your social media marketing activities, such as Friends+Me (which is “similar to Buffer but allows you to repost to your Google+ profiles, pages, communities and collections. You can also post to Tumblr. It converts Google+ into a social media management tool”) and Agorapulse, a social media management tool that integrates with Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

6 Free Social Media Tools for Startups to Build a Strong Social Media Presence by Duct Tape Marketing

Jessica Davis provides compact reviews of half a dozen helpful free tools for building a presence on social media, including DrumUp (“a smart content discovery tool that scours the web for relevant content based on the keywords you input. The tool acts as a central dashboard for your Twitter and Facebook profiles, letting you manage multiple accounts simultaneously”) and Easel.ly, an infographic creation tool which “offers ready-to-use infographic templates that are categorized by subject.”

28 social media management tools rated, scored, and reviewed (study) by VentureBeat

John Koetsier reports on research conducted with more than 1,100 social media managers to determine the most-used social media tools. Among the findings: “For enterprise, Oracle is surprisingly good, as are Sprinklr and Komfo. For smaller companies, Meshfire, Sendible, and Hootsuite lead the pack. And for the midsize company, Sendible, Meshfire (again), and Oktopost are leaders. Other tools you can’t ignore? TweetDeck, Buffer, SocialFlow, Spredfast, and Crowdbooster.” And the most widely used tool of all? Check out this post.

26 Social Media Monitoring Tools [Reference Guide] by Razor Social
***** 5 STARS

Frequent best-of honoree Ian Cleary lists five different areas you should be monitoring on social media (brand, competition, your prospects…) then serves up concise but useful reviews of more than two dozen free and fee-based tools (with pricing), including Talkwalker, Trendspottr, and Trackur (“a social media monitoring tool that provides executive reporting, sentiment analysis and influence scoring. It’s unusual to have sentiment analysis available for a monitoring tool with a relatively low starting price” of under $100 per month).

5 Essential Social Media Monitoring Tools for Beginners by Social Marketing Writing

Joe Cox lays out the advantages, features and pricing of a handful of popular social media monitoring tools including Hootsuite, Buffer, and Followerwonk: “Twitter’s own built-in search tools are incredibly limited, and Followerwonk aims to correct this, making it easier to find the right people to engage with. If you have been struggling with Twitter because you find that the signal to noise ratio on the network is so poor, then Followerwonk could revolutionize how you use the service.”

Tips to Use Social Listening to Drive Business Goals, Plus 11 Free (or nearly free) Listening Tools by Karianne Stinson

Karianne Stinson explains how social listening can provide benefits in areas well beyond marketing, including customer support, competitive analysis, product development, crisis management, and sales support (“Social listening can give your sales team great insights on potential customers pain points”); details ways social listening can help achieve corporate goals like reducing customer service calls (by helping the brand produce “content that proactively answers questions”); and then lists 11 helpful and free or low-cost social listening tools.

3 Tools that help you Understand and outreach to your Audience by State of Digital

Bas van den Beld provides in-depth looks at three tools “that help me get a better grip of who I am targeting” as he puts it, including Peerreach (“Peerreach gives you a nice one page overview of someone. It shows you the topics the person is ‘all about’ and it will show you the interest areas their followers have. It also has a Chrome plugin to show on your Twitterfeed how ‘important’ the Twitterers are. And one nice thing is that you can compare them to other Twitterers by adding up to four handles to compare and see who has reach on what topic and whether or not they ‘fit’ your needs”).

16 Social Media Tools The Experts Swear By by Social Fresh

16 social media marketing pros (and past Social Fresh Conference speakers) briefly highlight their favorite tools, from Matthew Knell on Buffer (“We’re big fans of Buffer because of its simplicity and it’s ability to plug into a bunch of other content aggregation / curation tools (Feedly, Pocket, Mention) to make content easier to find”) to Eric Boggs on LinkedIn (“I get more value out of LinkedIn than any other tool or platform. It is a fantastic prospecting / sales resource for B2B marketers”).

Top 28 Social Media Tools to Make Your Job Easier by SlideShare

Catherine Pham presents the basics about a range of helpful social media tools in this slide deck, from commonly used platforms like HubSpot, Buffer and Hootsuite to more specialized tools such as Tweepi and Twitonomy for Twitter, viralWoot and Piqora for Pinterest and Instagram, and Circloscope for Google+.

15 Best Social Media Tools by CodeGeekz

The English is a tad rough but the list is solid as Gavin Matteo reviews “a list of Best Social Media Tools for our audience,” from Mention (Google Alerts on steroids) and BuzzSumo to Rapportive (which displays LinkedIn profiles for your contacts from inside Gmail) and Tagboard, a “multi-platform, free and highly useful tool. It offers an easy way to monitor social interactions and act on them quickly. You can also search for specified hashtags on several social networking systems, including Google+ and Vine.”

10 Free Online Tools to Monitor Your Social Media Influence by NoPassiveIncome

Erik Emanuelli offers compact reviews of free social media monitoring tools ranging from Google Analytics and YouTube Analytics to Twitter-specific tools like Tweetstats and Twitter Counter, which “is a useful service to measure some parameters of Twitter, like the followers growth rate, the average number of tweets per day, and more. It also allows you to compare different accounts, which means you can get an instant overview of your relationship with your competition and your overall progress.”

6 Super Quick Social Media Productivity Tips + 23 Tools to Help! by Maximize Social Business

Frequent best-of honoree Neal Schaffer here shares six strategies for accomplishing more with social media in less time; working “smarter, rather than longer” as he puts it. Each tip links to related tools. For example, to help schedule your posts, he recommends WordPress JetPack Publicize, CoSchedule and SMQueue.

16 DIY Tools for Social Media Management by Business2Community

Jim Belosic shares an infographic highlighting “16 tools that can help businesses with their social efforts,” and which is “helpful for folks who are preparing to migrate away from Wildfire and North Social” (both of which were acquired in 2014). The tools are categorized into three groups: social media messaging & scheduling; analytics; and social landing page tools.

6 top social media management tools by iMedia Connection

Greg Kihlstrom “discusses six tools that help you manage your communication and content delivery across one or more platforms. Their capabilities vary from managing content, to analyzing and reporting on the best times to post, to determining the effectiveness of campaigns,” including SocialFlow, Sprout Social and IFTTT.

Social Media Marketing World: 16 Tools to Optimize Your Social Media Performance by Razor Social

Ian Cleary (again) summarizes a presentation he delivered covering “a range of tools to optimize social media performance…really interesting and useful tools to help you target the right people, get better results with your content, convert more traffic and improve results,” such as Leadpages, a landing page creation tool that “provides you with a range of landing pages that are known to convert very well with existing customers.”

5 Top Brand Monitoring Tools for Marketers by 60 Second Marketer

Jamie Turner provides concise but helpful reviews of a handful of popular social media monitoring tools, from Social Mention (which is free) to Brandwatch [] (which isn’t–but is very powerful: “check out how many mentions your brand has across the internet, where they are coming from, and how far the comments have reached. The tool gathers data from a staggering 70+ million sources that include social networking platforms, forums, blogs and news sites”).

Marketers Adopt Social Media Analytics Tools by eMarketer

More than 60% of U.S. marketing groups have adopted social media analytics tools. The top three uses for such tools are campaign tracking (60%), brand analysis (48%) and competitive intelligence (40%). Yet more than half of those marketers still cite staffing/resources and linking measurements to objectives as significant challenges.

10 Tools to Make Your Social Media Management Easier by SteamFeed

Andrew Jenkins reviews 10 of the tools he uses “to consume and curate content as well as manage and interact with (his) community,” including commun.it (specific to Twitter, commun.it gives gentle prompts and reminders regarding who to engage, follow, unfollow, get back in touch with or acknowledge for the level of interaction and engagement you have had”) and Nimble (“Nimble takes what commun.it does for Twitter and carries it across LinkedIn and Facebook”).

16 Tools Every Social Media Manager Should Use by Visually

To maximize the business benefits of social media, Stephanie Castillo writes “you should develop a strategy, based on as much knowledge as possible about your audience and their behavior,” then outlines 16 tools to help in that effort, ranging from Visually’s own (very cool and free) Google Analytics Report to Tailwind, a tool that ‘tracks activity across Pinterest about your company, products and competitors.”

29 Social Media Tools Recommended by the Pros by Social Media Examiner

In this outstanding list of tools and star-studded post, Cindy King compiles reviews from 29 top social media marketing pros of their favorite tools. Among them: Mari Smith reviews Pocket, which “allows you to consume and save a wide variety of online articles, which you can then post to Twitter or Facebook, schedule via Buffer or review at a later time”; Ekaterina Walter covers ShareRoot (“an all-in-one solution for Pinterest”); and social media monitoring tool TalkWalker is reviewed by Gini Dietrich.

9 Tools to Discover Influencers in Your Industry by TopRank Online Marketing Blog

Noting that “people with a strong center of influence can provide valuable context and credibility to a company seeking to connect with an audience of buyers,” Lee Odden provides concise reviews of nine tools to help identify and engage with industry influencers. Among the tools: Traackr (a premium tool used by PR, communications and marketing pros), Buzzsumo, and Kred.

The cornerstone of all successful B2B marketing strategies is to know your target buyer and know them well.

B2B marketers invest a lot of time profiling their ideal customers so they can more fully align their messaging and programs to drive results. For many, developing detailed personas on their target buyers are a must. Typical information for these personas includes title, reporting structure, education, work experience, age, leisure activities…you get the idea.

But what if you could get a real glimpse into how your customers and prospects work every day? Think about it…the types of technologies they utilize on a daily basis to get their job done can provide a snapshot into their specific work responsibilities and daily workflow.

The reality is that businesses today could not function without the many technologies they utilize to simplify and automate everyday functions. At 1.8 billion users a day, Microsoft Office is a given for business professionals. If you are in Accounting or Finance, ADP, Concur, NetSuite and others will be part of your daily workflow. If you are a small business, it may look like QuickBooks. As a Marketer, Marketo, Eloqua or Salesforce.com will be part of your technology suite.

The type of technology a company chooses to invest in often can tells a better story about their priorities than a title can. For example, the responsibilities of a Director of Marketing can vary considerably from company to company. Yet if you know the company is using Eloqua for marketing automation, it suggests that they have a fairly sophisticated digital marketing strategy, high-level marketing operation expertise, and a significant budget.

Looking beyond persona development, having an inside track on which technologies a company chooses to install, can provide complementary and competitive intelligence that can drive more effective demand generation execution. If your business provides a connector to ADP, Salesforce or Marketo that provides financial or contact data, honing in on those companies and contacts that utilize these software programs allows you to target your marketing efforts where you can have the most impact. Or, in the example of competitive intelligence, what if you had intelligence on organizations using a competitive technology or a tier 2 solution? When a company invests in a similar solution to your own, the business need and budget are already established (two of the biggest obstacles in the sales process). Before you send an email or your sales team picks up the phone, you already know the key selling points you need to make to go for the win.

For sophisticated marketers, this kind of technology intelligence can take your targeted campaigns to whole new level of effectiveness. At the end of the day, it just makes sense.

At Dun & Bradstreet NetProspex, our TechProspex data tracks over 5,000 technologies across 2,200 product mapped to over 4M companies with a 90% plus accuracy. When it comes to targeting, the more you know about your prospects and their technology, the better. Let our high-value TechProspex data give you a distinctive competitive edge.

Want further insight? Download our Five Targeting Strategies for Technology Marketers to learn more.

Wal-Mart has announced it will sell the self-balancing scooters called "hoverboards" that are taking over. 

And Mark Cuban isn't happy about it. 

The famous entrepreneur and billionaire recently reached an agreement to buy a patent license for the popular item, according to Buzzfeed. 

"They are in for a nightmare," Cuban wrote in an email to Buzzfeed after learning Wal-Mart plans to sell the scooters online this holiday season. 

The "self-balancing scooters" will go on sale at Wal-Mart starting around November 1, according to Sapna Maheshwari at Buzzfeed. 

The electric scooters have been described as a "hands-free Segway."

Executives at Wal-Mart anticipate this will be the hot new holiday item. The hoverboards will only be for sale on the website at first. 

"We’ve bought deep in this item because our buyers expect it to be a hot holiday gift, possibly as hot as the Razor Scooter since it skews more towards adults," a Walmart.com spokesperson told Buzzfeed. 

Celebrities including rapper Wiz Khalifa and singer Justin Bieber have been seen riding hoverboards in recent weeks.

We've reached out to Wal-Mart and will update if we hear back.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: The most surprising brands millennials love

As I stumble through Spotify looking for the newest top-40’s playlist wondering how best to start this post, I glance over at our marketing team in hopes they will read my mind and provide me with an opening. Rather than mind reading, they are talking about the best way to generate sales from current leads, and how to grow our reach to gain new leads. I can hear snippets of their conversation; they’ve pushed our social media, content marketing, and used calls-to-action to generate leads. The goal is to grow our list of contacts.

Now the task shifts to how you can create sales from current leads and reach new ones. Let’s get into two valuable techniques: influencer marketing and customer emails. More importantly we’ll get into how they can help you create relationships with your leads.

Use the Power of Influencers

Take advantage of the resources around you, use key influencers to push your brand to a bigger market — this should be a crucial part of your marketing strategy. In the iDroid world we live in today, key influencers range from bloggers to clients and even current employees. Building a relationship with these influencers can be more valuable than money spent on traditional advertising funnels.

Another relevant, though sometimes overlooked, marketing tool is word-of-mouth. A statement from an industry influencer carries more weight than one from your everyday customer. While both are great, the power of influencers recommendation comes with a proven track record for success.

If You Build It, They Will Come

It’s safe to assume most brands today have a general grasp on the importance of content marketing. Going back to what we touched on earlier, blogging can help increase your brands’ influence. The question then becomes, once you’ve made the effort to create a blog or other marketing tool, how do you spread your reach to connect with others?

The key is to identify key target areas then focus on that audience as your niche market. Once they’ve been identified, find a way to best connect with them to build a successful campaign. An effective campaign includes:

• Setting goals and understanding what it is you want to accomplish will help you decide on not only whom you want to work with, but moreover how you will work with them.
• Create messages to be shared with the masses. Find a specific group and focus on the quality of the content rather than traffic analytics.
• Push for client involvement in the product review, capturing their attention will only push their experience to be hands-on.
• Get to know your competitors, spend time researching their success and see if you can learn from them. Don’t limit yourself, check outside of your industry for more possibilities.

Simply Make It Personal

Another efficient and longstanding strategy for creating relationships is connecting with your customers through email marketing. The beauty of email is it allows you pass along a message in a personalized format and simultaneously allow for leads to interact by clicking through the email.

Organize your email list and if you choose to track the analytics, you’ll already know where the leads are coming from. Whether it be through social media, an eBook, referral, or MQL — take notice. In doing so, you can tailor your emails based on the precise marketing tactic each lead responded to.

If you have other ways to segment your demographics, use them! The point of this all is to break down your massive list into smaller pieces; from there, you can connect with each group accordingly which translates to a better chance of generating response(s).

Getting to know your leads is the key in converting them into sales. Building a relationship with influencers and establishing communication through email marketing are both keys to your success.

So plug in to your Spotify, stop trying to read minds and start to get to know those leads!

Wondering what the term “field marketing” means?

Don’t let the jargon confuse you. Field marketing is an area in which you’re likely already experienced. The idea is simple: it involves selling a product, distributing promotional information, and personally connecting with target buyers.

Field marketing can take many forms, and in the B2B world you’re likely supporting sales, teaching a class, leading a workshop at a conference, or hosting a demo at an event. If you’ve ever been to a conference with an exhibitor table, that’s field marketing. If you’ve ever been to a company-sponsored meet up or live digital event, that’s field marketing too.

While the fundamentals of field marketing have stayed intact—support sales and marketing with programs that bring in quality leads—the ways in which field marketers can engage their target audiences are evolving. The shift from traditional to digital marketing has presented a unique challenge for field marketers to come up with innovative and new ways to communicate and track their field marketing initiatives.

1. Know Your Audience Well

With so many conferences and events to target, where should you start?

The answer is simple: laser focus on the opportunities to best reach your target audiences. This process means targeting the events that your ideal customer is likely to attend.

You might think that it’s best to target the biggest “name brand” events. Don’t fall into this trap. There are many different niche industry events with sponsorship opportunities. You could host your own event or teach a class, too. The bottom line is that you should know what your audience cares about and where key people are likely to be. The rest will fall into place.

2. Know The Foot Traffic Plan

Thinking of sponsoring an event?

Before you write a check or commit to exhibiting, ask the event organizer to share his or her plans. Conference strategists spend months planning, and they’re paying attention to every last detail. They know exactly where the highest traffic event areas are, and they know where people are going to be at any given time.

What will event attendees be interested in browsing? How much downtime are they likely to have?

Make sure that you know the answers to these questions before committing to any field marketing campaign—especially if you’re planning to host your own.

3. Know Your Goals

How will you convert the people you meet into buyers?

The biggest challenge with field marketing is that it’s often limited to the moment. Events, especially, can be quite chaotic with attendees browsing multiple demo tables and meeting dozens of new people. You want to make sure that you keep in touch with everyone you meet in a substantial and meaningful way.

It all comes down to lead generation and lead nurturing.

Don’t force your audience to sign up for your email list. Rather, give them a clear incentive to keep engaging with and learning about your company. You never know where people will be in a few months or even a few years. Nurture relationships for the long-haul.

Final Thought

Nothing comes close to the value of an in-person interaction. You have very few opportunities to meet and engage with your target audience. That’s why field marketing is important—it’s a practice that ensures that you’re always present and visible.

Make the most out of every opportunity by knowing your events, understanding foot traffic patterns, and establishing goals upfront. In addition to meeting great people, you’ll also want to build upon and nurture those relationships for long-term engagement.

After over ten years in sales and marketing, I know the value of cold calling. But predicting the best time to cold call prospects isn’t easy.

I’ve had to change up my tactics over the past few years, because let’s face it, we’ve all changed how — and where — many of us work and engage with potential clients. Additional factors like remote global teams, flexible work locations, and wide-ranging schedules make it even more difficult to pinpoint cold-calling trends.

But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible! I’ve got some great cold calling tips and research for boosting your cold calling success, even in 2024. Let’s dive in.

Table of Contents:

• Understanding the Right Time for Cold Calling
• Strategies for Cold Calls
• Cold Outreach Statistics in 2024

Understanding the Right Time for Cold Calling

It might seem like a magic formula, but coming up with the best time to cold call takes work. I’ve looked over several studies and spoken to sales experts to get their tips for when to make your cold calls so your sales convert.

Best Day for Sales Calls

A recent study by CallHippo analyzed over 15,000sales calls to determine the days in which cold calls are more likely to connect. According to the study, the best day of the week for sales calls was Wednesday, by a long shot.

On average, sales reps were able to strike up conversations in 195 of the calls made on Wednesday first-try, compared to only 90 of the calls on Monday and a paltry 60 calls placed on Friday.

If you like percentages, this means that 33.9% of calls placed on Wednesday connected, while only 15.7% of calls on Monday and 10.4% of the calls made on Friday made it through.

That makes Monday and Friday the worst days to reach your target market.

And when you think about it, the results make sense. On Monday, I’m usually still getting ready for the work week ahead, so reaching me won’t be as easy. Likewise, by Friday afternoon, I know tons of people who are just looking forward to the weekend and can’t (or don’t want to, honestly) focus on closing a deal.

But by the middle of the week, most people (including me) have had enough time to settle into the week’s work and take care of their pressing needs, so a cold call would be much less likely to feel like an interruption.

The Best Time of Day for Sales Calls

We now know Wednesday is the sweet spot where your calls are more likely to get through on the first try. But if you want to increase the odds of that happening, you’ll also want to consider the time at which you’re making the call.

The same study conducted by CallHippo suggests the best times to cold call are 10–11 AM and 4–5 PM. At first, that may seem counterintuitive. After all, you’d either expect someone to be preparing for lunch or leaving work during these hours.

But based on my experience, these are the exact reasons why these are the best times of the day to get a successful cold call.

Just think about your typical office day. In most cases, I’m wrapping up tasks in the late morning, right before lunch, which means I’m available and more willing to take a sales call than earlier in the day when I’m just starting to tackle the morning’s must-do tasks.

After lunch, things get busy again, and I don’t really have much time to spare until the late afternoon when my workday is pretty much over or I leave the office altogether. So, it’s harder to pick up the phone.

Cassie Fields, president of AutoLeap, a Canadian auto software company, likes to refer to these times as “shoulders.”

She states, “My connect rate was always highest during these times of the day. If you think about a typical executive's workday, they don't start meetings until after 10 AM, and they typically end meetings by 4 PM.”

The Worst Time of Day for Sales Calls

If there’s a best time for cold calls, there’s also a worst time to make a sales call.

Like me, you probably aren’t surprised at all to see that 7 AM is the worst time to connect with a prospect, according to CallHippo. Compared to the 3,000+ first-attempt conversations achieved at 4–5 PM, calls at 7 AM. only managed to spike first-attempt conversations with 500 people.

Making a cold call before 10 AM is tricky. You don’t know whether prospects are ready, and more importantly, willing, to answer. And that’s putting aside the fact that so many of us are still working remotely, making work schedules and start times more unpredictable.

I’ve also learned that calling super early or really late doesn’t mean I’ll actually reach a decision-maker either. While 64% of CEOs wake up before 6 AM, they tend to wake up early to focus on their work without any distractions.

That said, there’s one big exception to these early morning calls — being in a different time zone than your prospects. For example, if I’m staying in Los Angeles and intend on reaching out to someone in Boston, my 7 AM would be 10 AM on the East Coast. So, reaching out is worth a shot even if it cuts into my beauty sleep from time to time.

Strategies for Cold Calls

As any good sales person will tell you, to make effective cold calls, you’ll have to do more than call any random phone number on a Wednesday at 4 PM.

Here are a few things you can account for when preparing and iterating on your cold call strategy.

Mind your response time.

If you don't follow up with new leads within the first hour of qualifying them, you could be missing out on successful sales.

Now, first-hour follow-ups aren‘t as common of a practice as you may think, at least judging from Revenuehero’s most recent study. In it, the company requested demos from 1,000 B2B websites, and the results were somewhat worrying.

Out of the 1,000 requests, Revenuehero received only 365 responses. That means a whopping 63.5% of the demo requests fell into the void. And out of the companies that responded, 162 of them took a day, week, or even more than a week to respond. Talk about letting a hot lead cool off.

But it wasn't all doom and gloom, as 203 of the companies in the same group responded within the hour. And if you ask me, that’s the category you want to fall into.

After all, 78% of buyers purchase from the first company to respond to their inquiry, meaning the faster you reach out to an inbound lead, the better.

Personally, I always try to follow up with new leads within the first hour they become qualified. Otherwise, I know I could be leaving valuable opportunities on the table.

Take it from Marty Bauer, director of sales at Omnisend, who takes a similar stance.

“If someone is showing intent or submits a lead form on your channels, speed is critical. The best time to contact them is now because that’s when the customer has a need and is attentive to your solution. If you wait until 8 AM or 2PM the next day — you have likely missed the best window of opportunity.”

The moral of this story? When in doubt, call immediately.

Be persistent.

Do you quit calling a lead after your second or third voicemail? If so, you might be selling yourself short. Sometimes, it really does pay to keep trying.

CallHippo found that 40% ofsales repsgive up on a prospect after the first call, even though it often takes up to six follow-up phone calls before you convert a lead.

I don’t use only calls in my sales process either. I always take advantage of multiple touchpoints and channels. HubSpot found that 68% ofsales professionals used three or more channels to close their sales too, so I’m in good company.

Generally, I like to follow up calls with an email, and I even use email as part of my cold outreach efforts if reaching the lead via phone proves difficult.

Use the right tools.

Using the right tools can definitely help you close sales, but finding the right balance with your software stack can take time.

HubSpot found that 45% ofsales reps felt overwhelmed by the number of tools in their tech stack. And it’s not hard to see why, either. I frequently use multiple email accounts, marketing tools, sales platforms, social media, and a CRM on any given day.

While I find my CRM to be vital for sales activities — and 91% of sales professionals agree with that sentiment — that doesn’t change the fact that most of my peers often deal with a lengthy list of non-integrated tools to get the job done.

My honest thoughts? Sales reps should leverage software with AI.

Using software that provides AI-driven insights is an excellent way to cut down the amount of work and planning you have to do.

And that’s why more and more salespeople are hopping on the AI trend — at least based on the results of the survey driving HubSpot’s latest Sales Trends Report.

Here are how some of the ways 1,477 sales professionals are using AI today:

• 83% of sellers said AI was effective at recognizing and responding to buyer sentiment.
• 17% of sales reps use AI to help them pick the best time to upsell.
• 26% of sales reps use AI to help pinpoint their timing for cross-selling.

I also use AI for everyday tasks, like drafting emails or getting the timing for sales calls right. And considering HubSpot’s report also found that AI is making it easier for customers to help themselves, there’s no doubt reps will find more creative uses for AI in sales as their role adapts to the current market.

Increase your close rate with scripts.

HubSpot found 20% of sales people rely on call scripts to help them with their sales process. I know scripts have definitely helped my success rate, and I always like to have at least two or three options nearby to fall back on.

What’s more, 15% of the sales pros surveyed by HubSpot said that call scripts are one of their most effective strategies for helping them close deals.

I’ve found that creating scripts that allow for a variety of responses often makes it easier to talk with prospects. Plus, if I have a few paths laid out right in front of me, it's easier to figure out how to redirect them without turning them away if one solution doesn’t work for their needs.

If you need a starting point for a cold call script, check out HubSpot’s cold call script template.

Cold Outreach Statistics in 2024

With our Sales Trends Report, HubSpot recently released insights worth keeping in mind as sales professionals revise their cold call and sales strategies for 2024 and beyond.

Here are a couple of highlights I think will motivate sales reps to keep investing time and effort into cold calling.

First, let’s look at how cold calling stacks up to other channels. HubSpot asked sales pros what channels they tend to use for cold outreach.

And although the survey allowed participants to select multiple channels, phone calls still came on top as the preferred method, with 38% of the surveyed sales pros favoring this channel. Email (36%) and social media (34%) were the next two on the list.

These results show that much like me, sales pros are keen on using a multichannel approach. That said, I know plenty of salespeople who prefer sending emails over making a phone call. But while I’d rather skip working on my opening lines most days, it’s also important to look at what’s most effective at converting leads.

When it came down to the effectiveness of these channels according to sales pros, the numbers weren’t much different. Up to 37% of allsales reps reported that phone calls are the most effective channels for cold outreach. Conversely, 23% said email was most effective, and 30% said social media worked best.

The takeaway? Sales teams should still focus on cold calls as part of their outreach. Email, in particular, has a wide gap between popularity and conversion rate, so while I might prefer to send out a few dozen emails, deep down I know putting in that effort and making a call is much more likely to work.

Choosing the Best Time to Cold Call

Ultimately, picking the right time to make your sales calls is essential to sales success. I’ve been working on lead generation and cold calling for over a decade now, and even then, when I get in a rut, I try changing the time or day I make most of my cold calls. Alternatively, I ask a colleague to take a look at the script I’ve been working from to see if there are any changes they’d make to it.

Test these approaches and adopt the ones that work for you. You might be surprised to find how many more prospects you can reach with a few simple tweaks.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in September 2015 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

What do you do when you’re a certain personality type - e.g. high energy, fast and enthusiastic - and your prospect is the exact opposite: deliberate, reserved, quiet. It’s common knowledge in sales that you should pace or mirror your prospect to build rapport. But should you really?

As a sales pro, you want to master the art of communication. It’s the skill you continuously want to hone and sharpen - through books, courses, coaching and daily practice. But studying psychological sales techniques can be a slippery slope that leads you down the road of deception.

The number one thing you should focus on when working on becoming a better communicator is: authenticity.

Why?

Two reasons:

1) It will ultimately lead to a much easier life and a much bigger career. You won't have to constantly compute what you say and how you say it and keep track of every way you contort yourself. It's requires a lot of effort to keep that show going, and the payoff isn't that great.

2) Your prospects know how to spot inauthenticity. Everybody is great at detecting incongruencies; young kids, old people, and everyone in between.

We all sense it when a sales person says one thing, but means something else. Even if we can’t exactly pinpoint it - we instinctively notice that something is off.

Your prospects dislike incongruent communication. They’ll feel put off by you, your company and your product - even if they’d actually be a great fit and benefit from your solution.

All of that being said; "authenticity" is a big and fuzzy word - what steps can you take to practice it in your day to day life?

Become an effective communicator (while staying true to yourself)

Mirroring prospects, pacing their body language and posture and reflecting their choice of words back to them - all of these tactics are often taught as measures to build rapport.

(I’ve shared my views on rapport in a previous post.)

But many sales reps apply these concepts poorly; they’re so preoccupied with mirroring the prospect that they lose themselves in the process.

Don't try to trick people into liking and trusting you. Instead, focus on making it easy for your prospect to receive, understand and accept your message. The goal is to become so flexible in your communication that you can attune yourself to their way of communicating.

Be flexible, but stay authentic

When you learn about psychological techniques, take a long-term approach.

1. Observe. Become more aware and fine-tune your antennas. Watch what naturally happens when you communicate with someone and you’re in sync with them… or when there’s a disconnect.

2. Once you’re ready to start practicing, turn it into a game. Practice this with people who are aware of what you’re doing. Play with these concepts to internalize them on a behavioral level.

3. Operate with awareness. Over time, you'll be more naturally become more flexible in your communication while at the same time staying true to yourself and being authentic.

Understand and be understood

Learning to fit the delivery of your message to your prospect will help you to be understood better, and learn to understand better. Which is a prerequisite for discovering opportunities to create value - and close deals.

There's already too many sales people willing to tell you what they think you want to hear to make the sale. Don't turn into one of them.

Don't contort yourself to make a sale. Instead, tap into your true strengths and learn how to use them to communicate in the most effective way with the prospect in front of you.

Marketers – Should you be spending your time along the way and develop programs specific to the customer journey? I think too many articles are written on this topic and I have never been comfortable developing a plan to address this idea.

Here are my thoughts on this topic. In my opinion, this term, customer journey is an over-used term. Let me tell you why…

What is the customer journey?

Almost every marketing speech I hear these days that tries to marry marketing with sales talks about how customers are coming in and out of the journey. The journey is usually highlighted on a page and it includes stops for companies to draw attention to their company product or services, engage them with blogs and follow-up messages through email and social media channels and hopefully, the client will make the decision to select your company to do business with.

How did the customer journey get so complicated?

The answer, we, as marketers are reading more and more information about how we need to engage more with our clients and bring them into this process of reading content on our sites and continuing a dialogue with clients because they have so much information to sort through regarding their service needs and questions.

Is there a better approach to looking at the customer journey? The answer is YES!!!

Believe it or not, I really do not focus on the customer journey. The focus for me is quite simple.

• Make customers aware of your products/services and show how your company can offer value for your clients.
• Bring people in and make the process simpler and easier for your customers.
• Finally, make sure your clients are connected personally to one of your own client service/management staff.

If you take care of servicing your clients, you don’t need to worry about where they are in the journey.

Where should Marketers focus their time and resources if not focused on the customer journey process?

Going Mobile – People are in more of a hurry now more than ever. Even if your website is mobile-friendly, it still may not be the easiest for your clients to navigate and find information. This is a huge challenge right now for me. I am doing a lot of listening to clients and trying to better understand their pains with respect to our website. From here, I am trying to make our site much more simpler and more appealing to mobile users.

Client Service – People now don’t have time to conduct their own research. They call-in and want answers to their questions over the phone or by email. Where is this step in the customer journey? People want answers to their questions and if your representatives are not available they will go somewhere else. People don’t have time to conduct in-depth searches on their phones. Clients are discovering that they can better use their time by calling or emailing client service staff people.

Manage Social Media Marketing Process more effectively – Learn to find ways to communicate that are radically different than the normal communication on these sites. Get people’s attention and draw them in. For me this has been a huge change I have made in the last year. In addition, I would prioritize the platforms and chose one platform to really focus on. You don’t have to have a presence on every social media site.

Manage Content Marketing Process more effectively – Don’t think more content equates to more hits. Write 2-3 articles a week and take some time to write a good article and lead them to take some more action…read another article, contact a company representative for more information, include an offer or extend an invitation of some kind.

Summary

If you work with a system that captures people’s information and sends several follow-up communications over a period of time, continue to work with these type of systems. Make these processes more personal by making sure these messages come from you or someone specific in you company. Make sure you always give people a reason to contact you if they still have questions or want clarification. Track these leads and see if they are already being serviced by your website or client service staff. I am finding the more simpler the process I have in place on the web or by contacting client service staff, the faster these leads are becoming clients.

(This is the real reason below that I am not a big fan of the client journey process) (I am not saying the journey doesn’t exist. I am just wondering why so much emphasis is placed on it. Focus on more on service, mobile and moving toward simpler processes)

One last exercise.

Finally, put yourself in the client journey process. Do you go to a company website and after looking at the service, you navigate the site for more blog information and where to connect on Twitter or Facebook? I can only speak for myself, but typically I look for the product/service, the price and the hours of operation. From here if I have questions, I may call the company or email the company if I can find an email address on the site. I’m not a fan of information emails like info@company.com. Somewhere, I like to see a person’s name that I can can contact. I want a simple process that provides me with additional information about the service that will help me determine if the company I am buying from has a solid, quality product/service. If the process is simple and easy-to-follow, typically I will come back to the site. If I can call and get answers to my questions in a quick, efficient manner, chances go up substantially that I will be doing business with this company. In addition, I may even visit the location in person if it is a local company. Do you want to measure and analyze my journey or would you rather spend the time up front to develop a better client service system? In the end it is about sales…How quickly can you get there?

Picture Source: Pixabay

As a sales person, what happens to your quota if you hit it? It goes up! In hyper-growth companies it may go up exponentially. Why does it go up? Did the market change? Are you getting extra people? Did your customer get more budget?  The answer to those questions is probably: No. No. No. Hell no.

Working for a rapid growth company

But growth targets demand you hit a bigger number, more views, more SQLs, more MRR, more upsell, more cross sell, more more more. And targets keep going up for ever and ever.  Oh and if you fail to hit these growing targets you are at risk of being kicked off the island!

Help! Please?

This growing demand for more productivity out of every member of the sales organization, as well as the need to deliver a better customer experience and speed the sales cycle, is the driving force behind an industry referred to as sales acceleration, and it is one of the fastest growing markets today:

Sales acceleration technology increases the productivity of sales teams, both in efficiency and effectiveness, while improving the client’s experience, through automation and deep engagement analytics

Several years ago marketing was struggling with similar issues around personalization, albeit between views on a web page and the lack of engaged visitors.  This turned into Marketing Automation and spun off a series of companies such as Eloqua, Marketo, SugarCRM and Hubspot. Can you imagine living without marketing automation these days?

The sales acceleration market fill an existing gap by providing advanced automation coupled with comprehensive buyer-side insights to streamline sales processes and improve customer engagement.

How did this gap occur?

Before we start filling the gap, it’s best to first understand where did it come from:

#1. B2B buyers have become “Amazonized”

Similar to “B2C” selling, buyers have turned to online sources to educate themselves about products and services before reaching out to vendors – “Amazonizing” the purchasing process. This has changed how sales teams must serve customers – requiring more agility and insight to be effective.

#2. Trend of volume over quality

Marketing automation systems have had a problem to fulfill the growing demand for leads, and in turn started focusing on creating leads by quantity, not quality. As any salesperson will tell you, “the leads are weak”. As a result sales teams are now spending far too much time on leads that are simply not qualified.

#3. Customers want more personalized conversations

No client wants to wake-up to hundreds of automated spam emails or receive tens of cold calls from a person who does not understand their business.

Spamming a customer has nothing to do with selling.

Today most clients want a personalized approach by a trained professional. Or in sales speak every client wants a B2B Consultative Provocative sales experience.

To accomplish this, sales professionals need lots of information about the client.  But a client who goes online is not interested in surrendering the needed insights to the “unknown” sales professional with a 99% likelihood that their email address is fed into an “spamming” system.

This has created a gap that in many cases continues to grow, triggered investments in sales acceleration technologies of more than $1.2 billion, and created a market projected to reach $30 billion within the next two years.

Five steps to close the gap

Through a combination of analytics and automation, sales acceleration tools give businesses a new approach to implement and manage their sales processes in this changed sales landscape with:

Step 1 – Use analytics to measure what works

With deep engagement analytics, sales acceleration tools give sales teams greater insights into client-side behaviors so they can see a client’s interests to nurture and develop a relationship.

Such insights cannot be just based on open rates, and click through rates. Sales organizations require deeper insights that can show, for example:

• Which rep spent the most time emailing to prospect
• How effective were their emails
• Which SDR generated the least churn
• Which campaign resulted in the shortest sales cycle

 Work More Effectively

This allows you to build effective processes for the team. Something we have been lacking for far too long.

Step 2 – Create customer-focused sales processes

The emphasis for today’s sales teams must be customer-focused and consultative to strengthen customer relationships. For sales reps that have been trained to be product-focused, this can be challenging, but sales acceleration tools can help turn the focus toward the customer by providing more insight into clients’ interests and interest levels.

These processes are entirely optimized around engaging the right client at the right time, on the right topic.  It results in more qualified leads from fewer inbound developed leads or outbound-generated leads.

Stop wasting time on nonqualified leads

This reduces time wasted on leads that simply aren’t qualified.

Step 3 – Streamline the sales processes

Routine tasks that take away from core selling time are huge pain points for today’s sales leaders. Look, or rather listen to your inside sales team. Do you hear them talking on the phone? Are they feverishly researching their next client to send out a personalized email?

Stop entering data – let your tools take care of that

If not, then most likely they are entering data… or manually pulling content together. According to Sirius Decisions, 65% of businesses have noticed how reps spend an enormous amount of time on these non-selling activities. Data entry, and data augmentation needs to happen automatically. Freeing up valuable time of your sales people.

Step 4 – A/B test EVERYTHING

With a data-driven model, and along a proven process, marketing and sales organizations have the infrastructure to understand what is working and not working with their messaging. Reps send out between 30-40 emails a day. These emails are often a prospect’s first impression of your company! Before you scale this to your entire team you want to be sure your messaging is consistent.

Don’t scale failure. Scale success.

They can see how engaged reps are with prospects – and what messaging gets the best responses. This insight helps teams assess sales performance and processes to see what messaging and approach works best – so the best approaches can be repeated across the organization.

Step 5 – Do more of what works, less of what doesn’t work

Based on the analytics we have learned what works. At this point we can use automated capabilities such as email templates, group email, and email sequencing to create more emails.

Sales hacking may be a great tactic, but it is not a growth strategy.

We are now scaling what works.  Whereas most companies and sales organizations primarily copy what they suspect to work, by going on the internet and adopt to outdated templates and processes (A good article to read on this topic: Stop the sales hacking).

Furthermore, best-in-class organizations understand that both marketing and sales need to be involved development and personalization of client-side content. According to Aberdeen Group’s report “Engage, Personalize, Analyze, Win … Repeat,” these organizations ‘aggressively align marketing and sales activities around content development, management, and deployment’ for greater advantage.

Aberdeen’s research shows that organizations that give sales reps access to sales enablement technology to personalize content have higher lead acceptance and lead conversion rates than other organizations.

Conclusion: A process driven by analytics

In closing, if you are involved with inside sales, you need to automate to hit growing targets, for this you need to establish process, and use data to measure what works.  To execute you will come to rely on sales acceleration technology. It’s the competitive advantage that best-in-class corporations are already using.

Maximizing your sales potential requires proven processes, and automation of non-core sales tasks.  Analytics provide you the insights in which processes and messaging work best, so that you can repeat them across your entire team. Analytics show you what prospects are the most engaged, so you can quickly rank top prospects and follow-up more effectively. Sales acceleration technology gives you the tools to deliver on the potential.

Do you want to learn more?

These and many more insights on how to build, and operate a scalable SaaS organization can be found in the book, “Blueprints for a SaaS Sales Organization”. You can find the book on Amazon.

This blog post was co-authored by Jacco van der Kooij, author of Blueprints for a SaaS Sales Organization.

Original Post

When we’re approached about strategy at SHIFT, we’re often being asked about the reasons behind why we’ve made the recommendations or choices we have about the approach to a program. Alternatively and understandably, clients want to try the shiny new marketing thing they’ve heard about – social media, remarketing, retargeting, and so on.

With a lot of time and effort involved in each trial, it’s to no one’s surprise that explaining the work and the outcomes is key. The best approach to take with each client request – no matter the tactics they want to try – is with three questions to get to the answers that help determine if the trial is something that fits in their bigger strategy while justifying the test.

• What are the goals?
• What are the methods best suited to achieve the goals?
• Does our company have the bandwidth to contribute to the tactics?

That’s it. They seem like simple questions, but why those three?

What are the goals?

A key question that often doesn’t have an answer entirely determined at the start of a conversation, but important nonetheless. Is the goal to drive brand awareness, get a promotion in front of interested audiences, or drive conversions? Whatever the outcome, nearly everyone has an outcome in mind at the start of a conversation and those outcomes are different depending on the person’s role.

The VP of sales wants more deals. The VP of marketing wants more leads. The VP of comms wants more brand awareness. Having everyone at the table to establish goals is vital for long term success.

Now’s the time to share those expectations, to think them through and approach the plan as a team – the more minds centered on solving for the goal – the better the outcomes will be.

What are the methods best suited to achieve the goals?

Once the goals are firmly in mind, beginning to formulate tactics that lead to goal completion is the next step. Let’s say that the goal is “driving more leads through thought leadership”. What are some tactical ways we can achieve the goal? eBooks, whitepapers, a good blogging strategy, speaking, and so forth. Those are the tactical elements of the program.

Now which is best suited tactically given the time and the effort the company can realistically contribute? We’ve stumbled on the key.

Does our company have the bandwidth to contribute to the tactics?

Given the tactical decisions, now it’s time to realistically about what we can achieve with the resources that exist. Do we have the budget we need to do a data-driven test of the tactics? Do we have people who have the time and the mandate to contribute to this effort?

Don’t be fooled. If anyone one piece of this puzzle is missing, then we’re doomed to start. Time, money, effort, methods and goals are all necessary in achieving success.

If we lack the foresight to see what we’re attempting to achieve, we’ll fail.

If choose the wrong tactical elements to drive toward our goals, we’ll fail.

If our bosses are all on board with the ideas behind the program, but not on board with time and effort being contributed to that program with realistic expectations on the length of time it will take to show results, we’ll fail.

So, how do you plan to win?

The sales industry has long been fascinated with the difference between salespeople who just “get by” and sales stars who seem to succeed effortlessly, at two or three times the rate of the average employee.

What makes sales stars different from their mediocre coworkers?

Research shows that unique personality traits combined with a perceptive sales approach are what set top performers apart.

Here are the top sales secrets that make high performers so much more successful than the rest.

1. See everything from the customer’s perspective.

Most salespeople have probably spent some time imagining what potential customers want from a business relationship, but a top performer will take this thought exercise much further.

With each potential client, a great salesperson will try to identify the prospect’s top priorities and concerns and use that information to tailor his product offering and approach to specifically address those needs.

This specificity and personal treatment of prospects is what gives a top salesperson the ability to anticipate a customer’s needs and make him feel like he is being helped rather than being sold.

2. Believe in the product.

Real enthusiasm for a company’s product is infectious and hard to fake.

When a salesperson believes in his product’s value, he can frame his entire purpose around offering solutions to client’s problems rather than simply closing a deal. This helpful approach will also put a prospect at ease because it feels like working with an expert offering advice rather than a salesperson charming him for a commission.

Believing in the company’s product has more to do with understanding the ideal customer than having the absolute “best” product on the market. So, every salesperson should be able to believe in the helpfulness of his product once he identifies the best customer.

3. Do not waste time begging lukewarm leads to buy now.

A great salesperson knows that his product is not for everyone and is honest about it.

A top salesperson will even have the confidence to walk away from a prospect if it is not a good fit.

Forcing prospects into his company’s solution might help a salesperson’s commission upfront, but it will ultimately hurt the business as a whole when the prospect backs out after a month.

Top salespeople know that time used persuading a lukewarm lead to buy would have been better spent tracking down new sources of qualified leads or developing current relationships.

4. Ask good questions.

A top sales performer will be less interested in pitching and more interested in having conversations with prospects.

Good conversational skills hinge on asking good questions, so top salespeople will have a few well-crafted ones in their back pocket at all times.

Not only are conversations more natural than pitches and more comfortable for prospects, but if a salesperson asks the right questions, he can uncover the customer’s needs and concerns and figure out the best way to address them.

5. Know the product inside and out.

After a top salesperson figures out his prospect’s needs and concerns, he must draw on his expertise to determine the best solution for that customer.

Great salespeople do not underestimate the importance of understanding the product, how it can help, and having a few bits of data to back up their claims.

This sales secret seems pretty obvious, but it cannot be overstated. Product knowledge is vital for great sales technique and extremely teachable, so there’s no excuse for a serious salesperson to let it slide.

6. Build authority and trust.

A top salesperson realizes that sales are easier when prospects trust him.

Approaching each prospect as a consultant rather than a salesperson shifts the focus to helping rather than selling, which will build trust.

A top performer will also use his expertise to participate in industry dialog, whether in online communities or local groups and establish himself as an authority in his field. Commenting on relevant articles that potential clients will likely read and answering questions in topical forums will not only establish authority but also drive qualified prospects to his door.

An average employee is content to be an anonymous sales representative for his company, but a top salesperson will work to develop a reputation of expertise in the field.

7. Throw out the script.

Slideshows and scripts are written to cover basic buzzwords and generic specifications with no particular customer in mind.

A great salesperson will know the script well enough to cover relevant information with prospects while tailoring his approach to the client’s particular needs. Clients hate sitting through dry sales pitches, so top sales performers ditch the pitch when necessary and engage with prospects human to human.

8. Do not waste the customer’s time.

There is nothing that screams of amateur ineptitude more than wasting a customer’s time covering stock information that isn’t relevant to them.

Top salespeople know their customers well enough by the time they are into the details of a deal that they do not waste time covering information that is not important to the specific situation. With the client’s experience always at the forefront of his mind, a great salesperson will cut what needs to be cut to keep the meeting on topic.

9. Be tenacious.

A top sales performer knows what to do when customers have objections. Rather than panic, he asks more questions and continues the conversation with the goal of finding the root reason for a customer’s objection.

Tenacity does not have to mean being pushy. Often when prospects bring up issues, it has more to do with their trust of the salesperson than the proposed price of the deal.

A great salesperson will realize that objections are opportunities to learn more about a client and take the opportunity to step back and re-inform their approach.

10. Enjoy the process.

Probably the most important factor in a star salesperson’s success is that he has an aptitude for sales, which makes it easy for him to enjoy the process. Of all the sales secrets that set top performers apart from the rest, this is the one that cannot be taught.

A salesperson who is suited to the job will enjoy earning a client’s trust, anticipating a customer’s needs, making numbers, and becoming recognized as an authority in his field.

Great salespeople have Need for Achievement, Competitiveness and Optimism, which are all critical traits that make careers in sales satisfying and enjoyable day in and day out.

Most salespeople are not consciously aware of whether or not they have the right personality for sales, so it is helpful for companies to use aptitude testing during the first stages of the hiring process.

If a salesperson has the Drive and personality to succeed in the industry, he can learn all the sales secrets, build authority in the community and enjoy the process of becoming a star salesperson.

Join the Conversation:

What are your top sales secrets?

The post 10 Secrets of Top Sales Performers appeared first on SalesDrive LLC.

My first post for the Ambition Blog is written in the spirit of our newly-launched #SaveTheMillennials campaign.

The purpose of the campaign is to proactively solve issues pertaining to managing a Millennial workforce.

So I thought it would be appropriate to poll 3 close acquaintances who manage teams comprised primarily of Millennials.

The twist: They’re Millennials, too.

Q&A with 3 Millennial Managers

​Almost exclusively, the conversations I hear about Millennial management discuss the supervisory role from the lens of a Gex-X member or Baby Boomer.

Not so, here.

As you’ll see in the Q&A below, Millennial managers are not immune from the challenges our older generations have faced in wrangling our full potential.

Meet the Managers

Millennial Manager #1. Grant H.

My name is Grant and I lead a software sales team of passionate, hospitality nerds across Northern Europe and a bit of Africa.

I’m a graduate of the University of Tennessee – started my career in sales in D.C., moved to Seattle and now grinding in Europe.

As far as interests go, I’m definitely a travel junkie. Also an avid reader, aspiring history buff and lover of a good TV series.

Millennial Manager #2. Kevin B.

I work for an advertising sales agency that’s heavy on cold calls, up to 200 per day. I did so well as a rep that my company tabbed me to open its Atlanta branch.

I’m a big sports guy, originally from Philly and graduated from University of Tampa.

Millennial Manager #3. Jake U.

I graduated from Emory with a B.A. in Environmental Studies in 2011. After holding a full-time internship at an advertising agency for my senior year, I went to work full time the day after graduation on a major telecommunications client.

In 2012, I switched agencies to do marketing analytics for a major airline.

There, I was quickly promoted to Senior Analyst and then Manager, managing four Millennials, after forming strong relationships with my client and excelling over my peers through hard work and determination.

I have recently switched jobs to go client side to the major airline, developing an analytics process for their Revenue Management department while managing a team of 6.

1. All three of you ascended to manager status faster than most Millennials. What got you that success, and what advice do you have for Millennials looking to become managers?”

Grant H. 

Off the bat: I don’t hold higher status than my team members.  I’m no better than them. I’m no more gifted than they are. I resent any manager that leads in any context other than we chose to do a different job.

We chose to lead rather than individually contribute. Our success is through our team’s success.

If you take hot air balloon view of how I reached my position relatively quickly can be attributed to a couple of specific factors: timing and risk.

I’ve heard from people you can’t influence timing. I don’t necessarily think they’re wrong but I’d argue that they aren’t right. At a minimum, they’re only painting half the picture.

While you might not be able to speed up or slow down events to suit your whimsical fancy, you can certainly position yourself to benefit with the structure you’re presented.

For example, in my case, I saw the business potential for our products in EMEA and I pushed to move here before others noticed the trend.

Or, if they noticed it too, I acted. That kind of, “if you can’t be better, be first” mentality.

So, having that type of foresight can help you manage your timing constraints. However, it should be noted that the acquisition of our startup is something that I had no control of whatsoever.

If that voids my previous statements: whatever – do well and good things will happen to you.

The risk is I went the startup route. Startups have less stability but the payoffs are higher if they’re successful.

You typically move a bit faster in startups as well because they’re all about the meritocracy model. That “get shit done” mentality.

I think as Millennials we are a bit more risk acceptant – we have this inherent notion that nothing can really hurt us.** So, the thought of moving abroad was a bit more palatable for me.

Because, why not?

I suppose the best advice I could give a Millennials who want to become managers would be to go all in. Leaders appreciate conviction and certainty. It’s extremely rare to be “tapped on the shoulder.”

Management is a choice, not a reward. If you want to advance, be clear about your intentions to your management and set realistic goals with a proper time frame to achieve it.

Look at each meeting as your opportunity to prove your worth as a thought leader. Leave the half measures and indecision to the underperformers.

*Sidebar 1 – Another factor to be mentioned is my industry. I’m in software sales. Sales orgs promote pretty quickly. If I was an accountant I’d have a harder time being a fast mover.

**Sidebar 2 – I’ve noticed that this is a much more American attitude than European. The amount of opportunity (specifically around technology companies) is just so much richer in the US that we worry less about job stability.

Many of my similarly aged colleagues across Europe have a deep seeded fear of economic instability – much more than the same peer group in the States simply because of their job landscapes and small country-specific economies.

Basically we can move to SF, Seattle, or NYC with no issue whatsoever. They need hard to come by visas.

Kevin B.

Since I began working at this company, I’ve kind of developed two personal mottos, all of which were absolutely critical for my success and led to me getting my promotion.

Motto number one: “Keep an old-school mindset — do not to act like most Millennials.” As in, I’m keeping my nose to the grindstone and refusing to let distractions get in the way of my success.

Motto number two: “I’m focused on my own lawn and have no idea what the grass looks like on the other side.” In other words, I don’t have one foot out the door and I’m staying completely focused on maximizing my opportunity at my current company.

To extrapolate on those and turn them into some actionable advice – foremost, don’t get caught up in social media, watching some viral video or so forth.

Another big thing I’ve learned is that work trains you for work more so than grades. A lot of smart people my age graduate with high GPAs, obtain a graduate degree and the like.

But truth be told, I’ve seen a lot of these people fall victim to entitlement – and they’re the ones struggling in the workforce right now. Hard work, not grades or academic background, is what breeds success. And entitlement kills motivation.

Last thing: I hear a lot of people tell me they’re “determine to succeed” and then work from 9-5 everyday.

That’s bullshit. In sales — especially in this day and age — 9-5 is bullshit, unless you aspire to mediocrity.

You have to put in the long man hours early in your career to accelerate your growth. This is your best opportunity to do so — don’t let it go to waste.

Jake U.

I was able to rise quickly through the ranks by utilizing hard work and curiosity.

Millennials have a tendency to think that rewards will come naturally because they are smart, but this quality alone is not enough.

You really have to put in your time and be willing to raise your hand to take on extra work and have the drive to dig deep and investigate problems and potential solutions.

It’s this creative thinking that will set you apart from your peers.

2. What have been your most frustrating experiences in managing Millennials? Your most rewarding?

Grant H. 

I really like how Millennials look at how things could be done. Again, we like to take risks and we don’t focus on our failures.

We love immediate gratification and we have short memories. It’s a blessing without much curse. This lets us try new things and we keep driving forward.

For the very same reasons, we get distracted easily. It’s common for my team to lose focus or to be deflated if there isn’t something shiny in front of them all the time.

Not every week needs to be butterflies-and-rainbow’s appreciation-competition-week. Sometimes I feel that we act like we’re entitled to uproot the status quo just to say we uprooted the status quo.

Kevin B.

Most frustrating: People that don’t serve their time and leave for a better job because the grass is greener.

Rewarding: Recently, enough of my ATL team qualified for the company incentive trip to New Orleans, thus I was able to join them.

My peers, in terms of job title and responsibilities, on the trip were all Gen-X or Baby Boomers.

Quickly upon arrival, I was given the vote of confidence of being in charge of the plans and celebratory festivities for the qualifying reps from across the entire company that were in attendance.

To be recognized and then respected like that by my older peers, while getting to enjoy the spoils with my fellow Millennials – that was truly rewarding. The Millennial colleagues I manage know my work ethic.

I very, very rarely lose my cool, and when I do, it’s because that work ethic is disregarded or under-appreciated (mainly from a rep that positioned themselves as a go-getter in their interview but treated the job as a stop-gap and didn’t pay their dues).

Fortunately, that isn’t too often, though it does happen.

Jake U.

The stereotype of Millennials feeling entitled can often ring true in a workplace.

Many Millennials will see how their executives act and think they can get away with it (i.e. taking off early without asking permission), but what they don’t realize is they have to earn that right by clawing their way up through the ranks.

Millennials tend to be very quick learners, however, so it’s very rewarding when you teach them something that they then go on to master and become subject matter experts in.

3. You’re in a role typically held by baby boomers and members of Gen-X, What advice do you have for them, as a millennial, for getting through to your generational peers?

Grant H.

I think there are two camps on this one: Those who want to vocalize the generational gap and those who don’t. I think in either case you need to be aware of it.

Focus on the things we need and understand why we need them. This isn’t a one-way street.

Help us understand where you’re coming from too. Coach us. Mentor us. Teach us the skills you’ve spent your career honing.

Please manage to my personality before you manage to my generational label. Talk to me about my goals and aspirations and be ready to share your own.

Bottom line – don’t think using colloquialisms like “on fleek” will, in any way, make us relate. Actually, no one, regardless of generation, should use “on fleek”. Ever.

Kevin B.

In so many ways, your professional success is going to be based on appearance. You have to give people what they want.

Let them see “the good life” and don’t be a curmudgeon, or else they won’t know you have their back. They will work for you if they know they’re on your team and they’re also working hard for themselves, too.

Positive people are putting stuff on social media — it’s all new to them. You need to reinforce a positive environment through acknowledgement and, in general, being a positive manager.

Jake U.

To the older generations managing Millennials, I would say that we are a very smart, quick learning generation. We have a lot of potential and myriad new, fresh ideas.

Don’t be afraid of suggestions that we have that deviate from traditional standard practices, but at the same time, keep us in line to make sure we are being bred for our full potential.

Also, please take an interest and mentor us, as we have been used to this type of personal one-on-one relationship growing up and will respond positively to it.

Improving Millennial Sales Leadership 

We Millennials require the help of our wisened Gen-X and Baby Boomer colleagues. With proper support, sales leaders can #SaveTheMillennials.

Please visit http://savethemillennials.com and pledge your company to the cause, share a favorite Millennial moment on Twitter or join our Managing Millennials LinkedIn group.

There are also some great tech companies on there who can help, so feel free to check them out as well.

Special thanks to our 3 Millennial sales managers for agreeing to participate in this interview and for their candid answers.

To our readers, good luck and I and hope you found some new value and insight from these interviews.

You can buy six brand-new tablets from Amazon for less than the cost new iPad.

At first, that claim may sound unbelievable, as just five years ago few people had tablets, and the ones who did had likely spent hundreds on them.

But on Thursday, the Amazon unveiled a $50 version of its Fire tablet. It has a 7-inch color display, a quad-core processor, and front- and rear-facing cameras.

It's even selling them in six packs for $250.

So why can Amazon sell its devices for next to nothing?

Because unlike Apple or Samsung, Amazon doesn't need to make any money on the hardware. 

The company has for years said that it makes money when you use the tablet to buy apps, games, movies, books, TV shows, or physical goods on Amazon. It's a way of locking you into the Amazon ecosystem. You get the cheap device, but use it as a portal to buy stuff from Amazon. That's where the real money comes from. Whereas Apple locks users into an ecosystem that encourages you to buy new devices every year or two, Amazon locks users into an ecosystem that encourages you to buy everything you need from toilet paper to the latest episode of "The Walking Dead" for years after the initial purchase of a cheap tablet.

An Amazon executive reiterated this strategy at the press briefing for the new tablets this week, telling Business Insider's Jillian D'Onfron, "Our thesis is that if they're using the tablet, we gain our profitability from that."

Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon, has in the past referred to Amazon's unique strategy in selling devices at such low costs, writing in a letter to shareholders in 2013 that during a visit to the beach, he saw nearly every generation of Kindle being used. 

"Our business approach is to sell premium hardware at roughly breakeven prices," he wrote. "We want to make money when people use our devices – not when people buy our devices... we don’t need our customers to be on the upgrade treadmill. We can be very happy to see people still using four-year-old Kindles!"

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: We unboxed the Amazon Echo — it's like Siri for your house

As its catchy slogan states, cotton is quite literally "the fabric of our lives."

But that was not always the case.

Forty years ago, cotton owned about one third of the textile market, but today the soft, fluffy material dominates about two-thirds of it, according to Marketplace.

What transformed cotton from a competitor to a commander of the fabric industry is a combination of science, marketing, and perseverance.

Early dangers of cotton

By itself, cotton fabric can be onerous and even dangerous.

For example, during the first half of the 20th century, cotton would easily catch fire; flame-retardant cotton fabric had yet to be invented.

Activities like smoking in bed with cotton sheets could be deadly. Many people suffered severe burns and some even died as a result. But in 1953 Congress passed the Flammable Fabrics Act, which placed strict regulations on the sale of flammable fabrics in clothing, mattress pads, and other common household products.

While catching fire was one of the more serious problems with early cotton fabrics, there were other flaws, too.

The rise of wrinkle-free cotton

Cotton wrinkled easily, and for decades before polyester was invented, cotton manufacturers had been treating cotton fabrics with chemical mixtures to try and reduce its wrinkle-able nature. But these chemicals made the fabric extremely brittle.

"You could sit down and your shirt would rip across the back," Noelie Bertoniere, who studied the chemistry of cotton in the 20th century and co-authored the book "Cotton Fiber Chemistry and Technology," told Chemical and Engineering News.

In 1951, the synthetic fiber called polyester was introduced to America and marketed as the fabric that required no ironing. As a result:

"During the mid 1900's, cotton's share in apparel and home textiles began to drop because of the growth in the use of polyester and nylon," Martha Carper, an assistant professor at the University of Delaware's Department of Fashion, told Business Insider over email.

Polyester was going to take over the world

After polyester entered the scene, cotton manufacturers knew they had to find a better way to make wrinkle-free cotton that was flexible at the same time.

"It was never really published but I think [the cotton industry was] really concerned that polyester was going to take over the world," Carper told Business Insider in a follow-up phone interview. "So the cotton industry, in order to protect and grow their share ... invested heavily in research and development in the concept of wrinkle-free."

One of those researchers was award-winning American chemist Ruth R. Benerito.

The woman who made cotton "the fabric of our lives"

Benerito has won numerous awards for her contributions to the cotton, wood, and paper industries and accumulated 55 total patents.

Some of these contributions were based from a single, ingenious chemical cocktail that was first applied to cotton to create the wrinkle-free cotton we know and love today.

Benerito, with her research group at the USDA Southern Regional Research Laboratories in New Orleans, attacked the wrinkly problem by first throwing out all the traditional chemical concoctions that manufacturers were currently using to treat cotton against wrinkles which were making the fabric too brittle.

Cotton chemistry

The reason cotton wrinkles in the first place is because it is made up of lots of parallel chains of the organic compounds called polysaccharide cellulose. These chains are weakly attached at the atomic level by chemical bonds.

Leaving your cotton shirt crumpled on the ground is enough to break these bonds, which then reform into a different configuration, also known as a wrinkle.

To keep cotton wrinkle-free, scientists initially used chemicals that interacted with the bonds, locking them in place. But this left the fabric crisp and rippable.

Benerito's revolutionary approach was not to lock the bonds in place but to reorganize the structure of cotton's parallel chains that link together and form a piece of fabric. Using a special chemical reagent, Benerito's approach kept cotton fabrics flexible but reduced their tendency to wrinkle.

"Wrinkle-free cotton was really created in the fabric or garment form," Carper told Business Insider. "You're not growing wrinkle-free cotton and you're not processing the cotton in a way that the fibers are wrinkle-free ... it's created by topical finishes that are put on the fabric...that is a chemical reaction to the cotton [that makes it wrinkle-free]."

Benerito's method was later incorporated into not only wrinkle-resistant cotton, but stain and flame-resistant cotton fabrics as well. It was also used to make new wood produces and epoxy resins.

For all her contributions, Benerito was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2008 where she joined the ranks of Ernst Alexanderson, who invented the radio, Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, and Baruch Samuel Blumberg, who invented the vaccine for Hepatitis B. As of 2015, there are 516 members of this prestigious group.

In the end, cotton and polyester combined forces. Most fabrics you can buy today are a blend of cotton and polyester so that you get the best of both worlds.

CHECK OUT: 13 ways wonder material graphene is going to vastly improve a bunch of things you use all the time

SEE ALSO: A NASA video shows what a total lunar eclipse looks like from the moon, and it's mind-blowing

Join the conversation about this story »

And another warm temperature record bites the dust. Then another, and another, with still more to come.

New data released from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) shows that August was the warmest such month on record, the summer months of June through August were the warmest on record for the planet, and the year-to-date also set a record for the hottest such period both on land and in the sea

A statistical analysis from scientists at the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) found that there is a 97% likelihood, given the record warm first eight months of the year, that 2015 will go on to exceed the record for the warmest year, which was set last year. Read more...

The problem with being a marketer today is that it’s tough to find — and network — with the best minds in marketing. GrowthBeats only happen so often, right? We’re bringing that GrowthBeat experience to your laptop through VB Insight Twitter Chats.  VentureBeat’s Twitter Chats are your opportunity to join in that conversation without hauling yourself halfway across the country. These conversations are value loaded and time critical — in just a half hour you can get valuable insight, share knowledge and thought leadership, and make connections with top marketing minds — all without leaving your desk chair.

Join VentureBeat on Thursday, Sept 17 at 12 p.m. PT/ 3 p.m. ET/ 19:00 GMT for a special Twitter Chat with VentureBeat Insight analyst Jon Cifuentes, author of VB Insight’s most recent report on marketing analytics. We’ll be chatting about marketing analytics — specifically how customer analytics is driving today’s marketing decisions and where to get the best value in your analytics strategy. In addition to Cifuentes, we’ve also invited industry insiders and marketing experts to share their wisdom and insight — and we want to hear your voice as well. You can follow the #vbwebinars hashtag to stay up to the minute in the chat.

Here’s how it works:

• Log into your Twitter account using Twitter’s native web app or your favorite Twitter client and start chiming in at 12 p.m. PT/ 3 p.m. ET/ 19:00 GMT. It’s just that easy.
• Introduce yourself with your first #vbwebinars tweet, including your name, title, and the organization you are with.
• The questions will flow from the @VentureBeat Twitter handle with the hashtag #vbwebinars tagged to each tweet. For example:

The Tweet Chat Questions

@VentureBeat will issue questions out to our audience with a hashtag #vbwebinars to trend the discussion (this is the same hashtag that we’ll be using for our webinar as well). It will ask the first question at 12:01 p.m. and the final question will be asked at 12:25 p.m.

Q1: What’s harder, generating insight through analytics, or turning insights into action? #vbwebinars

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From VentureBeat

Use psychology to sell? Old hat. Combined with marketing automation, personalization is as close as you can get to sales hypnotism. Register today!

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Q2: What’s the single biggest challenge in running a top flight analytics program: tools or talent? #vbwebinars

Q3: What’s the best model for organizing for data analytics? #vbwebinars

Q4: Is there a case where vanity metrics are important? #vbwebinars

Twitter users following this event will reply using the #vbwebinars hashtag. The conversation will be followed by searching on #vbwebinars hashtag.

Helpful Tweet Chat Strategies

• Please don’t pitch products or services — stay focused on the topic and contribute your thought leadership.
• Remember that this is a public chat — keep it professional but informal.
• Don’t forget the #vbwebinars hashtag or your comments will not appear in the Twitter streams of most of the chat participants unless they follow your account specifically.

What’s in it for you? Besides the obvious interesting discussion and knowledge sharing, participants in our Twitter chats report gaining significant numbers of followers. Of course, it’s a pretty entertaining and fast half hour of chatting too.

We’d love to have your participation in the Twitter chat today at 12:00 p.m. PST. Time to get your tweet on!

This Twitter chat is a precursor to our webinar on marketing analytics with Jon Cifuentes. Register today so that you don’t miss the live roundtable discussion and audience Q&A — and gain valuable insight on a topic that makes or breaks marketing campaigns.

Register here for free!

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VB WEBINAR:

Join us for this live webinar on Thursday, September 17 at 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern. Register here for free. 

The use of personalization in marketing is paying big dividends, according to a new report by Andrew Jones for VB Insight. Even something as simple as calling someone by name in the subject of an email produces outstanding results, with 42 percent-higher open rates.

But that doesn’t tell the whole story. While these returns may be impressive, the customer is changing the rules.

Consumers are being overwhelmed by messages, and, as a result, have increasingly shorter attention spans. The customer is shutting the marketer out — turning off notifications, unsubscribing from emails, and blocking both cookies and ads. Consumers increasingly expect, and engage with, personalized messages and experiences. Anything short of that is being ignored.

And personalization is different in each channel. In ads, web, mobile, and email, customer data and engagement rates vary wildly — as do customer expectations.

To help you understand more about the psychology behind personalized marketing, along with practical examples of what works and a look at what the future holds, Stewart Rogers of VB Insight will be revealing fresh data from Jones’ report. Rogers will be joined by Talia Wolf of Conversioner, and Sam Wolf of Lucky Vitamin, who will answer questions and add expert commentary.

The webinar will cover in some detail why we react so well to personalized marketing, how dynamic websites affect consumer reactions to the use of their personal data (and will do so in future), and whether the speed of message delivery is being driven by young consumers or by marketing technology.

But what about those examples of how personalized marketing generates returns?

Membership-based, discount shopping club Beyond the Rack partnered with Kenshoo to drive new members via Facebook ads at the best possible cost-per-acquisition (CPA) while improving return on ad spend (ROAS). By increasing the scale of targeted ads, the company was able to achieve nearly 3x ROAS.

DocuSign used Demandbase to increase sales pipeline 22 percent by targeting specific companies by name. Demandbase has associated millions of IP addresses with specific companies, which enables this specific targeting.

After using Criteo, Sony saw its conversion rates more than double year-over-year, while their cost of sales decreased by 15 percent. Sony also saw a 281 percent increase in revenue at a 74.6 percent lower cost of sale year-over-year during the ultra-competitive period from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday.

And Jackthreads worked with Sailthru to achieve a 6.8x increase in ROAS for dormant buyers and a 7.7x increase in ROAS for lapsed buyers.

There are many more examples of high returns from personalized marketing in Jones’ study — Marketing Personalization: maximizing relevance and revenue — but to get the lowdown on what is coming next, how customers react to personalization, and what the future looks like, you’ll need to register to hear what the experts have to say.

Don’t miss out!

Register here for free.

In this webinar, you’ll learn:

• How marketers are dropping bounce rates by 35 percent, increasing conversions by 46 percent, and raising revenues by 73 percent using personalization
• Why personalization matters, the psychology behind it, and why marketing channels change how you use personal data
• The gap between what is possible and what is happening right now, to help you understand the opportunity

Speakers:

Stewart Rogers, Director of Marketing Technology, VentureBeat
Talia Wolf, CEO, Conversioner
Sam Wolf, Vice President, Lucky Vitamin

This webinar is sponsored by Autopilot. All research performed by VB Insight is entirely independent.