Rnordman

We all make bad decisions sometimes, but have you ever wondered what mental obstacles can lead you astray? This infographic goes over 20 of the most common cognitive biases that can mess with your head when it’s decision time.

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The  interesting  thing  about  management  is  that  the  role  is  commonly  misunderstood.

Stop  and  think  about  what  usually  gets  someone  promoted  to  a  management  position.  Typically, it’s  the   results he  or  she created  in  a  previous  position.  In  other  words,  people  move  up  the corporate food chain based on knowledge, skill, or, most commonly, performance.

Especially  salespeople.  Typically,  it  is  the  top  salesperson  who  is  picked  to  become  the  next manager.

And,  more  often  than  not,  the  great  salesperson  struggles  as  a  manager.  Why?  Because  they  are two   different roles  and require  two  completely  different  skills  sets.  And  great  players  often  make terrible   coaches.

But  companies  make  it  worse.  They  typically  require  that  sales  managers  focus  on  management tasks, like  sales automation, CRM,  proposals,  slide  decks,  budgets,  reports,  policies  and procedure, things  like   that.  Which,  at  first blush,  would  seem  to make  sense  since  those  things are important  and  necessary.

However,  they  pale  in  comparison  to  the  effect  your  leadership  skills  will  have  on  the performance  of  your   sales team.

Think  about  all  the  things  managers  do  that  have  NOT  been  mentioned:  recruiting,  hiring, performance management,  coaching,  creating  a  productive  culture,  communicating  vision  and purpose,  and  much, much  more.

These  are  all  leadership  functions.  And  to  call  them  critical  is  a  serious  understatement.

In  the  big  picture,  what  we  really  need  corporate  managers  to  do  –  when  it’s  all  said  and  done  –  is  to   identify, hire,  and develop  the  potential  of  capable  people,  and  to  create  a  culture  where that  talent  can   thrive.

Everything  else  is  just  support.  

Which  begs  the  following  questions:

• How  many  prospective  managers  are  actually  assessed  for  their  ability  to  identify  talent?
• How  many  managers  are  trained  to  hire  effectively?
• How  many  managers  would  get  strong  marks  for  coaching  and  training?

The  answer  is  very  few.

Instead,  we  continue  to  promote  top  salespeople  simply  because  they  are  great  salespeople.  But the   reality  is that  selling  is not  the  same  as  leading.

And  it  is  the  leadership  side  of  the  sales  executive  role  that  will  ultimately  make  you  or  break  you  as  an   executive.

4 Keys to Success as a Sales Executive  

When  sales  teams  underperform,  companies  often  struggle  to  find  the  root  causes  of  the problem. So,  in   search of  answers, pricing  strategies  are  dissected.  Marketing  plans  are scrutinized. Software  is  replaced.

In  my  experience,  however,  the  problem  is  usually  not  price  or  product  or  marketing  or  tools. Sure,  those   things may  need to  be  addressed,  but  the  causes  of  underperformance  are  often systemic  and/or   structural.

And  this  is  where  sales  leadership  is  extraordinarily  important.  Why?  Because  the  leader  is directly   responsible for  the systemic  problems.

Worse,  he  or  she  is  often  the  direct  cause  of  the  problem.

Let’s  look  at  four  leadership  ‘secrets’  you  need  to  address  to  be  successful  in  the  Sales  Executive role.

1.  Acquiring and developing talent is far and away the most critical element of  your  job.

Big  secret,  huh?  Like  you  don’t  know  this  already.

But,  even  recognizing  the  critical  importance  of  identifying  and  recruiting  top  talent,  how  many   organizations  do  it  well? The  answer  is  very,  very  few.  Sales  teams  are  rife  with  average  players   with  loads  of  excuses.

Whose  fault  is  that?

You  hire  reactively.  You  have  no  strategy  for  identifying  and  acquiring  great  players.  Your  on-­ boarding methodology  is almost  non-­existent.  You  constantly  complain  that  you  don’t  have  time   to  train  your  people.

Bottom  line,  this  is  a  leadership  function.  Which  means  if  you  don’t  do  it,  nobody  else  will.  So, if you  want  to jump  to  the top  of  the  class,  make  this  your  most  important  priority  and  focus  on it every  single  day.

Identify.  Recruit.  Hire. On-­board.  Train.  [And  repeat]

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You don’t win championships with average talent.
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And,  not  surprisingly,  average  leaders  don’t  develop  great  salespeople.

2.  How  you  deal  with  sub-­par  performance  will  define  you  as an  executive.  

Since  talent  is  so  important  to  your  success  (see  No.  1),  the  way  in  which  you  manage  poor   performance  is critical.

But,  since  most  sales  managers  are  completely  underwater  with  all  the  management  tasks  they   are  required  to complete, their  most  common  complaint  is  that  they  have  little  or  no  time  to coach,   train,  and  address performance.

And  this  is  a  HUGE  mistake.

Where  performance  issues  exist,  managers  –  especially  new  or  inexperienced  managers  –  often   struggle  to address  those issues.  The  conflict  is  very  real,  and  most  people  don’t  enjoy  the   confrontation  that  is  necessary  to talk  candidly  about sub-­par  performance.

So,  they  employ  a  number  of  non-­confrontational  approaches,  including  sticking  their  heads  in the sand  and hoping  things will  get  better.

But  allowing  underperformers  to  remain  on  the  sales  team  is  damaging  from  a  number  of   perspectives.  Overall team performance  suffers.  Top  performers  resent  it.  And  your  leadership   credibility  suffers  dramatically.

Remember  this  critical  message: “A” players want to play on winning teams, and they won’t stick around very long with average leaders.

3.  Creating  a  ‘no  excuses’  culture  is  critical  to success.  

If  you’ve  been  in  sales  management  more  than  a  few  months,  you’ve  heard  the  excuses:

• My  territory  (or  market)  is  different.
• The  economy  is  killing  me.
• Our  prices  are  too  high.
• The  competition  is  giving  it  away.
• I  have  to  spend  too  much  time  with  our  CRM  software.

That’s  just  for  starters.  There  are  plenty  more.

Leadership  is  often  about  distinguishing  between  the  very  real  obstacles  that  impact  success,  and   those  excuses that  serve only  to  mask  poor  performance.

It  is  critical  to  understand  that  allowing  salespeople  to  use  excuses  and  blame  circumstances  for   their  failures will  quickly define  your  sales  culture.  And  excuses  make  it  almost  impossible  to   identify  and  address  the  actual issues  that  impact sales performance.

Having  been  in  sales  for  more  than  three  decades,  I  know  that  there  are  any  number  of  factors   that  can adversely  impact results.  No  question.  But  the  primary  difference  between  top   performers  and  pretenders  are how they  respond  to  those factors.

Great  players  find  ways  to  win.  They  refuse  to  be  deterred  by  anything.  They  take  personal   responsibility  for their  own success.

And  great  sales  executives  make  that  trait  a  non-­negotiable  part  of  their  sales  culture.

4. Creating  competition  is  critical;  creating  silos  will  crush  you.

There  seems  to  be  a  significant  trend  towards  not  posting  sales  numbers  or  even  publicly   recognizing  top  performers. Which  is,  as  plainly  as  I  can  put  it,  ridiculous.

If  that  is  your  practice  as  a  sales  executive,  you  can  rest  assured  that  “competitors”  –  people who are  motivated to  compete and  win  –  will  work  somewhere  else.

Sales  is,  by  definition,  a  competition.  When  your  team  wins,  everyone  else  loses.  And  when  your   competition wins,  there is no  consolation  prize  for  second  place.

Creating  a  team  that  competes  is  absolutely  critical.  Salespeople  need  to  be  willing  to  do   whatever  it  takes  – legally, ethically,  and  morally.  They  need  to  be  willing  to  work  whatever hours   are  necessary  and  improve  their knowledge  and skills  as  circumstances  demand.

They  need  to  be  driven  to  compete  and  win.

However,  allowing  that  competition  to  create  organizational  silos  will  quickly  result  in  enormous   problems. Competition needs  to  external,  not  internal.

If  you  are  not  aware  of  the  tendencies  of  salespeople  to  do  horde  resources,  monopolize  assets,   and  create internal conflicts  in  an  attempt  to  get  ahead,  you  haven’t  been  managing  long.

As  a  leader,  you  should  create  a  culture  that  recognizes  and  rewards  individuals  who  play  to  win. Post  your numbers. Celebrate  wins.  Give  most  of  your  attention  to  the  players  on  your  team  who have  a  burning  desire  to be  at  the  top  of  the charts.

But  don’t  ever  allow  individual  competition  to  create  silos  inside  the  company.

Click  HERE  to  receive  Kelly’s  brand  new  ebook, The  Grinders:  3  Reasons  Why  Certain  Leaders  Win Consistently.  

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For  more  information on Kelly,  visit  www.BizLockerRoom.com.  

To purchase his book 1-on-1 Management: What Every Great Manager Knows That You Don’t, click here. 

To purchase his book Quit Whining and Start SELLING: A Step-by-Step Guide to a Hall of Fame Career in Sales, click here. 

The post Four Secrets Every (Sales) Executive Needs to Know appeared first on Peak Sales Recruiting.

We've heard it a million times: People don't quit jobs, they quit managers.

And a recent Gallup study of 7,200 adults helped prove the saying to be true.

It found that about half of all US employees have left a job at some point to "get away from" their boss.

So, what exactly are bosses doing to drive their best employees out?

Earlier this year LinkedIn Influencer and author Travis Bradberry highlighted the nine worst things managers do that "send good people packing" — and this week author Cameron Morrissey pointed out the four most common ones in a LinkedIn post.

Here are two of them — and some questions to ask to figure out if your manager is guilty of these behaviors:

1. They make employees feel undervalued.

People want to know they're making meaningful contributions at work.

According to a 2013 CareerCuilder study, 50% of respondents said "increased recognition" would entice them to stay with a company.

And yet, so many managers fail to recognize achievements and acknowledge the value employees add the to organization.

To figure out if your boss is good or bad at making you feel like a valued member of the team, Morrissey suggests asking the following:

• Is the manager listening to employee feedback?
• Are they giving constructive feedback to the employee?
• Are they showing appreciation and noticing successes?
• Are they empowering their employees to be able to do more than the basics?

If you said "no" to one or more of those, your boss is likely guilty of making you feel undervalued.

2. They don't set clear expectations.

When you're unsure of what's expected of you at work and you have no direction from your boss, it can be difficult (even impossible) to succeed — and above all, extremely frustrating.

Ask yourself these questions to figure out if your boss is being clear on what he or she expects from you:

• Does the manager flip-flop between priorities?
• Are there two or more sets of rules depending on who they are talking about?
• Do they procrastinate on decisions?
• Do they communicate the goals and vision for the department?

If the answer to one or more of these is "yes," there's a good chance your boss will be the reason you end up leaving your job.

Morrissey points out that bad managers aren't the only reason people quit their jobs. Companies also tend to play a part in an employees decision to quit, he says. "Executive management sets the tone and culture of the company, sets the pay scale, and makes the policies that managers must follow and enforce (many of which may rub the employee the wrong way)," he writes. "And there are a number of external factors like relocation, family issues, etc. that can result in an employee needing to move on. Because managers do not have control over all aspects of the motivators of an employee quitting, this ['people don't quit jobs, they quit managers'] saying is obviously not an absolute."

But while the organization does have an "enormous influence" over how everything is run, "the departmental manager has just as much, if not more, influence over how these things are perceived by their teams," he says. "The manager is the face, and often voice, of the organization from the perspective of the employee. To think otherwise is to grossly underestimate the manager's role in the organization. Managers can influence how bad news is presented, they set the tone by their behavior in tough times, and they can promote fairness and understanding."

Read the full LinkedIn post here. 

SEE ALSO: 14 signs your employees secretly hate you

Join the conversation about this story »

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Anheuser Busch InBev, the world's largest beermaker, is looking to acquire rival SAB Miller.

A deal would be the year's biggest, and combine two companies that control beer brands ranging Fosters to Corona.

AB InBev can trace its origins to a merger between a pair of Brazilian brewers in 1999. It has grown to more than $47 billion in annual sales after a string of takeovers. 

Those deals now total nearly $115 billion in value, according to data from Dealogic. The biggest was InBev SA's $60 billion takeover of Budweiser-maker Anheuser Busch in 2011.

Even the smaller SAB is a product of a series of deals, starting with the combination that gave the company its name, a 2002 deal to merge South African Breweries and Miller Brewing.

If they do reach a deal, it would combine two companies that controlled about 58% of the industry's $33 billion in global profits, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch analysts. That could lead regulators to push them to sell off some of the brands they acquired over the years.

Here's a run through of the biggest deals that created both companies.

It all started with a $1 billion deal in 1999 to combine two Brazilian brewers and create AmBev.

In 2004, AmBev and Belgium's Interbrew merged to create the world's largest brewer. Carlos Brito, who now runs the combined company, was CEO of AmBev.

In 2002 South African Breweries merged with Phillip Morris's Miller Brewing in a $5.6 billion deal.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

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Haters gonna hate . . .

Many an article has been penned (or, for the comment-lurking nitpickers, typed) about the failings of the Millennial generation.

• Why, they’re online addicts with short attention spans!
• They’re narcissistic, materialistic, unrealistic twerps who don’t understand what it means to get a real job!
• They’ve forgotten how to maintain interpersonal relationships that don’t involve a screen!
• They’re entitled and demand everything for free!
• They’re the reason marriages don’t work out anymore!
• They’re only skinny because they photograph their food instead of eating it!
• They’re click-happy, swipe-happy, selfie-taking, duck-lipped (or, if we’re really staying on trend, sparrow-faced) Fickle Freddies who share content more for social recognition than personal interest!

Whew. Annoyed yet? We certainly are.

Leave the big brush behind

In addition to painting with ridiculously broad strokes over a population that spans different countries, cultures, education levels, and consumer values, these often obnoxious claims fail to recognize the power of Millennials in online culture. Perhaps one truth that may be safely applied en masse is that this generation grew up during the rise of the Internet. Their formative years were spent alongside a rapid technological advancement not experienced by any other generation.

We’re talking about people who watched Family Matters and Full House, nursed Nano Pets, and jammed to the Backstreet Boys on Discmans. People who can imitate the sound of dial-up Internet but now navigate touchscreens and instant communication like extensions of their bodies. Millennials have grown up with constant, fast-paced changes to the way knowledge and information are obtained, processed, and shared.

As a result, they read and interact with content differently than those who witnessed these changes during adulthood, or those who were born already plugged into the App Store. Any online writing venture marketing to Millennials must address their unique reading styles. These are tech-savvy individuals with a literal world of obtainable knowledge and purchasing power. Writing specifically for Millennials may be the biggest influence on your blog’s potential success.

Get ready to target your writing

If Pocahontas were a Millennial, she’d have sung, “The thing I like about news feeds is, you can’t log into the same feed twice; the info’s always changing, always flowiiiiing!” In addition to the surge of information that constantly threatens to drown out yours, there’s this hard truth to face: your content probably isn’t original. The rule of the Internet seems to be if you can think of a concept, it already exists online somewhere. So, should Millennials swipe upon your blog, will the design and writing be enough to keep them there? The following steps are a guide to help you when blogging for Millennials so that you attract and keep your readers—and convince them to share your posts.

1. Looks are everything

Online content marketing tycoon Hubspot reported that Internet users judge the aesthetic value of a website in as fast as one-fiftieth of a second. That snap impression is particularly influential on Millennials, who, according to Millennial Marketing, will actually reject quality content if the visual effect is poor. Cluttered, unappealing web spaces are perceived as unreliable, unprofessional, and unintelligent. As seen in this helpful infographic by Digital Information World, 94% of online users develop mistrust and dismiss a website because of poor design, and 75% use website design as the basis for their opinion of a website’s credibility. For those who don’t identify as particularly tech-savvy, blog hosts like Blogger, WordPress, and Tumblr have built-in design templates and customizable options, as do many domain providers like GoDaddy and Wix.com. It’s worth it to take a few hours to play with these features and develop a unique, attractive web space that will make Internet readers want to stick around.

2. Meet their needs, and stop there

Remember the cutesy acronym KISS—Keep It Simple, Stupid? This doesn’t mean you should lower the reading level of your writing, but rather that you should keep your main text focused. Provide links to supplementary information instead of explaining it in the post itself, which often weighs down the writing and makes it harder for your answer-seeking readers to find the information they came to your page for in the first place.

3. Make the hunt easy

An important development (evolution or mutation? We’re not sure…) in the way Millennials read is that they scan for important information rather than reading content in its entirety. The most successful blog posts are those that are structured so that the main points can be gleaned from a quick scan even if you don’t read the entire piece. Headings, subheadings, lists, and graphical content are all excellent ways to guide readers to your post’s critical information in a hurry.

4. Use visual interest

In a similar vein, Millennials are more responsive to visual content than block text. This may require some technical skills or the selection of a host site that is better optimized for visual aids (Medium and Tumblr are great examples). High-quality images or videos are not only more likely to attract online readers to your blog post in the first place; they also increase the chances of those users sharing your post with their social media circles.

5. Teach, don’t preach

Unlike the older Baby Boomers and Gen Xers, Millennials respond best to content that reads as if it’s been written by someone similar to themselves—friends, family, even strangers—rather than by “experts.” In short? Be relatable and genuine in your writing. The #YOLO trend has thankfully died down (save for a few ill-thought-out tattoos), but the concept “You Only Live Once” does a good job of summing up what kind of content reaches Millennials. This is a generation that is largely motivated by firsthand experience. Create an experience through your writing that is interesting, relatable, and shareable.

That said, one of the most painful and misguided writing trends hitting websites meant to market to Millennials is the plague of dumbed-down writing. People read content to learn something, so don’t make your audiences feel that they aren’t being taken seriously or that you, the writer, are not trustworthy. Interesting, engagingly written content that teaches its readers something or inspires a dialogue will have more lasting appeal than assumed-to-be-popular vernacular.

6. Separate the trends from the fads

This is a biggie. Staying on top of trending topics, visual styles, and overarching messages that resonate positively with Millennials is important in developing a feel in your writing that will appeal to this target group. For example, 48% of Millennials interviewed for the Boston Consulting Group’s U.S. Millennial Supplemental Consumer Sentiment Survey (2013) reported they prefer to invest their time, money, and attention in companies that demonstrate social responsibility and environmental sustainability. In this study by NewsCred, 64% of Millennials report positive responsiveness to posts that are useful and relevant to their cultural interests.

What not to do, however, is hastily adopt fads. Fads don’t have lasting value within the generation; they are catchy items that surge in popularity and die down just as quickly, often drawing negative reactions when used after their peak. Need proof? Think of how quickly “clickbait” headlines plummeted from edgy to cringe-worthy.

7. Optimize for sharing

While the joke that the Millennial reader processes only 140 characters or fewer is a tad insulting, the point does have merit in terms of sharing potential. Incorporating Twitter-sized pockets of information into your post or boiling down the essence of the piece to such a size will help in getting it shared across social media platforms. Consider how lengthy news articles use pull-out quotes to highlight key information. Are the most important points of your post contained in succinct, nicely worded parcels?

8. Proofread

The Internet is brutal to those who make innocuous typos or punctuation and spelling errors. What happens in Vegas may stay there, but your Internet blunders are just a screenshot away from being permanent and globally accessible, like the ones seen here. We cannot state enough the importance of having your blog content edited by another party, preferably a professional.

9. Creep

When you’re faced with endless waves of competition, staying current is critical in maintaining approval from Millennial audiences. Research popular keywords, keep track of trending headlines and hashtags on Twitter, and be aware of frequently shared or liked news items to keep your own writing interesting and relevant. Millennials grew up in an era of rapid change that forced intuitive learning. As a result, this group of Internet consumers processes information quickly, learns fast, and adapts even faster; if your blog doesn’t do the same, they’ll move on to one that does.

Marketing ain’t wasted on the young

Advertising analytics prove that brand loyalty and buying habits are established at a young age. Politicians know that the underexploited young vote has the power to turn an election. Online writing industries—from blogs to news outlets to creative content hubs like Colossal and Upworthy—have shifted their headlines, content presentation, and writing voices to suit the reading styles most consistently observed in younger audiences. Millennials dominate the online world and are the next generation of consumers; wise bloggers know how to play to the reading habits and responses of this age group to successfully generate a following. Still above writing for Millennials? Better not quit your day job, son.

There’s nothing like running your own business to bring up all sorts of ‘stuff’. It’s as though hanging out your shingle as a designer/consultant/coach/strategist means that you’ve also sent out a signal to your various inner voices to start piping up with their two cents.

You know the ones.

• The one that sounds kinda like your Grade 5 teacher when they corrected you in front of the whole class.

• The one that sounds pretty much exactly like that gaggle of kids who made fun of your running shoes.

• The one that sounds identical to your voice, systematically nit-picking every thought and action.

Those ones.

Everyone has them. And it’s time for them to hush up. Their stories are not welcome here.

When it comes to negotiation and pricing our products and services, these inner voices get REALLY LOUD. Today, we’re going to tackle three of the mini-monologues that hold far too many ambitious entrepreneurs back from going after what they want and need.

Mini-Monologue #1

“Who am I kidding? I’m not a negotiator. I’m not the kind of person who does that – asks for more. I know my place, and I’m just going to keep working, keep quiet, and I guess it’ll all work out in the end.”

Whoa nelly. Let’s nip this one in the bud right away.

Everyone can be a negotiator. The magic doesn’t come from a special gene. It comes from figuring out what your natural abilities and strengths are…and then building your business and negotiation toolkit around them. Great at relationships? That’s the foundation you build before ever asking for something. At home working a spreadsheet? That logical spin will be your negotiation super power. A creative soul? That’s gonna make you a problem-solving pro. When you tap into your natural gifts, asking for something you want is totally in your wheelhouse.

Besides, business (like life) isn’t about rainbows and sunshine and puppy dogs. If you’re waiting for more time/money/energy/freedom to land on your lap…you’re going to be waiting a while. It’s much more efficient (and effective) to ask!

Mini-Monologue #2

“Uhrrrrm. I don’t know about charging $500. No one is going to pay that. I better stick to $300. Or maybe $200. I guess. I don’t think they’ll be able to afford it though. Maybe I can send them a discount code too?”

Oh boy. This one is a familiar inner voice to most of us.

I’m willing to bet that even the most accomplished and seasoned entrepreneurs have this one chiming in from time to time – so let’s ditch it. No more predicting an outcome that keeps you spinning your wheels, afraid of a ‘NO’. And stop negotiating against yourself…before ever speaking with your potential client. If you’re doing great work, if you’re delivering oodles of value, if you are a genuine person providing polished, professional services or products…then yes, people will be willing to pay for it. Match the value you’re creating with the price you’re charging, and you’re golden.

Plus, worrying about what other people can or can’t afford isn’t your job. You worry about you.

Mini-Monologue #3

“I’m totally ready to raise my prices! But first, I think I should take another class. Maybe if I got my MFA? Or MBA? And I don’t have any Big Name clients…so I can’t charge more yet. But I’ll definitely raise my prices after I …”

Classic pricing procrastination.

There’s always something more to be done. More to learn. More to tweak, polish or perfect before you’re ready to stick that new price tag on your offering. Just one more bit of research to finally make you a certifiable expert and authority worthy of that new price tag. Ugh. I’ve been there. (And I’ve got 11 letters of designations and degrees after my name to prove it.) There’s no magic checklist you need to complete before being ‘allowed’ to raise your prices. The cues are subtle but they’re all around you. Clients seeing outstanding return on investment? Raise ‘em. Booked out for the next few months? Raise ‘em. Learned a new technique that puts you ahead of competitors? Raise ‘em.

It’s up to you. You’re the pro…so price like it.

Are you ready to start getting paid for the great work you do?

The post Why Content Creators Should Kiss Their Programmers appeared first on Copyblogger.

Relationships matter more than ever in business now, and if you do not believe that, you have not been paying attention to the impact Facebook and Twitter have had. Because of this and more, people want do business with companies that share relevant and useful information with them.

The New Workday and Worker

Business is no longer just a 9 to 5 proposition. If you are a professional organization, that requires the help of qualified professionals, the only social media site that fits the bill is LinkedIn. One out of three professionals in the entire world either has a profile on LinkedIn, or is a visitor. They visit around the clock, so if you are a business with an urgent freelance need, LinkedIn can probably help you.

What Kind Of Businesses Can Benefit From Using LinkedIn?

Obviously, LinkedIn is the premier place on the internet to find information technology experts. But you can also find professionals in sales, marketing, finance, and any number of other business fields, as well as healthcare professionals.

Likewise, LinkedIn is the place for all of those businesses and more to promote what they have to offer the community. Most agencies in the United States now rate LinkedIn as the premier social media site for new businesses. LinkedIn has also grown exponentially recently in the number of business to business transactions.

New Developments Have Changed the Landscape Even More

Recently, LinkedIn acquired Lynda.com, the premier online education company on the internet. They feature thousands and thousands of online video courses on subjects ranging from information technology, to business, creative skills, and software. They have subscriptions for individuals, academic institutions, and government entities to access their video library in order to expand skills sets. These courses are available in a variety of languages including Spanish, French, and German.

It also means more. Members of LinkedIn can access Lynda.com videos and expand their skill sets, and employers can look and see just what courses they have taken, adding loads of value to LinkedIn as a company.

So what kinds of businesses need LinkedIn as a marketing tool? All kinds of businesses can find talent, even outsource tasks, and more on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is for multinational businesses that are hoping to expand their influence and gather more customers.

If a company is not currently using LinkedIn, or planning to use LinkedIn in the very near future, they are planning to fail in today’s global marketplace. This is the need of the hour and you should jump the bandwagon. If you need more details or have any questions, please feel free to get in touch with us. We have solution to all your social media marketing needs.

As a designer, I value the importance of first impressions and visuals. Visuals are key in situations such as having a single thumbnail represent an entire video. Every video on YouTube has a thumbnail to show a glimpse of the video. And boy, is there a range of types of thumbnails people create. If you’ve ever wondered how to get more than a preselected thumbnail from YouTube, check out this great post explaining how to create a custom thumbnail. However, what if you want to create an eye-catching thumbnail with text? Never fear! I will give you some instructions and tips to make creating a custom thumbnail easy as pie.

*Please note, YouTube guidelines indicate you must have a verified channel on YouTube to upload a custom thumbnail. You can verify your account here.

Here are some general tips to think about before you begin your design:

As for creating the actual thumbnails, there is a great graphic design resource called Canva. It allows for anyone to create simple, stunning designs. The website is easy to use and they have tons of design tutorials to help you along. There’s also a Canva app for iPad if you want to create your thumbnails on the go.

The page you’ll see after logging in will allow for you to create a design using the pre-sized templates they have for some of the most common uses. Click the ‘More’ button to browse even more options. They have a lot of template types and are constantly adding more. If you have a special size need you can select ‘Use custom dimensions’ and create whatever size you may need. When creating a custom thumbnail, you can select ‘More’, scroll down to the section labeled ‘Documents’ and select ‘Presentation (16:9)’.

Create a Custom Thumbnail Design in Canva

Once you have selected the image size you want, it will open a new window in your browser. You will see layout templates on the left side panel. The large white box on the right is what will soon be your well-designed, custom thumbnail. If you want to title your design something, select ‘Presentation (16:9) – Untitled design’ on the top toolbar and give it an awesome name.

Select a Template for Your Thumbnail

The layout templates Canva provides are great for getting your design started. You will see some that say ‘FREE’ which means they don’t have any assets you will have to pay for when you publish
or save your design. Typically, the part that would cost you anything would be the image, which you will likely be switching out so no worries! Choose whichever layout you like and you’ll see it appear in that big white box. However, if you find an asset that costs money, don’t worry. They cost a whopping $1 and you don’t pay until you save or publish your design.

Customize Your Design – Adding an Image

You can start by editing the background image. If you’ve taken a screenshot or photo that accurately and interestingly portrays your video you will click ‘Uploads’ on the very left of the screen and then select the green box that says ‘Upload an image’. Locate the image you want to use and open it. Once uploaded, click and drag it to the area the current image is. You should see a preview of how your image will fill the frame and then you can let go of your mouse to place the image in your design.

Image Filters

You can change characteristics of the image you imported. Select the image, choose ‘Filter’ from the left side of the toolbar. The top of the box has preset filters you can apply. If you select one, you can then customize it to perfectly fit your need with the sliders beneath the preset filters by selecting ‘Advanced’ on the bottom of the toolbox.

Editing Text

Once you have edited your photo, you can change the text already in the layout. Select the text and input what would accurately describe your video in a thumbnail. Remember: keep it concise. Thumbnails aren’t very large and you want to catch a viewer’s attention. Change the font, make it bigger, do whatever you have to do to make the text on the thumbnail stand out! Select the triangle on the right side of the toolbar and you can edit the text with the drop down menu. You can change the color, text kerning, alignment, etc. As you see from my example, the text area was right over an area of interest in my photo, so I wanted to move it to the open area. This will be dependent on your image and template you chose, so use your inner designer to balance elements of the whole thumbnail to get a great result.

Custom Icons for Your Design

Next you’ll want to adjust the graphics to correctly fit the image. If you select the search button of the left side of the screen you will see categories pop up and icons will be a choice. Select icons
and start browsing for something that fits your need. Once you have removed any icons you don’t want and have found yourself a winning icon, drag and drop it into your design. If you’d like to upload a logo, go back to the ‘Uploads’ tab and upload it. Once it’s uploaded, click it and it will appear on your artboard. A toolbar will pop up that you can view by selecting any feature in your design you want to edit. You can customize the icon with whatever color you’d like by selecting the colored circle in the toolbar. Resize your image to fit as you would like. Be sure to explore the other features Canva has to offer to make your thumbnail unique and stand out among the see of other YouTube thumbnails.

Once you are thrilled with your thumbnail you can download it as an image to upload to your account by selecting ‘Download’ on the top right of the window and ‘As an image’ from the dropdown menu. Now you have an eye-catching thumbnail to use for your awesome YouTube video!

 

The Bank of England has a great post on its Bank Underground blog which helps explain just how big the Chinese stock market rout is.

The post, by Fergus Cumming in the Bank’s Monetary Assessment and Strategy Division, breaks down the £1.7 trillion ($2.6 trillion) wiped off the Shanghai and Shenzhen Composite indexes in the initial 22-day summer market rout this year.  

The scale of China, and the amounts of money flowing in and out of the market, is truly mindboggling. 

The £1.7 trillion loss is equivalent to:

• the total value of goods and services produced in the United Kingdom in 2013
• more than the total outstanding stock of lending to UK households
• more than a third of the value of all gold that has ever been mined
• more than double the value of Euro notes and coins in circulation
• seven and a half times the nominal value of outstanding Greek government debt

Perhaps even more incredible is the £3.6 trillion ($5.6 trillion) the Chinese markets added in the 12 month run-up to the June.

In that one year, Chinese markets grew by a bit more than the combined market capitalization of every single company listed on the Japanese stock market.

Here's what that looks like:

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Here are some incredible toys hedge fund boss Steve Cohen has bought with his billions

Without analyzing opens and clicks, it’s hard to know what truly appeals to your customer. Surveys and focus groups have their limits since people often change how they act when observed – a phenomenon called the observer effect. The beauty of A/B testing is that it cuts out any guesswork, leaving you with actionable, data-driven insights. You can concretely determine which ideas should be used or discarded to build an ultimately winning campaign.

Here are five basic elements which are a good starting point for those new to A/B testing, and also fresh inspiration for the more experienced tester.

Subject line

In the inbox, first impressions can go a long way. You may have crafted a SPAM filter-friendly subject line but what will convince the user to open your email over a competitor’s? A good subject line is informative, concise and intriguing. A/B testing allows you to compare open rates and find lines which drive engagement.

Emoji vs text-only: Emojis tie in the lighthearted, more personal nature of social media platforms (e.g. Twitter, Whatsapp). Depending on your contact list demographics such as age and social media usage, it’s worth testing if emoji usage drives higher opens. Do remember to check browser and client support since they are still not widely adopted across devices.

Statement vs question: Asking a rhetorical question can persuade without being too pushy. Some consumers respond to a more direct approach and others may feel a question drives a greater sense of urgency or personal connection.

Sender name

Your sender name has a great impact on perceptions of your brand and on the nature of the relationship with your customer. Do you want to seem approachable and focused on the individual? Or are you a trusted authority on a topic? To find out the level of intimacy your customer best responds to, here are some useful A/B tests to run:

Company name vs individual: The first may cater towards users who want to belong to a community, or for a product that is more professional – while the second builds more of a personal customer-brand relationship.

First name only vs full name: This will help you gauge the level of formality your customers respond best to. For example, we would test “Sasha from Mailjet” against “Sasha Seddon from Mailjet”.

Different types of name: The name of a person can greatly affect how they are perceived. Try out different names to see which your consumer prefers.

Call-to-action placement

An eye-catching design and persuasive copy aren’t the only items on the checklist for a compelling call-to-action (CTA). It should work well with the overall layout while ultimately remaining the focus of the reader’s attention.

Position next to image or text: Which other piece of content best complements and enhances the CTA, without detracting from it or cluttering the email?

Left, right or centered: If you don’t need to provide much information, a centered button might capture attention best. Or, positioning the CTA to the left or the right might work better with directional cues present in the email, e.g. arrows, or with the natural reading direction of the user.

Framing an offer

Gut instinct plays a major role in decision-making. A recent study suggests that people make instant purchase decisions with their sub-conscious. How information is framed greatly influences customer response.

Percentage vs dollar off: Even if they will save the same amount of money, a percentage reduction may appeal more as there is no need to provide context. The reader can make a value judgement more quickly.

Day vs. Week: For service based products, try testing a day vs. week trial, such as 14 days vs. two weeks. Our hypothesis is that two weeks sounds like the better offer, but who knows? Some customers may feel like that’s too long of a trial. Testing will often uncover unexpected insights.

Send time

You have optimized your deliverability, content and design, but what if your timing is off? Here are some A/B tests to run to find out when your customers are most receptive.

Morning vs evening: Customers are more likely to read your email when they are less distracted or need to kill some time – this could be on the morning commute or when the working day is over.

At the start vs end of the week: Are customers most likely to be receptive after a refreshing weekend or during the week? Perhaps they completely unplug during the weekend and are most active on Monday mornings. Or, you may find that they don’t have time to check personal email during the week and are in the mood to purchase or engage during the weekend.

The insights gleaned from these email tests can also be carried over and integrated into your overall marketing strategy.

Hopefully these A/B tests have given you some food for thought. A/B testing is an incredibly powerful tool; there are a never-ending variety of tests you can run and with each one, you’ll understand your customers a little bit better.

Have any useful tips or ideas you’d like to share with other A/B testers? Drop us a comment below!

The post From a Hidden Niche, an Empire Is Born appeared first on Copyblogger.

Discover how an effective Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system can enable your business to measure customer satisfaction in order to boost sales and increase customer loyalty.

Customer satisfaction has become an increasingly important metric. Happy customers are more loyal and therefore more likely to invest more in your products or services. Whereas dissatisfied customers can cause brand damage, customer churn and lose you opportunities to earn more revenue. Furthermore, Gallup Organization has long recognised the correlation between happy employees and contented customers. Whatever your Sales staff do, or how your Customer Service Agents and other customer-facing staff react whenever they are dealing with customer queries or engaging with prospects will have an impact on your business.

That’s why it’s important to put in place the right organisational culture, people, processes, and metrics; as well as the most appropriate means of analysing customer data with the help of an effective Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.

‘The Ultimate Guide to Measuring Customer Satisfaction’ by Gregori Ciotti, adds that customer satisfaction can also help organisations to improve how they support their customers as well as informing their product and service development.

“A satisfied customer is one who will continue to buy from you, seldom shop around, refer other customers and in general be a superstar advocate for your business”, Ciotti states. The problem is that it’s hard to measure customer satisfaction. He rightly asks: “What should be measuring?” Indeed, what are the key performance indicators that can help you to define whether one customer is satisfied while another one needs more support?

Fundamental measurements

Ciotti recommends author Prof. Scott Smith’s methodology, which considers the fundamental measurements of:

• Perceived quality: This looks at whether customers felt that product or service fulfilled their needs, wants and desires in a way that met their expectations.

• Customer loyalty: Customer loyalty can be measured using the Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Net Promoter Value (NPV). An unsatisfied customer is unlikely to make referrals, and so it’s reasonably accurate (but, for example, customer loyalty can’t simply be based on how long a customer has remained with a particular bank. Sometimes customers just prefer the devil they know, and so more qualitative research is often required to support quantitative metrics such as NPS, NPV, the number of years a customer has been ‘loyal’, ROI, etc.).

• Attributional satisfaction: What feature did the customer like about a product or service? Conversely customers can be asked what they didn’t like, and about what could be improved to increase their levels of satisfaction. Satisfaction can lead to attitudinal loyalty, but while customers may be positive about your products and features, they may not necessarily translate to future sales. Effective use of CRM will take develop their attitudinal loyalty to behavioral loyalty, leading customers to a desired action, thus increasing your sales.

• A customer’s intention to make new and ongoing purchases: A happy customer will in most cases tend to return to buy products from you time and time again, and yet there are exceptions to this rule. Customers will, to a certain extent, forgive organisations for a few minor misdemeanours and so they may continue to purchase from them. While some may not have an option to buy the same kind of product or service from elsewhere. Yet in both cases your goal should be to fulfil their needs and meet their expectations.

Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) can train their customer-facing staff to ask short and simple questions each time they interact with customers and then record and collate this kind of data in their CRM system. CMOs can then use data insight tools to form a single view of each customer. This analysis can then be used to inform Customer Service Agents and Sales about what interests each customer, their purchase history, any issues that have arisen and so on.

The CRM system’s data analysis would most probably also use some or all of the above metrics to form a complete picture of the value of each customer to the organisation. It enables CMOs to segment each customer according to buying habits, needs, demographics, value to the business, and other insightful variables in order to improve customer satisfaction, customer loyalty and profitability. To achieve this, use CRM to know your customer.

Learn more about using CRM systems to make customer satisfaction the soul of your business by downloading the eGuide: ‘The Ultimate Guide to: Creating customer centricity with CRM’

This post first appeared on the Redspire CRM blog

Lessons learned from 40 years in PR (and the surfeit of painful pitches I now get because my blog has made it onto someone’s media list.

I learned on my first job with a PR agency owned by two ex-newspaper folks: as a PR person, your job is to turn what isn’t hard news into something that would be valuable and interesting to the readers of the publication and particularly the editor you’re pitching.

Eleven PR Rules

1. Read what they write, pitch to their demonstrated interests, and make the pitch personal.
2. Don’t pretend you know the person if you don’t.
3. Invest the time, energy, and money to get to know them in person so you establish credibility with no quid pro quo implied or stated.
4. Be professional…no “hey there,” or “Hi!” (“My name’s BRITney!!!!).
5. Don’t use exclamation points unnecessarily. As Tish, the editor at Beverage Media once told me, “God gave you three: One for your birth announcement, one for your obit, and one to use during your life. Use them wisely.”
6. Cut to the chase…open with an insight that speaks to their interest or something they just wrote, then pitch your idea’s value relative to that. “I just read the piece you did about e-commerce and was intrigued by your ideas. Here’s a different perspective on the subject you might find interesting.”
7. Follow up with a reason why their particular readers would find the story of interest.
8. Don’t ask them to do anything (“let me know if you want some more information, photos, etc.”). That’s your job.
9. Don’t follow up with an email asking, “Just checking to see if you got my pitch email.” If you must follow up, I’d rather get a phone call than an email…these days it’s more personal.
10. Find a creative way to get the answer to the question you’re really asking: “are you going to write anything about the subject I sent you.”
11. Lastly, recognize that journalism as practiced in the prior millennium is a dying craft. Those still employed are getting paid a pittance, and they’re clinging to a belief that what they do matters to the paying subscribers of their rapidly expiring publications. PR folks need to acknowledge and respect that.

And Beyond The Eleven PR Rules

So much for the lecture and the eleven PR rules. For the “and more,” let’s turn to the fun stuff.

Some egregious examples of real pitches I’ve gotten:

1. Sounds like a plot line for a porno film (but at least they said “Please”).

Subject: Please Cover: New Tech Product—Jumpstart Emergency Phone Charger Can Be Hung, Like a Charm, From Cell Phones.

Hi Steven,
Please let me know if you are able to cover or feature the following. Digipower is officially announcing today two of their coolest products to hit the tech accessories market called the “Jumpstart” and the “Jumpstart Sport.”

2. We’ve already decided what you are; now we’re just quibbling over the price.

Subject: Advertising and PR

Hi, I’m contacting you regarding your site at http://XXX.blogspot.com/YYYY is a digital PR and marketing agency currently representing several clients that would be very interested in gaining some exposure on your site.
I’m writing to ask,
a) If you accept press releases and what you [sic] policy is regarding these
b) If you accept paid editorial and the costs and terms associated with this
c) Your advertising rates

3. Anything else I can do for a perfect stranger?

Subject: Blog Question

Hi there, I am looking to get some information about your blog. I work for a PR agency in Chicago and am building a media list for one of our liquor clients. I am wondering if you might be able to tell me the number of hits your blog receives each month?
NB: I’m sort of anal about useful analytics. Some wag once told me “Hits” stands for How Idiots Track Success.

4. Should I be flattered or insulted, you want me to republish your content?

Subject: An article on Label Profile: Canadian Club by AskMen.com

Hi, My name is [name withheld to protect the clueless] from AskMen.com—a unit of FOX Interactive Media. As the world’s largest men’s web portal, AskMen.com attracts more than 7 million readers each month.
I wanted to take this opportunity to let you know that AskMen.com recently published an article entitled “Label Profile: Canadian Club” that I think would be of particular interest to your readers [good windup, so now, the pitch].
The article takes a look at everyone’s favorite whiskey label; well at least it’s my favorite label. Canadian Club whiskey has been around since the 1800’s, believe it or not, and they are not showing any signs of slowing down. I’m sure you know everything there is to know about liquor, but check it out anyways [Swing and a miss].

5. Aren’t You Going to Buy Me Dinner First?

This one’s my favorite; again, hiding the name to protect the clueless, but what was particularly aggravating is this came from a competitive beverage alcohol industry PR agency with which some of our clients currently work. Makes me wonder who’s minding the store.

Hello. Would you mind telling me how many unique pageviews you get per month?

Unique pageviews? That’s sort of like a question I got some years ago about this “Interweb” thing…they got the concept, but are a little sketchy on the specifics.

6. From the “Totally out of the blue department.”

Hello. I’m the webmaster of http://www.uti.biz [example]. I wanted to know if by any chance you would be interested in doing an unbiased review of our site http://www.uti.biz on your blog?

Turns out the site sells a cure for urinary incontinence. Now that’s relevant content.

Implementing a value-based strategy is on the mind of nearly every health care organization in the U.S. It seems that every week, one or another announces a new “Center for Health Care Value” or “Center for Health Care Innovation.”  These organizations are accepting the fact that the volume-driven system is in its dying days, and that the future will demand that they deliver demonstrably better value: improved outcomes, lower costs, or both.

Many institutions are overwhelmed by the change required and don’t know where to begin. As Michael Porter and Thomas H. Lee recently described in the HBR article “The Strategy That Will Fix Health Care,” implementing a value strategy involves dismantling specialty departments in favor of condition-specific practices, being paid and held accountable for results, pursuing geographic expansion, and more. It is a formidable transformation. But some institutions are succeeding, and we find that nearly every element of their value strategies builds on and is strengthened by one thing: the ability to measure outcomes.

Here are five reasons why:

1. Outcomes define the goal of the organization and set direction for its differentiation.

Few health care organizations have made it their explicit goal to deliver excellent outcomes. Providers commonly cite quality, research, or education as goals, but few measure their patients’ treatment outcomes or report them – either to their clinicians or the public. Improving value can only happen when providers align the focus of their clinical teams and their market strategy on achieving excellent outcomes, and in turn invest the resources to measure and report them.

In 2005, when Prof. Dr. Hartwig Huland led the opening of a Martini Klinik, a new prostate cancer center in Hamburg, Germany, he wanted to deliver the best care in the world for its patients, and he defined “best” in terms of outcomes: rates of cancer recurrence, incontinence, erectile dysfunction – things everyone knew were important but few measured. Focusing first on clinical excellence and driving his team to measure and improve it, Huland’s center gained a regional, then national, then international reputation and is now the highest volume center for prostate cancer care in the world. (See this Harvard Business School case for more.)

2. Outcomes inform the composition of integrated care teams.

Clinical training is inherently siloed, but value-based health care requires integration around the patient. This is not easy for specialists who are not used to working closely together, or worse, even dislike each other. But defining and measuring outcomes can bridge the disciplinary divide as teams must necessarily collaborate to achieve better results. Data that exposes poor performance in particular can be a strong motivator to join together to improve.

At Texas Children’s Hospital (TCH), in the early days of its pediatric cardiac surgery program, newly recruited director Charles Fraser investigated the hospital’s performance relative to national referral centers as reported in the literature. The conclusion was disheartening – on most procedure types, TCH significantly underperformed. Citing its outcomes performance as a mandate for change, Fraser set about a complete restructuring of the team: pediatric cardiac surgeons and cardiologists started collaborating more closely, dedicated pediatric cardiac surgery operating rooms and ICU space was created, and a systematic outcomes tracking program was put in place. The final result? Today, TCH enjoys a nationally recognized program with mortality rates significantly below the national average. (For more, see this HBS case.)

3. Outcomes motivate clinicians to compare their performance and learn from each other.

Comparison of outcomes is essential to disseminate innovations from one individual or team to another. Unfortunately, most quality measurement has focused narrowly on complying with evidenced-based processes. Although such compliance is important, it has limited impact on outcomes (often less than a quarter of variation in outcomes is estimated to be due to compliance with these processes). A more comprehensive focus on processes and outcomes and their interaction always shows opportunities to improve, from increasing survival rates and long-term functioning to reducing complications and speeding recovery. Comparing these types of outcomes in a transparent and collaborative way can be a powerful motivator for improvement.

This philosophy underlies a remarkable collaboration between Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan (BCBS Michigan), the state’s largest commercial payor, and a collection of public and private providers in the state. These “Collaborative Quality Initiatives (CQIs),” financially supported by BCBS of Michigan, focus on state-wide outcome measurement for particular medical conditions or procedures coupled with frequent in-person discussions among would-be competitors to understand variations in practice and performance and to debate how best to improve outcomes. This data-driven dialogue across the network dramatically speeds the identification and adoption of best practices. For example, in 2008 the network discovered high rates of complications in bariatric surgery patients who had deep venous thrombosis (DVT) filters placed during their operation. Within one year of the network-wide meeting where the results were discussed, DVT filter use dropped by 90%. Nationally, the FDA communication warning against use of such filters lagged by more than two years, and is still being implemented.

4. Outcomes highlight value-enhancing cost reduction.

Alongside influencing outcomes, clinical decisions also drive the cost of care: choosing which drugs to prescribe, which procedures to perform, and whether to admit patients to acute care facilities have significant cost impact. The trouble is, clinicians generally overestimate the benefit of their care, which means that many decisions lead to high costs with little impact on outcomes. Getting costs under control requires engaging clinicians with data that can help them understand which activities and services can be reduced or eliminated without compromising outcomes.

Insight Center

At the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), amidst an aggressive shift from volume-based fee-for-service contracts to risk-based population contracts (which put providers at risk for the cost of care), the Division of Population Health Management team knew it needed a better process for determining who was best served by resource-intensive procedures, particularly those such as gastric bypass, diagnostic coronary catheterization, and lumbar fusion whose efficacy was uncertain. Rather than require that physicians follow rigid protocols, the Division created a decision support system to help clinicians determine when a procedure was indicated, based on a patient’s clinical circumstances. Criteria from the literature regarding the appropriateness of various procedures were integrated into the electronic medical record, and patients received videos and handouts explaining the risk and benefits of the various treatment options, as well as personalized consent forms that adapted those risk and benefits for their specific circumstances. The entire system was informed and refined by ongoing tracking of outcomes, as reported by both patient and clinicians.

Clinical decision making improved; for example, rates at which patients were determined to be “maybe” or “likely” appropriate for diagnostic catheterization climbed from 86% to close to 97%. Patients’ confidence in their own decision making also improved. One of the local private payors was so happy with the impact that it agreed to waive the requirement for prior authorizations on all procedures for which this system was in place — a triple win for patient, provider, and payor.

5. Outcomes enable payment to shift from volume to results.

As payment transitions from a fee-for-service world to a value-based world, good outcomes are shifting from a lofty idea into a business imperative. Paying for results and packaging payment into a bundled price will create a fundamentally different marketplace dynamic. At present, it is unclear which provider organizations will win business and which will lose business in this environment. It is clear, however, that without a clear knowledge of their outcomes, no provider will be able to succeed with bundled payment contracts.

In Stockholm County, Sweden, the single payor wanted to expand the delivery of hip and knee replacements to eliminate long waiting lists. Armed with two decades of detailed outcome and case-mix data from the national registry, the payor developed a reimbursement model that packaged pre-operative, operative, and early post-operative care into a single price with a two-year warranty (five years if an infection was found in the first two years). Although the pricing of the model was 20% lower than the typical market price, several small, focused private providers signed on. With a clear price but greater flexibility on the delivery of care, these providers set about streamlining operational efficiencies and adding in outcome-improving steps. Within two years, the volume of hip and knee replacements delivered at these small specialty hospitals tripled while full-service hospitals watched their volumes drop by 20% (see this HBS case for further reading). Now the initiative is being expanded across the country and in seven other conditions.

Earlier this year, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid announced that by 2016, 85% of payments will be linked to quality. Private payors are joining arms with CMS in pushing this agenda. In other advanced economies, similar initiatives are underway. The value-based shift is upon us. If you are leading a health care provider organization and are uncertain how to navigate the shift, we have one suggestion: start by measuring your outcomes.

Big plays are major actions you can take to win your most important sales opportunities and grow your most important accounts.

Read: What is a Big Play and When to Use One

The first step in creating a Big Play is to define the goal you're trying to achieve. It could be that you need to:

1. Strengthen your relationship with the key buyers.
2. Create new relationships in order to win the sale or grow the account.
3. Maximize the buyers' perception of the value of moving forward, or choosing you.
4. Displace or win against a strong competitor.

All four of these challenges can be overcome with the right Big Play. Here are examples of Big Plays that address all 4 areas.

“Why do people buy products?” asked Theodore Levitt, the celebrated Harvard Business School professor, at the start of his 1969 book The Marketing Mode. He suggested an answer:

Leo McGivena once said, “Last year one million quarter-inch drill bits were sold — not because people wanted quarter-inch drill bits but because they wanted quarter-inch holes.” People don’t buy products, they buy the expectation of benefits. People spend their money not for goods and services, but to get the value satisfactions they believe are bestowed by what they are buying. They buy quarter-inch holes, not quarter-inch drills. That is the marketing
view of the business process.

And so it began, this meme of drills and holes.

An advertising man, apparently, Leo McGineva had become Leo McGinneva by 1983, when Levitt again referred to him and his bit-hole observation, in the book The Marketing Imagination:

McGinneva’s words eventually migrated into the mouth of Alex Steffen’s brother. In a September 2006 blog post about “the riches of a dematerialized life,” Steffen, a sustainability advocate, wrote that

most power tools are used for only minutes a year. And, when it comes right down to it, what most of us really want is not the tool itself but the thing we get by using the tool. As my brother puts it, ‘You want the hole, not the drill.’

The desire for the hole, you’ll note, has now subsumed not just the bit but the entire drill. Steffen returned to the subject a few months later, writing in a February 2007 post:

Take power drills. Supposedly, the average power drill is used for somewhere between six and twenty minutes in its entire lifetime. And yet supposedly almost half of all American households own one. … But what we want is the hole, not the drill.

Supposedly, supposedly. There were lots of links in Steffen’s post, but no source was provided for the assertion that the average power drill is used for a total of just six to twenty minutes during its lifetime. (I find the numbers highly suspicious. I wrote to Steffen asking for his source, but haven’t heard back.)

But that’s just a detail. Whether accurate or not, the drill-hole story was compelling as a rhetorical device. When the “sharing economy” went viral, it dragged the woefully underutilized power drill along with it. The drill became, as Tom Slee writes, “one of the archetypes of the Sharing Economy.” And, along the way, the archetypal drill warped our view of that economy.

Rachel Botsman, a business consultant, earned cheers when she told the story of the drill and the hole in a TED Talk on “collaborative consumption” in 2012:

How many of you have a power drill, own a power drill? Right. That power drill will be used around 12 to 13 minutes in its entire lifetime. It’s kind of ridiculous, right? Because what you need is the hole, not the drill.

So why don’t you rent the drill, or, even better, rent out your own drill to other people and make some money from it?

And she used the example in What’s Mine Is Yours, a book on the sharing economy that she wrote with Roo Rogers:

If you are like most people, you may use a power drill somewhere between six and thirteen minutes in its entire lifetime. … Ownership of a product you use for just a few minutes makes no rational sense. There is the obvious cost of the money spent on the drill itself, but there are also the hassles of replacing those little screw heads that are always going missing.

Little screw heads?

The meme received its broadest airing in 2013, when New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman quoted Airbnb founder Brian Chesky:

“There are 80 million power drills in America that are used an average of 13 minutes,” says Chesky. “Does everyone really need their own drill?”

I guess I don’t have to point out that if you take the average of 6 and 20, you end up with 13. It sounds so precise, doesn’t it?

It’s interesting that the power drill meme went from being a lesson about hard-nosed corporate marketing to being a starry-eyed idea for reducing resource consumption to being a full-blown, VC-ready business concept. The meme only ever really made sense in the sustainability context — and only theoretically even there. If a lot of people were to start sharing common household goods, rather than owning them outright, that would indeed reduce the amount of raw materials used in manufacturing the goods.

In the other two cases, the power drill example was pretty much idiotic. Sorry, Leo McGinneva, but people don’t buy a drill because they want a hole. They buy a drill because they want a drill. (If you don’t believe me, go hang out for a day in the power tool department of a Home Depot.) Any drill manufacturer that built its marketing around “the hole” rather than “the drill” would have been laughed out of business in short order. I’ll bet good money that McGinneva never drilled a quarter-inch hole into anything in his life.

The idea that household power drills might shift from an ownership model to a renting or sharing model was even more outlandish. Botsman said, “Ownership of a product you use for just a few minutes makes no rational sense.” Actually, it makes perfectly good rational sense (even if you discount the very real pleasure of owning a decently made drill*). It’s been widely noted that sharing a good or service can reduce costs for the consumer. What hasn’t been much discussed is the fact that sharing can also increase the consumer’s costs. To understand sharing costs and their influence on consumer behavior is also to learn something important about the form and limits of the so-called sharing economy.

The place to start is with economist Ronald Coase’s famous theory of the firm. Coase pointed out, in his 1937 article “The Nature of the Firm,” that markets involve transaction costs.** If you want to go out into a marketplace and buy something, you have to figure out who’s selling the thing you want, at what price, with what terms and guarantees, and so forth. And you have to figure out the seller’s reputation, and you may have to go through some negotiations and contract-writing and other time-consuming rigamarole. Coase applied this insight to the formation and growth of businesses. Firms exist because it’s often cheaper to do stuff — like manufacture a part for your product, say, or keep your books — within the confines of a formal organization, where transactions can be routinized, than to pay the transaction costs required to do the same stuff by contracting with outsiders in a market. Summed up Coase, “a firm will tend to expand until the costs of organising an extra transaction within the firm become equal to the costs of carrying out the same transaction by means of an exchange on the open market.”

Coase’s insight also helps explain why people own things, like power drills, rather than sharing them. A drill is a fairly inexpensive commodity. It’s easy to buy, it requires little maintenance, and it doesn’t take up much room in your house. And once you own it, you can use it any damn time you please. (The upside of low utilization is high availability.) So if you’re bored some Saturday afternoon, you can suddenly decide that it’s time to fix that shelf in the closet that’s been broken for two years — and, voila, the drill is at hand to get the job done. Buying and owning a drill, in other words, doesn’t involve much in the way of costs, either up-front or ongoing.

Now if, instead of buying the drill for yourself, you decide to share it with some other people, whether through a neighborhood co-op or some rental arrangement, suddenly you face all manner of transaction costs. You have to hash out the financial and logistical arrangements, you have to figure out where the drill happens to be at the moment you need it, and you have to go out and pick it up and bring it home (burning gas, perhaps, as well as time). And if somebody else wants to use the drill at the same time you need it, then you’re in for some negotiations and probably some aggravation. And if the drill breaks or gets lost (or a “little screw head” gets misplaced), a whole new set of transaction costs kick in. And, don’t forget, your knucklehead of a neighbor never recharges the battery after he uses the drill, so you’re going to wedge yourself into the closet only to find that the drill is dead. More aggravation.

Transaction costs, in this context, might also be called pain-in-the-butt costs, and pain-in-the-butt costs don’t have to get very high before you say, “Screw it, I’m buying a drill.” You accept, even welcome, low levels of utilization in order to avoid onerous transaction costs. And, yes, you are being totally rational. Utilization isn’t everything.

So it should probably come as no surprise that, as Sarah Kessler writes in Fast Company, the sharing model hasn’t worked for common household goods like power drills. Such micro-sharing arrangements may have seemed “like a warm and fuzzy inevitability,” but they never got off the ground. Neighborhood co-ops didn’t take hold, at least not broadly, and the entrepreneurs who bought the hype and tried to launch goods-sharing businesses are now going bust. (Of course, there have always been rental shops for larger, more expensive, and more specialized tools — they’re still around.)

“The real sharing economy is dead,” writes Kessler. Even that, though, is a sentimental notion. The “real” sharing economy was always about setting up big, central clearinghouses for connecting suppliers and buyers in certain service markets that have always operated in a commercial fashion — hotel rooms, taxis, etc. Businesses like Airbnb and Uber succeed by reducing transaction costs in established markets, not by increasing transaction costs in markets for simple consumer goods. The real sharing economy, in other words, has always had a lot to do with business and very little to do with sharing.

_______________

*I have a Makita, for the record. And, no, I’m not going to loan it to you.

**Coase actually called them “marketing costs,” by which he meant the costs of transacting business in an open market. “Transaction costs” is now the more common term.

Image: echoDave_1990.

By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca 

I love reading articles, books, and all things sales. Some I read to learn, others for pleasure – some people just write well; and then there are those that I read just to see how badly I disagree with the writer and their views. Among these my favourite by far, the ones I read for a laugh, a good deep belly laugh, are the articles that usually have headlines such as “The Secret to…”, where the author wants readers to believe that they have discovered or uncovered THE SECRET element that will forever demystify sales and selling; along the lines of Edison’s light bulb. As though before reading the piece we were stuck in the dark ages, having to make wick and gather wax to make candles, then rub sticks together making fire to light our candles. But now, thanks to this immensely generous pundit, finding prospects and closing sales will be as easy as switching on the light. I know that when they wrote the thing they did not intend for me to giggle, but making the reader laugh is usually their only redeeming value.

Pieces that read “Cracking The XYZ Code”. Every time I see a headline like that, I get out my life size cut out of Benedict Cumberbatch from The Imitation Game, and an

autographed photo of Dan Brown, eagerly anticipating a life changing experience. After all, I can picture the author, having made great sacrifices, suffered through the process of cracking the “whatever” code, now sharing it and liberating mere mortal sellers from their toil.

Over the years pundits have offered secrets, incantations, amulets and more, yet the output seems to be steady, with no significant improvement in the pace of revenue growth, margins growth, and the number of reps attaining or exceeding quota.

Now you can’t blame the pundits, they are in the business of selling books, and as long as there are buyers, there’ll be someone cranking it out. I remember one of the big disagreements my co-author and I had was over unnecessary, stupid, misleading and not factual statement on the cover: “There is a sliver bullet in Sales”, no there isn’t, and anyways, what hunting, werewolves or revenue?

Add to the above the magic of technology, and you have “stupid” automated. This not a comment on the quality or worth of the technologies, but the stories spewed by some who will lead you to believe the technology will change and improve your selling and sales results. It is a lot like fitness fads and ab machines peddled by former athletes or fitness wannabes. You still need to eat wisely, commit to a program and find the discipline and accountability to execute an ongoing and evolving plan.

The pattern is familiar, sellers jump on a trend, acquire the related consumable, but don’t change the way they execute in the field. After a few weeks of effort, and only minor uptick in results, the ab machine or sales tool or methodology ends up in the closet or under the desk, and it’s back to how we sold all along.

Change, long term sustainable and ongoing change, takes effort, and commitment. Often a greater level of effort than many have had to commit to in the past. The other element required that many don’t want or have access to, is support, just as with fitness programs, people who commit to a health plan and engage a professional trainer or fitness pro are more likely to not only succeed, but maintain the new discipline, than those who go it alone.

It is also important to remember that improving your selling is best achieved by building and adding to your skills and tools, not by narrowing, restricting or limiting your tools and techniques. The problem with SECRETS and CRACKED CODES, is they seem to need to displace or “kill” other methodologies that came before it. Witness the need by “Social Sellers” to start all discussion by saying “cold calling is dead”. The best sellers I know take from all methodologies and piece them together in a way that enhances and expands their skills, opportunities and sales.

So here is the last SECRET in Sales: There Are No More Secrets!

It’s all out there, all that is left is to execute. Some find it easier to blame the last fad, the latest technology, the new app, anything but the fact that we don’t do, or want to do certain things that have to be done in the course of a sale. This is no secret, but success in sales is less about methodology or tools, or attitude; success in sales is about execution – everything else is just talk.

Tibor Shanto    

Switzerland may typically be known for snow-capped mountains, delicious cheese, and luxury watches, but there’s much more. The nation is increasingly becoming a magnet for financial technology, known as FinTech.

FinTech is the fast-growing industry where businesses use technology to disrupt the financial sector, essentially cutting out the middlemen by connecting buyers and sellers directly.

Cryptocurrency startups — early-stage companies developing or working with digital currencies — are a key part of this movement, and many are honing in on Zug, one of Switzerland's 26 cantons (territorial districts). In fact, the small, German-speaking canton is Europe's Silicon Valley for cryptocurrency.

Why FinTech companies are flocking to Switzerland

For many FinTech startups, operating in Switzerland makes a lot of sense. The nation boasts an incredibly stable economy, a strong reputation for innovation (it's ranked No. 1 in the Global Innovation Index), and an emphasis on security and privacy. On top of that, the Bitcoin is a legitimate foreign currency there, meaning there is no legal uncertainty about using it within the country.

In fact, the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) authorized the Bitcoin stock exchange (ECUREX) in May, facilitating the exchange from Swiss Francs to Bitcoin. The new draft of the provision will address virtual currencies and go into effect at the beginning of 2016.

According to Switzerland Global Enterprise, other advantages include the nation's liberal laws, loosely regulated labor market, high security, and excellent free-trade policies.

All of these factors contribute to Switzerland being an established business hub, and several major companies, including tech giants like eBay and Google, have offices there. In fact, Google's largest engineering office outside of the US is based in Zurich.

US companies are increasingly expanding into Switzerland with regional EMEA offices or production facilities, further strengthening the relationship between the Swiss and American business and technology communities. On September 14-15, a major Swiss delegation represented the connection between the markets to observe the growing ecosystem of startups active in the U.S. and Switzerland.

Zug's transition from agriculture to "Crypto Valley"

Located south of Zurich, Zug transformed from a relatively poor farming town into one of the wealthiest, most desirable cantons in Switzerland. The main reason behind this shift: In 1947, the canton drastically reduced its tax rates to draw in companies. The tactic worked. Over the past decade, the number of companies operating in Zug jumped from 19,000 to 30,000. (Consequently, the unemployment rate in Zug is very low — below 2%.)

Zug's reputation as "Crypto Valley" developed in part because of Johann Gevers, CEO and founder of Monetas, a digital transaction platform. Gevers, who is also the co-founder of Bitcoin Association Switzerland, has been rallying to bring other cryptocurrency companies to Zug.

This is spurred by Gevers' belief that the existing, highly centralized financial system — in which every purchase is funneled through multiple banks, both big and small — is slow, expensive, and ultimately outdated. That's why he's tried to make Zug, and Switzerland as a whole, a breeding ground for cryptocurrency companies that try to avoid this financial bureaucracy.

Today, the canton is moving beyond the Bitcoin and developing new trading markets, encryption methods, and decentralized currencies, including the Ether — a blockchain-based cryptocurrency launched by a company called Ethereum.

FinTech startups in Switzerland

Here are a few Switzerland-based FinTech and cryptocurrency companies that are disrupting the market:

• Xapo: A "Bitcoin wallet" that is essentially a secure Bitcoin storage platform with three layers of security protection. The company even offers 100% insurance for all Bitcoin funds kept in its virtual funds.
• Monetas: An advanced digital platform that connects everyone to the global economy. It also boasts lightning-fast transactions at the lowest cost.
• Knip: An app that manages digital insurance by detecting individual savings potential, enabling users to electronically change tariffs, conclude new insurance contracts, and more.
• Squirro: A Zurich-based market research company that markets intelligence in real-time and explains the "why" behind industry data.
• InventGlass: A private banking resource that relies on machine learning to give investors personalized information.

Various upcoming events will focus on cryptocurrencies, including the International Crypto Finance Tech Conference on November 3 in Zug. (For more information, consult the local associations Swiss Finte.CH and Swiss Finance Startups.)

Learn more about FinTech in Switzerland.

This post is sponsored by Switzerland Global Enterprise.

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When I first started creating content for sales teams, I would follow a similar process to my own marketing efforts. Educate and deliver specific types of value depending on what stage of the sales cycle website visitors and leads were at.

Turns out I was doing it all wrong. This isn’t how salespeople use content to educate their opportunities.

Creating content for sales enablement is a very different game to how we create it for marketing. You’re creating it to help your sales team close more deals. You need to forget about top and bottom-of-funnel here. The sales process isn’t that straightforward.

Follow these steps and you’ll become the hero among your sales department.

Step 1: Understand your sales teams’ challenges.

Salespeople are at the front line of your audience. They’re talking to buyers every single day and understand your clients and their challenges very well.

Therefore, the first step to sales enablement content is to gather insight. Start by digging deep into as many objections as possible. Find the most common and then dig deeper to see what the hurdles of getting over them are.

Set aside some time to do this. Gathering everyone into a workshop environment can help get people in the right mindset to do this.

When eliciting and taking note of this insight, apply them to categories. We find the best way to do this is in the form of mindmaps:

Finally, be sure to share what you’ve got lined up in your editorial calendar. Sales can come up with great ideas on how to use, improve and optimise content for their own purposes. Keep them in the loop.

Step 2: Customise the content experience

High performing salespeople never stick to a set script, and the same is true for the content you create for them. Every piece of content they use should help guide prospects towards taking the next step.

The hurdles to these next steps are the objections and challenges you’re helping your salespeople to overcome. Because of this, no one experience will ever be the same. You need to customise the experience to each prospect.

Sure, you can optimise your CRM to keep track of who has received what, but this presents a challenge on the prospects’ side. B2B marketing usually involves more than one decision maker, which makes sharing the content for your point of content a messy task.

Instead, create an environment that contains specific content for certain segments. Content is all grouped together and can be share with one link. Go one step further and get engineering resources to create a system that allows you to build an environment for each prospect.

Whichever approach you go for, you need to make it easy for your sales teams to make it easy for their prospects.

Step 3: Enable your sales reps

Now you have an understanding of the overall objections and challenges your sales teams and prospects. Everything should be mapped out and content should be ready for your sales to use. Now it’s time to make it easy for them.

First things first – get your CRM in order. Optimise email templates to include links to whitepapers. You can integrate this into the overall messaging or include P.S. statements.

Secondly, create a content library to provide easy access to your content. HubSpot and KISSmetrics both do this very well you can use for inspiration – but be sure to use them on an internal basis only.

Conclusion

Providing your sales teams with content really helps them to speed things along. Certain challenges can quickly be overcome in a way that makes them look trusted and authoritative.

We’ve scratched the surface of the entire sales enablement process here, but it gives you a good starting point to work from.

The key here is to really, really listen. Elicit as much information as possible and go many layers deep. Not only will this benefit your sales teams, but may also give you insight to apply to your marketing efforts.

It seems wherever you look online these days, people are talking about the benefits of blogging. With a proven track record of generating traffic and leads –  as well as building relationships with potential and existing customers – there are a heap of reasons why you should consider adding a blog to your marketing toolbox. Best of all, it really costs you nothing except your time – and you’ll even have fun doing it!

In our latest video blog, Sarah – a member of our amazing Copywriting team – gives you 5 reasons why we believe you NEED to start blogging today.

Here’s the full transcript…

Hey! I’m Sarah – a copywriter here at Wyzowl – and I’m about to give you 5 reasons why you NEED to start blogging today!

1. It’s great for SEO!

SEO is one of those things that every marketer bangs on about. And sure, it can be a total snore fest.

But if you want to see your website at the no1 spot on Google, then you’re gonna have to make SEO your new best friend – and blogging can help you do that.

When your customer visits Google, they have a question that they want answering. Google’s job is to give them those answers. So, if you create blog content that specifically answers their questions, you are for more likely to rank for it. And if you make sure that your blog content is highly valuable – and relevant to your niche – then other bloggers are more likely to link to it, which means valuable links…higher rankings…and more traffic!

2. It’s perfect for social

Hmmm…what can I post on social to build more followers? Hey Hassan, have you got the video of the elephant riding a tricycle?

So…the more you blogs you write, the more content you’ll have for your social feeds, which means more people will share your stuff…which in turn, will build your followers.

3. It earns you industry leader status

So you wanna be known as the best at what you do, right?

Well, blogging can help you be the best. So long as you start to produce valuable content that can’t be found anywhere else – content that actually teaches your reader something – you will build up trust. The kind of trust that will turn you into an industry leader!

4. It attracts leads

Tired of wondering where all those juicy leads are? Well… blogging is the ULTIMATE leads magnet!

If you come up with the right topic – and promote your ass off – you’ll attract loads of leads to your blog.

What you need to do is place downloadable content within your blog post. Your reader will then click onto it, give you their contact details and – ta-da! – you got yourself a shiny new lead!

5. It influences buyers

According to QuickSprout, consumers say that a brand’s blog is the 2nd most influential factor when making a purchase.

So if you want to improve SEO, grow your social following, become an industry leader, attract more leads and boost your sales then you need to start blogging, right now!

No really, go do it, now!

This review of Joe Pulizzi’s new book, Content Inc., explores how B2B marketers can think big to take their content marketing to new heights.

In September of 2008, the stock market crashed.

This was also the month when I left my job to start a copywriting business.

When I left my job, I had one client for whom I’d done some proposal editing work. But I had few industry contacts, no marketing plan and no savings.

Luckily, I was accepted into the Ontario Self Employment Benefits program, which helps entrepreneurs launch businesses. Through the program, I received a one-year start-up grant and in-depth training on how to run a business.

The part of the program that impacted me the most was the sales training. Many of the entrepreneurs in my class were nervous about “selling”. We associated selling with the sleazy techniques used in Glengarry Glen Ross.

However, our instructor explained that we didn’t need to be pushy salespeople. Instead, he said that we should “Stop selling. Start helping.” He even gave us magnets with this saying on them, and I still have mine on my fridge.

During this lesson, I realized that selling didn’t have to be scary. Instead, I could give potential clients information that helps them do their jobs better. I started doing this by publishing articles on my blog.

Soon after launching my copywriting business, I found the Content Marketing Institute and started blogging for them. Content marketing aligns perfectly with “Stop selling. Start helping.” It just makes sense.

To this day, I focus on creating helpful content for my clients – B2B technology marketers. This is a big reason why my business survived the recession and is still going strong.

Since I’m a huge believer in content marketing, I was thrilled to review Joe Pulizzi’s new book, Content Inc. The book focuses on how entrepreneurs can use content to build massive audiences and create radically successful businesses. However, a lot of the book’s information can also apply to B2B marketers in established companies. Joe states that the book is useful if your company is developing a new audience – or if you’re selling lots of products and services but aren’t happy with your growth.

Here are five things B2B marketers can learn from content entrepreneurs:

1. Set big goals.

According to research from the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs, great content marketers do two things differently from others:

They document their content marketing strategies.

They review their strategies on a regular basis.

Without a content marketing strategy, you’ll randomly throw content into the world and hope that it resonates with your customers. A strategy helps you define your goals and learn more about your customers. The more you know about your customers, the more you will create content that appeals to them.

Another thing that great content marketers do is set big goals. “Your ultimate objectives – those big hairy audacious goals – should make you cringe at least a little bit,” the book states. When it comes to your content, aim to create content that your readers will find irreplaceable.

2. Highlight your subject matter expertise.

Your employees have a wealth of product and technical expertise that can help your customers. Highlighting their expertise in your blog posts and other content can boost your marketing results.

Content Inc. gives the example of Indium, a company that develops and manufacturers materials used primarily in the electronics assembly industry. In 2005, Indium’s employees started to share their knowledge on the company’s blog. Through its blogs, Indium now generates more leads at just 25% of its previous marketing investment.

3. Go beyond what everyone else is saying.

Many tech products promise to “lower your costs” and “save you money”. While this might be important, it’s also what all of your competitors are saying.

To stand out from the competition, talk about things that will get your customers excited. The book states, “To become the one resource that cuts through the clutter, the people in your audience need to believe that your content can change their stars (from the movie A Knight’s Tale).”

4. Pick the right channels.

While you may distribute content on a number of channels, you should pick one core channel to focus on. This channel should give you the best opportunity to reach your target audience.

Ideally, this channel should also be one that you can control. For example, while you can reach a wider audience by sharing content on LinkedIn, you’re at the mercy of the social network’s updates and policies.

According to the book, the safest bet for a channel is building a website or print property that you own. From there, you can use other channels, such as social media, to drive people to your content. Then, you can convert visitors into subscribers and later customers.

5. Get subscribers.

Your subscribers are your top content marketing metric.

Joe states, “When you go to sleep at night, you should be thinking of attracting subscribers. When you wake up in the morning, you should have subscribers etched into your brain.”

Your subscribers will often turn into your best customers. However, not all subscribers are created equal. Joe recommends focusing on building email subscribers to see the best results. The following chart shows the subscriber hierarchy, with email taking the lead and Facebook fans at the bottom.

Content Inc. provides valuable advice for entrepreneurs – as well as B2B companies that want to think like entrepreneurs. It also offers tips on building your audience, creating a content calendar and repurposing content to reach a wider audience.

Corporate strategy leads the charge in strategic alignment. But an aligned sales strategy turns market demand into revenue.

Surprisingly, 39% of CSOs don’t have a sales strategy in place.

An effective sales strategy will drive sales revenue. How do best-in-class sales leaders define a winning strategy? Read on to find out.

Content by CloudTweaks.com

Cloud Tools Can Help Increase Sales How new cloud technology can help you source, manage and close more leads. We take a look at how you can use cloud software to boost your sales team’s productivity and clinch more of those all-important deals! Selling and Marketing is integral to every business and a company’s sales team […]

The post 5 Ways The Latest Cloud Tools Can Help Increase Sales appeared first on CloudTweaks.com.

Following my blog earlier this month on win rate and velocity, we’ve finally reached the most important metric of the series… drum roll please…The Golden Ratio! With the Golden Ratio, aligning channels across conversion rate, win rate, and velocity will give you the full picture of channel performance.

What Is the Golden Ratio?

The Golden Ratio is pipeline generated over cost. I believe pipeline/cost is more important than ROI for marketing metrics. While ROI depends on multiple factors, some of which are out of marketing’s hands, such as sales performance and capacity, the Golden Ratio is measured primarily on marketing aptitude—the ability to deliver pipeline across certain channels.

Now, before we dive into the data, let’s set some context around first-touch and multi-touch attribution, since those are the two lenses for viewing the Golden Ratio across channels.

First-Touch vs. Multi-Touch Attribution

When looking at pipeline attribution, it’s crucial to understand the difference between first-touch and multi-touch.

• First-Touch Attribution: Attributing the pipeline contribution to the first touch point of the opportunity. Example: If a lead came in as a result of attending a webinar, regardless of all subsequent touch points, all credit gets attributed to that webinar.
• Multi-Touch Attribution: Attributing the pipeline contribution to all touch points of the opportunity. Example: If a lead came in as a result of a webinar, but later responded to an email campaign, attended a tradeshow, and then downloaded a whitepaper, all of those channels would get credit distributed equally across them.

Many companies only look at first-touch attribution, which is good for looking at acquisition snapshots (specific point in time), however it does not give a complete picture of channel performance across time. A lead could have come in through a certain channel, but gained most of the influence in subsequent touches, such as through a nurturing program. In a first-touch model, only the acquisition channel gets the credit. In a multi-touch model, all touches that influence an opportunity get credit.

Pipeline to Cost Ratio (First-Touch)

Here’s first-touch pipeline to cost ratio. This measures pipeline generated over the cost, normalized across marketing channels. All attribution is based on first-touch (lead source).

Pipeline to Cost Ratio (Multi-Touch)

Here’s multi-touch pipeline to cost ratio. This measures pipeline generated over the cost, normalized across marketing channels. All attribution is credited across all touch points.

What We’ve Learned

I love this data; we’ve got digital marketing down to a science! The Golden Ratio proves two fundamental theories, first of which every marketer probably practices, and the other that’s not so intuitive. Let’s take a look:

• This Is Why We Nurture: I was waiting patiently for the publishing of this blog for the big reveal. Email nurturing is amazing! OK, you’re not surprised, but at least now you have the data to prove it. Email has THE HIGHEST pipeline to cost ratio of all marketing channels, especially in a multi-touch model where email nurturing has huge influence over opportunities relative to cost. Think of those deals that have two-year sales cycles—why would you not nurture them?
• First-Touch vs. Multi-Touch: I recently met with a past colleague that was using a competitor marketing automation system that couldn’t do multi-touch attribution. She told me her company had stopped doing webinars due to poor performance. But she was completely unaware how webinars affected opportunities after the first touch. And judging by the data, webinars could have been a great vehicle for nurturing prospects. The moral of the story is that first-touch attribution only gauges acquisition, whereas multi-touch attribution gauges everything else.

Putting It All Together

Imagine if you had a magic crystal ball that told you exactly where your best leads came from. Well now you can build your own magic crystal ball (actually more like a magic telescope). By aligning conversion rate, win rate, velocity, pipeline, and cost across all of your channels—or even better—across all of your programs, you can clearly see what works and what doesn’t. Some of my current and past demand gen. colleagues have perfected this art; some have even been able to work backwards to drive future revenue projections. That’s how marketing gets a seat at the revenue table.

Notice something in the data that stood out to you? Got follow-up questions for me? Leave your comments below.

For us B2B marketers, LinkedIn seems to be the Holy Grail in the world of social media. It’s where our buyers are most likely to be, and as professionals they’re usually incredibly active.

Despite this, many marketers are struggling to gain traction and see results. Whether the goal is driving traffic or securing sales opportunities, people are still missing the mark.

At Seraph Science, we’ve found three effective approaches to LinkedIn marketing that have worked very well as of late. In this article, we’ll share these approaches as well as the ways you can get started and begin testing.

LinkedIn Marketing Approach #1: Repurpose Content in Pulse

LinkedIn’s Pulse platform is a great way to tap into an audience of professionals who are looking for insight and how-to knowledge on certain topics. It’s also super easy to begin publishing.

The benefits of using Pulse to publish content are many, but two of the biggest ones, we find, are content distribution and the positioning of expert status.

First of all, when you publish content on a regular basis, you get the attention of your audience. As long as the content is inherently useful, you’ll generate views and build your personal brand & expert positioning.

Secondly, and this is one of the primary reasons we use Pulse, is that you can easily re-purpose longer pieces of content into bite-sized chunks. Then, at the bottom of the articles, you can include a call-to-action for readers to learn more, directing them to a more in-depth piece of content.

This allows you to tease upon the full version of your content and drive traffic to your original piece of content, guiding more traffic and leads down your sales funnel.

You can see this in action here.

LinkedIn Marketing Approach #2: Driving Traffic from Groups

I love LinkedIn Groups. It’s almost as if LinkedIn is presenting us with a segmented audience based around interests and job titles on a silver platter.

But, don’t let that fool you. This isn’t an excuse to exploit this fact and spam groups – at the end of the day they’re still communities of people who will ignore you if what you contribute is no good.

Therefore, no matter what your goals are, start by getting involved with discussion in the group. Get yourself “top contributor” status by getting involved with discussions, providing valuable insights and starting new threads.

Once you’ve spent some time becoming better known, then is your time to begin sharing your content and driving traffic. Check out our latest article for a more in-depth guide on this approach.

LinkedIn Marketing Approach #3: Go Deep, Not Wide

Some marketers are too focused on volume. They forget that relationships are built upon connections, dialogue and actual conversations.

LinkedIn is no different. Although there’s a whole network of potential leads to tap into, the spray and pray approach won’t work.

Instead, consider taking a deeper approach when building these relationships. Select a handful of organisations you want as your ideal clients, then identify the best contacts to approach. Make sure they’re accessible by seeing if they’re posting updates or creating content regularly.

From there, engage with what they’re putting out. Share their content, comment on their updates and even engage with them on Twitter. Once you’ve done this a few times, then you can approach them to take the next level. This is how we’re currently doing things at Seraph Science.

This works a lot better than a standard cold email or LinkedIn message. You show you care about them and gives you some extra personalisation when you first approach them to guide them into your sales cycle.

Conclusion

These are three approaches that we’ve tested thoroughly and are currently using to generate leads, drive traffic and distribute our content.

The great thing about each approach is that you don’t need many resources or a huge amount of time to get started. It’s very easy to test on a small scale and test your efforts before committing to a more scalable approach.

The key is in interaction and building relationships within the platform. Do this, and you’ll see more success in your lead generation efforts than a typical spray-and-pray approach.

The sales enablement space is white hot with an incredible amount of interest and investment by customers, analysts, venture capital, and vendors. Ultimately this is good for customers as there is significant ROI for sales enablement tools and software.

With so many vendors flooding into the space there is also a lot of hype that customers need to sift through. And depending on the particulars of their solution, vendors too often present self-serving advice on the best path to success.

These myths fall in to the “tell customers what they want to hear” category but unfortunately will lead to failed projects. You need to decide for yourself and do a thorough evaluation to choose the right sales enablement tools and software to meet your business.

Here are the top 3 myths we encounter in our discussions with customers.

Myth 1: Search Can Replace Content Curation

Search is an incredibly important feature in a robust sales enablement platform. With advanced data science and machine learning search can be incredibly powerful and accurate. But don’t let anyone tell you that search can replace the marketing and sales enablement role as content curators.

We recently spoke to a large Enterprise customer who had a number of disjointed content repositories with several terabytes of data. The repositories had a mix of final content and various intermediate versions and supporting files. Vendors were telling them what they wanted to hear, namely, they could just leave all the content in their repositories and use search to find the relevant documents among the chaos.

This is a seductive siren song, but ultimately will lead to a failed sales enablement project. Want proof? Go to your company’s Intranet search box and type in that key sales document you are looking for. Did you find it? Of course not. Enterprise search over the chaos of both published and non-published content is an intractable problem. If Google and Microsoft can’t crack enterprise search why do you think your sales enablement platform can do much better.

But search against published and curated content is tractable and sales enablement platforms can do an amazing job if they use advanced machine learning and take in to account signals such as internal usage, customer engagement, and influenced revenue.

Where the content is stored is not the key point. The key point is that marketing and sales enablement must specify which content is published and ready for the sales team to consume. Whether this publishing step is simply copying the final file to a special directory or uploading it to the sales enablement platform is less important. The important thing is that there is an explicit publishing step.

Once published to the sales enablement platform, search can work its magic.

Myth 2: CRM Content Targeting Can Replace Searching and Browsing

Targeting content within CRM lead, contact, account, and opportunity records is an incredibly important feature in a robust sales enablement platform. Often this feature is sales playbooks or content targeting. On first blush, the idea is wonderful. Sales team no longer need to search or browse for content and instead the best and most effective content will be “automagically” pushed to them for each situation.

Content targeting can be very powerful and save time by focusing the ales rep on the most relevant content. We have seen great success with certain kinds of roles and certain kinds of content such as action plans by stage or the main pitch decks or the right price sheet. But it can’t be the only way to find content.

For many complex B2B scenarios the reps need other ways to find content such as searching and browsing. Want proof? Think about the 100s or 1000s of pieces of your content. Now think about your sales funnel. Knowing everything you know, do you know 100% of the time which 10 (more than 10 starts gets overwhelming) pieces of content should be put in front of a sales rep for each and every day of a sale? Of course not. And neither can your sales enablement platform.

Content targeting is an important tool, and combined with great browsing, filtering, search, and recommendations sales reps can connect to effective content.

Myth 3: Manually tagging content is sustainable and scaleable

You have a lot of content you need to manage and share. Maybe there is an easy solution – if you could just tag each item the right way, then everyone can quickly find exactly what they need.

It doesn’t sound that hard. First, you have to figure out the right tags to use. You might label everything with a type – “pitch deck”, “white paper”, or “price sheet”. You might label it with the set of products that it covers. And the relevant technology trends. And regions where it applies. And so on.

We’ve talked to hundreds of customers who have tried it, and they’ve all had the same experience – after you use the system for a while, the results are dismal. And they get steadily worse. Want proof? Let’s assume you have 1000 pieces of content and you want to organize your content along a few dimensions, say “Sales Stage”, “Product Line”, “Geography”, and “Customer Segment”. And to keep the math easy let’s say each dimension has 5 possible values. That leads to 20,000 possible combinations and the need to apply 4000 tags. And given the pace of business today, as content evolves and the tags evolve, you must keep applying the tags or the results deteriorate.

There are many other problems with tags which are detailed in the Trouble with Tags.

The reality is that nobody can design and maintain a tag system that keeps up with the pace of modern business, and nobody has time to update all the tags in the system whenever the business changes. So the tags you are using, and the tags that every piece of content has on it, get more and more out of date and disconnected from reality. It’s just not a workable model at any reasonable level of scale.

Conclusion

Sales enablement tools and software can provide organizations with excellent ROI by improving marketing effectiveness and increasing sales. In today’s marketplace there are more options and more hype than ever so it is important to evaluate vendor claims carefully and systematically. Our sales enablement evaluation tool can help. Even better than hearing vendor claims, put the software through its paces and judge for yourself.

How Lead Scoring Can Qualify Potential Clients for More Sales

Are your sales not growing despite more effort?

Does your business have a large database of leads but don’t know where to focus on the best?

Depending on the type of products or services your company has to offer lead scoring can help you hone in on more specific information from your prospects such as the number of professional contacts for B2B sales, the level of interest based on filled out forms and page views, or the size of a company in a given industry.

According to Wikipedia, “Lead Scoring allows a business to customize a prospect’s experience based on his or her buying stage and interest level and greatly improves the quality and “readiness” of leads that are delivered to sales organizations for followup.”

Before diving into the process your business will need to first implement several factors:

• Build a list of qualified leads through email signup forms, social media, contests, ect.

• Call on the current list of contacts first before conducting your research.

• Gather enough data on your subscribers and leads to help determine their potential.

• Hire a sales person or team to assist in lead qualification research.

Once your business is ready to qualify your prospects through lead scoring you will be better able to streamline your sales by reaching out to warm prospects who are most likely to be interested in what you have to offer. These high value leads have the potential of increasing your bottom line significantly as well as improving your marketing strategy.

There are two ways of determining the right sales leads for your business, which include a traditional method of lead scoring and a predictive one. Let’s take a look at the first option:

Tradition Lead Scoring

This has been the most common way to perform research, and is largely based on human intuition or an educated guess rather than on exact data or numbers. The problem with this typing of scoring is that customer behaviors and markets can change, in which case you may not have the most accurate information available. The research can become very complex and businesses typically need to manually find data such a geographical location and responses to different product lines or services.

Lead scores are generated based on two methods with the first being “explicit” information, which is what the prospects are actually telling you such as their email address, budget size, type of company, ect. The second is “implicit” information, which is based on digital actions like click-thru rates, subscriptions to your blog, ect.

Predictive Lead Scoring

In a less simplified yet comprehensive approach this method of research provides information from your CRM and marketing automation data of your top customers and leads with a more exact probability of who will make a purchase. This can include demographics, company revenue, social media activity, and data from online forms.

Through an automated algorithm process your business can more clearly define commonalities of your contacts as well as who would be the most qualified to approach for lead nurturing. The system also shows you which customers are most likely to leave and why, which can also help improve your communication and content marketing approach.

According to Fileboard, a sales development company, B2B organizations are starting to rely more on predictive lead scoring, and have seen a 24 percent increase over the last two years:

Businesses that have built a large database of customers and prospects can greatly benefit from lead scoring research. With more precise date you can not only learn more about who your target market is, but waste less time when approaching your prospects. Use this valuable information to increase sales, write better content, and attract more qualified leads.

If you are ready to take advantage of predictive lead scoring software applications there is a full list here to check out, many of which are offered at a low cost for small business budgets.

The tallest building outside Toronto is coming to Edmonton, the capital of Canada's biggest oil-producing province, Alberta.

On Wednesday, the Edmonton Journal reported that the Stantec Tower was expected to be 62 stories tall, or about 825 feet. This will make the building larger than the planned 56-story Brookfield Place set to be completed in Calgary — Alberta's largest city — in 2017.

The Stantec Tower will serve as the headquarters for Stantec, a global engineering firm with a market cap of around $2.2 billion.

And while construction of a few tall buildings in the Canadian province that has most benefited from the oil boom— and most felt the oil bust — may seem like a good thing, the "Skyscraper Index" suggests tall buildings should often be seen as a bad sign for an economy.

This index, developed by analysts at Barclays, tracks how the building of some of the world's tallest buildings have overlapped with financial crises.

Recent examples include the Taipei 101 tower, built to 1,671 feet and completed right before the bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2000, as well as the Burj Khalifa, built 2,717 feet tall and completed right alongside the fallout from the global financial crisis.

Now, the Stantec Tower will not really make a dent on the global stage as far as tall buildings go.

But the read-through here is that constructing towers coincides with boom economic times, leaving many of those completed towers to find an economy worse off than before they were built. Again, the Stantec Tower is set to be completed in three years, while the Calgary-based rival it will eclipse is set to open in 2017. These are big projects that work on a big lag, and you can't get them funded unless things are going well: By the time the economy slows, it's too late.

And already, things in Canada aren't looking so hot.

The economy is falling into a recession this year after two straight quarters of gross-domestic-product contraction. And Alberta has been hit harder than most provinces, with the Financial Post Magazine this week chronicling the decline of the province, which shed more than 20,000 jobs through the first half of this year, while the once red-hot housing market shows signs of cracking.

Earlier this year, the Post chronicled the rise of "ghost towers" in Calgary, where offices lay vacant in the wake of big layoffs in the oil industry.

SEE ALSO: Canada falls into recession

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You're probably a pretty intelligent person. But you could very well be acting in ways that make you look like a complete idiot.

To help you create the best impression possible among coworkers and clients, we rounded up nine common behaviors that outside observers may associate with low intelligence.

Chances are you've been guilty of at least one, without knowing that it could be hurting your reputation.

1. Holding an alcoholic drink

It's pretty obvious that drinking yourself into a stupor can make you look ridiculous. But a 2013 study found that simply holding a drink can make you seem less intelligent.

The authors dubbed this phenomenon "the imbibing idiot bias." Drinking and idiocy are so closely linked in our minds, they say, that when we see someone carrying a Corona, we assume that person will act like a buffoon.

In one experiment from the study, managers saw photographs and read transcripts from a hypothetical dinner interview. Results showed that the managers perceived the candidates who ordered wine instead of soda as significantly less intelligent and less hirable. 

2. Using fancy words when they're not necessary

Most undergrads admit that they try to use more complex language in their writing so as to seem intelligent. 

Yet research suggests that choosing more sophisticated words just for the sake of looking smart usually backfires. In one study, researchers took a dissertation abstract with lots of long words and created a simplified version by replacing the clunky words with shorter synonyms. As it turns out, participants rated the author of the simplified version as more intelligent.

The takeaway is clear: Don't sound all highfalutin unless you need to, or people may think you're dumber than you are. 

3. Misusing words and phrases

Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker recently wrote a book outlining the most common words and phrases that trip people up. 

For example, the phrase "begs the question" does not mean "raises the question." Instead it means "assumes what it should be proving." As in: "When I asked the dealer why I should pay more for the German car, he said I would be getting 'German quality,' but that just begs the question." 

Even super-polished people can make these mistakes, but if you can avoid them, you'll sound that much smarter. 

4. Walking too fast or slow

When you're traveling in a group, be sure to sync your walking speed with everyone else's. 

That's because research suggests people who walk slower or faster than those around them come off as less intelligent and less competent. 

5. Avoiding eye contact

Maybe you're just nervous, but looking down at the floor or off to the side while you're talking to someone can make you look bad. 

One study found that looking at someone while you're speaking to them makes you seem more intelligent. 

6. Cursing at work 

No matter how frustrated you feel at the office, do not let loose a slew of expletives.

In a 2012 CareerBuilder survey, more than half of employers said they would think an employee who swore at work was less intelligent.

7. Frowning or scowling

Not only will you look unfriendly, but you may also seem less intelligent than you really are. 

Recent research suggests that smiling faces appear more intelligent and trustworthy than angry faces.

8. Speaking in monotone

According to Leonard Mlodinow, author of "Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior," speaking expressively enhances the impression of intelligence. It's a matter of altering your pitch and volume and not pausing too often.

This is a handy trick to employ when you want to impress your coworkers with your brainpower during your next presentation.

9. Being afraid to ask for advice

In one study, participants reported that asking a coworker for advice would hypothetically make them seem incompetent. 

To test whether these fears were based in reality, the researchers had participants play a game in which they were paired with "partners" (the partners were actually the researchers) who either asked for advice on a brain teaser game or didn't. 

Results showed that participants rated the partners who asked for advice more competent. In fact, the participants who'd been asked for advice even indicated that they felt more confident, too, presumably because they were flattered that their partner thought they were smart enough to offer suggestions.

Bottom line? You could be so worried about seeming stupid that you're missing out on prime opportunities to appear smart.

SEE ALSO: 9 science-backed tricks for appearing smarter than you are

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