Rnordman

We are now deep enough into the election campaign that the federal parties are starting to release their platform costing. The Greens were first last week, while the NDP have promised to release theirs before Thursday’s debate. We will surely see the Liberals and Conservatives publish more details soon, too.

As an economist interested in tax policy, I have made my way through more than a few of these documents over the years. Here are six items on which I focus to assess the credibility of a party’s economic platform. With mastery of these six tricks of the trade, you, too, can analyze budgets like a pro.  (As mentioned in my disclosure at the bottom of this article, I have had some policy discussions with the Liberals during this election cycle, but I haven’t seen their final costing document.)

1. Baseline economic growth, revenues, and expenditures

During this election, parties have staked out very different approaches to how long we should take to balance the budget. The Greens, NDP, and Conservatives all plan a balanced budget right away, while the Liberals have set their sights on 2019 for budget balance. The best starting place to see if their plans are credible is to look at their projections for economic growth and the resulting baseline revenue and expenditures.

One potential source to anchor these baseline numbers is the April budget, which laid out a path for revenues and expenditures until the 2019-20 fiscal year. The problem with using the April budget as a baseline is that things have changed over the last five months. As one example, the price of oil was projected to be $54 for 2015. It now sits in the mid-$40s per barrel.

A more realistic choice might be the GDP forecast of the Bank of Canada from July’s Monetary Policy Report. The parliamentary budget officer already translated those new growth projections into fiscal forecasts for the budget balance, finding a projection for a small deficit in 2015-16, if no further actions are taken.

Another credible source is private sector forecasts, such as the ones from TD or the Royal Bank of Canada.

Parties will have a hard time selling their budget forecasts if their baseline projects are too rosy compared to realistic private sector or Bank of Canada forecasts.

2. Realistic costing of line items

The parties will need to attach a dollar value to each particular tax or spending item they propose to change from the baseline. Sometimes, the party might do a lot of work on the costing, with a detailed backgrounder and validation of their approach by outside consultants or agencies. Other times, they simply get their numbers wrong.

An interesting example is the projection for tax revenue from marijuana in the Green platform. They are booking around $5 billion of new revenue by Year 4 of their plan. This amount reflects about $175 per Canadian over age 18. The state of Washington is now collecting tax revenue at a pace of about $4 million a month, which would be $7 per capita annually. Colorado is collecting more than $12 million a month, which annualizes to about $28 per capita. It seems pretty far-fetched that Canada could reach $175 per adult so easily.

3. The cost-cutting fairy

In order to get a budget to balance, it’s pretty easy to stick in an assumption of “cost savings” that can be used to cover shortfalls in the budget. A prudent government should always review tax and spending items and fix or shut down inefficient programs. However, these kinds of savings are easier to talk about than to find. For credibility, there need to be realistic examples of where the savings will come from. Otherwise, the party is just hoping for a visit from a cost-cutting fairy.

An example of an attempt to budget for cost-cutting with questionable credibility was the 2014 Ontario NDP platform, which contained a new minister of savings and accountability, tasked with rooting out as-yet-undiscovered sources of savings. In my view, this lacked credibility, because the platform offered no serious examples of where these savings would come from.

For the Conservatives in this election, they plan on a balanced budget both in 2015-16 and 2016-17 without relying on any new revenue measures. Given the economic slowdown since the April 2015 budget forecast, they will have to cut back somewhere to maintain budget balance. I will be looking to see if they are specific or rely on cost-cutting fairies to get the job done.

4. The revenue fairy

The cosmic cousin of the cost-cutting fairy is the revenue fairy, who magically finds revenue overlooked by the previous government.

For example, the idea of pushing harder on “tax cheats” or “foreign tax havens” sometimes makes an appearance. (See the 2011 NDP platform for a “tax haven crackdown” example.) Domestically, the CRA is already working pretty hard at finding tax cheats—and the Conservative government has planned new revenue in the hundreds of millions with new tax-compliance efforts. So, any new money promised by a party in its campaign costing would need to somehow go beyond what the Conservatives have already planned.

Internationally, cutting down on the use of foreign tax havens or international profit-shifting by big corporations are likely good ideas—but they require much time and international co-operation to make progress. Canada can’t solve global tax problems unilaterally, and definitely not overnight. Assuming easy immediate revenue from these sources is just not credible.

Parties need to be specific and realistic to make these kinds of revenue claims credible, and not rely on revenue fairies to save their budgets.

5. Behavioural response

When tax measures are changed, people sometimes react by changing their behaviour. For some measures (such as the Children’s Fitness Amount), a behavioural response is the intended result. In other cases, behavioural response is just an unfortunate side effect.

A good example is the Liberal proposal for a high-income tax bracket of 33 per cent on incomes over $200,000. This raises the top tax rate by four percentage points over the status quo of 29 per cent. We have a great deal of evidence that high earners have some ability to shift some income away from taxation so that they won’t report as much income when tax rates go up. There are similar concerns about the NDP plan for corporate tax increases, as explored by Stephen Gordon in Maclean’s.

When we see the budget platforms, it is reasonable to ask if the parties accounted for this kind of behavioural response. If they didn’t, do they have a strategy to limit the ability of tax filers to shift income? Has the party budgeted for extra resources for the CRA on this front?

6. GDP and tax revenue feedback

Big government spending and tax changes can have an influence on the size of our economy. These changes in GDP can then feed back into the tax system and change tax revenue. I will be looking to see if the parties have baked these kinds of feedback effects into their platforms, and whether the assumptions on the magnitudes are realistic.

The NDP, for example, points out that its $15 child care proposal will likely boost women’s workforce participation, leading to higher GDP. Of course, this is years away, as its child care plan is phased in slowly over eight years. It will still be interesting to see if it includes any tax revenue effects in its budget costing.

Similarly, the Liberal plan to run small deficits until 2019 will lead to government spending about $10 billion higher than the other parties for the first two years of the next mandate. Some part of that extra spending will come back to the government through higher tax revenues. Moreover, if there is some kind of Keynesian multiplier effect at play, the revenue might go higher still. Will the Liberals need to use these assumptions to balance their budget by 2019?

With these six items on the checklist, all Canadians can join in the analysis of the budget costing of the 2015 election platforms.

Kevin Milligan has contributed to policy discussions with officials from all three major parties, most recently as an outside economic adviser to Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau. A full disclosure statement is here.

The post How to analyze budgets like a pro appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Want to know the easiest way to lose control of the sales process? Time and time again, I’ve seen salespeople hold off on presenting their price to a prospective client until the final written proposal. They don’t bring up pricing …
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Garage queens, display only, mint condition, and brand-new-in-box are terms that make me cringe. If you buy it, use it.

The same goes for marketing technology. When expensive software sits idle, it’s enough to make you ask, “Why are we buying marketing tools and not using it?”

As marketers, we have a ton of tools to work with. And a ton of tools we’re paying for, so it’s important we understand how to use each tool to its fullest potential.

In this post, we discuss marketing attribution across a variety of technologies and platforms used by B2B marketers. It’s a primer for getting coherent and consistent answers from the tools we use to generate leads, opportunities, and revenue.

We’ll discuss how to use marketing automation, A/B testing, paid media, retargeting, and call intelligence more effectively.

Two Ways To Turn Marketing Automation Into An Insights Tool

Without marketing automation, the job of online marketing would be tedious. Managing email lists, social posts, blogging and landing pages shouldn’t require hours of desk jockeying. To make marketing automation more effective there are a few best practices, including:

1. Lead scoring — A lead scoring system evaluates the likelihood of your leads converting into a customer.  A lead scoring system uses a set of criteria based on the current performance of your funnel. Using average sales cycle lengths, conversion rates, and demographic data about your leads, you can predict when they’ll close and how much they’ll spend.

Marketers score leads based on two broad criteria: how qualified your lead is and how engaged they are with your brand. The illustration below is great way to visualize lead scoring.

Those leads in the top right corner are engaged and qualified to buy. These are often designated as A1 leads and calculated using a score for “fit” and “engagement.” See below for an example of lead scoring.

How sophisticated should your lead scoring system be? Well, it depends on your lead volume and how much you’re spending on lead generation. Where an established channel exists, lead scoring enables marketers to predict when revenue will close, and enable sales teams to prioritize which leads to contact — both of which offers predictability and time savings.

If you’re shopping for a lead scoring tool or are using marketing automation already, then price and anticipated lead volumes will be the deciding factor for whether your lead scoring system is as sophisticated (and expensive) as poaching a data scientist from a major league baseball team, or a DIY model you tally yourself.

2. CRM Integration — Integrating lead generation data with your CRM turns your automation tool into an intelligence tool.

If you’re investing in a wide variety of a channels, from offline events to AdWords, then it’s easier to understand which leads are converting by looking at one centralized platform– the CRM.

It ensures you don’t double count leads, fail at merging data sets from different online platforms, and bias your investments towards channels you mistakenly think are making money.

There are a number of CRM integration options available to marketers, and the right one depends on your need and budget.

DIY solutions include outputting spreadsheets from a marketing automation platform and importing it into your CRM.

At the opposite end of the spectrum are solutions built in-house. Depending on the structure and size of your organization you likely fall in the middle, where an in-house solution is more expensive than purchasing an out-of-the-box solution and DIY is too much of a time-suck.

When searching for a CRM integration, consider the kind of data you need. Do you need first touch data telling you when a lead discovered your website/brand for the first time? Or do you need data that only tells you the last page they viewed before submitting a lead form?

Determining whether brand discovery metrics or last click metrics are important can help you decide the best CRM integration option for your marketing needs.

Other details include considering the length of your sales cycle. The sales cycle length dictates how long you need conversion data to be saved. The longer your sales cycle, the longer your conversion data will need to be stored until prospects turn into customers.

Lastly, access to customer support for your CRM integration and subsequent marketing attribution goals is another consideration for finding the best-fit solution.

Lead scoring and CRM integration are the two important factors for making MA an automation and insights tool.

Do A/B Testing Correctly From The Beginning

A/B testing is the foundation for creating the best customer experience. It helps marketers identify the kinds of content and page layouts that engage web visitors and app users.

While insights for engagement are great for fine tuning top of funnel marketing assets, more can be learned from A/B testing.

If the point of A/B testing is to gain assurance that your landing pages and website are fully optimized, then connecting A/B tests to bottom of funnel metrics like opportunities and revenue gives you supreme confidence that your conversion rate optimizations are profitable.

To get started in understanding what segment of new customers are attributed to optimizations you need to connect your A/B testing platform to your optimization platform to your CRM. Optimization platforms like Optimizely make connecting your A/B testing platform to your CRM simple.

After connecting optimization to customer success you’ll understand:

• The top landing pages for new customers
• Top traffic segments by industry vertical, deal size, region, and time-to-close
• Top exit pages

A/B testing is all about identifying the traffic you want to retain and identifying where you are losing your best traffic. It’s the equivalent to directing the right traffic to the right destination.

If your optimization platform is not connected to your CRM then confidence in your optimization efforts is dramatically reduced.

To be effective with A/B testing follow these steps:

Create a great hypothesis — Ask yourself what your best opportunities are (Top 5 highest bounce rate pages, top 5 abandonment points in your funnel, and top 5 most valuable pages)

Understand your user’s intent — By understanding what your audience wants and doesn’t want, you can improve your page. Using website exit surveys or customer feedback can help you understand what stopped the user from converting, what they didn’t find on your page, and why they visit your page.

Choose your tests — Make a change you can actually measure. Your tests should include message changes, design changes, and engagement capture moments (the step a visitor makes right before they are likely to become a customer, e.g. viewing a product video).

Measure the impact on the entire funnel — You aren’t optimizing for page success, you’re optimizing the entire funnel. Be sure to connect your A/B tests to revenue.

Get Smarter About Call Tracking and Call Intelligence

Inbound calls are a significant source of new business for many B2B brands. When it comes to shopping for expensive software products there are details and questions that are best handled over the phone.

Calls are an offline conversion that needs to be tracked in analytics as it represents a major part of your customers’ journey.

Here’s how to track, optimize and do attribution for your inbound calls:

1. Track calls from all ad types such as calls from ad extensions, paid search, and landing pages. Bid management solution, Marin, finds that 70 percent of calls triggered by paid search ads come from landing pages.
2. Measure call quality. Metrics like length of call, keywords mentioned, and confirmation numbers given can tell marketers how qualified inbound calls and leads are.
3. Determine what counts as a call conversion. This can be based on whether a caller signs up for a demo or trial.
4. Determine how much revenue credit call conversions deserve. At Bizible we use W-shaped attribution and distribute 30% of revenue to each of the 3 major touchpoints in the marketing funnel. For some brands an inbound call happens further down the funnel and vice versa for others.

Call intelligence platforms help marketers improve the customer experience by measuring call quality, using call data to route calls and using call data for retargeting lists.

Here’s a summary of how to get the most out of call intelligence from Julia Stead at Invoca.

Master Your Paid Social Advertising

Paid social advertising is a top of funnel (insert link to glossary) activity for B2B brands. When it comes to brand awareness, brand discovery and the first touchpoint (link to glossary) LinkedIn and twitter are indispensable ad platforms.

These ad platforms are channels for you to distribute content and bring traffic to your website.

Optimizing and doing attribution for paid social platforms helps marketers accomplish their job of keeping the funnel filled with qualified leads.

To get started, B2B brands need to look at the following social advertising metrics:

• Which clicks turned into leads?
• Which headline and content offered converted the click into a lead?
• What targeting parameter generated the most qualified clicks?
• What’s the click to lead conversion rate? The lead to opportunity conversion rate?

These questions can be answered once your website has the correct tracking setup and data is important to your CRM.

For paid social we create campaigns based on content. Our reports tell us which ad they clicked on, which platform they came from, and what page or ebook they downloaded before becoming a lead.

Once your prospects turn into customers, then an attribution solution can be used to tell you which ads initiated the brand discovery and which converted them through each stage of the funnel. Using an attribution model will then give revenue credit to those ads, signaling to you which ads work and which ads don’t.

Making the correct decisions in online marketing isn’t easy. It’s a process of testing a hunch and being able to see exactly what happens inside the marketing funnel.

For example, LinkedIn does not have built in conversion tracking code so you’ll need to add tracking codes to your ads. See our article on tracking parameters for more tips.

Do Retargeting Like A Pro

Retargeting keeps track of who visited your site and shows ads to them on other websites.

The single best practice advice is to segment your audience. But how do you know if you’ve segmented correctly?

Test a variety of lists composed of diverse segmentation data like newsletters readers, geographic location, offline conversion data and demographic data.

By using as much segmentation data as possible you can be sure to formulate a list and associated retargeting ads that truly resonate.

We recently wrote about a strategy we used to dramatically improve our retargeting efforts. In it, we explain how to match campaigns to funnel stages. In other words, how to make your retargeting effective by segmenting your lead list based on how warm the leads are.

Your message, ad content and content offer, should be tailored to how aware your audience is with your brand.

Have they viewed your pricing page? Have they visited your product page multiple times? Use this data to create campaigns and lists. As these clicks convert into opportunities and customers your list building prowess will grow. You’ll be sure that the criteria used for your retargeting lists are correct.

When considering the use of retargeting there are a variety of types to consider. These ad types vary by personalization. For example, you can personalize each impression with offers for specific product pages an individual viewed. Ads can be custom linked, for example if a person began a signup or added items to a cart then you can display an ad and link them back to the signup or check out page. There is also search retargeting which displays ads based on a user’s recent search history. Lastly, if your audience is on specific platforms like Facebook, you can use Facebook’s Perfect Audience to display ads in news feeds.

Below is an example of the dynamic elements in a retargeting ad. These are used to add a variety of personalization.

The landscape of retargeting is wide and varied but like many of the tips in this article you should tie your data to revenue.

Retargeting is a great way for marketers to extend their web reach and target web visitors who don’t convert on the first visit, AKA the vast majority of web visitors.

Be The Batman

Today’s marketers are like Batman. I don’t mean they lack actual powers compared to the likes of Superman and The Flash.

Marketers are like Batman because both carry a utility belt. And both have to know how to use their tools to be effective.

What separates great marketing teams from average marketing teams?

I believe it’s the ability to make careful decisions.  When you take full advantage of your marketing tools, you make the right spending decisions. It’s pipeline marketing 101.

Sticky products

Products are sticky if your customers buy over and over again generating recurrent revenue.

Typically these products are consumables that are required to keep the solution going.
There are also products that companies will buy recurrently as they have become obvious for business.
Like filing systems, copiers, printers, portable computers, … not exactly consumables but products that are being bought on an ongoing basis.

Sticky services

Besides the obvious services that are required on a normal basis like cleaning, utility maintenance, … there are services with a higher price tag that are recurrent too: accounting, auditing, cloud computing, …

Converting into recurrent

If you have a product or a service that brings recurrent revenue your future is more certain.

The problem is how to get your products into the recurrent class?
a) Maybe the concept of your product needs to be changed by making an essential part replaceable. However this is not suited or feasible for most products.
b) Or adding on services to your products like Apple does: for example assurance, maintenance,…
c) The easiest way is to change the pricing: from one price upfront into a monthly or yearly price to be paid – like a subscription. In many cases this is possible by adding the maintenance into the pricing structure.
Hence instead of selling a product you sell a lease or rent including the maintenance.

Benefits and drawbacks of subscription pricing

The drawback of such a subscription based pricing is that the customer can stop the subscription.
The benefit of subscription based pricing is the opportunity for the salesman to go and visit the current customers and staying in contact with them whereas with a one time purchase the relationship gets lost quickly after delivery.
An additional benefit is the possibility of a higher total revenue over time as your solution keeps being used at the customer.

Could you convert your products into a subscription based pricing ?

London (AFP) - The Rugby World Cup has become a huge business machine generating record revenues this year and aiming for even more in the future.

World Rugby is targeting commercial revenues of £240 million ($370 million) for the tournament which starts at Twickenham on Friday, 60 percent higher than 2011, according to chief executive Brett Gosper. He predicted a surplus of about £150 million

Some business experts reckon the World Cup generates one billion dollars for the global body, broadcasters, kit makers and sponsors.

On top of the World Cup's revenues, the 20 competing countries, are bringing £125 million ($191 million) in sponsorship deals alone, according to the Repucom sports marketing data firm.

The World Cup is "a massive commercial platform," Repucom chief executive Paul Smith told AFP. "It is a billion dollar enterprise drawing investment on many levels."

Television accounts for about two thirds of World Rugby's revenues, said Gosper. It is also leading rugby's attempts to conquer new markets.

The World Cup will be shown broadcast in 203 countries and territories. Germany will show 24 matches live and China 22, Gosper said.

"We want maximum exposure, particular in markets like India, China, Brazil and the United States," he added.

- No shortage of hosts -

 

The World Cup was first held in 1987 in Australia and New Zealand, but only became "truly global" in 2003 when it returned to Australia and was won by England, said Smith.

"It has been a slow building exercise," said Smith, while adding that it has major potential for growth.

Rugby fans are traditionally wealthier than football counterparts. The sport also has longstanding sponsors in finance like Societe Generale bank in France and US insurance giant AIG in New Zealand.

"It reaches so many corners of the world and of course as an Olympic sport now through sevens, it amplifies the whole importance of the game," said Smith.

"Lots of investment is going to come into rugby now in countries that haven't previously been fully participating in the game," he added.

World Rugby is hoping that the sport's Olympic rebirth in Rio de Janeiro next year will further boost finances and encourage new male and female players.

"Rugby has got to pursue those major corridors for development. The United States is key for that," said Repucom's Smith.

"It is a major population market. It's a very lucrative commercial market and of course it is a very lucrative broadcast market."

The proof of rugby's golden future may be that the United States considered bidding for the 2023 World Cup for which expressions of interest had to be entered by July. There is no shortage of countries willing to spend big to host the event even though Rugby World had problems when 2019 hosts Japan decided not to build a $2.1 billion national stadium.

The US decision to stay on the sidelines left Ireland, France, Italy and South Africa in contention for 2023 which will be decided in two years.

And victory in the 2015 tournament will certainly bring new riches to that country. New Zealand's All Blacks are the favourites and a third triumph would increase their value as an international rugby icon.

"Globally they are acknowledged as one of the great sporting brands," said Smith. "I wouldn't even describe them as a franchise. It is a money can't buy sort of deal."

New Zealand's size mean they do not draw the amount of revenue they could do if they were a bigger country, experts say.

England's Rugby Football Union "do a great job" attracting money, according to Smith. The RFU says it made revenues of more than £150 million for 2013/14 and put a record £75 million back into the game.

France has the biggest spending clubs -- the Top 14 championship have a joint budget of more than 300 million euros ($340 million) for this season, drawing top players from around the world.

 

 

Join the conversation about this story »

“There are many fine things which we cannot say if we have to shout.”

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More than a century before Susan Sontag wrote that “silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech,” Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817–May 6, 1862) wrote in his journal in 1853: “I wish to hear the silence of the night, for the silence is something positive and to be heard.” In another entry, he noted that in any great space for conversation, “there should be a certain degree of silence surrounding you.” For Thoreau, as for Sontag, silence wasn’t merely an aesthetic experience — it was a singular mode of inhabiting one’s own thoughts and conversing with the world.

Only a year later, Thoreau self-published Walden (public library; public domain) — one of the most insightful books ever written, which also gave us his enduring ideas on defining your own success — and expounded on this notion that silence ennobles conversation by giving thought space to unfold.

Thoreau writes of the small cabin he built with his own hands:

I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society. When visitors came in larger and unexpected numbers there was but the third chair for them all, but they generally economized the room by standing up. It is surprising how many great men and women a small house will contain. I have had twenty-five or thirty souls, with their bodies, at once under my roof, and yet we often parted without being aware that we had come very near to one another.

Long before modern psychologists came to study embodied cognition — the way the body in physical space affects the mind — Thoreau, whose house included a “withdrawing room,” describes the ideal physical space for silence-fortified conversation:

You want room for your thoughts to get into sailing trim and run a course or two before they make their port. The bullet of your thought must have overcome its lateral and ricochet motion and fallen into its last and steady course before it reaches the ear of the hearer, else it may plough out again through the side of his head. Also, our sentences wanted room to unfold and form their columns in the interval. Individuals, like nations, must have suitable broad and natural boundaries, even a considerable neutral ground, between them. I have found it a singular luxury to talk across the pond to a companion on the opposite side. In my house we were so near that we could not begin to hear, — we could not speak low enough to be heard; as when you throw two stones into calm water so near that they break each other’s undulations.

I revisit this passage often as I witness all the ways in which our culture designs the mansion of the mind further and further away from this ideal. There is, of course, the visible physical manifestation — our increasingly lavish abodes turn the sanctuary of the home into a showroom. But there is also the more worrisome invisibilia of public discourse — rather than throwing two stones into the calm water of considered conversation, the internet’s outrage culture hurls bucketfuls of rocks — reactive comments through which we decimate each other’s undulations.

Thoreau captures what we stand to lose — what we do lose — when we strip conversation of contemplative pause:

If we would enjoy the most intimate society with that in each of us which is without, or above, being spoken to, we must not only be silent, but commonly so far apart bodily that we cannot possibly hear each other’s voice in any case. Referred to this standard, speech is for the convenience of those who are hard of hearing; but there are many fine things which we cannot say if we have to shout.

Complement Walden, absolutely indispensable in its entirety, with John Cage on how silence thwarts our negative impulses, Paul Goodman on the nine kinds of silence, and this marvelous 1866 guide to the art of conversation, heeding which can greatly elevate contemporary discourse.

For more of Thoreau’s abiding genius, see his ideas on the art of walking, the value of useful ignorance, what it really means to be awake, and the greatest gift of growing old.

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Where can you talk about drunk tweeting with Entourage's Adrian Grenier, hang out on a cruise ship, and take a selfie with a bear, all in one day? At Dreamforce 2015, of course. Salesforce.com's annual conference is here, bringing equal parts pandemonium, fun, inspiration, and valuable sales tips.

In case you're not one of the 100,000+ salespeople who descended on San Francisco this week, we've collected the best tweets from the first day of the conference for your sharing pleasure. Retweet, favorite, and follow the hashtag #DF15 for all the latest updates.

Today it's less of a sales funnel and more of a sales funnel cake! As marketers let help stop the hot mess! #DF15

— Chantel Windeshausen (@ChantelWind) September 15, 2015

.@Warriors GM Myers at #DF15: In business and bball, getting the right people on your team is the "secret sauce." pic.twitter.com/Kt5KJ2kN0C

— B2B News Network (@B2BNewsNetwork) September 15, 2015

Mobile is important: a recent study of over one billion emails per month found that mobile accounts for over 50% of all opened emails. #DF15

— Columbia ExecEd (@ColumbiaExecEd) September 15, 2015

When creating a Core Value for your company make sure one of them includes "Will this make my Mom proud" #DF15

— Galvin Technologies (@galvintech) September 15, 2015

Hanging out at the #salesloft event with LaFemmePanache. I am pretty sure they want me to join the troupe. #DF15 pic.twitter.com/pqX4dOWL3f

— Trish Bertuzzi (@bridgegroupinc) September 15, 2015

The 3 F’s of Effective #Sales #Forecasting… the Framework, the Formula, and the Facts/Assumptions #salesmanagement #DF15 @SalesCode

— Jason Jordan (@JasonRJordan) September 15, 2015

Yerbamate. Err. Yerba theater. #DF15 pic.twitter.com/ROPNQz8m1b

— Justin Topliff (@justintopliff) September 15, 2015

YES! Make your sales message relevant to the exec buyer. They don’t care about you/your history. #openlounge @insideview #womenintech #DF15

— Barb Giamanco (@barbaragiamanco) September 15, 2015

How to be bold & succeed in sales: "Assume you are an equal from the start." @nadiabilchik #boldatbrunch #DF15 pic.twitter.com/G6c5iXK0nI

— Heather R Morgan (@HeatherReyhan) September 15, 2015

Customer success is a profit center, not a cost center #df15 @GainsightHQ pic.twitter.com/hZ8ZQgrx6D

— Fred Tsai (@fhtsai) September 15, 2015

RT: Average professional gets 304 emails per week = 28 hours per week on email! @JillKonrath #SalesSummit #DF15 < must work smarter!

— Gemma Davies (@gdavies2) September 15, 2015

"70-80% of the time, the buying decision is made before they even contact you" - @G2crowd. #DF15 #customerreviews

— Samantha Ferguson (@DGsalamander) September 15, 2015

Bearfie! #df15 #DevZone pic.twitter.com/LEVaSKijWb

— Guillaume Roques (@groques) September 15, 2015

"Selfies are one of the best advertising tools, it's about peer-to-peer marketing." ~ @BrianSolis at #DF15 pic.twitter.com/XfJkuOHSrz

— Carlos Gil (@CarlosGil83) September 15, 2015

Don't rush the buyer to signature, coach her to success. #DF15 #SalesSummit https://t.co/VFPvzTdL5s

— Jill Rowley (@jill_rowley) September 15, 2015

Reverse-mentoring: use your younger, social savvy reps to help older, traditional sellers with social selling. #DF15

— Alyssa Drury (@alyssadrury) September 15, 2015

Awesome to see so many young girls learning to code at #DF15 #DFgives pic.twitter.com/o7HzGVvixe

— daniela barbosa (@danielabarbosa) September 15, 2015

Adding this acronym to my marketing dictionary - OPC - other people's content! Love it @jill_rowley #SocialSelling #DF15

— KristinaCleary (@KristinaCleary) September 15, 2015

Art of a @LinkedIn invite ~ make it personal, relevant, show interest in the individual and give them a reason to connect #SalesSummit #DF15

— Gemma Davies (@gdavies2) September 15, 2015

Who's ready for a dip in the pool? #DF15Dreamboat #DF15 pic.twitter.com/5MMJ2PsNHk

— Alex Plaxen (@aplaxen) September 14, 2015

Man buns at Dreamforce. Man buns everywhere. #DF15

— Pedro Arellano (@DSSPedro) September 15, 2015

 

What are some agencies doing differently to grab big name clients? How can you improve your chances to start working with the Fortune 500? Not only does it pay better but counter-intuitively it’s usually easier and a lot less fuss to work with larger “big brand clients.”

There are lots of reasons for this. Everyone is afraid of going after the big brands because they seem intimidating. Because of this they are contacted by fewer salespeople looking for a quick sale. This is where you can swoop in, add real value, and get their business.

This is an article that is based on an interview with Bill Carmody from TrePoint.com. You can listen to it here.

The Foundation to Landing Big Clients: Add Value First

Our co-founder, Trent Dyrsmid, started the interview focused on how Bill was able to win contracts with big brand clients. What allowed Bill to get in the door with these big brands? Was Bill’s success from experience and time in the industry and a big Rolodex of contacts or was it from a systematic approach to prospecting and lead generation?

Where I think that I have been most successful in my career is adding value first which means rather than focusing on what I need or what my business needs I am looking at my clients and saying: “How can I help them?” You are giving value in exchange for the opportunity to work together in the future. – Bill Carmody

When you come from the basis of being helpful from the get-go you are setting yourself up for a win. You are adding a brick to your prospect’s business so to speak that strengthens your position and the chance of getting business almost exponentially. This is the heart and spirit of entrepreneurship that cannot be highlighted enough.

How do you find out if there is some way that you can be of service? You ask of course. Question your prospects about the challenges they are experiencing. You should be in interview mode when talking to your prospects. You should be asking questions to align what you’re selling and what they’re buying and see if you can find a common ground. You shouldn’t be talking about your company’s features or statistics.

Step 2: Be Creative

Surprise and delight your prospects. People are bored with mass marketing. People are bored overall. And some of them run big brand companies. Sending a cheesy 3D mail item to your prospect is a great way to add some excitement to their day. If you personalize this you stand out even more from the masses. People are hungry for recognition and excitement. You give them recognition by personalizing your sales message and excitement by mailing them something entertaining.

Bill sent out some volleyballs to his clients with the message: “Let’s get the ball rolling.” Sure, this is cheesy but his prospects loved it and judging by the growth of his company it is working.

The more visual you make your content the more effective it becomes. Send your big brand prospects to personalized visual pieces of content. Create 3D slideshows. Make a custom screen recording where you solve a problem for them. The amazing things you can do is not based on some kind of a formula but on taking some initiative and focusing on the surprise and delight factor.

Step 3: Be Confident and Authentic

To work with big brand clients, you need to exhibit true confidence. True confidence makes people come across as attractive and trustworthy.

You see a lot of people that are trying to fake confidence. True confidence is impossible to fake because it is based on faith in yourself. Faking something is based on the opposite of faith in yourself. So how do you get confidence if you can’t “fake it till you make it?” You take massive action in a dignified way despite your fears. Confidence is something that comes naturally after intense action levels.

It’s like muscle memory. You do something first and then after you did it you get the courage to do it. It works in reverse. When you act despite the possibility of failure you start building confidence because you are no longer outcome dependant. Outcome dependence makes us awkward and anxious.

Many salespeople try to act cool and invulnerable while they are desperately clinging to an expected outcome. That stinks. It is unauthentic. Admit your nervousness, admit your awkwardness, admit your faults. People can start liking you regardless. Everyone is looking for authenticity. When you combine that with consistent action you are setting yourself up for the win.

Step 4: If You Don’t Have a Unique Selling Proposition yet, Niche Down

Why would a big brand prospect choose you over a competitor? The lowest price doesn’t always win. Being cheaper than your competitors might even hurt your chances when you sell to big brands.

Do you have some unique service or something that makes working with you special? If you don’t you can make your company as niche specific as the market allows. Now you are an exclusive service provider to whatever market or industry your prospect is in. That can be your unique selling proposition when selling to a big brand.

Step 5: Meet in Person or in Video Conference

Ideally you want to drive or fly to meet your prospect in person after the negotiation has started. If that isn’t possible, try to meet with them via video conferencing. When they can see your face it builds trust. They can see that you’re authentic.

Just trying to sell over the phone or email is going to have a negative effect on your close rate. It is possible but meeting in person and via video works so much better and it is easier for high ticket items and when you are trying to convince a big company to become a client. Your competitors are definitely going to be pushing for a meeting. So should you.

Conclusion

Use these tips to improve your close rate on big brand prospects and smaller prospects alike. They work equally well on both. Please do us a favour and help us spread the word through a tweet or social share and we would appreciate any comments or questions below. If you would like more information on content marketing we have a library of free resources that you can get to here.

Size does matter when it comes to the size of customer rewards, according to a new study. A gift that consumers find too small could backfire, say researchers in the latest Journal of Marketing.

How small is too small? Microsoft once mailed their biggest Xbox customers an e-card that held 25 cents’ worth of Microsoft points. The result? Customers felt devalued—that Microsoft only considered their business worth a measly quarter. Researchers call the backfire phenomenon the “trivialization effect.”

To test their theory, the researchers created seven studies where they provided participants with both real and imaginary services. Participants were then either thanked, or awarded a small amount of money for their participation.

In one study, guests at a full-service hotel conference centre were asked to write a review of the place, and afterwards, were given a note that simply thanked them—or thanked them and awarded 5¢. The researchers found that customers appreciated a simple thank you, but did not value tiny monetary gifts added to the note.

Customers will change their evaluation standards once money is added to the picture, the study says. A verbal acknowledgement is assessed relative only to other verbal norms of showing appreciations, while financial acknowledgement is evaluated relative to both verbal norms and customers’ monetary expectations, according to the researchers.

Sometimes, nothing is better than something.

MORE ABOUT LOYALTY PROGRAMS & CUSTOMER SERVICE:

• How Kiip CEO Brian Wong helps brands make ads people actually like
• Giving customers the white-glove treatment
• Cineplex will soon charge more Scene points for premium movie tickets
• How Nordstrom built the world’s best customer-service machine
• In the age of the social media hissy fit, how to win back angry customers?

The post If you’re going to reward customer loyalty, don’t cheap out appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

The new generation has grown up with the internet, smartphones and social media at their fingertips, shaping their appearance and interactions with the world. A 21 year-old entering the workforce in 2006 had, on average, played video games for 5,000 minutes, exchanged of 250,000 emails, instant & text messages, and had 10,000 hours of cell phone use, according to Marc Prensky – known as the inventor of term, “Digital Natives.”

Staying connected is more important than ever in a world where we use technology to share and assemble information into patterns. You can find the new generation in offices using multiple screens, streaming music and interacting with their smartphones at the same time. Enabling, motivating and selling to this generation is one of today’s management challenges.

Buying and selling is rapidly changing

As a result of rapid technology evolution, customers now seek information in different ways and their purchase behavior is gradually changing as a result. Consequently, the role of sales and marketing is also changing. Josh Bernoff from market research company Forrester calls this the beginning of the “age of the customer”, which heralds the end of the previous “age of information”. I wrote an article on the impact and pitfalls specific to this transition into the age of the customer and some more insight on the age of the customer itself.

Impact on Digitalization in the Field of Sales

Let’s take the example of a seasoned sales rep having to interact with a digital native customer. He’s been trained and is an expert in asking questions, listening, uncovering pain points, and is able to prove the benefits of a solution. He’s equipped with a laptop to perform demos during meetings. He may try to avoid the use of marketing-prepared presentations as they are often not adapted to real sales situations. As a result meetings can be full of misalignment because of the customer is expecting:

• The sales rep to be knowledgeable on the specific business, ways of working and corresponding challenges of his company
• ROI figures and insight as to how the company could change its way of working
• Visual support during the conversation
• Less focus on the features of the product itself; which is often what sales is most trained on.

In addition, he may be irritated at how lack of technology use slows the meeting. So let’s have a look at the impact if the sales rep was armed with adapted materials and technology. Many things would be different, but the most important ones are:

• The Sales Rep can analyze and prepare the content of the meeting based on the buyer’s readiness. This allows the sales rep to ensure the right topics are discussed and they are aligned with their customer’s expectations.

• The sales rep can be armed with the right sales technology and enabled to use interactive tools in an integrated way. Provisioned with sales tools specific to the buyer’s persona, and relevant for the company. Maybe any business case he shares has been predefined with comparable and realistic numbers showing ROI and other relevant impactful key performance indicators (KPIs).
• The interaction changed to become a relevant engaging conversation aligned with  the vision and understanding of the customer.
• The company is able to improve the use of sales tools as well as analyze the impact of existing tool usage on close rates.

Impact and complexity

For companies to accommodate the new buyer there needs to be change. This change can’t just take the form of adding more technology to the existing environment. It requires a clear understanding of the buyer, how they need to be supported and what is of most value to them.

Join Showpad and Perpetos for an informative webinar on September 17th to learn how top sales performers increased their numbers by shifting from product pitches to dynamic and value-driven sales conversations.

This article originally appeared on the Showpad Blog.

The amount of money spent on marketing is growing, and the way we spend is changing. The statistics that prove this are plentiful, and becoming more convincing as the years go by.

Here are two very compelling examples:

• By 2016, we expect the amount of money spent on digital marketing to consume 35% of total marketing budgets, according to the CMO survey
• By 2020, the amount of money spent on online marketing will overtake TV advertising for the first time, according to ZenithOptimedia

Businesses are investing more, and changing their game plan. Sitting on your hands is no longer an option. The data in your database is becoming worthless by the minute if you have no data quality strategy in place.

In order to compete in tomorrow’s business landscape, you’ll need to use your marketing budget more efficiently than ever before. It will need to be optimised, honed and adjusted at every stage of the process.

However, a killer marketing plan can only get you so far if it’s founded on poor quality data.

Data Flaws Are Costing Your Business Money

Experian research found that flawed data is costing UK businesses £197 million. This is a huge amount of money to spend on messages that never reach an audience.

In the company’s 2014 data quality survey, it found that 99 per cent of businesses are actively tackling data quality in some way. Yet clearly, we have a bigger problem if so many businesses are still losing money.

The problem is that we’re not tackling it effectively enough, or quickly enough, and we’re not investing enough money.

The biggest cause of concern for marketers is invalid contact data, which is a risk for every business that uses a CRM. Once we put a contact record into a CRM, we rarely look at it again until we next need to deal with that person, which leaves a very large scope for mistakes.

The problems Experian reports as a result are staggering:

• 67 per cent of businesses say some of their marketing emails bounce back after a campaign
• 70 per cent of businesses report data quality problems in loyalty programs
• 22 per cent of contact data is thought to be inaccurate

How can marketers market to people if they don’t have the right contact information? How do we know if someone is loyal if we can’t trust the data that the whole program hinges on?

The biggest cause of these data quality issues is human error, particularly in a contact centre environment. It’s not rocket science: people make typing mistakes, spell things wrong, type nonsense in a field to get around an error message, or save the same thing twice by mistake.

Over time, data also naturally decays as people change their job role and contact details. Even if a database were pristine, we’d expect data to decay at 2.1 per cent, per month.

We All Know Data Quality a Problem

According to this report from Experian, 83 per cent of CIOs believe that their data is not being fully exploited.

And in the Experian survey we’ve referenced in the previous section, 94% of the 1,206 organisations surveyed acknowledged that they have data quality problems.

We can see that the epidemic of poor data quality comes as no surprise to anyone.

In fact, the proportion of inaccurate data in a database has risen from 5 per cent to 22 per cent from 2013 to now, with human error being blamed for more than half of the issues. Specifically, 42 per cent of respondents to Experian said they believed poor data quality was causing problems in their marketing campaigns.

If we allow this situation to go unchecked, marketing departments are going to become less and less effective, since the number of valid contacts is continually shrinking. The marketing list will wither away as the data quality is eroded, and marketers are going to keep pushing up their budgets and pouring money down the drain.

We’re Improving Data Quality too Slowly

A quarter of the respondents to the Experian survey are still reviewing data manually, looking at spreadsheets line-by-line to pick out things that are wrong.

Manual pruning of data is an unreliable, inefficient and expensive way to tackle poor data quality, and it only compounds the wasted effort in the business’ marketing department.

To get a CRM to a reasonable state using human intervention, it would be horrendously time consuming – if it were even possible to guarantee a good result. Some databases contain millions of contacts.

Businesses are starting to realise that data quality is worthy of more serious investment. 81 per cent believe good data is key to marketing success. And Experian found that 34 per cent of businesses are using data quality and deduplication software. While this is a small number, it is likely to grow as more businesses recognise the need for it. After all, data quality software is not simply a mechanism for passive review; it can also continually monitor data and help to purify it over time.

Employees that can find data quickly, and rely on its validity, tend to be more enthusiastic in using and adopting data quality processes. That means the teams that rely on pure data will be better engaged with maintaining its quality.

Data Quality Yields Results

Marketers need high quality, complete, valid and accurate data to make good quality decisions, and to avoid the need to scrap a project and start again from scratch. The more data we have, the bigger the potential for waste, and the more expensive it is to put off the data quality initiatives we need.

If you need further proof of the value of data, look at the way it is traded. Some entrepreneurs have actually built their business on maintaining high data quality. If your own marketing data is eroded, the only option left will be to buy from a list supplier who has spent money checking the validity of its contact records.

Back in the old days of the Internet – that is, the late 90’s and early 2000’s – “build it and they will come” was a fantastic strategy. There were fewer people either building or visiting websites, and therefore, if you did create a website, newsletter, or e-course, it was almost a given that people interested in you would find you.

It’s how I built my first business.

I built it. They came.

Today, that is no longer the case. You’re competing not only with people who offer similar content, but over several different platforms. And if that wasn’t challenging enough, you’re competing not just with other solopreneurs and other one-person businesses, but organizations with huge human and capital resources.

How do you stand out?

One path is to promote, to market, and to figure out unique ways in which to reach your core audience.

Here is a simple gameplan to get the most traction for each piece of content you create.

Why Promoting Content is Important

In his post “The 80/20 Rule for Building a Blog Audience” marketer and entrepreneur Derek Halpern notes:

If you spend time writing a piece of content, and that content only gets 1,000 readers, chances are there are one million other people in the world who can benefit from what you wrote.

Why then, would you spend more time creating content when you already have something that your ideal customers can benefit from?

Halpern has an 80/20 content strategy, that is, he spends 20 percent of his time creating it and 80 percent of his time marketing it.

While this is a fantastic strategy if you’re new and need to grow your audience quickly, content marketing experts do warn that sticking to this strategy can mean that you’re underserving your existing audience.

In a fantastic post, Mark W. Schaefer at the {grow} blog writes,

The only people who will create long-term business value for you is your core audience—your return readers. In fact, I think “returning readers” is the most relevant metric for business-oriented content including blogs, podcasts, videos, and even Pinterest pages.

Of course there has to be an element of promotion to help attract new readers and to help your chance of being discovered by people who want and need your content. But spending four times as much time in self-promotion verses value-creation may build traffic spikes but probably not reader loyalty.

So how can you grow your audience while still focusing on creating massive value for your existing readers and followers?

Here’s a plan: Give yourself quick wins with an automated strategy and a checklist.

We’ve whipped up one for you in this post. Read on to see how to use it.

Promoting Your Content: 5 Quick Wins

1. Send it to your email list (Time taken: 2-5 minutes)

One of the best ways to get immediate traction with your content is to send it to your email list. Your email subscription list is typically comprised of people who have signed up to receive updates from you because they like and trust you or your brand and want to hear from you.

These are the people who are most likely to add high numbers to your social shares, to read your content the moment it’s published, or to forward it to others who may benefit from it.

Your email subscribers are most likely the most engaged of your audience, so it’s always a fantastic idea to share content with them on a regular basis.

The way you do this sharing will come down to how you run your business, what your relationship with your readers looks like, and what kind of updates your subscribers have come to expect.

For instance, here at Buffer, we’ll send out links to posts to people who have chosen to receive updates on the day the post is published.

Some people, such as James Clear, will send full posts to their subscribers, so that they don’t have to visit the blog at all if they choose not to.

Others choose to send a “newsletter” on a weekly or monthly basis with links to the blog posts published during that period.

Try and experiment with these methods to see what works best for your audience.

2. Schedule it on social media over a period of weeks (Time taken: 5-10 minutes)

A social media editorial calendar can be a fantastic thing and one most business owners swear by, especially if they run small operations with little help.

When you publish a post or a piece of content, one of the best things that you can do is to spread out the promotion over a period of time using tools like Buffer.

With Buffer, for instance, you can easily schedule your post to be promoted on Twitter and Facebook the moment it goes live, then again the next day, and perhaps again a week later. Do this for all your social media profiles.

In fact, we highly recommend that you create schedules and write them down, so that every time you hit “publish” on a post, it’s a no-brainer. You refer to your list and know exactly when to post links on social media. By automating this process as much as possible, you assure that you’re getting the maximum possible potential reach for your content while minimizing the time it takes to do so.

In this post, Kevan Lee explains how we do this here at Buffer.

By sharing the same content nine times in seven days, Coschedule quadrupled their traffic as shared in the graphic below:

3. Email everyone who is mentioned in your post or article (Time taken: 5-10 minutes)

A fantastic way to not only connect with your audience, but to connect with other people in the industry and their audience, is to mention them in your articles and blog posts and then let them know when you’ve done so, in order that they can share with their readers if they so choose.

When Kevan here at Buffer tried this strategy, he had a 66 percent success rate.

Here’s the email he used:

To find someone’s email address quickly:

1. Look through their website for a “Contact Me” or “About” page to see if you can find it there.
2. Try LinkedIn. Often, people who want to be contacted will put their email address up in order to be found.
3. Google combinations of their name with “@websitedoman.com” (in quotes) to see what comes up. For instance, if you were looking for my email address, you’d be able to find it very quickly by using the search term [Mridu “@theinternationalfreelancer.com”]

4. Syndicate your content (Time taken: 10-15 minutes)

A great goal to have for your content marketing strategy is to build partnerships with larger media organizations in the way of syndication and content-sharing opportunities. This however, will take time and effort, especially with bigger partnerships like the kind we have here at Buffer with Fast Company and Entrepeneur.com.

While you’re working on building those, don’t forget to utilize the free networks like Medium and LinkedIn that offer you similar syndication opportunities to reach newer audiences.

Medium has a very nifty guide to publishing on its platform and the things to keep in mind. Read it here.

And in this fantastic post about publishing to LinkedIn, Noah Kagan lays out the following tips:

1. Make your titles between 40 and 49 characters long
2. Make your posts on LinkedIn visual! Add 8 images
3. Don’t add video or other multimedia assets to your posts
4. Use “how-to” and list-style headlines
5. Divide your post into 5 headings in order to attract the greatest number of post views
6. People like to read long-form content on LinkedIn – 1,900 to 2,000 words long
7. Don’t get your audience all fired up
8. Make your content readable for an 11-year-old
9. Promote your LinkedIn publisher post on other social networks!
10. LinkedIn likes get you views, shares, and comments
11. Publish your LinkedIn posts on Thursday

I don’t recommend that you syndicate every single post, but for select ones that may resonate for those unique audiences, it’s a great way to bring interested readers over to your neck of the Internet woods. I also, personally, don’t syndicate new content immediately. I’ll wait for something to go bit on my website and then send only that content to syndicate partners with the assurance that it’s something that will resonate with their readers, too.

I also try to keep my syndicated posts unique. If you’re in the fantastic position to be syndicating your content and having it republished on several websites, you want to be strategic and try and avoid sending them the same posts each time, so that they can have unique content to share with these audiences.

5. Create quick and easy graphics to share on social media (Time taken: 10-15 minutes)

You’re a Buffer blog reader, so I don’t need to tell you just how important images are in social media. We’ve talked about that here, here, and here. Research shows that photos on Facebook generate 53% more likes than the average post.

If you’re using images in your posts anyway, a quick and easy win is to share the headline or quote from your post along with an image. If not, you can quickly and easily do so in Canva or many of the other image-creating resources mentioned in this post. We’ve found that it’s incredibly helpful to share images in your social media posts, since according to a 2013 Pew Research Study, nearly half of all Internet users have reposted a photo or video they found online.

This can help you gain traction on image-oriented social sharing networks even if you don’t have much of a presence on them.

For instance, this picture on my blog post really helped bring readers in through social media, especially—to my surprise—from Pinterest, since I have no real Pinterest presence. It was really interesting to see a high number of social shares and to see what resonated with that audience, an audience I otherwise would not have had access to.

Over to You

At Buffer, we’re big believers in spending time and ample resources and creating great content for our readers. But we’d love to hear what you have to think?

What’s more important—creation or promotion? And how much time do you spend on each?

We’d love to hear your stories in the comments.

The “inbound versus outbound” marketing debate is something business owners and marketing professionals have been disputing for years. Which is better? Which offers the highest return? Which builds brand equity quicker and lasts longer? While the arguments are interesting, there’s really no other choice in 2015: Inbound marketing is far more effective, by a landslide.

Understanding the Two Strategies

Outbound marketing, as you likely know, refers to a marketing strategy in which businesses push products and services onto people by presenting them with information and marketing messages, regardless of whether or not they’re looking for it. When you think about outbound marketing, think about TV commercials, billboards and radio spots. The very nature of outbound marketing has led many to refer to it as “interruptive marketing.” While there is certainly some value in outbound marketing, it’s hard for anyone other than big brands with strong brand recognition to benefit from it.

Inbound marketing, on the other hand, is much more affordable and natural. “The idea of inbound marketing is that you target a core audience by providing useful and quality content to entice them into finding out more about your products or services,” says marketing professional Theresa Goodwin. “So, in essence, you give them something in order to get them to come to you.”

Out With Outbound Marketing

The internet community as a whole has singlehandedly pushed inbound marketing into the lead. Consumers rarely rely on print advertisements to make purchase decisions. They simply head to their computer, strike a few keys, and find what they’re looking for. As a result, traditional outbound marketing techniques are converting at all-time low rates.

Approximately 44 percent of all direct mail is never opened. Eighty-four percent of 25-34 year olds have abandoned a website because ads were irrelevant or intrusive. Eighty-six percent of people skip through television commercials when watching recorded shows. In other words, people are trying their hardest to avoid outbound marketing. They see it as invasive and annoying. Instead, they prefer to consume useful content and make conscious decisions regarding where they click and what brands they engage with.

In With Inbound Marketing

“Inbound marketing, which finds its roots in permission marketing (a term coined by Seth Godin), manages to attract, engage and convert prospects primarily as a result of its methodology,” writes Todd Mumford, inbound marketing specialist.

Quality inbound marketing understands that customers find interruptive marketing objectionable. They want to control their own buying destiny. As a marketer, this means letting customers research solutions and determine (on their own) that your brand offers the best solution, based on the content they’ve engaged with.

Choosing Inbound Marketing

There are dozens of reasons why inbound marketing is preferred over outbound marketing in the modern internet-based marketplace, but here are a handful of the most important ones:

• Price: Inbound marketing is substantially more cost-effective than outbound marketing. Whereas outbound marketing typically costs a fixed amount and only exists for a predetermined period of time, inbound marketing scales accordingly and lasts indefinitely.
• Natural: Inbound marketing is polite and courteous. It allows the user to engage as much or as little as they’d like. This natural feel results in healthier brand-customer relationships over the long run.
• Two-way communication: Have you ever talked to a billboard? When you ask questions to your TV, does it answer them? Obviously not. With inbound marketing, customers can and will communicate with your brand. And you get the chance to respond. This two-way communication is invaluable.

Make Inbound Marketing a Priority

There’s no real debate when it comes to inbound versus outbound marketing. Sure, outbound marketing still holds value for certain major brands, but it’s not a cost-effective, long-term solution for smaller brands seeking to engage customers. Inbound marketing, on the other hand, is. If you haven’t yet invested in the creation of quality, original content, there’s no better time to start than today.

What does it take to be a sales superstar? The answer, unfortunately, is not simple. It depends on what sales managers expect from you, your personal goals, and what buyers want from you. The key is to focus on developing skills that enable you to grow as well as help your buyers. 

Are you on LinkedIn? If so, that's great. If not, go make an account right now. I'll wait.

...

And, we're back!

Maintaining a presence on LinkedIn is critical for salespeople. Buyers today turn to social media to research prospective vendors and get answers to their product questions. And just like salespeople check out their prospects' profiles before they pick up the phone, prospects also stop by reps' pages to get a sense of who they'll be talking to.

With this in mind, simply having a LinkedIn account isn't enough. Are you coming off as a (gulp) LinkedIn loser? 

According to CareerHMO, the key to avoiding this label is cultivating a complete, informative, and concise profile. Avoid LinkedIn loserdom by heeding the advice in the following SlideShare.

By Eric Wittlake, {grow} Contributing Columnist

LinkedIn is today’s B2B media powerhouse. If you are a B2B marketer, in nearly any sector, chances are you are paying attention to LinkedIn, as well you should. LinkedIn brings three things that make it stand out from other B2B media companies.

• Scale. According to comScore’s July 2015 rankings, LinkedIn is the 15th largest media property in the US. That makes it larger than consumer staples like Weather.com, Conde Nast and BuzzFeed. Chances are, a portion of your business audience uses LinkedIn regularly.
• Data. We directly contribute and maintain our own data on LinkedIn, making it one of the most accurate sources of data for B2B marketers.
• Content Distribution. With Sponsored Updates, LinkedIn’s native ad format, LinkedIn has an offering that is tailored to distributing your content.

So how do you take advantage of it? Here are five things that, in my experience, will make a big difference in the performance of your LinkedIn Sponsored Update campaign.

1. Nail your targeting

With all the data LinkedIn has available, this part should be easy. Unfortunately, it isn’t. Nailing this requires some approaches that can be counterintuitive.

• Keep your targeting lists short. Instead of building an exhaustive targeting list, such as every group your audience might use (and watering down your targeting significantly in the process), use LinkedIn’s audience expansion feature instead.
• Use Skills targeting. Skills targeting provides far more granularity than traditional role or functional targeting. With traditional role-based targeting, you would target marketers in order to reach someone like me. But with skills targeting, you can target people involved in specific areas within marketing, such as B2B Marketing, Demand Generation or Account Based Marketing. Skill and group targeting are consistently the top performing approaches, but skill targeting almost always is able to provide more volume with similar cost efficiency.
• Use negatives. In LinkedIn, not every data point is populated in every profile. Actually, lots of data is missing. Instead of adding new targeting requirements, consider excluding segments you don’t want to reach, such as smaller companies and entry-level staff.

Straight role-based targeting (such as targeting senior IT) almost always costs more, because you likely have more competition, and doesn’t perform as well as more specific targeting criteria like skills or group membership.

2. Expect mobile

It is 2015. Mobile overtook desktop in time spent more than a year ago. According to LinkedIn, 70% of clicks in the main stream are from mobile devices.

Today, social advertising IS mobile advertising, yet it seems many marketers haven’t accepted this reality yet. Just two weeks ago, I stumbled across a company promoting new research and insights on about mobile marketing and today’s mobile consumer. Turns out it was a PDF, possibly the worst format you could choose for a mobile audience. I eventually gave up trying to read it on my phone. And no, I didn’t take the time to save it so I could read it later at my desk. Stop expecting people to work that way.

3. Give people a personal reason to care

B2B marketers love to position the business value of their content and their solution. How to reduce costs, improve profitability, drive growth, etc. But unless you are marketing directly to owners, these aren’t primary motivators. Seth Godin outlined a hierarchy of the needs or motivators of B2B buyers which bears repeating. Here they are, in order:

• Avoiding risk
• Avoiding hassle
• Gaining praise
• Gaining power
• Having fun
• Making a profit

Your ad and offer need to focus on the top of this list, not the bottom.

One of the best converting offers I’ve worked with was a piece of content promoted with the line “we’ve read all the books so you don’t have to.” We didn’t promise profits, growth, or business efficiency, even though that is the space we were working in. Instead, we promised to take the hassle out of getting the information people needed. And it worked extremely well.

4. Hack your social proof

Social proof, particularly in the form of positive comments, matters on LinkedIn. Not only do positive comments help to validate your offer, they also give your ad more real estate in the LinkedIn stream.

But don’t wait around for positive comments. Reach out and get people to comment. Or comment yourself if you must! Not only will it provide social proof, it also kickstarts a virtuous cycle on LinkedIn. Because of the engagement, your ad is favored by LinkedIn. Because of the comments, it captures more attention and more engagement. And then LinkedIn favors your ad even more.

I’ve seen this cycle in practice multiple times: an ad with initial positive comments significantly outperforms the rest of the campaign, yet the exact same ad in another campaign without the comments is a yawn. The difference is social proof.

5. Track and optimize

One of the shortcomings of LinkedIn is that it doesn’t yet support conversion tracking. Making it worse, until recently, posting your content with a tracking link from your advertising or social management platform would actually mask your URL, making it unclear where the link was taking you.

Fortunately, LinkedIn now supports the use of your social or advertising tracking links. So use them! The results will almost always take you down a different optimization path than what you would do purely focusing on the metrics available through LinkedIn.

LinkedIn ads – What works for you?

What has been your biggest frustration with LinkedIn Sponsored Updates, or what tip or trick has worked well for you? I’d love to hear about it in the comments below!

Eric Wittlake spends his days working with B2B marketers and (occasionally) shares his marketing views on his personal blog, B2B Digital Marketing. You can find him on Twitter (@wittlake) when he isn’t working with B2B marketers.

Image created with Superstickies

The post 5 Big tips to make LinkedIn ads work for you appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

When it comes to content preferences, an overwhelming 91% of B2B buyers said they prefer more interactive/visual content that can be accessed on-demand, according to the 2015 Content Preferences Survey, which C4D co-sponsored with Demand Gen Report.

And it’s not all that surprising, really — especially when you consider that 74% of respondents from the same survey reported having less time to view content than they did a year ago. Today’s buyers are not only time-starved, they’re consuming a wide variety of content when making purchasing decisions. That’s why, in order to make the biggest impact and stand apart from their competitors, B2B marketers need to do more showing and less telling.

But a new study from the CMO Council, which highlights the current use of visual content, uncovered just how many marketers are still missing the mark when it comes to leveraging these assets to reach and engage their buyers.

The report From Content To Creativity: The Role Of Visual Media In Impactful Brand Storytelling, revealed that while 65% of marketers recognize that visual content is vital to their brand’s messaging, only 27% of senior marketing executives are able to organize and manage their visual content across the company’s marketing and non-marketing teams.

The writers of the report point out that one of the main reasons for this breakdown is the lack of content development strategies.

Liz Miller, Senior VP of Marketing for the CMO Council, noted in a recent Demand Gen Report article that many marketers are falling short when it comes to regarding the visual asset as part of the strategic customer experience and engagement dialogue.

“Perhaps because visual assets have long been the domain of creative or agency resources, the conversation around maximizing value across the organization has fallen off of the priority list,”

“But as customers continue to react in meaningful ways to visual media, marketing cannot afford to stand idly by and not include visuals in the content ROI agenda.”

Here are some other findings from the report that highlight the growing importance of visual content:

• Video content is expected to dramatically increase in importance in the near future, according to 79% of respondents; and
• Infographics (60%), photographs (50%) and illustrations (41%) are other content formats expected to see an increase in usage.

Call it “sales.” Call it “client conversion.” Call it whatever you want. But if you're a salesperson, you’re going to be in front of prospective clients all day and you want to say and do the right things to get them to trust and want to work with you.

For more than 20 years I’ve been teaching professionals, small business owners, and salespeople how to get more new clients by being transparent. You have a process, do you not, to convert a prospect to a client? You know the questions you want to ask, right? You know the things you want to say? You know how many steps it’s going to take and how many phone calls? If you're planning on winging it, don't. We all need to have a process.

The straightest line to building trust with buyers and gaining agreement to move forward is to be transparent with your process. And this means you need to be transparent in your communication and language.

First of all, let prospects know how many steps are in your process. Make it clear that you use a three-step process, or a five-step process, or whatever.

Here's an example of something you might say at the outset of a relationship:

“I’ve developed a process that I believe is the best way for us to determine if I might be a resource for you, or if we have something worth discussing.”

Keep in mind that the phrases “best way” or “works the best” are powerful words in the world of sales and influence. Most people want to know what "works the best.”

Once you've gotten buy-in at the beginning, you can dig in. Remember that sales is just a series of permissions. You gain permission to have the appointment. You gain permission to ask the buyer probing questions. You ask permission to keep the process going.

With this in mind, using transparent language at each and every step increases your chances of keeping your prospect on board. Here's a transparent phrase you can use to advance to the next step in the process:

“Here’s what we’ll go through. Here’s what we’re likely to do. Does that sound okay? Does that feel right for you?”

The buyer will either say "yes" or they’ll want to make an adjustment. That's fine. Make the change and then get the “yes” to continue with your process.

Transparency should extend all the way to the close. When it comes to “asking for the business,” here’s some language to consider:

“If I were you, if I were in your situation, this is what I would do. What do you think about proceeding in this manner? How does that feel to you?”

If the prospect has a relatively open personality, say, “How do you feel about that?” On the other hand, if they’re more of a guarded type of individual, try, “What do you think about that?” In either case, make a recommendation and see how it sits with them.

If you get a positive response, don't just sit there and hope they’ll ask, “Where do I sign?” Make it crystal clear where you'd like to go next:

"Great, when would you like to get started? Shall we get started today? May I send our basic agreement to you?”

When you’re transparent with your process, everybody knows what’s coming. There are no surprises. Moving forward to the next step is always obvious, and signing a deal becomes almost a foregone conclusion.

If you have any result-producing tips you’d like to share with me, please send them to BillCates@ReferralCoach.com.

Content is the meat and potatoes of an inbound marketing strategy. While content marketing and inbound marketing sound very similar in definition, content marketing is actually a subset of inbound marketing. According to marketing platform, Hubspot, content marketing is a marketing program that centers on creating, publishing, and distributing content for your target audience to attract new customers. Inbound marketing is the entire strategy involved with creating and sharing that content. The question is, with everyone jumping on the inbound train, how can we create content that’s truly unique? Use these rules to when developing your content marketing strategy.

Know your audience.

Creating content shouldn’t be a race against your competition. It should be created specifically for your audience. Developing buyer personas should be one of the first steps in your inbound marketing strategy. These fictional characters will dictate the content you create. In creating your personas, you’ll actually find that the content you need is identified right off the bat. What is your persona looking for? What are their challenges? How do they like to receive information? The answers to these questions will equipp you with topics and distribution channels to use to reach your target audience.

Choose your channels.

Now that you know where your personas frequent to find information, set up channels which allow you to reach them on a consistent basis. A blog, social media, or newsletter allow you to create new content which can be targeted to specific personas and their current situation.

Don’t be pushy!

One of the major reasons inbound marketing works is because it does not rely on traditional interruption-based promotion tactics. Whether you’re developing content for an ebook, blog post, or social media update, focus on helping the reader rather than scaring him or her away with traditional “BOGO” or pushy content. Excellent examples of inbound marketing content include:

• Tip sheets
• Templates
• Blog posts
• Webinars
• Emails to approved and relevant contacts

4. Create evolving content.

As your personas move through the buyer’s journey towards becoming a customer, their needs will change and so should your content. Content at the awareness stage can be high-level whereas content for a persona at the comparison stage can be a little more brand specific. Labeling your content as an awareness, consideration, or decision stage piece is a great way to ensure your content helps your personas transition.

5. Map out what you’re going to share.

Using an editorial calendar will help you create unique content on a consistent basis, and help you become more productive. Not only will you easily identify gaps in your content strategy, but you can also assign tasks to your team members.

6. Measure your engagement.

How well did your readers engage with the content you shared? Here are a few ways to measure:

• Number of likes/shares on social media
• Comments on a blog post
• Downloads of an offer/PDF
• General website traffic stats (views, clicks)

Knowing which pieces of content generated more traffic or engagement will help you identify what works and what doesn’t. In fact, there are no rules against repurposing that same content! Read this post for details on sharing refreshed content.

What are your best content marketing secrets? Share in the comments below!

Marketing has historically been seen as a cost center with marketers constantly working to prove ROI and fighting to be perceived as a profit generator. A marketing tactic that’s traditionally seen as one of the most pricy investments? Third-party events. I’m talking about tradeshows, hosted-buyer programs, conferences―anything where you’re giving funds to a third-party in hopes of connecting with your target audience in a live-event venue.

So, how do you ensure you’re putting your coveted marketing dollars to good use with third-party events as a part of your marketing mix? The answer is to do your due diligence and research all of the available vendor-organized events in your wheelhouse that could supply you with ideal leads. Evaluate each event/sponsorship opportunity to see if it is capable of drawing the people you want to reach. You should also decide if your involvement will help you achieve your goals, whether that’s measured by new names, new opportunities, and new pipeline.

With that being said, simply follow the four guidelines outlined below, and you’ll be on your way to finding the perfect sponsorship match for your money that will bring you the best ROI:

Tip #1: Be Inquisitive

Some vendors will resist answering your detailed questions, while others will appreciate your attention to detail and desire to find a good fit. Regardless, be tenacious! Stick to your guns, know what’s important for achieving your goals, and get the answers that you desire. Here are some questions to get you started:

• When is the event taking place and where?
  • This may seem obvious, but some vendors may approach you with undefined or flexible details such as date and location. You need these specifics in order to compare against your overall program plan and budget, so get those locked down.
  • HOT TIP: Plot out your prospective event sponsorships on a calendar. This will help give you a more visual view of your secured commitments and how your potential ones could fit in the mix.

• What is the conference theme? What topics will be covered?
  • Check that your message is in sync with the event’s theme. For example, you may be marketing an app specializing in payroll fulfillment. You start looking at a human resources conference and realize that the theme revolves around conflict resolution. This likely won’t align with your company’s message, so it’s back to the drawing board for you!
  • HOT TIP: Check out the agenda on the event website and review both the titles of the presenters and the descriptions of their sessions. This is simple research you can complete before engaging with the vendor.

• How many attendees are you expecting? What are your current registration numbers? How large is the database you’re marketing to?
  • These numbers will help you create realistic goals for visitors to your booth, appointments set at the event, your giveaways budget, and more. It will also help you evaluate what kind of monetary investment you are willing to spend on the event. For example, do you want to spend $50,000 to have signage at a luncheon that only has 100 attendees? It will likely depend on how much the audience matches your ideal customer, which we’ll discuss below…
  • HOT TIP: If you’re starting to think this event is a good fit, create preliminary goals to present to your manager for budget approval. They’ll appreciate your foresight and be more likely to give you the “thumbs up!”

• How many sponsors do you expect at the event? Are any of your competitors sponsoring? Have they sponsored in the past? Has your company sponsored in the past?
  • It’s important to know how many other sponsors will be with you at the event to consider if you think you’ll be lost in the crowd. You also want to know if your competitors are showing interest―this may indicate that you should be there, too.
  • HOT TIP: The last question (“Has your company sponsored in the past?”) may seem silly, but many marketers have only been in their roles for a few months, so don’t be ashamed to ask! Good to know if someone preceding you selected this event.

Tip #2: Identify Your Perfect Persona

Once you’ve got the event basics down, it’s time to check that you’d be reaching the people you actually want to reach. Start by asking some of the following questions:

• What are your audience demographics? Do you have a breakdown of titles and departments? What is the percentage of B2B vs. consumer-driven companies? Are there more enterprise-level companies or smaller start-ups?
  • Regardless of the type of company you are, B2B or consumer, these may be the most important questions you ask. The answers will help you build out the audience profile they expect at their event―and see if it’s a match! For example, your ideal persona may be a CIO at an e-commerce company with more than $400 billion in revenue. But, while the event you’re currently reviewing draws CIOs, they work at smaller B2B businesses. If that’s the case, you may want to re-think your participation in this event.
  • HOT TIP: I like to ask for past attendee lists and do some research on my own as vendors may inflate their numbers. They’ll be unlikely to give you a full list of name/title/company due to privacy concerns, but you can usually get titles and/or at least company names. Then you can go into your database or use a data vendor like Hoovers to evaluate if these attendees truly fit your criteria.

• Are attendees qualified in any fashion?
  • This is especially important for executive events, like hosted-buyer programs with pre-set 1:1 meetings or executive educational events like Argyle Executive Forum. These are usually on the pricier side, so you want to make sure that the company is doing its due diligence to bring high-quality attendees to the table.
  • HOT TIP: Ask about cancellation policies for these more upscale events―are replacements from the same company/level required to fill that newly open appointment? Make sure you’re going to get the value you expect.

Tip #3: Define Your Courtship

Now it’s time to define your courtship. Most importantly, this is where you determine how much value you will get from the opportunity. Ask yourself:

• What do sponsors receive? Are there speaking opportunities? What will bring me the most value?
  • Get a sponsorship prospectus and scour the details. Most packages will include the basics like “branding”―aka company name/logo on the website, in the conference brochure, etc. Look beyond these for ideas that will give you more impact and get your message across to this audience. Don’t forget to check on your options for receiving contact information so that you can follow up with these leads. Review the document for the following common sponsorship packages:
    • Speaking Opportunities: Decide what works best for your needs. Where do you find the most engagement? Some common options include:
      • Roundtables
      • Panels
      • Thought Leadership Presentations
      • Case Studies
    • Engagement Opportunities: How will you be able to connect with this audience? Some options available may be:
      • Tradeshow Booth
      • Contests
      • 1:1 Appointments
      • Exclusive VIP Luncheon
    • Extra Branding Opportunities: If you have some extra clams to spend at the event to meet sponsorship dollar requirements or you want to make a stronger branding impact with this particular audience, try some of the following strategic logo placements:
      • Lanyards
      • Hotel Room Key Cards
      • Charging Stations
      • Meal Breaks
      • Gala Entertainment
      • Literature Distribution
  • Do your best to evaluate the cost vs. impact. Work on predicting your ROI. It may be nuanced, and it may be qualitative based on your past experience. For example, since I’ve been at Marketo, we moved to a customized sponsorship option with a vendor because we want to get high impact with our content through a thought leadership presentation versus a moderated panel where our message could be muted by other participants. We also decided that we no longer want to participate in a VIP dinner because we weren’t seeing much value (our sales reps shared feedback that they ended up being stuck next to just two people at the table all night, so there wasn’t much opportunity). So, we got the best of both worlds in one sponsorship package!
  • HOT TIP: As evidenced by my anecdote above, you have the power to negotiate! Is there a sponsorship package that tickles your fancy but is missing a piece that would make it more enticing? Ask to combine it! Or remove something you don’t find valuable. The vendor will want to make you happy (and get your $$$), so they should be willing to work with you for the best fit.

Tip #4: Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is

You’ve asked the vendor a lot of questions and you have a detailed document describing the event, who will be attending, as well as sponsorship options and your notes on whether your company should participate. Now’s the time to present your research and recommendations to the people that hold the purse strings.

Be sure to include:

• Audience profile
• Sponsorship packages
• Predicted ROI
• Where the event(s) fit into your overall marketing plan/budget
• Your recommendation of whether you should sponsor this particular event and why

I recommend sharing everything you’ve evaluated, both positive and negative, to show your manager your critical-thinking skills and your desire to make the right investment for the company. Once you’ve agreed upon your next steps, reach out to the vendor(s) and give them the good (or not-so-good) news. Then you’ll be well on your way to gathering new leads and reaching a new audience! (Who knows―maybe these steps will lead you to sponsoring Marketo’s Marketing Nation Summit 2016…)

What kinds of questions do you ask when evaluating third-party events? I’d love to learn more from you to help me find the perfect match!

Leaders may or may not have a title, but what they always have are relationships where people are motivated to follow them in the direction they are heading. Leaders also have another thing in common; they are constantly taking action to improve the condition of their team or organization. Improvement signifies that something is changing.

When we talk about improvements and change in our Surviving and Thriving in Change training sessions, there is always one negative person who is quick to point out, “Not every change is a good change.” We are the first to agree with this comment. We have a history of changes that not only failed to improve the condition of something, but actually made things worse. When these types of comments are shared, we recommend leaders respond in two ways:

• First, agree. Not all change is good change.
• Second, let team members know that not one improvement will ever occur without a change.

Here are 10 tips that we can learn from leaders who effectively lead change:

Genuinely care about your team: If you genuinely care about your team members and the organization, you want everyone on your team to be highly successful. But it is very difficult to be successful and stay successful without changing. Both competitors and customers are continuously raising the bar. If employees and your team are not willing to rapidly change, you will become obsolete. Great leaders recognize that maintaining the status quo is not an option for the team.

Create a positive vision for the implementation of the change: If the leader cannot visualize a positive vision for the implementation of the change, then the leader’s direct reports certainly won’t see the change as positive. And, if the leader is not confident in their ability to turn the vision into a reality, the level of resistance from stakeholders rises dramatically. Great leaders see the change as an opportunity for improvement, and confidently believe they can turn their positive vision of the change into a reality.

They role modeled the change: Employees believe what they see in the halls more than what they hear or read posted on the walls. Strong leaders lead by example, and become the change they are asking of their employees.

Honor the past, then build a bridge to the future: When new managers come into an organization, some have a need to tell everyone how good the organization they came from really was and how their mission in life is to fix all the wrongs of the new organization. When it comes to leading innovation and change, this strategy has a high chance of backfiring. When managers put down their new team, team members ask themselves two questions: “If your old company was so good, why did you leave?” And, “If it was so great, why don’t you go back?” When team members have their past trashed by a new manager, they dig in their heels to protect the past. They tend to think thoughts like, “I was here before you, and I’ll be here after you leave.” Instead, honor their past and let a discussion about what a new vision with even better results could look like.

Set goals that are focused on continuous improvement: Create an environment where everyone is focused on “good, better, best…never let it rest, till the good is better and the better is best.” Yes, sales revenue, profits, quality, efficiencies, staffing ratios, staff education and innovation need to improve each month. This often leads to some people saying, “It doesn’t matter what we do, you’re never happy.” But, great leaders are happy every day. They are grateful for what is accomplished every day. But, great leaders are great leaders because they continuously improve the condition of their team and organization.

Promise problems: Most leaders want to tell people that the change is going to make everything better. A much better strategy is to tell your direct reports that with the implementation of this change, there will be a ton of problems… but what excites you is knowing that if any team can figure out the problems and solve them… this team can.

Involve your direct reports in developing a plan: People don’t dislike change as much as they dislike being changed. Take the time to involve the people who will be responsible for implementing the change…even your most difficult or challenging employees.

Over-communicate: When it comes to big change, employees love telling their leaders that because of the change… we’re too busy to meet. It is a trick. In times of change more communication, not less, will help guide the successful implementation of the change.

Focus on results: When it comes to significant change, leaders can get sidetracked and focus on how team members feel. The challenge is that most people are not excited when they are being asked to make significant changes in how they do work or the amount of work they are asked to do. To focus on morale here is a mistake. Instead, focus on the results you are trying to achieve by implementing the change. When people achieve positive results and the team is aligning to a world that is about to become, morale will take care of itself.

Change what you reward: Great leaders know all too well; you get what you reward. If your goal is to improve processes and efficiencies in your organization, then reward the people who accomplish the goal well. We recently worked with an organization who implemented new software that made the organization much more efficient internally. Some departments refused to utilize the new software. Other departments did implement the software, and became much more efficient. The problem was, however, that rewards were equally distributed among all departments, whether they utilized the software and increased efficiencies or not.

Change is hard for employees and leaders alike. But, great leaders stay focused on their positive vision for the team and organization, and take the challenge in stride. When you are capable of successfully and efficiently implementing change, you prove your worth as a leader and earn a reputation as a leader your organization can depend on for many years to come.

Use email metrics as a great diagnostic tool. These metrics provide a ‘look under the hood,’ so to speak. Just like a car, if something isn’t running right, you fix it. If you see a metric that’s off, or not where you want it to be, it’s time to break out the toolbox and make some repairs.

To help you reach your goals, we’ve created a list of eight ways you can improve your email metrics.

Improve your open rates

1. Write a must-open subject line.

Your subject line should tell the recipient what the email is about in a clear and concise way. Your subject line should average around 50 characters or less, and use urgent language that convinces a recipient to open the email right away. Words like “today,” “one day only” and “act now” are great examples.

2. Make sure the ‘From label’ is legit

If you send emails that are from CrazyCowboy@yahoo.com, they won’t get opened. Your emails should be from your business and contain the company name in the address. If a recipient sees an odd name in the ‘from label,’ they’ll likely ignore it.

Improve your click-through rates

3. Watch your layout

Email design is important. If your text and pictures are scattered all over the place, recipients will likely close the email. For help, turn to our guide that covers the dos and don’ts of email design.

4. Keep the message short

Quickly explain the purpose of the email. No one wants to read paragraph after paragraph of information. Your recipients don’t want long emails; so don’t waste your time creating a novel.

5. Create a call to action button

Try creating a call to action button in your email rather than a hyperlink. A button stands out and clearly shows the reader what the purpose of the email is.

Improve your conversions

6. Make the checkout process seamless

If customers click on an emailed link to make a purchase, you’re halfway there. If a customer doesn’t follow through with the sale, your checkout process could be to blame.

How long does it take to check out? Is it easy to navigate? Customers want a fast process. If you want to improve your checkout process without bringing a website developer on board, try Shopify. This DIY tool will help you set up an e-commerce site that customers will love.

7. Improve your forms

If your call to action is based on getting new leads, or having customers sign up for a service or consultation, make sure the process to sign up is simple. Long forms and tedious websites are deal breakers. Try Lander – it’s a tool that creates lead-generating pages that are hassle-free for the customer.

Improve metric management

8. Use a tool to centralize data

Tired of tracking email, social and sales metrics in a dozen different platforms? Turn to Dasheroo. With this tool, you can see all of your metrics in one dashboard.

Metrics are the key to optimizing your email marketing. Remember to make changes slowly so you know which change contributed to your success.

Reeling in leads can be like running a Spartan race in stilettos, drinking Baileys on a hot summer day, or listening to your Aunt Janice tell you about the time she had her hip replaced… possible, yet unpleasantly challenging.

All jokes aside, I know how hard it is to find that hook, that angle that intrigues buyers and makes them realize the worth of your product or services. However, captivating buyers early on with relevant, engaging content is the key to shortening the cycle and can be accomplished with the right data and a little bit of creativity.

According to Demand Generation’s “2015 Content Preferences Survey,” 67% of buyers rely more on content to research and make purchasing decisions than they did a year ago. What’s more, 45% of buyers reported that they must view three to five pieces of content before engaging with a salesperson; some respondents admitted to needing to see upward of seven pieces before speaking with a rep.

It’s probably a good time to evaluate the success of your current content marketing strategy. Buyers like to see a myriad of content before engaging with you, so make sure you have a wealth of content that is easily accessible to your website visitors. Ensure that you’re using different types of content—blogs, case studies and eBooks—to interest those who may want to see a variety of pieces.

An abundance of diverse, branded content will not only provide concrete information, such as product functions and prices, but will also enable your potential buyers to gain a deeper sense of your value proposition and personality. In a world of lofty marketing concepts and campaigns, there is nothing a customer appreciates more than you getting to the point and providing them with something of value.

When you offer your buyers all of the information they are looking for in one central location, you can shorten the buying cycle dramatically. You establish a trustworthy relationship between your brand and buyers by providing resonant content that incites action, i.e., content that makes your buyers want to speak with a sales rep.

But the secret ingredient to optimally accelerate the buying cycle with your content marketing is leveraging insight extracted from your marketing database. We must ensure that the business contacts information residing within our databases is accurate and complete so we can create content targeted specifically toward certain groups of buyers.

Here’s an example: if you have a group of small business owners from the same geographical location that have similar budgets, you can create a message that specifically mentions their location and links back to the products and services within their price range. In doing so, your buyers will feel that this message was personally tailored to meet their needs and interests.

Is your content marketing successful? Measure the average length of your buying cycle to find out. You might learn that you need to learn more about your contacts in order to create higher-quality content that engages and turns them into buyers.

The term “Sales Development Rep” is a relatively new title for the frontline salesperson. From the classic cold caller, to old school door-to-door sales rep, to the more updated business development rep… the way we refer to reps on the frontline of the sales process has evolved over time.

But the mainstay throughout the evolution of the sales development rep is — and has always been — specialization. What do all of those aforementioned roles focus on, first and foremost? Prospecting and uncovering qualified leads to feed into the sales pipeline. The primary focus of a sales development rep is to find for those ideal prospects and create a customer acquisition machine.

JM Hood is a perfect example of a someone who didn’t necessarily begin with the title of “SDR,” but grew into the industry from the bottom into a powerhouse sales development leader. We asked her how she got her start, where she is now, and how sales development has influenced her career. Here’s what she had to say:

1. Where was your first role in the sales industry?

I kind of fell into it!  I landed a business development gig at a local credit union. My role was to cold call companies in Silicon Valley like eBay, Google, other big tech firms, set up shop during their lunch and convince the employees to move over their direct deposit on the spot.

2. What role are you in now?

I am a Manager of the Sales Development Team at AdRoll North America, and have created the global process/training for the teams in New York, San Francisco, Dublin and Sydney.

3. Is there a set career matrix for SDRs at your current company?

Our career matrix is currently in flux. The career matrix is dependent on where you’re at as a company. For example, if you’re a really fast growing company, you’ll have a need for people to move faster depending on the size of your teams and headcount you are allocated. We are currently transitioning as a company. While we’re continuing to grow (and a lot!), the hiring growth has slowed down a bit. This means the career matrix and path has a need to change with the times.

Being a tech “startup,” it’s one of those things to always be ready to change and have the resources (training, development, career path, etc.) ready to rock at any given time.

4. What is one piece of advice you would give to someone entering their first job as an SDR?

It will be tough and it will be hard. You’ll have days you don’t want to send that other email or make that extra call. Find one thing new to learn each day and set yourself reminders to always step outside the box.

—

Sales development is proving to be the springboard to many a career, launching sales veterans into management and leadership roles at lightening speed. Whether within their starting company, or in new ventures, the growth potential of a seasoned sales development rep is boundless.

Want to be a Manager of Sales Development someday? Start your career as an SDR, and odds are, that day will come sooner than you think.

The post Started From The Bottom, Now We’re Sales Development Leaders: JM Hood With AdRoll appeared first on SalesLoft.

The top problems facing CMOs haven’t changed for decades. CMOs need to optimize their budgets and drive cost effective opportunities into the sales funnel. Until recently, it was hard to quantify how a marketing organization was driving opportunities. In the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s, marketing initiatives could be run across a wide variety of programs and channels, but it was nearly impossible to tell which channels were working. Marketing had to request that the sales team ask their prospects where they heard about the company. Marketing professionals were in the dark and hoped that good creative and hard work would fill the sales funnel. There was an aura of “magic” to Marketing, and the idea that you just needed to trust that it was working reigned supreme. It reminds us of the old Marketing adage that, “I know half my advertising is working, just not which half.”

Then something interesting happened in the 90’s as marketing began to shift to digital platforms: for the first time marketing professionals gained ad specific attribution. There was data, real data, and lots of it. Slowly the “magic” of marketing began to go away and be replaced with quantifiable results. Marketers could see that the money spent on a specific marketing channel directly led to a certain number of leads, and those leads converted to opportunities and produced a measurable amount of revenue. The marketing team could work with the sales team to determine ROI; a metric traditionally tracked by Finance was now part of the marketing vocabulary and CMOs had the ammunition to take control and grow their budgets. With this shift, marketing budgets, for the first time based on hard data, grew, and included more money for the tactics that were proven successful and the technology needed to help track the marketing funnel.

CMOs were happy with this new paradigm. It was easier to show success. For most it was a simple formula: use advertising and content to drive a user to a landing page with a form, get them to fill out that form, and then hand that lead off to Sales. It was simple, effective, and easy to track.

Then something happened to make the CMOs life a nightmare: smartphones.

With the advent and adoption of smartphones, consumers started spending more time on their phone versus their laptop or desktop. This meant that marketers needed to adjust their ad spending accordingly, and they did. According to eMarketer, in 2016 mobile will represent 60% of all digital advertising. And the most recent data shows that consumers now view over 50% of ads on mobile devices — and when they do click on an ad or visit a site they aren’t filling out a contact form with their thumbs. They end up using one of the primary features of the device in their hands: they call.

People still make calls. They want to make calls. If they didn’t, we would have an entire world of people with PDAs, small tablets, or other devices in their pockets that did everything a smartphone could do without an expensive voice plan. For the occasional call we could use FaceTime or Skype. But that is simply not the case. Call volumes are soaring. According to analyst research firm BIA/Kelsey, 162 billion inbound calls will be driven to U.S. businesses by 2019 from mobile marketing channels. Quite simply, there are many instances where people still want to talk.

If the move to digital ads illuminated the marketing landscape (by allowing you to track results and optimize your marketing spend), then the move to mobile ads has created a “black hole” in the middle of that circle of light. That “black hole” is phone calls. And it’s growing every day.

If consumers are spending more time on their mobile devices, and advertisers are following suit, and consumers are increasingly choosing to call a business rather than filling out a form, shouldn’t those calls be tracked just like a form? Shouldn’t marketers have the same level of data and analytics around the channels that are driving the most calls, leads, opportunities, and revenue that they have been getting from digital platforms the last 15 years? This is the value DialogTech provides, by shining a bright light on the black hole that exists in your marketing attribution. By providing attribution for call conversions and enhancing the sales processes with smart contextual call routing the black hole disappears, and at the same time customers are delighted that they are being provided the ability to communicate with companies via their preferred method.

For too long during this digital revolution the technologists of the world have been trying to steal our humanity from us by taking away what makes us unique: our ability to communicate, to have a dialog. They want to reduce everything to filling out a form online or forcing customers into a shopping cart, and the sheer increase of calls being made is showing us that people don’t want that. They want to be able to call, ask questions, and have a dialog, and by not offering that to them they will gladly take their business elsewhere.

This guest post was written by Josh Dickson the founder of Syrah, which makes a web content editing tool, and syndicated with permission. The original vesion is here.

According to famed Silicon Valley investor Bill Gurley, 2015 will be the year of at least one dead unicorn.

“I do think you'll see some dead unicorns this year,” said Gurley earlier in 2015 at SXSW.

For all the talk in technology about embracing failure, we've seen relatively little among the highly valued companies known as unicorns. If no major companies are failing, and instead have access to permanently wide open streams of capital to fix insurmountable problems, perhaps we're in even more of a bubbly tech ecosystem than many think.

And, if the risk of failure is essentially zero, late stage investors like T. Rowe Price, Janus, and Fidelity are certainly getting an incredible deal on their investments. With the average company staying in the S&P 500 for a mere 18 years as of 2015, it's crazy to think that there wouldn't be major failures amongst a group of companies that's ballooned to 84 as of earlier in 2015 — especially as many of the privately held companies would have already gone public in earlier investment cycles.

The idea of dead unicorns in general isn't so compelling to think about. Dead unicorns mean people losing their jobs, their work and projects becoming abandoned. For employees, it means intense periods of stress, loss, and potential hardship. Unlike the financial crisis of 2008, there are no short positions, reverse ETFs, or levered credit default swaps to buy that could provide someone upside like with the failure of a public company.

But unicorns are no longer so rare, and failure is part of a healthy economy's means of turning over into new ideas and new leadership. With tech in the midst of a wide-ranging boom, there are other, more financially-stable and innovative companies hungry to hire away talent into positions better suited to the employees and the economy as a whole. And in failure, there are certainly lessons from which the other unicorns can emerge stronger and more resilient.

The strange thing about dead unicorns is that picking out the ones you expect may be in trouble is tricky. Companies have been able to raise massive amounts of capital, amounts that companies can sit on for years while doing next to nothing. This means failure in technology doesn't look like failures in other industries. Aside from anecdotal stories like the Zirtual mess, unicorns don't simply vanish over the weekend like Bear Sterns. Unicorns die a slow death as their core products lose relevance, new product initiatives fail, user growth slips away, costs mount, and key employees and talent drain from the system. There are layoffs, late-stage down round financing, and pivots. For every company taking cash as it attempts to improve its financials before finally going public, there's another just weeks from becoming a boutique European-inspired furniture retailer.

When we look at how a unicorn might fail, it's clear that one in particular is already well down the path to failure — Evernote.

“Not Passionate”

After a multi-year period of what can only be described radio silence from Evernote, the company made a change at CEO in late July of this year. Phil Libin, a member of the founding team who had repeatedly talked about building Evernote into a '100 year company,' was departing and handing the role over to Google Glass executive Chris O'Neill.

Arik Hesseldahl outlined the transition for Recode:

Evernote did not make O’Neill available for an interview, but in answers to a series of emailed questions, he called the company’s product one that passes what Google CEO Larry Page likes to call “the toothbrush test,” meaning it’s something that a person can use at least twice a day. He counts himself among its fans: “I’m one of the tens of millions of Evernote users who view it as an essential part of my daily life,” he said.

He said he plans to boost Evernote’s efforts to convert its free users to its various paid tiers of service. “Global user growth looks strong as do early returns on recent monetization efforts. User growth and revenue are the oxygen for any successful company so we’ll be looking to double down on this traction,” he wrote. “My job is to lead and scale this great team through the next phase of product and revenue growth, and to preserve Evernote’s unique culture while evolving it over time.”

In explaining the change, Libin described himself as “not passionate” about many roles that fall to a CEO by default: Building a sales team, helping employees grow in their careers and creating the kind of predictable business model that appeals to Wall Street investors.

Based in Redwood City, CA, Evernote isn't exactly on its own in terms of tech-oriented neighbors that it competes with for talent. This makes it particularly inexcusable for Libin to be seemingly disinterested in helping employees grow, especially when he failed to hire a COO until June 1 of this year.

Attracting and retaining talent is a core responsibility of the CEO, and if Libin is seriously disinterested in the latter, he should have departed long ago. I can't imagine the feeling of being an Evernote employee who hears your long-time CEO (and still executive chairman) publicly admit to not giving a shit about your future. Employees and their organizational growth are the lifeblood of technology companies, and it's incredible to actually hear an executive simply admit to not caring. (No, I doubt Steve Jobs cared either, but Libin is no Steve Jobs, and I don't remember Jobs saying so publicly.)

O'Neill's comments are even more of a worrisome signal. I tend to agree with Casey Newton of The Verge in that O'Neill's public comments (quoted above) are worrisome to say the least. Not to mention O'Neill's background seems... off, to run a struggling note-taking software company.

The '100 Year' Company

Evernote's unicorn status dates back in 2012 with a $70M Series D. That brought the total raised by Evernote to $166M, which has since almost doubled to $290M.

Josh Constine writing for Techcrunch in May of 2012:

It’s official. To transition from a startup into a late-stage company that aims to be around for 100 years, Evernote today confirms it’s raised a $70 million Series D round of funding at a $1 billion valuation. Meritech Capital and CBC Capital were chosen to lead the round because they’re the firms that can help Evernote prepare for an eventual IPO.

Evernote doesn’t need the money. It still has much of the $96 million that it’s raised to date in the bank plus over one million paying customers out of its 25 million+ users. But now Evernote will have the cash to isolate itself from short-term market conditions. The Series D will also fund international expansion, including a push in China, strategic acquisitions, the development of business accounts and other features, and hiring of developers, designers, Q&A, and support.

But just because it’s maturing, Evernote has no plans of slowing down. I interviewed CEO Phil Libin about what the future holds for Evernote. He assured me “This funding keeps is us in the sweet spot to take risks. This is the most creative stage for the company.”

Evernote is one of few software companies to have succeeded in China, thanks primarily to its unconventional strategy there. United States-based tech companies like Twitter and Facebook have long been banned in China for their reluctance to monitor (and delete) posts. Chinese clones that mimic functionality while fulfilling the monitoring requirements are frequently the result, like Weibo (Chinese “Twitter”) and Renren (Chinese “Facebook”). Evernote essentially built its own Chinese clone of itself, which it operates entirely in China, complete with a Chinese name: Yinxiang Biji. (Literally “memory notebook” by translation.) As of early in 2015, Evernote had 11.5 million users in China — its second largest market behind the US.

Aside from Evernote's success in China, the Evernote of 2012 sounds little like that of 2015. The short-term market conditions that Evernote of 2012 worried about failed to materialize; instead, 2013 and 2014 were among the best times to raise venture funding ever for private US companies. While the company has made a number of smaller acquisitions, it's failed to make a single acquisition that had a major effect on or addition to its core product. Product risks and new features never materialized. Much like Dropbox, the core product has changed little over the past several years despite the company being flush with cash, traction, and resources.

Libin and Evernote cited choosing two Series D leads for a particular reason: to help prepare for an eventual IPO. Now, in 2015, Evernote is if anything further away from an IPO than ever. Recode on the CEO transition:

Still vague about his preferred timing for an Evernote IPO, Libin hasn’t changed his often-repeated answer about Evernote’s “moral obligation to be a public company” eventually. He also repeated his standard line — one that he has recited since at least mid-2012 — that a public market debut is probably “about two years away.”

“One of the things I’m looking forward to is not being the person whose opinion about an IPO matters the most,” he said. Asked if O’Neill will be the CEO that finally takes Evernote public, Libin said with a grin: “He better.”

In other words, Evernote is not remotely close to an IPO now and never has been.

Making Good Products

The most damning critique of Evernote in 2015 is Phil Libin's comments about Evernote in 2012:

Evernote competes with Dropbox, Box, iCloud, and Google Drive in cloud storage, Instapaper and Spool in web clipping, and Photoshop and Gimp in image editing as Evernote acquired image annotator Skitch last year. The wealth of established competitors indicate a challenge for Evernote, but also a clear need for its products. Libin tells me he doesn’t see competitors as Evernote’s biggest threat, though. “The most likely way we’ll fail is if we stop making good products. If we get defensive, we’ll lose focus on quality.”

Evernote hasn't made even good products for a long time. Like many others I've talked to, I was once a heavy Evernote user, and its died a slow death of irrelevance in my work flow. It fails to even do one thing great, and instead tries to make up for it by doing a number of other things poorly.

Following the CEO announcement, I went to download Evernote for iOS from the App Store, naively wondering what the company had been up to in my years-long absence. I was surprised to find out that Evernote actually was already installed, on both my laptop and phone. Evernote had long been cast aside to my digital junk drawer, the folder of mostly un-deletable garbage from Apple, next to the iTunes Store, Compass, Game Center and iTunes U.

Still, these experiences are anecdotal. The real question is how has the market dealt with Evernote in the years since 2012, and whether major trends are moving in its favor or against it.

Like Dropbox, Evernote eventually came to the realization that real monetization requires business customers. (Which themselves generally require sales, something Libin is, again admittedly, not passionate about.)

It's hard to see how the company has had any success on the business customer front.

Most business customers are using other products already that more than adequately address the need of a note taking application. Many customers have long converted to Google Apps, which bundles document sharing (and spreadsheets, and 'power point') into a larger, more valuable suite of products centered around Gmail. Microsoft's OneNote is available for free, and its collaboration tools are available already for organizations running Microsoft's Office 365.

The most interesting shift away from an Evernote-like model is Slack, which has seen its own meteoric growth into the unicorn club. Slack's power is not just as a messaging platform; it's a real, live, categorized and searchable history of business happenings sorted by channel. What might have once existed as a shared note can now feature multiple types of media, participants, and files, in a far more open and real time fashion than Evernote has ever been able to offer.

It's unclear where Evernote for business might have ever fit in to business workflows, but with the additional openness that tools like Slack promote, Evernote is making a decidedly siloed application in a business world that's becoming more open, accessible, and real-time at every turn.

Evernote knows it. Late last year, the company attempted to roll out a messaging product, Work Chat. I reached out to a number of friends to ask if they had heard about it or used it at their company, with the answer being a resounding, “No and why is Evernote making a chat application?”

The product certainly seems to be a flop in the market. Many Evernote users want to remove it entirely from their note-taking software. 

Growth

It seems like the product is losing relevance, but what do usage numbers look like on important platforms?

Evernote for iOS App Store Rank History, 2011-Present

Download numbers point to Evernote's peak from 2011 into early 2013. While the company's product still ranks relatively well, the numbers are in the midst of a steady decline. (It's worth noting that Evernote does better in the Mac App and iPad App Stores, though the lower volume of each store clouds the picture of how well Evernote is really doing there, and these numbers are US only.)

Microsoft's OneNote has made stable gains over the same period of time.

OneNote for iOS App Store Rank History, 2011-Present

Download numbers are of course just one part of the story. If unicorns die from slow declines in relevance, a more interesting marker is review quantity. Review star counts are not a great way of measuring the success of the company producing the app; Facebook's reviews have been terrible since late 2014, when the company pulled Messenger functionality from its main application. Still, they are a great measure of how many people really care about your product, as both sides of the user experience (both people who love the product, and people who love to hate it) tend to drive review engagement. 

Evernote for iOS App Store Reviews, 2008-Present

These sorts of numbers are not normal for growing, healthy companies, especially with 2015 looking like it might end up near half of that in 2014.

Companies that are undergoing healthy growth see very different engagement metrics:

Snapchat for iOS App Store Reviews, 2011-Present

We see this kind of growth elsewhere in the note taking space, most troublingly for Evernote in OneNote.

OneNote for iOS App Store Reviews, 2011-Present

Retention

Evernote is in the midst of a sizable, prolonged decline in relevance in numerous areas.

On the product side, customers are slowly beginning not to care about the product, while downloads slip and competitors offer better products, many of them, like OneNote, free.

Financially, the company has not raised capital in over three years despite an incredibly friendly climate for doing so.

Competition, not just from note-taking applications, but from elsewhere in Google, Slack, and Dropbox has slowly consumed many of Evernote's features, especially the ones it hopes that it can persuade businesses to pay for.

With other companies up and down the valley experiencing robust, sustained growth, that leads to a new problem: the ability to attract and retain employees. Transformative technology companies are not build by mediocre tech teams, and the best engineers, designers, marketers, and product managers simply have their choice of companies to work for. Evernote's stock situation and inability to move toward IPO severely hurts its ability to hire.

Glassdoor's reviews of Evernote paint a picture of a company suffering internally from the things customers are seeing externally. Removing the more anecdotal critiques of management, it's clear that Libin's recusal from dealing with employee development has had serious consequences. 

Glassdoor Employee Reviews of Evernote, July 2015

“If you want to grow in your field and become great at what you do, avoid this place like it's the plague.”

“Our focus was to improve quality in 2014, I thought, but there was no real improvement but adding stupid new features like Work Chat. With all good chat products like Slack, who [would] use a poor messag[ing] platform? I think they forgot their core competence and start[ed] trying to build an empire. [Total] opposite from collaboration.”

“I have worked for many companies but I have never seen a company who is going downhill this fast. Feel so bad for the smart people who still work there.”

“At times there is a lack of focus on the core product and the execution of company objectives needs streamlining.”

“The company has been experiencing high turnover, which hurts [morale].”

“Please figure out a way to keep the top talent in our buildings.”

“The company has been struggling financially, and this is evidenced by its recent desperate campaign of showing popup's to the free users. Also, many new ideas, like Work Chat, have failed in the marketplace. As such, we have seen something we call attrition, in which scores of people, including a company founder, have quit in the recent months. Desks and entire spaces in the office have gone empty.”

Changes in executive leadership and product direction can be forgiven, but employees in private companies expect to see growth both in terms of their careers and in terms of stock-based compensation. That stock based compensation is among the reasons why companies typically look to go public, or allow early employees to partially cash out during late growth rounds. For Evernote, it's unclear how or when employees will be able to redeem those stock and option rewards. Should Evernote need to take additional cash at a lower valuation, later-stage investors will ensure they get a larger piece of any future successful exit, with lower employee compensation the result.

As startups begin to perform poorly financially, and most tech startups have salaries as their leading cost, layoffs are one way to immediately begin cutting costs. Evernote started with cutting 5% of its 400+ person workforce earlier this year in a “restructuring.”

The Slow Death of Irrelevance

Evernote isn't dead — not yet at least. Its product is still functional, its website working, and employees will walk into its offices on Monday morning. But the seeds for its long-term demise are already well under way.

As growth slows, the most pressing need for the company will be attracting and retaining the kind of talent that can build products capable of turning its fortunes around. That will be difficult. Hiring top talent will be expensive as Evernote loses relevance, and with it, its status as a company that top talent wants to work for. Employees will struggle with how to view awards of Evernote equity, which will be heavily diluted should the company need additional funding before those employees are able to redeem their awards.

Taking a step back, it's amazing how little $290 million in funding has gotten the company.

The idea of taking notes has always been a part of a larger mission around workplace productivity, just ask Phil Libin in 2012. The product roll outs that have occurred, like Work Chat, have been lackluster and late to market. It's core product remains too useful for free to encourage anyone but power users, of which there are becoming fewer, to upgrade. And it's hard to see how Evernote will have success in selling into corporations after it never built out a sales force or enterprise-focused product offerings. The window on the latter in 2015 seems to have substantially closed off as the space becomes more competitive.

The lesson for management teams at other unicorns is clear from Evernote: Forget worrying about whether you're going to be around in 100 years, and refocus on making products that people want that will make money.

Update, 9/15: I've written a follow up post, available here. I'm also @joshdickson40 on Twitter.

SEE ALSO: Ex-Evernote CEO turns VC: 'I don't believe in work-life balance. I believe in life's work.'

Join the conversation about this story »

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When companies come into being, they usually have very specific ideas about their customers: what age they are, how much they make, etc. My question to you as a salesperson (and hopefully as someone who is interested in Social Selling) is, “If a company’s owner or management takes the time and energy to determine this, why shouldn’t you?”

Determining your buyers’ persona (or personas) is an important part of this process. But you also need to be concerned with engaging them at not only the right time, but the best time.

Have you ever worked hard to get a meeting with a person or company you thought was perfectly qualified, only to find out they’ve already obtained whatever it is you’re selling from another salesperson or vendor? Frustrating, right? You’ve spent a lot of time prior to the meeting with your sales prep, only to be shot down before you even begin.

This is why I think the best time for that engagement is before they even need your product or service.

And this is where Social Selling really shines.

Instead of wasting that prep time, use it for what I call “prior engagement” in Social Selling. Prior engagement is the process a Social Seller goes through to attract prospects to her or him before said prospects are ready to buy. It also builds a Social Seller’s “thought leadership” in whatever field or vertical they serve with your products and/or services. If done right, Social Sellers may not even know the specific identities of your prospects prior to being contacted.

Identify Their Triggers

To be in that “prior-engagement” zone, you first need to identify three triggers your prospects need to pull prior to them even thinking about a purchase from you:

Who does your client hire before they need you? Example: If you sell office furniture, your future client is already talking to commercial real-estate agents, architects, telecom companies, IT firms, office-supply companies, recruiters and so on.

What conversations are your prospects having internally that leads up to your solutions? Continuing our office-furniture example, they’re talking about expansions, new hires, moving, mergers, etc.

What questions and challenges will your prospect be facing when deciding how and what to purchase? With office furniture, they’re concerned about quality, quantity of pieces needed, functionality, budget, style… the list goes on.

Develop the Right Content

After you’ve ID’d those triggers, you need to develop insights that provide your prospects with the right questions ask and the pitfalls to avoid. The tactics and strategies you proactively offer to solve their problem will draw them toward you to start a conversation. After all, you’ve proven you will provide value to them during your talk.

The next step is to develop the content that supports those insights. This is where both LinkedIn and your thought leadership come in. Here are five steps to engage on LinkedIn:

1. Find and connect with the right decisions makers and influencers on LinkedIn. At this point you won’t know if and when they will need you, but this is about filling the very top of the sales funnel and providing the right content to get the ones that are ready to raise their hand.

2. Use Google Alerts and/or LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator (Premium product) to keep tabs on your prospects’ articles, activities and announcements. Look for triggers that arise and reach out to them at appropriate times.

3. Write LinkedIn Published Long-Form Posts (think blogging, but on LinkedIn). This is where a lot of your pre-engagement content will be used, so it is vital this content is meaningful to your prospect. When you post, all of your connections will receive a notification of your publication; if it relates to their needs, they will click through to read your insights. If you have a strong call-to-action in your content, you will convert those readers into phone calls.

4. Find excellent articles, blog posts and other content (that’s not necessarily yours). Again, those articles should “pull” your prospects’ triggers, as you determined in your prior-engagement research. Then share that content on your LinkedIn Newsfeed.

(Here’s an advanced tip: Share your Newsfeed articles directly with your prospects in a LinkedIn message:

George: As a CEO of a growing company, I thought I would share with you this great article on how to engage and hire productive employees. Please let me know if you find it useful.

Don’t overuse this one, though.)

5. Develop relationships with strategic alliance partners and other vendors that your prospects work with before they need you. Create a networking group with select referral sources with whom you can all benefit from strategic introductions.

By using the prior-engagement strategy, you can attract prospects you may not even know exist at the best time for them… just before and/or when they need you!

If you want to get a better conversion rate from your website, you have to have an effective CTA. Whether you want increased signups, more sales, or more website traffic, your CTA is key. There are numerous reasons people aren’t purchasing from your website or reading your newsletter. However, the first reason probably has something to do with your CTA. Therefore, today I am providing you with a few tips for creating a more effective CTA for a better ROI.

Contextualize Your CTA

Your CTA needs to be attractive, useful, and fun to receive the best ROI. Anyone can tell someone to do something, but why should they listen when they do not see the value in it. Therefore, I suggest providing details to your readers so they can know where the CTA leads to and why it would benefit them.

Make Your CTA Grab Attention

Remember when I told you that the CTA has to be fun. This is exactly how you grab reader’s attention. It is okay to use bright colors, attractive fonts, and bizarre designs. You want to make sure that it does not fit in with the rest of the text, so readers don’t miss it. CTAs that are in color are sure to grab a reader’s attention and they are more inclined to see where this attention-grabbing text leads.

Keep Your CTA Relevant

Once you have caught your reader’s attention with your CTA, you have to make sure that it is relevant to what they are looking for. Does it provide them with a story or answer their questions? For example, instead of saying “Buy Now” say, “Buy Now for a Limited Time for $50”. You have already caught their attention with the flashy text, but when you tell them that it is a limited time offer of $50, it lets them know this is urgent, how much they need to pay for the item, and that when they click on the CTA they will be lead to an order page. The CTA may be short, but it is short and to the point, which is exactly what you need to boost your ROI.

Use Directional Cues

Your CTA is perfect, but you have to put in a little extra legwork to ensure that your readers will find it and take action.  All of the elements on your site should point to your CTA, which helps readers see that it is important. You want their attention constantly being pulled towards it, so they minimize time searching the website and forget why they were originally directed there. Directional cues could be something as simple as inserting an image that leads to the CTA or having the CTA provided in a header.

These four tips that I have shared with you today will help you get a better ROI from your CTA. As long as you are leading your readers to an effective CTA there is no way that you can go wrong. Just make sure it stands out and provides them with a sense of urgency and you could see a boost in your ROI by the end of the next couple of weeks.

Ask a roomful of B2B demand-gen marketers what their biggest headache is, and 99% will say: lead quality and lead quantity.

But the only reason we want more leads is because we want better-qualified leads. And we figure the best way to get better-qualified leads is to have a bigger selection of leads to choose from. Right?

The reality is that lead quality rarely correlates with quantity. Getting a higher volume of leads doesn’t solve your headache. It’s more like taking a handful of aspirin for your aching knee, and giving yourself a terrible stomachache instead.

Lead Quality: What Does It Really Mean?

The fact is that with the right tools, you can get consistently get a higher quantity of high quality leads that keeps your sales pipeline full of promising opportunities.

How is that possible? One of the priceless gifts we have today is data. With the right tools, we can mine data to find out more about our prospects than we ever thought possible.

But that gift is a double-edged sword. The amount of data out there is overwhelming. If you’re a Fortune 1000 company with a database of millions of customers, hundreds of products and multiple offices around the world, you have a ton of data. The challenge is how to extract valuable insights that will inform your tactical and strategic decisions. As statistician Nate Silver (of ESPN’s FiveThirtyEight Blog) has observed, “finding the signal in the noise” is like finding the proverbial needle in a haystack.

Marketers face the same dilemma with data and lead generation. You have a list of 10,000 contacts that look like your buyers. Even if those contacts seem to have budget and authority, you really can’t be sure about need and timing. And need and timing are the key elements that determine lead quality.

So, how do you know which of those contacts have a need and are ready to buy? How do you avoid putting too much faith in tools that promise to find quality leads among masses of data, only to turn up “false positives?”

It’s all about what you know.

Some marketers think predictive lead scoring will tell you what you need to know. That’s not entirely true. Yes, predictive lead scoring “qualifies” and ranks your contacts; but it only does so based on static attributes like company size (budget) or job title (authority) and a limited number of behavioral signals (read your newsletter). Unfortunately, predictive lead scoring will never identify those two essential elements of need and timing. (To learn more about the differences, watch this webinar.)

How Predictive Intelligence Delivers Quantities Of Quality Leads

With the right predictive intelligence solution, however, you can eliminate this lack of visibility. That’s because an effective predictive intelligence platform will sync your internal data with millions of external data signals to provide a clear, unified view of all your prospects’ buyer profiles, intent signals and predicted buying stages.

For example, 6sense customers can see not only budget and authority, but also know need and timing of each prospect. They know need by seeing which products their prospects are considering and the data sources they have been accessing to learn more about those products. They know timing because the 6sense predictive intelligence engine combs a unique and proprietary blend of data sources to find activities that indicate that the account is entering a buying cycle.

Our customers can track how each prospect moves through his or her buying journey, leaving traces of wants and needs – this data can be used to personalize and target prospects at exactly the right time with the right message. The buyer’s journey today is dynamic; and without a way to gauge need and timing, your lead generation efforts are seriously impaired.

If you know who is “in market” to buy, you don’t need to spray and pray. You can market to and sell to the right people and not to those you think might be interested. If you focus on a buyer that is highly likely to buy, versus bunches of buyers that might be likely to buy, you’ll get better ROI. Less time wasted. Fewer opt-outs. And a higher quantity of quality leads.

For marketers, it’s the best of times and the worst of times. We’re becoming more involved in the pre-sale process as each buyer’s primary tour guide on their journey. That means our value to an organization is increasing, as well.

Strategies are more complex, campaign design depends on data, and paid advertising is one of the most effective ways to rise above the noise and reach audiences in our over-saturated market. To properly execute such calculated efforts, marketing teams require multifunctional, integrated platforms, tools, applications and, ultimately, a bigger budget.

The good news is, investments in marketing technology are increasing, and defending these buys to the C-Suite isn’t as hard as it might have been just five years ago. But, in the words of the Notorious B.I.G., mo money mo problems.

Greater investment in tech means mounting pressure for marketers to prove just how much return their efforts are providing. The data that’s available with marketing technology and it’s inevitable connection to revenue means that marketing spends are more strictly tracked than before. We have a responsibility to utilize the most effective channels in order to efficiently utilize the budgets we control.

It’s a tough spot to be in sometimes, no doubt, but the best way to showcase marketing ROI is to illustrate its impact on lead generation, sales closes and revenue gain.

And that’s where the trouble begins. Marketing teams, in my experience, have been well ahead of the technology curve in most organizations. They’ve led the charge as proponents of smarter, more efficient marketing using the right technology, tech that can impact every part of an organization.

Yet, marketing’s fate often isn’t in its own hands. In the end, it’s the sales team that must close the leads and create the revenue that can be traced back to specific marketing efforts.

Going Beyond Alignment

Here’s a good example of what I’m talking about: If marketing requires support from sales to prove ROI, just ensuring proper lead hand-off isn’t enough. Sales needs to utilize CRM in a specific way to ensure marketing efforts are properly sourced. I’ve heard from many a marketer that their biggest challenge now isn’t getting executive buy-in for their efforts, but rather getting sales to understand their role in the grand scheme.

Marketing and sales alignment can only be reached when a framework consisting of data-driven tools and practices is in place to facilitate information tracking and sharing in real time.

To build this infrastructure, companies need:

• A marketing platform (MP) for the automation and management of lead generation campaigns
• Customer relationship management (CRM) software for tracking and measuring sales activities
• Complete integration between the two softwares

When properly integrated, the two softwares create a closed-loop reporting system that tracks and analyzes key marketing and sales metrics. But for reports to demonstrate true ROI, both marketing and sales must contribute to and fully adopt the softwares.

Marketing must share:

• Lead intelligence, including each lead’s website activity, campaign engagement, download history, social media interaction, etc.

• Lead alerts, including email messages, important notifications (like when a hot lead re-visits the website) and trigger actions (like downloading an eBook or requesting a consultation)

Sales must share:

• Touchpoint histories for each lead, including a record of email and/or phone call attempts and connections

• Lead status updates, including the stage of each deal from first contact to proposal to a closed deal

• Closed won deal amount, including those for new customers and existing customers

The information collected through the integration of a marketing platform and CRM software feeds into highly detailed reports that illustrate: the number of leads your marketing efforts have generated; which campaigns drew them in; how many of those leads qualified for sales; how many converted into a sale; and how much that sale generated in revenue for the company. These are the metrics that will raise CEO eyebrows and (hopefully) earn a larger marketing budget.

But What Can Marketing Departments Do?

The great hope with all of this connected data is that marketing and sales won’t find themselves at odds like they used to. But I recently sat in on a phone call with a sales lead and a marketing lead and realized the conflict was shifting. It’s no longer simply about if leads are good or bad, it’s that marketing can’t prove that leads, campaigns and channels are good or bad without information—a CRM data—from sales. This is where marketing departments have to evolve.

Marketing teams require a technology/operations person who can liaise with sales personnel and CRM managers to ensure the ROI data is being collected. He or she is an essential resource for the setting and tracking of company wide engagement, not just marketing data, that proves marketing made a contribution to the organization. And because of that, this person should be responsible for coaching internal stakeholders on the importance of using the technology correctly.

Is this a marketing role? By default, it has to be. The investment in marketing technology means a person on that team has to advocate for the efforts, including ensuring ROI is captured. That’s the promise of the technology, but it’s up to the humans using it to make sure it’s kept.

With proper connection between platforms and teams, data runs full circle and informational gaps are bridged. This enables marketers to see how their efforts are directly impacting revenue. With this insight, they can also prove marketing ROI with hard numbers and statistics that will appeal most to the C-suite.