If you thought LinkedIn paid advertising was out of your league, think again.

The Missing Link team did it again. Sean Dolan, today’s amazing guest from PushFire, provides an information-packed show you’ll want to listen to again and again.

You’ll learn more about the different types of paid advertising available on LinkedIn, what’s available to any small business owner, and how to make the most of your paid advertising through different LinkedIn ad options.

Sean Dolan brings the heat as he shares his extensive experience with LinkedIn paid marketing. The Missing Link host Sean Jackson asks him some hard questions, and he delivers every time.

In this episode, you can look forward to learning the following (plus more):

• The advertising options available on LinkedIn
• The pricing options available to you
• Why you should plan to waste some of your money
• How many people you need to target
• Exactly where to get started
• Why your ad size matters

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Rainmaker.FM is the premier digital marketing and sales podcast network. Get on-demand digital business and marketing advice from experts, whenever and wherever you want it.

The post How to Advertise on LinkedIn Without Breaking the Bank appeared first on Copyblogger.

It can be easy to forget about the big picture when you’re caught up in the day-to-day whirlwind of qualifying prospects, closing deals, or managing a team, but it’s important to think about where you want to end up and what you need to do in order to get there.

There are countless roles in sales and many different ways you can climb the ladder to make your way to the top. However, there are four primary sales career paths:

• Inside Sales
• Sales Operations
• Business Development
• Marketing

Yes, sales and marketing are separate departments, but many people switch between the two during their careers, given their similar nature. And sales operations and business development both relate more closely to marketing than you might think.

Now let’s walk through each of these four sales career paths from beginning to end.

Inside Sales Career Path

This is the typical path for sales reps at B2B SaaS companies that spend their days on the phones, rarely out in the field. It’s the modern path for the classic salesperson who longs for the feeling of closing big deals and cashing commission checks.

The entry-level role for this trajectory is the Sales Development Rep. This position involves prospecting leads, creating opportunities, and setting up meetings for closers. The best reps move on to become Account Executives who spend their days in meetings with prospects and closing deals. After learning the ins and outs of how sales teams operate, top-performing AEs can move into leadership roles, like Sales Manager and Sales Director.

The most successful of sales leaders go on to become Sales VPs, especially if they get their MBA. Top-notch VPs then get promoted to Chief Revenue Officers (CRO) who are responsible for driving sustainable revenue growth.

Sales Operations Career Path

Sales operations is another new type of career path that has emerged with the advent of CRMs like Salesforce. This field is perfect for analytical people who prefer to dig into the nitty gritty of CRMs to reveal opportunities for optimization.

While most people move into sales operations roles after spending some time in inside sales, the most entry-level role for this path is CRM Specialist. From there, the next position in line is CRM Admin, also known as “the Salesforce guy (or girl).” People in these roles spend their days getting the most from Salesforce and pick away at the 5,000 page Salesforce User Guide in their free time. Once they really know their stuff, they go on to become Sales Ops Managers and Sales Enablement Directors further down the line.

The best of the best sales operations people eventually move into executive roles as VPs of Strategy. From there, they can be promoted to Chief Strategy Officers (CSO) who develop and execute strategic initiatives to drive growth in innovative ways.

Business Development Career Path

Business development is best described as the creation of long-term value for an organization from customers, markets, and relationships. People cut out for business development roles are very different from people in sales operations — rather than spend their days digging around in Salesforce, they prefer to build real relationships with potential partners, customers, and influencers.

The most entry-level position in this path is Business Development Rep (BDR). BDRs are often tasked with the same objectives as SDRs – qualifying leads and setting up meetings for closers. The BDRs who are make real connections with people and easily establish rapport can become effective Account Managers who work with customers to ensure they’re ensure they’re happy. The most personable of account managers do well moving into channel sales leadership roles, Channel Manager or Channel Director. People in these positions spend their time building co-branding relationships and developing partnerships with like-minded, non-competitive companies.

People in channel sales interested in an executive role should have their sights set on becoming VP of Business Development. And the C-suite position next in line is Chief Business Development Officer (CBDO), which involves facilitating business growth by strengthening relationships with customers and partners while constantly seeking new opportunities.

Marketing Career Path

Even though marketing is an entirely separate department from sales, there’s more overlap than meets the eye. By now, you’ve probably heard about smarketing, a term made popular by HubSpot. Sales and marketing go hand in hand, and people often move from roles in one to another. Many executives at SMBs and startups serve as the VP of Sales and Marketing. Navigating between these departments is more common than you might think.

The marketing roles most closely related to sales is Marketing Operations. This involves handing off leads to the sales team and ensuring that workflows and communications with prospects are optimized. People in these operations roles can move into Sales Operations roles, given how closely related they are. Or they can move up into leadership roles as Marketing Managers and Marketing Directors, if they really master their trade.

It should marketers managing relationships with partners work closely with Channel Managers, and are prime candidates for such roles – lots of overlap here.

The executive role in marketing is VP of Marketing, which entails scaling the company’s reach by driving more website traffic and generating more leads. The next step up to the C-suite is Chief Marketing Officer (CMO).

For entry-level sales reps (SDRs and BDRs), the world is your oyster – there are countless career paths to choose from in sales. It’s just a matter of discovering what you enjoy doing most and where you want to end up.

To learn more about where your career is headed, check out our Sales Career Path Chart.

Israel has been branded the “startup nation.” For good reason: A tiny country of only 8 million people — 0.1% of the world’s population — has more companies listed on the NASDAQ than any country in the world save the United States and China. Frequently cited as one of the world’s most vibrant innovation hubs, Israel boasts more startups per capita than any other country in the world.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that Israeli startups are struggling to scale. Only a handful of so-called unicorns — companies that have achieved a valuation of over $1 billion in the last 10 years — come from Israel, and only one Israeli firm, Teva, ranks in the world’s 500 largest companies by market capitalization. As a result, tech-sector employment has declined as a percent of the workforce, from 11% in 2006–2008 to 9% in 2013. That’s disappointing for a country with so much potential. But is all of that changing? Are Israeli companies on the verge of developing a repeatable playbook to scale their companies and become market leaders, not just acquisition fodder for the Silicon Valley giants?

We think so.

Why Is Israel So Entrepreneurial?

Decades ago, the thesis of Yossi Vardi, a prolific technology entrepreneur who has invested in 75 Israeli startups, was that Israeli entrepreneurs should seek quick exit opportunities through global corporations interested in buying a window into Israeli talent and technology. Today, this thesis is less relevant. For the first time in history there are Israeli companies scaling up successfully as global market leaders, and the ecosystem is evolving to support them. Indeed, the pattern of scaling seems to be changing meaningfully in recent years. In 2014, for example, 18 IPOs raised a record-breaking $9.8 billion, compared to just $1.2 billion in 2013.

So how do Israeli ventures scale up? What are the challenges and lessons of scaling up? To answer these questions, we built a database of 112 Israeli companies founded between 1996 and 2013 that have met or exceeded $20 million in revenue. We selected this benchmark because it reflects the phase in which companies have proven product viability, achieved initial product/market fit, and are now expanding sales and growing more complex operations. We also interviewed over two dozen Israeli entrepreneurs and the investors from these companies — the leading thinkers in the region — to determine the playbook that these startups are executing in order to scale.

Here’s what the data say about Israeli startups:

1. They’re Israeli-run but with global footprints. Eighty-two percent have global offices, and yet 91% are still run by Israeli CEOs, as opposed to foreign executives hired from the outside.
2. American VCs are critical. Ninety-one percent of the firms have received funding from foreign (mainly American) VCs.
3. The founders have started companies before. Sixty-three percent of startups currently scaling up are run by Israeli entrepreneurs with prior founding experience.

This evolving model is being supported and encouraged by the local Israeli VCs. According to Izhar Shay, a general partner at Canaan Partners, “The investment community has matured to recognize they need to plan for scale. They are seeking to build companies so that they are attractive to late-stage funds.” And the late-stage global funds are swarming in, from Accel to KKR to Li Kai-Shing’s Horizon Ventures.

This article outlines some of these patterns, seeks to characterize them, and draws out patterns in the data.

Pack Your Bags Early.

Despite hosting a rich startup ecosystem, Israel is simply too small a country for entrepreneurs seeking to build big companies. As a result, Israeli entrepreneurs need to begin immediately thinking outside of Israel since their primary market is often the U.S. The common approach is to incubate the business locally in Israel with a small development team, prove early product/market fit, and then build a sales and marketing organization abroad, usually in the U.S. In the old model of Israeli startups, many Israeli executive teams would hire a vice president of sales in the U.S. to assist with the local go-to-market approach. More recently, Israeli founders are themselves moving to the U.S. to build the satellite office and to personally oversee the recruitment and management of American executives who can lead the sales and marketing efforts.

However, waiting to move to the U.S. until the late-stage go-to-market phase may be too late. All of the risks inherent in launching a startup are exacerbated by the geographic distance between Israel and the U.S. Hiring talent and gathering customer feedback are even harder when teams are so physically far apart, and this separation can make it harder to build culture, forge partnerships, and raise capital.

So how early should the founders pack their bags and ship out to the U.S.? Our analysis and interviews suggest the prevailing wisdom has shifted toward a simple answer: as early as possible. Although the technical team often remains in Israel, many of the executives interviewed recommend departing for the U.S. as early as a year or two after founding. A move allows the business to get close to the customer, learn their pain points, and adapt accordingly. Understanding the market and establishing product/market fit is a critical seed-stage milestone.

When Udi Mokady and Alon Cohen launched CyberArk — the darling of the cybersecurity industry, with a market capitalization of nearly $2 billion — the founders abandoned the local strategy early on. “We began selling to local Israeli companies but had a strong feeling we were developing a product and go-to-market strategy that was missing the larger opportunity,” said Mokady. As soon as CyberArk raised Series A funding, they set up a U.S. headquarters, in Massachusetts, to immerse the team in the American market. “At the time, moving close to the market was not a given, and venture capitalists did not have a clear playbook. Nowadays the argument is very clear.”

Similarly, when Yaron Samid launched BillGuard, his team debated whether to build an enterprise or a consumer company. One-and-a-half years after founding the company, Yaron moved to New York and discovered that consumers, rather than banks, were the primary customer of BillGuard’s service, which helps customers identify fraudulent credit card charges. With the development team based in Israel, Samid shuttles between New York and Tel Aviv, where he shares weekly insights garnered from conversations with partners, consumers, and investors in the market. Viewing this as the typical challenge of running a global company, Samid believes there is no substitute for the learning that comes from being close to the market.

The second reason to move early is to hire the absolute best sales and marketing talent. Again and again, the most challenging issue we heard about from entrepreneurs and investors is finding and retaining exceptional talent, a problem exacerbated by geographical and cultural distance. According to Modi Rosen, general partner of Magma Ventures, “The challenge of scaling is primarily in hiring for the sales and marketing front. Having the founder [locally] present for this process can be the difference between success and failure.” Companies should strengthen the Israeli management team with local talent who understand how to define the market, how to sell into it, and how to gather feedback. Furthermore, companies need particular executives to serve as the primary liaison between the sales and marketing team in the U.S. and the development team in Israel. There are many Israeli professionals who have worked in the U.S. and have gained management experience at large organizations such as Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. There are also American executives who have experience working with startups with R&D in India, China, and Israel. Both cohorts can bridge cultural and geographical gaps.

In CyberArk’s case, Mokady admits the team faced major challenges in hiring talented and seasoned American executives. “We had a rough start,” he says. “As an unknown Israeli company breaking in to the U.S. market, we were not able to attract A-rated sales and marketing professionals. It took some time to gain momentum and learn how to attract local talent.”

One of the key lessons CyberArk learned is to partner with VCs in order to source top talent. Mokady believes that partnering with a Boston-based VC would have helped CyberArk address its talent problems more effectively because the VC would have vouched for the company. With that said, the founding team had big dreams of becoming a global company from the beginning. Although their investors were not local, CyberArk still benefitted by partnering with foreign VCs that helped them make the leap from Israel to the U.S.

Think Bigger.

This takeaway surprised us. After all, Israeli entrepreneurs are known to be tenacious and eager to tackle complex technological and entrepreneurial challenges. However, in our interviews with Israeli venture capitalists, we learned that around the board room, Israeli entrepreneurs tend to become overly preoccupied with the product and core technology. This fixation generates a short-term view on the potential of the venture to expand beyond the immediate product line. Of course, almost all entrepreneurs are preoccupied with near-term priorities, but our interviews uncovered a pattern of Israeli companies putting too much focus on the product at the expense of building a broad vision for growth, even after achieving product/market fit.

Scaling up begins with thinking about how you build a bigger story and a bigger vision once the company is expanding. Alan Feld, cofounder and managing partner of Vintage Partners, cautions Israeli entrepreneurs not to define their product category too narrowly. “The big idea is to think as a potential industry leader rather than a one-product company. Think of where you want to be in five years and begin building a product pipeline to get there.” For Netanel Oded, of Israel’s National Economic Council, the critique is more poignant: “In Israel, nobody is saying ‘I’m going to completely disrupt transportation.’ Israeli entrepreneurs are first and foremost focused on applying technology to create a business, not necessarily on disrupting big markets through the use of technology.” This subtle difference risks limiting the scope of the opportunities Israeli entrepreneurs are chasing.

Once startups begin to scale up, founders need to ask long-term strategic questions such as: How do I support growth in human capital? How do I strengthen my market position through acquisitions and innovation? How do I prove the unit economics to justify raising a growth round that will let me expand more rapidly? These are also questions that will concern late-stage investors who provide the companies the opportunities to scale and, eventually, go public.

Partner with Foreign VCs

Israeli entrepreneurs are becoming more focused on getting foreign (mostly American) VC partners in the early stages to help them pursue these opportunities from the onset. American VCs have a significantly wider network and have a capability to access management talent, data, partners, and customers to help a company scale. American VCs think about scale from the start, because their large fund sizes necessitate bigger returns. They spend more time on strategy, go-to-market, business development, and financing.

The data reveal how dramatically foreign investors impact the growth of Israeli companies, as measured by annual sales and number of employees. Israeli companies funded solely by foreign investors generated more growth than those funded by both Israeli and foreign VCs and significantly more growth than companies funded by Israeli investors alone. (One caveat: This may not point to causation, as some investors are better than others at picking rapidly-growing companies.)

But American VC partners might not always be the right choice, especially in the earliest stages. Many entrepreneurs and investors argue that Israeli VCs are more frugal and that this discipline is an important early attribute for startups. According to Ori Israely, investor and former general partner of Giza Venture Capital, “There is more fit between [an] Israeli entrepreneur and [an] Israeli investor in the seed stages. Israeli funds often know how to work better with the early stage companies because they provide efficient capital, not necessarily more capital.” Israeli VCs seek to invest relatively smaller amounts—not to squeeze out the entrepreneurs, but to help them be more efficient in the early stages.

The extra runway from an American VC can come with strings attached. Once entrepreneurs bring in an American VC that typically invests at higher valuations, there is greater pressure to hit bigger milestones, move to the U.S., and pursue larger outcomes. So the decision on when to bring on an American VC is an important and strategic one.

Lead Your Company to Scale.

A decade ago, the traditional model for building up Israeli companies was to hire an American CEO. Our interviews and analysis suggest that this model failed. Today, companies reaching scale are run by Israeli founders and/or Israeli CEOs. Studying the liquidity events of Israeli firms valued over $150 million, Vintage Partners found that 81% were run by Israeli founders, while half of the remaining 19% were run by professional CEOs who were Israeli. In short, Israeli entrepreneurs are leading their companies to scale.

This conclusion is an interesting one. On one hand, Israelis need to continue to lead their companies to scale effectively. On the other hand, they need to attract foreign VCs to help them do so — typically by moving to the U.S. and recruiting a U.S.-based executive team.

So how can Israeli entrepreneurs effectively lead their organization to scale? Our interviews suggest Israeli founders have worked hard to mitigate the risks associated with a move to the U.S., developing techniques to effectively manage distributed teams and cut through cultural barriers:

• Focus on culture from day one. Startups are incredibly fluid early on, and these early days are critical to building teams that can communicate and function effectively in geographically distributed circumstances. Over the course of 2–3 years, the product, the value proposition, and the competition will change dramatically. Yahal Zilka, of Magma Ventures, emphasizes that for the company to be aligned in multiple locations and react effectively to rapidly changing circumstances, employees need to develop a culture of trust and respect that transcends continents.

• Place one founder on each continent. If the founding team contains more than one person, an effective formula that we’ve witnessed is placing one founder in Israel and one abroad, where he or she will recruit the management team. Typically, these founders know each other very well, have a deep mutual trust and respect, and can communicate seamlessly, often from years of serving in the military together. Alon Cohen, cofounder and former CEO of CyberArk, moved the company headquarters to Dedham, Massachusetts, just one year after founding in Israel. Cohen said that moving the headquarters to the United States had been talked about for some time after the company was founded, in 1999. Shortly after the move, the company hired 25–30 people in the U.S. while maintaining R&D in Israel. Fifteen years later, CyberArk employs more than 500 individuals worldwide and serves more than 1,800 customers, including 40% of Fortune 100 companies.

• Get a mentor with a solid track record. It may sound obvious, but unlike in Silicon Valley, there are not many entrepreneurs from Israel who have built unicorn-sized companies. “Over the growth stages in particular, Israeli entrepreneurs need access to mentors that can deliver contextual insights and ask tough questions about scaling up in the United States,” says Dror Berman, of Innovation Endeavors. The mentors who serve this role in the U.S. know how the entrepreneurial game is played, know the relevant growth-stage investors and investment bankers, and are adept at navigating exits at different stages. There are also more institutions and infrastructure for training managers, such as MBA programs, executive education, and certification programs. Most Israeli entrepreneurs have not been through this whole cycle at scale. Those that have are gold.

Israeli entrepreneurs are influenced by the success stories of their past. From 1995–2010, the Israeli startup ecosystem was not focused on creating big companies. Things have changed dramatically in the past two decades. What was once the story of ICQ’s $287 million exit to AOL is now the story of MobileEye’s NYSE IPO and $12 billion market capitalization. Years from now, Waze’s $1 billion sale to Google may look like merely a solid outcome, rather than the canonical case study of Israeli entrepreneurship that it is today.

It is time for more Israeli entrepreneurs to swing for the fences. Building big companies means Israeli entrepreneurs should pack their bags and move to a large market early, partner with American VCs, continue to lead the company through the mid-to-late stages, and focus on building a culture.

In our data set, we found over 100 companies that have the potential to become unicorns and decacorns. We look forward to watching that list grow and evolve.

There was quite a reaction to our recent article New Studies Make It Official: Sex Doesn’t Sell. That’s not surprising, considering the topic: the relentless trope of sex in advertising. Some marketers even emailed me objecting to a point to the research; they even presented data from advertising campaigns where sexual imagery and content bolstered a brand.

Their statistics were sound, I must admit, so what is going on? Does the babe or stud holding your beloved product work or not? Out of work actors and checkbook-holding CMO’s want to know.

I would contend, based on the studies I cited, that sex still doesn’t sell. Having said that, I can accept that at one point sex did potentially sell. Let me expand, specifically by expanding on one of the studies mentioned in the previous article.

The coupling of sex and big data

The expansion comes from the insights of a recent Newsweek article, written by the authors of the cited Psychology Bulletin study in the previous article: Robert Lull and Brad Bushman.

To support their initial analysis, Lull and Bushman took sex in advertising to big data levels. They conducted a meta-analysis—or quantitative review—of existing studies on the impact of sex and violence in advertising. They processed 53 studies that qualified for inclusion, involving a total of 8,489 participants.

According to the article, this the sampling of what they found:

• – Brands advertised alongside violent media content were remembered less often, evaluated less favorably and less likely to be purchased than those advertised in nonviolent contexts

• – Brands advertised using sexual themes were evaluated less favorably than brands advertised using nonsexual images

• – As the intensity of sexual ad content increased (from suggestive poses to full frontal nudity), memory, attitudes and buying intentions decreased

• – There were no significant effects of sexual ads or violent ads on memory or buying intentions

• – However, when media content and ad content were congruent (eg, violent ads in violent programs, nonviolent ads in nonviolent programs), memory improved and buying intentions increased.

In the end, Lull and Bushman stand by the notion that sexual (and violent) programs and ads do not increase brand value. The exception, they admit, would be when media content and ad content occurred together; however, these measures of ad effectiveness were either insignificant or actually somewhat negative. The authors furthermore admit there is much research to be done when it comes to the sexual advertising on the internet, but as things now stand…

Does that settle the issue of sex in advertising?

The Divorce of Sex and Human Awareness

As mentioned, I could certainly accept the idea that at one point sex in advertising worked effectively for brands. Perhaps the game has changed in this digital age where consumers are savvier than ever in filtering media missives. In fact, there are theories that support a paradigm change:

The Evolutionary Theory

This theory is proposed in the Newsweek article by Lull and Bushman. In short, the theory states that our minds are hardwired to be attentive to sex and violence. They were a vital way of life for our ancestors. As the authors state:

Attending to violent cues prevented our evolutionary ancestors from being killed by enemies or predators, while attending to sexual cues attuned our evolutionary ancestors to potential opportunities for reproduction.

The problem is that the human attention span is now focused on other, more cerebral notions, as we continue to evolve. Sex and violence capture our attention, but they ultimately don’t keep it when presented alongside other competing messages.

Desensitizing

There are many studies claiming that exposure to sex and violence ultimately desensitizes the human mind.

I am not going argue any moral grounds in this article. Nevertheless, it simply makes sense that the more competing sexual imagery being broadcast the less effective it will serve a specific brand. As qSample has presented: 5 minutes is the average attention span of a person (dropping from 12 minutes in the course of the last ten years). There are simply more choices, more media bombardment, and less room to make a connection with consumers.

Believe it or not, even sex can be watered-down in the human consciousness.

Conservative Nation

The U.S. has become more progressive in the last few years, according to Gallup. However, Gallup also states that the country still tilts heavily towards more conservative values, a trend that occurred as the economy soured in blue-collar states after the 2008 economic crash.

The media may be shelling consumers with sexual imagery and content, but it makes sense there would be resistance by a more traditional population more accustomed to being frugal in a new economy.

With all of this in mind, it’s reasonable to understand why sex doesn’t sell (even if, according to the emails I got, it once sold well years ago in well-planned campaigns).

Could sex sell again in the future?

Perhaps. But at the moment it’s certain that sex is formidable for seducing consumer attention, but rather limp when it comes to actually promoting a brand.

I was talking with a friend of mine recently — the CEO of a high-growth SaaS company whose name I’ll protect for the sake of privacy — who conveyed to me his frustration with measuring the ROI of events. Like a growing number of B2B SaaS companies, his startup hosts an industry event every year that’s more or less designed to grow awareness of his market and build relationships with prospective customers.

The event’s widely considered a success by its attendees, but this CEO told me it’s hard to say exactly how successful it is — and that’s a very real problem when he’s trying to communicate to his board why the company should continue putting significant resources behind it. The event draws a wide range of high-profile speakers and generates a fair amount of press, but what’s that quantitatively worth to the company’s bottom line?

Sound familiar?

For many B2B SaaS CEOs, events are a quagmire. On one hand, hosting, sponsoring, and attending them can be a great way to build your brand, engage with industry influencers, and fill the middle of the funnel with qualified leads. On the other hand, events are historically difficult marketing investments to measure, which often leads to them being underutilized or improperly valued.

Are B2B Events Really Measurable?

Here’s why that’s a mistake: Events (whether it’s a smaller field marketing workshop or a larger industry conference like HubSpot’s INBOUND, which is happening this week in Boston) can deliver an extremely high ROI that can be quantified. But in order for that to happen, CEOs must start thinking differently about how (and when) they measure each event’s impact.

To do that, you have to start viewing events as proportional investments in various stages of the customer lifecycle. For example, if you spend $100,000 to sponsor and fly your team to HubSpot’s INBOUND, you might break that investment down this way:

• 33% lead generation: A big part of sponsoring and attending an event like INBOUND is lead gen, but it’s not all you do there. As such, allocating a portion of your total spend (in this example, $33k of your $100k) on lead gen allows you to better evaluate the proportional impact of that one activity. It lowers the bar in a good way by more accurately reflecting the activity-investment ratio.
• 33% existing pipeline: At INBOUND, some of your time will also be spent on nurturing and accelerating prospects who are already in your pipeline. Designating part of your $100k investment to this aspect of your pipeline is also reasonable and it’ll make measuring the ROI of the event much easier — particularly if you actually close an existing prospect at the event.
• 33% customer success: Events like INBOUND are also a good opportunity to interact and build relationships with existing customers, but that aspect of events is rarely evaluated as part of the ROI calculation. It should be.

Now, keep in mind that the proportions above are just examples. The value you place on each category (lead gen, existing pipeline, and customer success) will vary by the type of event, who will be there, and what you plan to accomplish.

If, for instance, you’re hosting a customer summit, then you might change the ROI calculation to look more like this: 5% lead gen, 5% existing pipeline, and 90% customer success. Alternatively, if you’re attending a tradeshow, the ROI calculation might look like this: 70% lead gen, 20% existing pipeline, and 10% customer success.

Pre-Requisites for Measuring B2B Event ROI

Once you’ve nailed the investment breakdown for an event, it’s important to make sure you have metrics in place to actually evaluate each aspect. It’s nice to know that 50% of your time/energy/activity will be spent on lead gen at an event, but that’s meaningless if you don’t have a way of measuring your performance in that category.

With that being said, here are some things you’ll want to do before (and after) an event to effectively measure its ROI:

1. Implement the right metrics for each category: You can’t measure what you can’t see. It’s absolutely critical to have lead gen, existing pipeline, and customer success metrics in place that you can put against the results you achieve at an event.
2. Evaluate past performance: If you’ve hosted a customer summit before, look back at what happened to the leads and customers you interacted with at that event. Did those accounts close at a higher rate than other lead gen sources? Did customers upgrade or renew at a higher rate than customers who didn’t come to the summit? If you’re hosting or attending an event for the first time, you can still evaluate performance by benchmarking against similar events.
3. Create a “before and after” plan: What will you do before the event to maximize your ROI? And how will you follow-up with the leads and relationships you develop at the event? Before an event, you might reach out to key prospects to set up appointments or meetings. After an event, you need to have a clear strategy for engagement, just as you would after any other meeting with a prospect or customer.

Like most things, the success of an event is largely predicated on preparation. If you go in with a plan and a clear strategy to maximize the ROI of the three categories I mentioned above, then it becomes much easier to evaluate (and, more importantly, justify) your investments. If you don’t, then you’ll probably walk away from the conference wondering how to explain that $100,000 investment at your next board meeting.

The post A Simple Way to Measure the (Potentially) Enormous ROI of B2B Events appeared first on OpenView Labs.

Every salesperson knows the quality of their sales manager will have a profound impact on their own success. A recent study I conducted proves this point. Sixty-nine percent of salespeople who exceeded their annual quota rated their sales manager as being excellent or above average. In addition, the quality of the sales organization is directly associated to the quality of sales leadership. Fifty-six percent of salespeople who rated their sales organization as excellent also rated their sales manager as excellent—compared to only 3% who rated their organization as average.

If the best sales organizations have great sales leaders, what separates high-performing sales leaders who exceed their quota from underperformers who miss their quota by more than 25%?

To find the answer to this question, over 400 sales leaders (vice presidents of sales and frontline sales managers) completed an extensive sales management performance study. Twenty-nine percent of participants met or exceeded their annual quota last year, while 42% achieved between three quarters and all of their quota. Twenty-nine percent achieved less than 75% of their annual quota.

I also interviewed over 1,000 sales leaders to better understand the impact of management styles and personality patterns on sales success. This combination of quantitative and qualitative research provides insights about the attributes of high-performing sales leaders compared to their less successful counterparts. These attributes are described below in order of priority.

Target fixation. The best sales leaders are target and deadline driven. In personality testing, top sales managers scored 19% higher in the self-discipline facet, 20% higher in the success-driven facet, and 27% higher in the priority-focused facet than underperforming sales managers. As a result, they have the natural disposition to fixate their team on achieving their revenue goals at the exclusion of all else. They block out distractions and compartmentalize negative news that might sidetrack their team or cause their department to flounder. They keep their team focused and moving forward with a sense of urgency, regardless of the circumstances.

Command instinct. Great sales leaders establish firm command over their team by exercising the power their title and position entail. For example, they hold their team to a higher level of accountability. Seventy-five percent of high-performing sales managers agreed that their salespeople are consistently measured and held accountable against their quota, compared to 58% of underperforming sales managers. However, their authority is not autocratically administered as you might think. Rather, it is based upon establishing an environment where sales team members continually seek to prove themselves, thereby driving higher overall departmental performance. The leaders establish this culture using a “carrot and stick” psychological approach. Overachievers receive praise and public recognition, while underachievers are admonished or ostracized until they redeem themselves. In essence, the command instinct is responsible for creating the peer-pressure and attention-seeking environment that eliminates complacency.

Hiring ability. The ability to hire quality talent will determine the success or failure of the sales organization. Seventy-two percent of high performing sales managers rated the sales team they manage as excellent or above average, compared to 54% for underperforming sales managers. Conversely, 46% of underperforming sales managers rated their team as average or below average, while only 28% of high performing sales managers thought so. High-performing sales managers focus on hiring salespeople who are skillful builders of relationships, are persuasive, and have a reservoir of experience they use to control sales cycles.

Sales intuition. Sales is a mentorship-based profession, and a key differentiator of great sales leaders is their ability to dispense tactical sales advice and add value during customer meetings. While the average sales experience for both high-performing and underperforming sales managers was 17 years, high-performing sales managers estimated they have achieved their annual quota 88% of the time over the course of their career. Underperforming sales managers indicated they have achieved their quota 75% of the time. This suggests that the depth of a manager’s sales intuition—the practical knowledge gained from the experiences of participating in sales cycles and managing salespeople—is directly associated with their success.

Control orientation. Sales managers who closely monitor and strictly enforce a sales process are more likely to exceed their quotas, and the best sales leaders seek to control the daily behavior of their sales teams. Forty-three percent of high-performing sales managers responded that their sales process was closely monitored, strictly enforced, or automated, compared to 29% of underperforming sales managers. Forty-four percent of underperforming sales managers indicated they had a nonexistent or an informal structured sales process.

Coaching adaptability. Great sales leaders understand that there is a diversity of selling styles by which salespeople can achieve success. Therefore, they don’t employ a one-size-fits-all coaching style. Rather, they adapt their style to suit each individual. The fact that high-performing sales managers had a higher team effectiveness factor than underperforming teams supports these statements.

A team effectiveness factor is calculated by averaging total quota achievement across the number of salespeople on the team. For example, if a team of ten sales reps who each had $1 million quotas sold $8 million in total revenues, the team effectiveness factor would be 80% ($8 million of actual sales divided by $10 million of quota). High performing sales managers averaged an 81% team effectiveness factor, while underperforming sales managers averaged 55%. One explanation for this significant difference is that high-performing sales managers have a wider range of coaching adaptability.

It’s also important to note that high-performing sales managers had higher quota risk pool factors than underperforming sales managers. A sales manager’s quota risk pool factor is calculated by adding together all the quotas of the salespeople who report to the manager and dividing the sum by the manager’s quota. For example, a sales manager with a $10 million quota who manages ten salespeople with $2 million quotas  would have a quota risk pool factor of two.

Strategic leadership. All sales leaders are battlefield commanders who must devise the organization’s sales strategy to defeat the competition. This requires plotting the best course of action to maximize revenue using the most cost-effective sales model. Great sales leaders possess the knowledge to correctly deploy field or inside salespeople, to segment the market into verticals, and to specialize sales teams by product or customer types when necessary. This helps explain why there was a 51% quota performance gap between high-performing and underperforming sales leaders last year. High-performing sales leaders reported an overall average annual quota attainment of 105% compared to 54% for underperforming sales managers.

The sales organization is unique and unlike any other department of a company. The best sales organizations have strong leaders who exercise control and establish the code of behavior that all team members must abide by. They employ their experiences to determine strategic direction and coach team members individually. Most importantly, they know how to keep the team on track and focused on winning.

Why does your company have a blog? Is it to help the search engines find you? To have some content for the email newsletter?

Those things count, but they probably aren’t your number-one concern. If you’re in B2B and you’ve got a company blog, you’ve probably got it for the leads. And you always want more leads from your blog. Better leads. And then, a way to nurture them.

Fortunately, blogs can be really good at all that. Blogs actually come in as one of the best lead generation tactics going for B2B marketers. Here’s how they rank in the pantheon of B2B lead generation techniques, according to the Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs “B2B Content Marketing: 2015 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends” report: marketers say only in-person events and webinars are more effective.

For another perspective on blogs – from the readers’ point of view – here’s which content formats B2B buyers say they use the most. The data is from the 2015 Content Preferences Survey, published by Demand Gen.

And among all content types, blog posts remain the most frequently shared pieces of content, with 40% sharing them frequently and 33% sharing them sometimes.

While blogs don’t make first place for lead generation, they are a key part of a lead generation marketing mix. And they work especially well when they’re optimized for lead gen. If you try just a few of the tactics listed below, you may find them even more effective than some of the studies (which average out performance) do.

1. Optimize for search traffic

First, have a keyword worth optimizing for. Usually that means a carefully selected long-tail key word.

Next, make things easy for yourself and install the WordPress plugin “Yoast SEO.”. It will give you a list of things to fix, optimize or complete to get your post SEO-ready. Just keep following its suggestions until the little Yoast SEO button turns green.

2. Offer calls to action to “content upgrades”

These are related content pieces made of more detailed or more actionable information than what’s included in the post. Typically they’re offered as a call to action at the close of the post, but sometimes you’ll see them sandwiched between paragraphs.

The key element of the content upgrade is to link to a gated asset, with an opt-in form for getting the visitor’s email address. This is one of the best ways to not only get leads, but to also get leads who have raised their hands for a specific kind of content. You can figure out a lot about not only their interests, but where they are in the buying cycle, simply by tracking which pieces of content they’ve asked for.

But there is a downside. You’ll need the content upgrade – the new piece of content. That means a bit more work, but it’s worth it. Some marketers have increased their blog’s opt-in rates by more than 300% with content upgrades.

Here are some ideas for possible content upgrades:

• A template (social media updates template, sales letter template, editorial calendar template)
• The video recording of a seminar
• A workbook
• A video series
• A process map

Here’s an example of a content upgrade from the CoSchedule blog. The blog post is about how to repurpose blog post content into new formats. The content upgrade is a map that guides you through which pieces of content to reformat, and which formats would work best.

3. Offer recommended reading at the close of blog posts

This is basically the free version of a content upgrade (free because there’s no email address required). It’s not nearly as good for lead generation, because you aren’t getting someone’s contact information, but it is a way to keep them on your site and engaged until they are ready to give you their information.

Here’s an example of a related reading box at the end of a blog post on the Stripe blog. Notice the content upgrade just above it. It’s okay to offer both.

You’ll see a recommended reading block at the bottom of this page, too. We find them very useful.

4. Ask for email addresses

This is a tactic you should be using all over your site, but especially on your blog. Actually, many smaller B2B companies ask for sign-ups only on their blog. They don’t have opt-in forms in the footer, or anywhere else.

Here’s an example of an opt-in form on our site. You can probably see the live box on this page, just to the right of this article.

You can also ask for email addresses with a lightbox, aka a “pop-up” or interstitial. If you find those too annoying, try using a slider opt-in box instead. The free list building app SumoMe ListBuilder is a great free plugin that will let you do all the basics and more with opt-in boxes. It works on WordPress, HTML-based sites, Shopify and Squarespace sites, too.

You can also go one step higher. It’s possible to personalize which pieces of content you recommend to your site visitors. Unless you’re a really small shop on a super-short budget, personalization is better than just recommending the same content to everyone.

We practice this content personalization on our site with BrightInfo. You can probably see the BrightInfo blue overlay in the bottom of your screen right now. And every so often, a BrightInfo slider moves in to recommend related content.

Don’t forget to include an opt-in in the footer area of your blog (and your whole website). Here’s a nice one from the American Express OPEN Forum:

5. Plan your content strategically

You want to educate rather than sell on your blog, but that doesn’t mean you can’t educate in a way that supports turning visitors into leads, and leads into customers.

Some of the best lead-generating B2B blogs specifically plan and schedule content for different phases of the buying cycle, and also for different buyer personas.

Note that for the later phases of the buying cycle, you may want to write blog posts that summarize and link to case studies and whitepapers.

For more insights into how to craft content for each stage of the buyers journey, from awareness to expanding the customer relationship, see our ebook, “10 Ways to Nurture the Buyer’s Journey: Why Understanding the Buyer’s Journey in Important”.

Planning content for different audiences and different buying phases is particularly difficult. According to The CMO Council and NetLine’s just-published survey, 48% of CMOs say that content not developed for target audiences is derailing their lead flow process. It’s tied with budget limitations for causing the most problems.

If you’re not sure what people want to know in those early phases of the buying cycles, talk to your customer service department or to your sales team. Both those departments have a trove of knowledge about what your existing customers and current prospects want to learn about.

Customer service reps and sales people know:

• What questions customers and prospects usually have
• What types of problems they’re looking to solve
• What they’re worried about
• What they hope your product or service will ultimately give them (like more free time, or fewer customer complaints)

6. Make your posts more engaging to read

Too many B2B blogs are less than reader-friendly. This hurts lead gen simply because it means your blog is not very readable. If you want people to read and engage with your content – and maybe even ask for more – you’ve got to make the experience as pleasant as possible for them.

Unfortunately, that means you need to make your content scannable. Far, far more people will scan your posts than read them. And even if they do read them, they need to feel like reading won’t give them a headache.

Here are a few ways to make your blog posts more readable:

• Use subheaders
• Use bullet points
• Write short paragraphs. No more than five lines long, and it’s OK to use one-sentence paragraphs.
• Use an attractive header image, then another image in the blog post about every 300-400 words or so.
• Consider embedding a video, animated gif or a SlideShare.
• Write at a 7^th-grade level or less. Use the free Hemingway app to show you which grade level your post comes in at.

These are the first paragraphs of a blog post from CopyBlogger. Note how short they are. This lures the reader in – who can’t read a one-line sentence or two?

7. Publish more often

I know, I know: You have no time. You can barely keep up with publishing every other week, or even every month.

There’s a bit of contention on how often is best to post. Many major bloggers and marketing experts, like Derek Halpern, Brian Dean, and others got their blogs off the ground with only a post a month. That’s impressive, but honestly, it’s rare. Most blogs need new content at least every other week to see traction. Some consider the weekly post the standard. Check what your competitors do. In many industries it’s mandatory to post daily (or more) if you want to keep up with the competition.

Here’s a graph from Curata’s 2015 survey of 428 B2B bloggers. According to their data, weekly posts are best.

If you’re worn out by all the content creation, it’s okay to add some curated content. Aim for about 10-20% of your posts to be curated. This saves time and resources from creating the content, and it also positions you as an authority in your field. If you republish a curated piece whole, use a rel=canonical link in the metadata so Google doesn’t see it as duplicate content. The rel=canonical will show Google where the post’s home turf is, and that site will get any SEO juice. You can also curate by summarizing someone else’s post and adding plenty of your own commentary – but now you’re back to spending time writing. If you do curate this way, you get to keep the rel=canonical as your site’s URL. Be sure to link back to the original post and give them obvious credit.

8. Convert your posts into other formats

You’ve done the hard work of creating the content – the research, the writing, the images. Why not get some more mileage out of your labors? There’s absolutely no reason blog posts can’t be reformatted into other things. Like…

• SlideShares
• Videos
• Infographics
• Social media updates
• eBooks
• A rewritten guest post

As an example, the Act-On eBook “6 Tips for More Effective Hashtags” was created by compiling and polishing a series of blog posts.

Every reformatting you do exposes your blog post (now turned into something else) to another audience. It’s also a great way to promote your content. Speaking of which…

9. Promote your blog posts

“If you build it, they will come” may work for invisible baseball teams on rural farms, but it definitely doesn’t work for blog posts.

Some marketing experts recommend investing 4-5 hours of promotion for every hour spent creating a post. If that seems impossible, aim for a 50/50 split. That’s the formula most successful bloggers force themselves to stick to, even if they’d really rather just go write another post.

Not sure how to promote your posts? See our own post, “26 Ways to Promote Your Blog Post.“

For this post we’ve been focused on the blog as a lead generation tool. If you want to optimize your entire website for lead generation, see our ebook, “Turn Your Website Into A Lead Generation Machine.”

Creating a sense of urgency can be extremely powerful in email marketing, and marketing in general. Urgent situations cause us to suspend deliberate thought and act on rash, snap impulse decisions.

Urgency causes people to act quickly. Many times what is stopping a subscriber from converting on a landing page or email is people thinking too hard, not responding to our calls-to-action or simply waiting too long to act. Raising the urgency level in our emails cuts into this to create a significant improvement to conversion rates.

In this post I’ll go through some of the methods you can use to create urgency and some examples of how companies are already doing it in their emails.

Using a countdown timer

Countdown timers are widely used across all industries. They’re the universal symbol for not only time, but time counting down. It reminds the subscriber that the clock is ticking, raising the urgency level and compelling readers to act before the time runs out.

Here is a great example of an email from TigerDirect.com who included a prominent countdown timer as the central piece of their email.

Appeal to your subscribers responsive instincts

There’s something to be said for this technique. You’re empowering your user to act. By using terms like “Act now!” and “Hurry!” you’re pushing them towards making a quick decision.

Although your regular subscriber’s inbox will be flooded with emails like these, they do work.

Here’s an example of a Homebase hero image with a term just like this.

Urgent Vocabulary

As mentioned above, you can use terms lots different terms to create a sense of urgency in your email. The vocabulary you use should be pointing your user towards that sense of urgency. Although there are a huge range of words and phrases you can use, here are a few ideas to get you started:

• Urgent
• Vital
• Now
• Quick
• Hurry
• While stocks last
• Ends today
• Ending soon
• Don’t miss out
• Must end

Words and phrases similar to this force your subscriber to think quickly, improving the likelihood that they convert.

One important thing to note with these terms is that excessive use could land you in hot water with spam filters. Avoid overuse of these words and phrases to steer clear of spam folders. You can also include these phrases directly into your imagery, as per some of the examples below.

Scarcity Principle

The scarcity principle is one of, if not the most, powerful ways you can create urgent behaviour. It runs on the idea that when a subscriber thinks something is running out, they desire the product more.

Scarcity can be created in your email campaigns very easily. By creating a product or service with intentionally limited supply, or constantly reminding subscribers about the limited supply of an otherwise abundant product, you can force people into making rash decisions.

Although not strictly in email, I’m sure we’ve all been booking flights before and it’s said the dreaded message “Only X seats left at this price!”

Recently, Litmus used the scarcity principle to great effect in their email campaign. They let subscribers know the exact amount of tickets left for the Email Design Conference, encouraging users to buy the tickets before they all sold out.

Social Proof

Let me ask you a question. You have two Italian restaurants side-by-side, one is full with a queue outside, the other has only a few people eating. Based on a snap decision which one would you presume is better, and which would you prefer to eat at? Most people will presume the full restaurant is better, and that’s due to psychological theory called Social Proof.

It runs on the idea that if a product is low in stock or a service is busy humans will interpret that the product on offer must be good, since everyone wants it. This ties in somewhat with the scarcity principle.

Let’s look at some example-specific examples of social proof in action.

The signup that appears on the Litmus website for their newsletter is a great example of this.

It’s directly appealing to our social proof by reminding us of the large amount of people signed up already to the newsletter. This makes the user think “Well, if 300,000 people are signed up it MUST be good!”

Another example of social proof in action is in this Empire Direct email.

Not only is it letting subscribers know that 213 people have already bought this product, it’s also telling them that 95% of buyers would recommend it. Once again, appealing to our quick decision-making side.

More Examples

There are a lot more examples of companies using a sense of urgency in email marketing in effective ways, this is just the tip of the iceberg. I do have a few more for us to ponder though.

Rei

This email from REI features multiple calls to a sense of urgency in the subscriber.

The first thing a user will see is the subject line and preheader, reminding them that it’s the last chance to shop and the sale ends today.

That is followed up by the use of large text and bold colours to reinforce the ideas further down the email. Note the large “Ends today” text directly under the navigation.

Snow+Rock

This Snow+Rock email is another great example.

The hero images reminding us that the ‘Deal of the day’ ends at Midnight. It also features a great spinning animated GIF that drags our attention to the fact that there’s only one day remaining on this offer.

House of Fraser

This House of Fraser sales email features some of the terms I mentioned earlier to force a sense of urgency.

It also features a great animated GIF behind one of the terms “Must end today” to really draw your eye to it.

TK Maxx

Following on with the theme of emotive text and animated GIFs, this hero image in a recent TK Maxx email ticks both those boxes. It’s definitely a bold choice!

You can find plenty more examples of emails like this to use as inspiration all throughout your inbox.

Conclusion

Hopefully I’ve shown you in this post the power of using a sense of urgency in your email campaigns and how other companies are doing it. It really is a fantastic way to encourage users to act on your offers. A lot of the techniques featured in this blog include some similarities to the Nudge principle, which I found fascinating. If you want to read more on this, I’d encourage you to check out the Nudge Blog.

Research shows top sales performers not only understand each customer company, but also the person making the buying decisions. To help you better see things from the buyer’s point of view, Ken Thoreson explains 10 traits buyers look for in sales professionals.

If someone were to ask you who your technology services firm’s main competitors were, you could probably rattle off the names of a few firms without giving it much thought. After all, you know which firms are considered industry leaders and which firms you tend to go up against in competitive bid situations. Don’t you?

However, our research found that this isn’t always the case for technology services firms. In fact, if you and your buyers were to sit down and write a list of your firm’s top competitors, our research showed there would likely be only a 25 percent overlap in your lists.

This means that the large majority of firms your buyers consider to be your competition aren’t even on your radar.

So, why does this disparity matter? Well, it could be an indicator that your technology firm is failing to take certain types of competitors seriously. Even though you think you know your industry inside and out, you may not be viewing your clients’ problems through the right filter. This could cause you to overlook completely different categories of solutions that your clients may be considering.

Here’s the bottom line: ignorance of true competitors is seldom going to help you compete. If you don’t know who your competitors are, you can’t differentiate yourself in a way that drives clients to make your firm their final decision.

Luckily, these disparities and uncertainties can be easily cleared up through the power of market research. Here are a few reasons why understanding your competition is invaluable.

3 Reasons Why Your Technology Firm Should Embrace Market Research

Knowing your competitors helps your firm stand apart.

The market is already highly competitive and filled with other firms that have established themselves as the “go-to” brands for certain products and services. When your firm has a stronger awareness of your competitors, you can identify gaps in the industry that could potentially become your firm’s niche. Based on what your competitors are or aren’t known for, your technology firm can build a brand that makes you the “go-to” for a particular differentiator.

Understanding your clients helps your firm attract more clients.

When you have a few truly great clients, it’s understandable that you’d want to attract more clients just like them. Conducting market research can help you understand what those great clients find particularly appealing about your firm. With this knowledge, you can more effectively seek out the type of clients you like to work with.

Understanding your clients’ challenges can help you find your differentiator.

Taking the time to fully understand your clients’ biggest and most pervasive problems is an important part of finding what sets your firm apart from the competition. While you may already offer services that can be of great benefit to potential clients, they may not even consider your firm as a solution because they are looking at their problem through a different lens. By using research to develop a more thorough understanding of your clients’ challenges, you can more accurately and effectively position your technology firm’s services as a distinctive solution.

If your firm is only aware of 25 percent of your true competitors, that means 75 percent of your competition is flying under the radar. Rather than falling into the trap of “ignorance as bliss,” focus instead on the power of knowledge. By using concrete market research to gain a better understanding of the competition in your industry and gather insight into your clients’ biggest challenges, you can build a brand that positions your firm as a true industry leader.

Your business has more data on prospects and customers than ever, but this data is coming from myriad sources — mobile, web, application marketplaces, digital advertising, social and more. And when the buying process spans multiple channels and devices, data can become siloed, so much in fact that it can be difficult for B2B marketers to see the complete customer picture.

Challenges When Forming a Full Picture of the B2B Customer

Compared to a consumer business, B2B businesses face long and complex buyer journeys. It’s rare that a prospect does a Google search, clicks your link, goes through the funnel and converts in that first session (whereas this happens every day for eCommerce companies).

Buying new software is much more of a considered purchase than a transactional purchase. There is a lot more market research involved, a lot more time involved, and often times a lot more people involved (from both sides of the deal).

With so many touch points in the buyer’s journey, which touch gets the credit for sale? Does SEO get credit because the first click was generated from an organic search result? What about that blog post the prospect then reads? Or how about the nurture email they received from the marketing automation system (e.g., Marketo or Hubspot)? Or maybe it was stopping by your booth at a trade show.

And then, what about when the sales team gets involved? How much credit does the BDR get who nudged the prospect enough with a compelling messaging? What about the actual sales rep who closed the deal?

Which touch gets the credit? You can’t merely do a first-touch or last-touch or even U-shaped attribution model. Those are far too simplistic for a complex buyer’s journey that spans multiple marketing and sales touches.

It doesn’t help that marketing data usually resides in a system like Marketo or Hubspot, and sales related data resides in the CRM like Salesforce. How do you accurately combine the data from those two systems? What if there are other systems involved like Google AdWords, LinkedIn, Twitter, or earned media (PR)?

All of these complexities are only further exacerbated with larger deal sizes in true enterprise software selling.

Forming a Full Customer Picture

Unfortunately, there is no magic button to press that unifies all the data perfectly and easily. There is no magical easy-to-use software system that fixes everything out of the box. There are best practices and some emerging solutions that can certainly help though.

First of all, you have to remember “garbage in, garbage out” – before you start trying to unify data, you have to make sure your data quality is there. You have to start with really clear funnel definitions that accurately map to your buyer journey. Then those steps of the funnel (or “events” in marketing speak) need to be tracked in the appropriate system (like Marketo/Hubspot, and Salesforce.com).

This is where team matters. After all, complex software doesn’t instrument itself. And data hygiene doesn’t happen on its own, nor are internal SLAs adhered to voluntarily. A really good Marketing Ops person helps on the marketing side, and a really good Sales Ops person helps on the sales side. Or you could have a really awesome BizOps person/team who straddles both camps (though they are rare).

After the funnel is defined, the systems are instrumented, and the policies are followed – now you have to get the data into a central repository to actually run analysis and gain insights. This central repository can be something generic like Looker or Tableau, or it could be something more purpose-built like BrightFunnel, Bizible or Allocadia. In reality though, a lot of this data mashup work happens in Excel today.

Sounds like a perfect equation for a new-fangled software tool to come in and solve, right? In an ideal world, yes. But every company has a slightly (or dramatically) different buyer’s journey, with different funnel definitions, and different ways of tracking in marketing/sales systems. It’s a fundamentally difficult problem to solve because each company’s go-to-market effort is a total snowflake when you get into the details.

Using the Customer Picture to Influence Business Decisions

Once you go through the hard work of setting all this up, you can actually start to get a detailed view of what marketing and sales efforts actually work to generate leads or influence deals in the funnel. You can move away from generic measures like total leads generated per campaign or blended cost per MQL. You can start to tie pipeline dollars to marketing actions. You can start to see what accelerates the buyer’s journeys. And ultimately you can become more surgical in your marketing and sales efforts. In the end, working to create a more complete buyer picture, regardless of how siloed your data and channels are currently, will serve your business tremendously.

The post Creating a Complete Picture of the Enterprise Buyer: Why Multi-Channel Attribution is Challenging B2B Marketers appeared first on OpenView Labs.

As a B2B marketer that is hyper-focused on getting our Sales team to use our content, there are three numbers which I find a constant personal challenge: 87, 40 and 60.

According to the CEB, 87% of new training content shown to salespeople is forgotten after 30 days. The CMO Council found that typically 40% of a salesperson’s time is spent either looking for content created by Marketing or creating their own content because they can’t find an asset that is fit for purpose. Finally, 60% refers to the the amount of content created by Marketing that goes unused in B2B organizations (according to SiriusDecisions).

So, what can be done to get Sales using your marketing content?

Firstly, Marketing needs to get its own house in order before pointing fingers at their colleagues in Sales. The first steps to understanding how content is used in your organization is to do a content audit and review your content strategy.

1) Do a content audit

Taking time to understand all the content that has currently been created in your organization is a helpful start to understand what is being used and what has fallen by the wayside.

Michael Brenner, Head of Strategy at NewsCred and a former SAP exec, revealed that during his audit of SAP’s content he discovered that “over 60% of the content created by Marketing – for one product area alone – was never used by anybody.” Audits can often be uncomfortable but are hugely necessary.

Open up a spreadsheet and dedicate a row to each piece of content that you have created to date. Your column headings should include ‘URL’, ‘author’, ‘buyer stage’, ‘content topic’, ‘content type’, ‘social shares’, ‘unique visits’, etc. If you want to accelerate the process, free tools like urlprofiler and Quick Sprout can give you this information for every URL you submit.

Once you have completed your content audit you’ll be in a better position to identify underperforming content and work out why it’s not being utilized, by Sales or others.

2) Review your entire content strategy

A content strategy review differs from a content audit as it is delves deeper into the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content. Rather than focussing on content performance, a content strategy review it is more about the processes around content.

A basic content strategy review looks at the entire lifecycle of content from initial audit to planning to creation to governance within the enterprise.

The key stages after doing a content audit are:

• Strategy

This is where you determine ownership areas and taxonomy, establish content program and production process, create a content sourcing plan and determine brand and voice definition.

• Plan

This is where you look to make staffing recommendations, decide on CMS customization, and devise your content metadata and distribution plan.

• Create

This is all about asset production and the quality assurance procedures that are in place to make sure each piece of content your create SEO-optimized and adhere to brand voice.

• Maintain

This is the stage where you look at the metrics you are using to measure your content marketing, use analytics to determine if it is successful or not, and put in place a process to retire or improve underperforming content.

Have you done both an audit and a strategy review? Good. Now you can begin to engage with Sales.

3) Talk to your Sales team

Recently, we spoke to Tim Riesterer of Corporate Visions and posed the question of how to encourage salespeople to use marketing content. The three commonest complaints he’s noticed from salespeople were that Marketing created too much content, marketing content messaging wasn’t appropriate for sales environments, and the form of the content was appropriate for their various sales tasks.

All of these can be rectified easily – streamline the amount of content that you create, bring Sales into initial content messaging discussions and atomize your content so that it’s easier for Sales to consume and recommend to prospects. However, you may find your own organization has unique hurdles that dissuade your Sales team from using your content. Speak to your Sales team and find out from the ‘horse’s mouth’ where the issues lie.

4) Centralize your content and use metadata to tag it

Remember that CMO Council stat? Often Sales can’t find marketing content because it is just so distributed around the organization – siloed and unmarked. Look at ways to consolidate your content into a single content repository. This could be a custom CMS or the same spreadsheet that you used for your content audit.

Also, don’t assume that just because you have your content in one place that it auto-magically becomes easier to find a single piece of content. Make sure that each piece of content has descriptive metadata that can be used by busy salespeople to find the content they need. Metadata doesn’t just need to be ‘content type’ and ‘author’, it should extend to content topics, themes, buyer stages and so. All of these descriptors serve as useful keyword filters with which to narrow down searches for that perfect piece of content to send to a prospect. More importantly, your metadata can help you read your prospect’s mind.

5) Use Content Intelligence

The previous suggestions are all proactive steps that you can action right now. However, if you you want to scale these efforts, inevitably you will have to turn them over to smart technologies that can do the heavy-lifting of auditing content and mapping it to prospect and leads in your Sales environment.

Our sales team uses idio for Salesforce which learns from buyer reading patterns and suggests to the rep which piece of content they should send to each of their leads. This has been a boon for our sales team who often find themselves in the middle of an ever-expanding ecosystem of marketing content and a swathe of prospects whose interests and needs are changing all the time.

Through employing the above steps in our own organization, we’ve been able to turn those three numbers (87, 40 and 60) from gnawing reminders of our own content inefficiencies into helpful benchmarks that we can use to see how quickly we are winning at getting Sales to use our marketing content.

In this e-book, we take lessons from Salesforce’s Content Marketing Team to help you measure your content marketing strategy. Download your copy today!

In the final part of this series on The Mainframe, hosts Tony Clark and Chris Garrett discuss how to use your tools to apply metrics processes that provide you with the information you need to take action.

And please note: Chris had a bit of audio trouble in this episode. Normal service will resume next week!

In this episode of The Mainframe:

• Why one free tool could fulfill 80 percent of your needs
• How to know where your best leads are coming from
• How to convert more of those leads into customers
• Key answers you need to start gathering right now

Click Here to Listen to
The Mainframe on iTunes

Click Here to Listen on Rainmaker.FM

About the author

Rainmaker.FM

Rainmaker.FM is the premier digital marketing and sales podcast network. Get on-demand digital business and marketing advice from experts, whenever and wherever you want it.

The post How to Get Your Metrics Really Working appeared first on Copyblogger.

We’ve addressed the two most important questions when proposing a sales development team to execs: Why? and How? THe “why” is simply that sales development uses specialization to close more deals. And the “how” is proving that launching a sales development team will exceed executives’ expectations of revenue and return on investment.

But even though the sales development team drives an efficient sales process and makes for a predictable revenue model and scalable sales team — there are still skeptics. After all, it’s hard to restructure your entire sales team without some resistance to change.

There are a few common objections to restructuring sales teams to involve sales development. Here are the top five objections we’ve come across… and reasons why they shouldn’t stop you from building a sales development team:

1. “We Don’t Have The Resources”

If their objection is that there’s currently no budget to hire a new team focused specifically on sales development — then the answer is specialization, regardless of scale.

Here’s how you do it: even if you only have one rep, they can prospect Monday and Wednesday and act as a closer on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. With two reps on board, one could prospect while the other closes deals. It will instill the mindset of specialization, which is the real value behind sales development.

2. “We Don’t Have The Lead Volume”

It’s not just about inbound leads. It’s about the combination of inbound and outbound that maximizes your businesses’ appointments and demos.

Lead volume has nothing to do with whether or not you can implement sales development, unless it’s in the most extreme cases (i.e. huge deals at an extremely low volume). If you’re selling multimillion dollar Boeing jets, you might not need a sales development team to prospect new business, because the options are so limited. But deals of such a large size are few and far between.

If you are selling software, sales development can increase demos and drive up your revenue numbers.

3. “We Don’t Want Our Prospect’s First Conversation to be with the Least Experienced Reps”

This is the single most common objection to specialization. Think about it this way… even if you have the best Account Executives, their skills revolve around consultation and closing activities. They deal directly with providing a solution to their prospect’s problems. They are not adept at handling the top of the funnel objections that come from cold calls and emails.

Our best clients’ SDRs are even better than their AEs at overcoming initial objections ranging from“We’re happy with our current strategy,” to “We don’t have time to talk right now.” SDRs deal with challenges like these every single day, and are able to dive deeper and bring value to their business goals. SDRs can spend a higher percentage of their time practicing and role playing the best ways to handle these unique situations.

4. “We Don’t Want The Prospect To Be Passed Off The Minute We Gain Traction With Them”

Passing the baton should improve a prospect’s relationship, not hurt it. A great way to make prospects feel special is to “upgrade” them to an Account Executive. Once a prospect has a good conversation with an SDR, the rep might say something like:

Given your interest (or position in the company/decision making process) let me upgrade you to one of our experts, who can really understand your business objectives and present the solution in a way that helps you make the most informed decisions.

It frames the suggestion in the light of not only giving the prospect something new, but introducing them to someone who knows more about the product and can be of value.

5. “We Let Marketing Take Care Of Lead Nurturing”

A sales development team maximizes one-to-one conversations, while a marketing team masters one-to-many conversations. This makes marketing automation a fantastic tool for blasts and drip campaigns, but not the right one for sales development.

Sales development reps need to generate outbound demand through more sincere methods (phone calls and emails without looking like a robot sent them. They need to be hyper personalized and respond to inbound leads humanly as soon as they are generated. They need to answer questions quickly, and schedule demos rapidly. It’s the most agile way to handle your prospects.

—

Need more ways to overcome objections to building a sales development team — and how to prove it to execs? Download the rest of How & Why You Need to Build an SDR Team and find out for yourself. This eBook contains everything you need to know to start building your revenue-generating, sales development, customer acquisition machine.

The post Overcoming Objections To Build a Sales Development Empire appeared first on SalesLoft.

In B2B sales, generating leads is only the beginning. To win the business, you also have to follow up with those leads in a timely fashion. In order to maximize the return on investment (ROI) for your lead generation efforts, consider hiring an outsourced sales team that specializes in lead generation and appointment setting.

At some organizations, even the most experienced salespeople are expected to spend time on the phone following up with leads. Such an approach is detrimental to your reps and your revenue goals. You’re not making the best use of your sales veterans’ expertise in closing sales, which tends to reduce your ROI when finalizing deals.

While there are many different approaches to outsourced sales, there are two good reasons to partner with an outsourced sales team: 1) You have too many leads for your internal sales team to qualify in a timely and efficient manner, or 2) You don’t have enough qualified leads for your sales reps to close.

In either case, your sales pipeline is under-performing – and you need some way to drive more sales-qualified leads into the pipeline. One solution is to introduce an outsourced sales team specializing in lead generation and appointment setting. Each of these sales team members will receive specific lead generation training designed to maximize your lead generation ROI.

3 Ways Outsourced Sales Improves Your ROI

Partnering with an external team is an efficient, cost-effective way to keep the top of your sales funnel full, and it frees up your in-house team to focus on closing deals, renewals and upselling.

Here are three reasons your business should consider using outsourced sales to improve ROI:

1. Achieve Growth Goals
   When you outsource lead generation for the top of your sales funnel, you avoid the increased overhead and administrative costs you would incur by simply hiring more internal sales staff. At the same time, an outsourced team makes it easier to consistently hit your growth targets. When you work with a sales partner, you’re able to adjust your necessary bandwidth and funnel size to perfectly fit your business.
2. Improve Lead Quality And Conversion Rates
   Working with an outsourced lead generation partner increases the number of sales leads while also improving lead quality. Typically, you would work with the sales partner to agree on specific factors for qualifying leads to ensure you’re only going after ideal prospects. As a result, your conversion rate increases, improving your ROI.
3. Reduce Ramp-Up Time
   Hiring a brand-new internal sales team is costly and time-consuming. If you were to start today, it could take a year or more until your team finally hits its stride. Meanwhile, during that time, the market could have shifted in significant ways. When you partner with an outsourced sales firm instead, you’re working with a seasoned, effective sales staff, while avoiding the hassles of recruiting and a long ramp-up time.

Lead generation is an essential part of capturing new business, but you need to make sure those efforts are resulting in closed sales. Partnering with a trusted outsourced sales firm is a great way to keep your sales pipeline full and maximize ROI for your lead generation efforts.

What does your sales manager do? What is he or she supposed to do?

If you are like many other CEOs and business owners, you have two different answers for those questions. My colleague, Karen Brown, recently blogged about the widespread misperceptions over sales managers’ value. We often witness a baseline misunderstanding about what role the sales manager should be playing in the organization.

Frequently, there is an expectation that the sales manager will sell and manage. And, in fact, the sales managers often have been promoted from the sales team after proving themselves as sales superstars, which may encourage ongoing dependence on their sales. But this leads to disappointment and under-performance from the sales team because the roles of salesperson and sales manager are so fundamentally different.

A whopping 82% of sales managers are not effective as sales coaches, which is the most important thing they should be doing with most of their time (Objective Management Group). Instead of spending the requisite 50% of their time coaching, we have found sales managers spending as little as 10%.

I’ve done informal polls before with groups of business owners, where the majority of the group (two-thirds to three-fourths) have indicated that their sales managers are spending the bulk of their time on crisis management. Ideally, only 5% of a sales manager’s time would be devoted to crisis management. But these business owners ranked it more demanding than things like coaching, motivating, recruiting, holding salespeople accountable (you know, the stuff managers are supposed to be doing!). Incredibly, crisis management demands more attention even than managing compensation plans, strategy, and direct selling. Just imagine how much more your sales team would be selling if they were getting the attention they needed from their sales manager.

I once heard a sales consultant make this point:

“A sales manager’s job is not to grow sales. A sales manager’s job is to grow salespeople in quantity and quality.”

Which is 100% true. But that’s not what many sales managers are doing.

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you have a sales manager who does possess the skills and abilities necessary to manage the sales team effectively. Great, you are already ahead of the game. But that’s not enough by itself. Instead of spending their time doing the activities they need to do to grow their team, they are often pulled in other directions.

The activities they are putting off require them to be fully present and engaged with their salespeople. You can’t mindlessly coast through effective coaching, motivating and holding salespeople accountable. These are one-on-one activities that require a manager to be on point, tuned in to the individual salesperson’s goals and motivations, individual strengths and weaknesses to help them bring their “A game.” If the sales manager is mired in crisis management, territory disputes, chasing their own sales quotas, or rescuing salespeople on doomed sales calls, they will be spread too thin to execute effectively in the role of manager.

Why are sales managers focused on the wrong activities?

Typically, it’s one or more of these reasons:

• Necessity (either its required of them or is due to lack of adequate resources, including training and size of sales team).
• Choice (they may want to put off the tough 1-on-1 work, which may be a training issue —lack of knowledge, practice or confidence— or it may be more of a skills mismatch issue).
• They are mimicking what they’ve seen other managers do, even though it’s wrong (training issue).

What should your sales manager be doing, ideally?

• Spending a full 75% of their time engaging and interacting with the sales team (coaching, motivating, holding individuals accountable)
• A full 50% of their time should be devoted to coaching their salespeople
• 10% of their time should be spent motivating salespeople
• 15% of their time should be spent measuring performance and holding salespeople accountable
• 5% of their time should be spent engaging in recruiting activities
• 5% of their time should be spent on crisis management
• 5% of their time should be spent on internal company issues
• 5% of their time should be spent on direct selling
• 3% of their time should be spent on business and product strategy
• 1% of their time should be spent on organization / reorganization issues
• 1% of their time should be spent on compensation planning and management

Why should you care?

You’re busy; we get it. If you care about ongoing revenue generation and improving your company’s bottom line on an ongoing basis, it’s in your interest to ensure your sales team’s performance is optimized.

Your sales manager is responsible for developing the sales team, and through that, growing your sales. Having an effective sales manager in place is critical for your sales team’s success. Just as the sales manager keeps your sales team accountable to maintain their performance, so too do they need to be held accountable to someone to maintain their performance. And that falls to you.

What can you do to support better sales management as the CEO?

1. If you have not already done a skills assessment for your sales manager, get one (download a sample here). If they are wildly mismatched for the role, better to realize that now than later.
2. Sit down with your sales manager and find out how their time is being spent. If they are not spending about 75% of their time interacting with their sales team actively coaching, motivating and holding salespeople accountable, find out why. Let them know that that you want them to focus 75% of their time on those activities.
3. Have your sales manager track how their time is being spent (such as by color coding their calendar, based on the activity groups outlined below).
4. Don’t forget to circle back and inspect the calendar periodically and keep your sales manager accountable to doing the activities that will actually improve your sales performance.

Have your sales manager breakdown their activities into groups:

Activity Description Color (for example) Coaching / Motivating  Pre-briefing and debriefing calls, helping inspire better performance from salespeople based on individual motivators and goals Green Accountability Inspecting sales team’s individual activity levels, movement in their pipeline, and their actual behaviors Blue Recruiting Networking, etc. Purple Mentoring Developing people on your team beyond just their sales skills Grey Strategy Work related to attacking the market Orange Marketing Should the sales manager even be responsible for this? Yellow Crisis Management / Internal Issues You know what this is . . . Red Compensation Planning & Management Self-explanatory Tan Miscellaneous Anything else that sucks time away from the actual beneficial activities of coaching motivating and holding salespeople accountable; parse this out into additional categories if it makes sense for your situation. White

That’s just a start. There may be deeper issues impacting the performance of your sales manager and sales team, including (to name a few):

• Lack of a formalized, repeatable selling system
• Lack of fully integrated, functional CRM system
• Lack of supporting sales and marketing content (website, case studies, white papers, etc.)
• Lack of a strategic hiring and onboarding program
• Lack of necessary training (for the manager, and maybe for the whole sales team)

A customer service solution that is specifically designed for B2B communication can save your team a lot of time and you a lot of money.

Delivering quality B2B customer service is a difficult endeavor. It takes many skilled customer service reps utilizing the tools they have to provide the best service possible to the customer. Improving the tools your customer service team has can help them do their job better, which will help satisfy customers and save you money. A customer service software solution that’s designed specifically for the types of customer you serve can greatly reduce costs and improve efficiency.

1. Improved efficiency
Your customer service team is busy. They’re handling tickets, writing emails, taking phone calls, conducting live chats, and they’re probably doing all of that on a number of different software applications. When you switch to a unified customer service software solution, everything is pulled together and readily accessible, making it easier to find information and manipulate data on a case-by-case basis. In addition to having one unified solution, certain aspects of the customer service process can be automated. Sorting and deflecting tickets is something that a customer service team member shouldn’t have to spend their time doing. A customer support software solution helps them use every moment doing work that truly helps the customer with what they need. This means you’re getting the most from them every hour that they’re working.

With the right software, team members can also collaborate on tickets, making it possible for them to provide even faster and better service to customers. When team members work together to get the customer the best possible answer, they’re pooling their knowledge. The old saying – two heads are better than one – is still true, and with collaborative customer support software, you can have the collective knowledge of your team working to best serve your customers on any given ticket.

“Providing better service will help you save money by improving customer retention.”

2. Customer Retention 
Providing better service starts with improved efficiency and goes from there. When team members have more time to devote to actually helping customers, they can provide them with their full and undivided attention. This will improve customer satisfaction, which will help you save money by improving customer retention. Acquiring new customers is expensive, so doing everything you can to keep the customers you have will help keep revenue high. According to The Chartered Institute of Marketing, it’s between 4 and 10 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to keep an old one. Providing excellent customer service is one of the best ways to keep your customers happy and reduce turnover.

Also, customer service software provides customers with the option to easily search past tickets for answers to their questions. This makes it possible for customers to help themselves. Of course, if they do need help, a member of the customer service team is never far away.

“Good customer service builds trust and strengthens relationships.”

3. Customer relationship building
Good customer service does more than provide answers to questions and fix problems – it builds trust and strengthens relationships. The stronger your relationship is with the client, the more likely they are to stick around. Building relationships isn’t easy when the customer’s information is spread out over multiple applications. By unifying everything, you’re providing your customer service team with all of the information and tools they need to help strengthen ties with customers. They can see all of the customer’s history and information to better understand the customer as a whole. This allows them to streamline the questions they ask, quickly get to the issue at hand and help the customer in a more personalized way. Building strong relationships based on trust will help you save money because happy customers spend more. An added bonus is that providing good service can act as its own form of marketing.

When your customers respect and trust your product, they become brand advocates. If they know someone in need of your products or services, they’ll recommend you. According to a Nielsen report, 92 percent of people trust a recommendation from someone they know. This makes your customer’s referral an effective marketing tool. By providing great customer service to current customers through a B2B customer service software solution, you’ll reduce marketing costs and see a greater return on investment through customer referrals.

You don't need to be an expert about personal finance, know which stocks are the hottest, or come from an affluent family to strike it rich.

"Like most things in life, becoming good at attracting money is no different than becoming good at anything else, be it being a sub-par golfer, losing weight, or mastering a second language," writes Steve Siebold, author of "How Rich People Think."

He would know, being a self-made millionaire who has studied over 1,200 of the world's wealthiest people.

To get good at accumulating money, you can start by shifting your focus, Siebold finds: Rich people focus on earning, while average people focus on saving.

"The masses are so focused on clipping coupons and living frugally they miss major opportunities," Siebold says. Meanwhile, the wealthy are focusing their energy on not just earning — but earning a lot of money.

This doesn't mean rich people don't save, the self-made millionaire clarifies: "The wealthy also know saving is important. But they know earning money is even more important. Most people are more concerned with the modest gains they accumulate from their savings and investments than they are with using their billion-dollar minds to create a fortune."

This focus on earning must be consistent and deliberate.

"Even in the midst of a cash flow crisis, the rich reject the nickel and dime thinking of the masses," Siebold explains. "They are the masters of focusing their mental energy where it belongs: on the big money."

There's no need to abandon practical saving strategies. But, if you want to start thinking like the rich, "stop worrying about running out of money and focus on how to make more," Siebold advises. "Constantly worrying about money is no way to live. Dream about money, instead."

SEE ALSO: 2 words rich people never use, according to a self-made millionaire

Join the conversation about this story »

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Article marketing is dead.

Long live article marketing?

This off-page optimization tactic was once an integral part of every successful SEO campaign.

The rise and fall of article marketing

The concept behind article marketing is building links through creating content at sites with high PR. The links are normally found at the byline of the articles.

Online businesses hired writers on the cheap to produce articles by bulk. Once they receive the articles, site owners uploaded these on article marketing sites. It will take within the week before the site published the article.

The results were palpable as the articles published on these sites ranked on Google search just days after publication.

As article marketing is picking up steam as an effective SEO tactic, so did the misuse of this tactic.

SEO gurus beat this tactic to the ground by publishing crappy articles on the sites at the same time. They also published the same article on different sites. This created duplicate content issues among the sites.

As a result, content from article marketing dominated search results.

It would be sufficient if the content provided value to users. Instead, the articles were run on the mill and provided generic content.

Instead of providing search engine users solutions to their problems, there were presented with even more problems.

Google took swift action in the wave of low-quality content from article marketing sites. The search engine rolled out the Farmer update in 2011 that penalized sites hosting low-quality articles from the rankings.

Four years later…

The aftermath inspired more algorithm changes that were meant to uphold the best SEO practices.

Four years after, sites like Ezinearticles were never able to recover from the onslaught, ranking-wise.

But what does it look like from the inside?

In this post, we will try to uncover the state of article marketing sites of today. Most of the sites soldier on despite the massive losses in traffic and negative reputation throughout the years.

Before we begin…

One thing that we hope to see from article marketing sites is how much different they are now compared to their peak years.

Since the idea of article marketing is no longer effective, the site should have at least found a way to tap into their community and turned a bad situation into something good.

There are sites that shed away with the stigma article marketing and started out anew. One of those sites is Buzzle.

The site no longer relies on user-generated content to power its site. Buzzle now has in-house writers to provide content.

People can still register to become an author, but only to iBuzzle, the non-fiction sister company of Buzzle.

An article marketing site that seemed to have bitten the dust is GoArticles.

What I’m trying to say is that article marketing site should no longer cater as an SEO product. Rather, it should be presented as something else instead.

What that “something” is, we have yet to find out.

But we will never know what is up with these sites unless we take a closer look at the most infamous article marketing sites.

Let us start with the site synonymous with article marketing.

Ezinearticles

There is not much difference from the site design now compared to years ago.

The difference users will see from the site’s dashboard is how it is not completely about article marketing.

Upon logging into my old account, an opt-in box greeted and linked me to the products page.

The site now offers article template packages to users. The reason behind the product is that site owners like you may not have time to craft well-written articles from the ground up.

The template packages are available to help build your article from a pre-made template. All you need to do is edit the template to fit in your message.

Doing this allows you to focus on writing your ideas and automate the storytelling process!

The only caveat I can think of is if your competitors are using the same templates to write their content. You may end up having similar articles after publications. This is where the power of editing the templates comes in. It ensures that your post will be unique and personal enough to be similar with other sites using the same tempaltes.

I have not tried out the template packages yet. But the rationale behind them are sound enough for people to consider using them.

Aside from the products, Ezinearticles has a Challenges feature.

This section encourages users to write more articles on the site. Once the Challenges are finished, you receive a badge on your profile to show that you are an accomplished Ezinearticles users.

The more badges you earn, the more authoritative your Ezinearticles profile is.

Accomplished Ezinearticles users can use their profile as their portfolio. I am just not sure how much weight does the badges have in real life.

One thing that bugs me is the option to print a certificate that you are an Ezinearticles writer. The site is far from being an exclusive membership site. I think it is just a fun way for publishers to take pride in being a site member. But it makes little sense to give credence to Ezinearticles that lets people sign up an account for free.

Regardless, the Challenges are a fun way to build sample works of articles that you can use to showcase your skills to clients.

Your articles are also a great way to build an influence within the community of users. If they like your article, there is an option for people to follow and like your posts.

Speaking of communities, Ezinearticles has turned to its community as its lifeblood. The site as an article marketing site has become an unattractive option. The same problems that plagued article marketing of years past still exist.

But there are small strides in building a more conscious and self-aware community that connects publishers. People can start conversations with other users, which I have done below:

It took me two weeks to get a reply, but at least someone did!

Ultimately, I consider Ezinearticles more of a curiosity at this stage than anything else. Since it is no longer a powerful SEO tactic it once was, it resorted to building a community to help publishers connect with each other.

But it is still a long way to go before the site kicks into high gear. The article published in the site still leave a lot to be desired.

The Networking feature is not as vibrant as it could be.

Aside from Ezinearticles, there is one site that has the potential to grow into something more than just an article marketing site.

Infobarrel

Unlike other article marketing sites, the site gives you the opportunity to earn from your content via the IB ads systems. You will earn 75% of the ads revenue that were generated from your content.

This model encourages publishers to promote their content on different online channels to increase views and possibly clicks on the display ads.

Based on the quality of content and topics published on the site, I’d say Infobarrel is quite successful.

The really cool thing about Infobarrel is the community it fosters. The site has a very active forums page, where users new and old ask questions and contribute answers that add value to the community.

To put the cherry on top, Infobarrel holds monthly contests. The site will increase the ad shares of the top three performers in the contest. This encourages users to put out awesome content day in and out!

Overall, Infobarrel is heads and shoulders above other article marketing sites simply it is more than just a marketing site.

Users can learn a great deal from the interesting content published in the site. Also, the community and contests provide an incentive for users to network with others and publish the best content possible.

Final thoughts

At this stage, article marketing sites still hangs on for dear life as a marketing tool. In general, marketers are better off using proven tactics to help shore up their sites or blogs. But there is still good in article marketing sites as a platform for thought leadership and community building.

Whether or not these sites adapt to the needs of marketers to build relationships and connections, it is hard to tell.

For hardcore article marketing site users out there, please weigh in your thoughts in the comments section. There are things I may have failed to touch upon that you want our readers to know.

More on article marketing:

Premium Content Marketing Tools to Boost Engagement with Your Blog This 2015

Let’s Give Thanks to 5 Things that Happened in 2014 to Online Marketing

Everyone uses excuses. Most people actually have favorites that they employ over and over. Rather than ignore them, let’s just go ahead and confront the little monsters so that they don’t distract you.

An “excuse” is a justification for doing -- or not doing -- something. I think the dictionary implies that it’s a “reason.” However, in reality, an excuse usually turns out to be something other than the real reason that motivates your actions (or lack thereof). For example, let’s say that your excuse for being late to work is due to traffic. Well, that’s not truly the reason you didn’t make it to work on time. The reason you were late is because you left your home without enough time to allow for traffic.

Excuses are never the reason for why you did or didn’t do something. They’re just a revision of the facts that you make up in order to help yourself feel better about what happened (or didn’t). Making excuses won’t change your situation; only getting to the real reason behind it can do this.

The first thing to know about excuses is that they never improve your situation. The second thing to know is which ones you use on a regular basis. Do any of the following sound familiar?

• I have to find balance in my life
• I am overworked
• I am underworked
• Too many people work here
• We don’t have enough people
• My manager sucks/doesn’t help me/won’t leave me alone
• I don’t have time to study
• I don’t have time for anything
• Our prices are too high
• Our prices are too low
• The customer won’t call me back
• The customer cancelled the appointment
• People don’t tell me the truth
• They don’t have the money
• The economy is bad
• We don’t have/can’t find the right people
• No one is motivated
• People have bad attitudes
• No one told me
• It was someone else’s fault
• They keep changing their minds
• I need a vacation
• The competition is giving its product away
• I have such bad luck

Bored yet? I know I am! How many of these have you used? Make a note of every statement you’ve ever heard come out of your mouth. Now ask yourself, will any of these excuses improve your condition? I doubt it.

So why, then, do so many people make them so often? Does it even matter? An excuse is just an alteration of reality; nothing about it will move you to a better situation. The fact that “the customer doesn’t have the money” will not help you close your deal. The fact that you “only have bad luck” is not going to change your luck. In fact, if you keep telling yourself that long enough, you’ll start to expect it -- thereby ensuring that things will continue to be bad.

You have to start understanding the differences between making excuses and providing actual, sound reasons for events. A massive difference between successful and unsuccessful people is that successful people simply don’t make excuses. They are actually quite unreasonable when it comes to providing reasons -- at least for failure -- as well.

I’ll never ask myself (or anyone else, for that matter) why I was unable to bring my product to market, raise enough money, or make enough sales because as far as I’m concerned, no answer will do. There are no justifications that will change these facts or situations -- and any reasons I might provide are only opportunities yet to be handled. Remember, nothing happens to you; it happens because of you.

If you make success an option, then it won’t be an option for you -- simple. No excuse exists that can or will make you successful. Engaging in self-pity and excuse making are signs that someone has an extremely minimal degree of responsibility.

Compare these two different ideas:

1. “He didn’t buy from me because the bank wouldn’t make the loan.”
2. “He didn’t buy from me because I was unable to secure proper financing for a potential customer.”

The first statement assumes no responsibility for the event, while the other does -- and identifies a solution. Once you adopt a more advanced sense of responsibility -- and refuse to make any more excuses -- then you can go out and search for a solution. And as an added bonus, you will avoid such situations in the future.

The quality of being rare is what makes something valuable. So anything that is plentiful has very little worth. Excuses are one item that people seem to have an almost endless supply of. Because they are so plentiful, they have no value. Because they do not forward your desire to create more success for yourself, they are worthless uses of your energy.

You cannot allow yourself, your team, your family, or anyone in your organization to use another excuse as a reason why something didn’t come to fruition. As the old saying goes, “If it is to be, it is up to me.” 

Editor's note: This is an excerpt from the book The 10x Rule: The Only Difference Between Success and Failure. It is published here with permission.

The role of the CFO is rapidly changing. A chief financial officer can no longer simply rely on crunching numbers while focusing solely on a company's balance sheet.

To succeed from here on, CFOs will need to shift their focus towards analytics, people management, disruptive technology, and several other crucial and newly forming variables. 

Business Insider sat down with Ash Noah, vice president of CGMA External Relations at the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA). Noah is the former CFO of the international unit of TNT Express, a global transport and logistics provider. In his role, he led finance teams in 45 countries through a significant transformation. Today his team travels all over the world, talking to CFOs and other financial experts about company needs, transformative changes in their industry, and much more.  

Noah painted a picture of what the CFO of the future will look like, and it's a stark contrast from today's financial leaders. 

1. CFOs must become analytics wizards.

The current role of the CFO is very transactional. However, that is starting to change. Noah says CFOs are quickly becoming more analytical at their core.  

"We should only be spending about 10% of our efforts and time on transactional and 90% of our time on analytics," he says. "Only about 3% of organizations are at the desired state. Most organizations are in the 50/50 range, and most companies are trying to move up that chain. The more time you spend on analytics the more you help the business and enable effective business partnering. The CFO of the future will be a true business partner who will provide these insights."

Noah says there is already a "pull from businesses" as they seek out more analytics data and that CFOs are cognizant of that pull.

2. CFOs must manage an increasing amount of risk.

The level of risk and the rate at which risk is increasing is unprecedented. This calls for highly skilled risk management processes, says Noah.

The "clear and present danger" is that a business model is going to be "disrupted by technology," he says. CFOs are now constantly asking, "Who is going to put me out of business tomorrow?" 

The CFO of the future needs to be beside the CEO, helping to navigate these risks. "Making your business resilient and strengthening your business model is what the CFO of the future will have to do," Noah says.

To underscore his message, he points to the S&P 500. In the 1950s, most companies featured on the list would remain there for 60 years. Clayton Christensen of Harvard University says today's average S&P 500 company will drop off the list in 18 years. Based on those numbers, 75% of the current S&P 500 will not be featured in 2027. 

3. CFOs must adapt to new technology.

Noah says you must look at your business model and figure out how it can constantly be adapted and how you can finance that evolution. "How you use new metrics to enable innovation is an absolutely essential question for a CFO."

CFOs can no longer rely on old tools and the traditional return on capital, return on investment, payback period, and all the measures that CFOs are so familiar with.

"The old way of thinking stifles innovation and ruins new business creation," Noah says. "The CFO of the future must enable innovation and manage risk better."

4. CFOs must become better at managing people.

Noah says you have to use your technical skills in the context of the business to influence people and to lead change.

"Leadership, people, and business skills are absolutely crucial to the future of the CFO function," Noah explains. "The more you move up, the more you want to make sure you have the right people and leadership skills. Typically finance functions have not paid attention to that in the past."

5. The CFO of the future must guide decisions in a politically charged atmosphere.

The role of a CFO is to represent the organization and fight for the business models of the new world. Noah cites the example of Uber, which has been attacked by government agencies over its contractor-versus-employee structure and its general services. 

"A CFO of the future needs to be at the forefront of providing the business with financial and business implications," he says. "I would stop short of saying a CFO should lobby, but they need to be able to partner with their business in areas such as union regulations and minimum wages laws."

He adds that CFOs need to be able to "measure political impact and show the effects it has in terms of dollars and risk. They also need to enable their partners to lobby and send the right type of messages."

6. CFOs must manage big data as a large part of business operations. 

Data and analytics are becoming increasingly crucial to businesses, not just in terms of finding new markets and new segments in order to achieve revenue generation, but also for understanding, variabilizing, and controlling costs.

According to Noah, "We did a report on big data a few years ago, and 93% of people surveyed said the way decisions are made in the future will change because of data. We are not expecting CFOs to be data scientists — they don't have to understand the algorithms — but the CFO of the future will need to be the connector between the business and data scientists."

Noah also points out that CFOs in the future will need to be better adept at finding a business' needs and solving problems as they arise. "They are the ones that will translate that to the data scientists," he says. "They are the ones that will help them build the right queries and get the answer the business needs and then be able to take those insights back to the business in order to make them actionable."

7. CFOs will make effective decisions with analytics from outside of the enterprise. 

"CFOs need to develop the right question when creating datasets," Noah says.

He notes that a lot of companies are using big data to drive decisions outside of the enterprise: "Fundamentally it is unstructured; it is outside the boundaries of the enterprise. Right now a lot of the non-financial data is not trusted by owners of that data. However, 74% of companies are saying their gathered information is accurate."

Non-financial data may include machine-versus-human labor and productivity, and how many products were consumed or sold in the marketplace. "To really get insights into a business you have to look at the underlying non-financial drivers to the financial information," he says.

8. CFOs need to understand business drivers and the underlying non-financial information that drives the financials of their company.

While analytics outside of the enterprises will become increasingly important, CFOs must also be able to look at the value their company is creating based on variables such as intellectual property and intangible assets. Those non-financial business drivers are becoming increasingly important. 

Noah explains that "when we look at trends, the valuation of a company was traditionally based on 80% of the value created in the balance sheet by tangible items and about 20% of the value was intangible. There was a gap between the market cap of the company and the balance sheet valuation." A study in 2010 found that if you look at S&P 500 valuations today, the gap between the balance sheet and the market valuation has become 80%. That means 80% of the valuation is no longer in the balance sheet.

"If the CFO is focused on the balance sheet and is focused on compliance, focused on processes and procedures and conformance, he's not engaging in value creation," Noah says. "The more significant value is now created from your intangible assets. The CFO of the future really needs to understand and become more of a P&L CFO to engage in value creation."

He adds, "Value creation today is a knowledge-based economy. Companies are now more likely to create value using intangible assets and intellectual property. "

9. Hiring decisions will become a major part of the job for future CFOs.

CFOs will need to drive talent acquisition and retention. 

"A CFO will need to have a structured approach to create the competencies a company needs, and they will need to fill in the gaps," Noah says. "A CFO must adopt a structured-competencies framework and recruit and train new workers based on that framework."

He also believes the CFO will need to find creative ways to retain workers based on the company's desired competencies. 

SEE ALSO: Here are CFOs' 6 biggest fears right now

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: This CEO raised his company's minimum wage to $70,000 a year — and his two best employees quit

Google is starting to roll out its digital payment system Android Pay in the U.S. today. The new digital wallet allows users to make payments for purchases in stores using their phone.

Android Pay can be downloaded to any phone running an Android operating system of KitKat 4.4 or higher. Upon launch, it will be accepted at over one million locations, including name brands like Toys ‘R’ Us, Whole Foods, McDonald’s, and Bloomingdale’s. In total Android Pay is launching with twenty merchant partners and a fleet of banks (American Express, Discover, MasterCard, Visa, Bank of America, Capital One, Discover, Navy Federal Credit Union, PNC, Regions Bank, USAA, Citi, Wells Fargo, and US Bank).

The launch may be a little confusing for existing Google Wallet users, so take note. When current Google Wallet owners go to update the app, it will be replaced with the new Android Pay. Once updated to Android Pay, they’ll no longer be able to make peer-to-peer payments. In order to give friends money, users will have to download the new Google Wallet, which only executes peer-to-peer payments.

Two wallets

Forcing consumers to use to two separate wallets for different payment functionalities may be a misstep on Google’s part. For one, it’s immediately confusing. Users may be confounded as to why they can no longer use their digital wallet to pay their friends. Secondly, it asks that users download yet another app for a service that should be included in a single wallet.

It could be argued that Google is a step ahead of competitors like Apple Pay and Samsung Pay because it offers peer-to-peer payments at all. Neither Apple Pay or Samsung Pay offer peer-to-peer money exchanging. However, there is a whole other market of more successful peer-to-peer technologies that Google Wallet has to compete with like Square Cash, Venmo, PayPal, and others. Even Facebook Messenger has a peer-to-peer payment method now.

Also, it seems that both Apple and Samsung are far more interested in facilitating commercial transactions than payments between friends.

Paying at the register

There is a race to develop what is essentially the next credit card. Apple, Google, Samsung, and others are trying to make a digital wallet that encompasses both payments and consumer rewards programs. But getting customers to scan their phones at the register is proving difficult. One study shows that Apple Pay, which launched last November, has low rates of adoption. Only 13 percent of iPhone 6 users have used Apple Pay, according to the study. The reason is because people often don’t remember where they can pay with Apple Pay, and in general they forget to use it even at stores that accept it.

Android Pay, with its limited number of partners, may face some of the same hurdles. However, competitor Samsung Pay might not. Samsung Pay, which launches later this month, said it will be able to make payments at 99 percent of retailers. That may make it less confusing for consumers and possibly more enticing for them to sign up.

Then again, no digital wallet has really been able to make the case to consumers for why they should start using their phone to make payments instead of their credit card.

Missed opportunity

Though eventually we may be paying for everything with the tap of a phone screen, consumers are not there yet. In the meantime, there is a big opportunity to get mobile shoppers to adopt the technology for purchases made in apps. An increasing number of people are shopping on their phones. A report from Statista projects that mobile shopping will account for a quarter of all ecommerce transactions in 2015.

But shopping on a phone, like shopping on a computer, can be an irritating endeavor. Entering payment and delivery information is such an annoyance to shoppers that they’d often rather abandon their shopping cart than spend a few minutes filling it out.

When Apple Pay launched last year, it gave its users the ability to use Apple Pay both for in-store and in-app purchases. Employed in an app, it means that consumers can pay for a purchase by scanning their fingertip. That ease of use is enticing for those of us who are already making purchases on our phones.

Notably, neither Samsung Pay nor Android Pay has followed Apple’s lead and have instead focused their technology on in-store payments, where digital wallets are less meaningful to consumers.

Google says it’s planning on launching just such a functionality later this year, though there’s no official timing on the roll out. This may give Google an advantage over Samsung, whose competing payment method is automatically installed on some of the most popular Android phones. Google has already started messing around with a “buy button” that lets shoppers buy goods directly from ads in search results. Working this functionality into Android Pay so that consumers can make purchases in-app could make the app more relevant — even to Samsung owners.

Update: Android Pay will roll out a buy button for in-app purchases later this year. 

According to TopRank, 93% of B2B marketers are now using content marketing.

What this message is telling us is that content marketing is recognized by a lot of marketers as a “must-have” arsenal for their marketing campaigns.

However, while a lot of marketers may be using this marketing method, you can bet that a good number of them aren’t getting any real results out of their marketing efforts.

Why, you might ask? Simple. A lot of them are doing it wrong. So wrong…

As you can probably imagine, no matter how effective a marketing method is, if you aren’t using it correctly, you won’t be able to get any kind of decent results from it.

That being said, allow me to share with you 3 of the most common – let alone critical – content marketing mistakes that’re causing a lot of marketers to fail miserably.

Not tracking the list of people that you send outreach to.

“I already replied to your message, why are you sending me this message again?”

“We’ve already discussed this. Why are you asking me the same questions?”

Those are just some of the horrid replies that you can get from your audience if you do not track the people you are sending outreach to.

Clearly, not all replies that you’ll receive from your outreach efforts are good. This is especially true if you sent the same outreach message to the same person twice or thrice.

This kind of mistake can be very costly for your business because the chances are good that your audience will think that either you are spamming them, or you and your team are so disorganized at how you run your business.

Of course, when your prospect customers view you as either of the above, it’s going to become almost impossible for you to close them as your customers.

Publishing mediocre content.

Check out the articles published on this website. Giving the page a quick gander will tell you immediately that they are serious about producing quality content. Not only are their articles lengthy, but they are also packed with expert advice, and actionable tips that their audience will surely like.

True. It isn’t right for us to gauge an article’s’ quality based on its length alone, however, we need to remember that the trend shows how most pages that are ranking number 1 on Google’s search results are those that are about 2200+ words in length.

This is a clear indication of how people (and the search engines) are loving lengthy content.

That being said, instead of writing a short (and in most cases, mediocre) 400 – 500 article, bump up your word count to about 2200+ words. While doing so, you also need to make sure that you are providing real value to your readers, and not just increasing your content’s word count.

Using a poorly crafted outreach template.

When it comes to doing outreach, quality and quantity is very important.

Quantity is important because no matter how good your outreach template is, there is still a huge chance that your prospects will decline your message (or flat out ignore you), simply because they are too busy, or your offer isn’t just something that they are looking for right now.

That is why you need to make sure that you’ll send as much outreach messages as you can, so you get a decent amount of people to reply.

However, increasing the quantity of your outreach is only half of the equation. Quality is just as important.

I say that because people online are usually very keen on what they click. This is especially true when they are on their inboxes.

Most internet users have had their fair share of people spamming them, that they have become quite good at sniffing out which messages are spammy, and which are legit.

Of course, you’ll want your outreach message to look like the latter. That is, if you want your audience to read your message and reply.

If you are new to the whole outreach process, allow me to Share with you some of the guiding principles that I almost always consider when crafting my outreach templates:

• Never EVER use “Dear Sir/Ma’am”. Just use “Hi first name” or simply use, “Hi” or “Hello”.
• Make your subject line, and the first sentence of your outreach message as punchy as it can be.
• Always leave a clear call-to-action within your message (preferably at the end).
• Just use 1 call-to-action per email message.
• Emphasize on how they can benefit from helping you. Remember to answer the acid test, “what’s in it for me”. If you fail to do this, you drastically decrease the chances of getting any kind of replies from your audience.

Another good resource to learn about how to create an effective outreach message is an article published by Neil Patel way back in 2012.

Final thoughts.

Whether you’re looking to grow your traffic, generate leads, or straight-up increase your sales, content marketing can surely give you the results that you are looking for. However, you need to make sure that you aren’t just putting in the effort and resources to it; you also need to make sure that you’re doing it right. Otherwise, you’ll end-up with very little results, or, you might end up damaging your brand.

Photo courtesy – © Mark Carrel / Dollar Photo Club

Combining 2 Popular Strategies for Increased Marketing Success

The marketing world is abuzz with two major methodologies. Neither is particularly new. Both are built on simple principles of common sense. Independently, they are changing the way marketers work. When combined, they completely redefine how we achieve and measure success.

What are they? Inbound and Agile. If they aren’t already pillars of your marketing strategy, read on because they should be.

What Is Inbound?

Inbound marketing focuses on delivering such value that prospects are pulled toward your business, gravitating to your expertise, credibility and actionable information. This is in contrast to more traditional marketing, which works to push messaging and ideas onto a target audience in hopes that they will be convinced to take action and move toward conversion.

Does it work? You bet.

According to HubSpot’s State of Inbound Report, 54% more leads are generated by inbound tactics than traditional paid marketing. And companies that choose to invest more in inbound marketing than in outbound tactics save $20,000 each year. What’s more, twice as many marketers agree that inbound marketing delivers lower average cost per lead than traditional outbound methods.

You can’t argue with results like that.

What Is Agile?

The agile concept, as it applies to workplace processes and efficiencies, emerged from the world of software development. While there are structured components of agile development, its basics are as follows:

1. Start with a simple idea.
2. Work alone or with a small team to execute quickly and without too much planning.
3. Immediately after finishing the first iteration, seek out ways to improve it.
4. Quickly make those improvements and release the next iteration.
5. Repeat.

The goals of an agile methodology are increased efficiencies, continuous improvement, and the ability to respond faster to user feedback.

VersionOne’s State of Agile Report found that 73% of respondents indicated that by implementing agile, they achieved faster time to project completion.

Inbound + Agile = Success

Inbound marketing drives conversions by delivering value to prospects that will draw leads in and convert them into customers. Agile focuses on rapidly releasing iterations and then collecting, analyzing and acting on feedback to continuously improve. Together, you have an approach to marketing that is quick, nimble, relevant and customer-centric from beginning to end.

Here’s how to make it work for you:

Create Buyer Personas – Now

The better you know your audience, the more effortless and effective your communication will become. Only when you fully understand your target market, not just as buyers but on a personal level, can you successfully – and quickly – appeal to them.

If you haven’t already, start by creating buyer personas. Then, put them to work in your marketing efforts.

3 Reasons To Get Serious About Buyer Personas NOW:

1. Understand your customers to serve them more effectively. Buyer personas allow you to create content your audience will love, campaigns that will engage them, and conversion opportunities they will respond to.
2. Identify where your customers go…then be there. Creating buyer personas helps you identify where your customers go for content, resources and information. This allows you to deliver content and promote it in the places your prospects are most likely to see it.
3. Ensure Sales and Marketing are chasing the same targets. Buyer personas create a consistent, shared, well-defined understanding of each group of customers you’re targeting. Sales and marketing are in the business of generating, nurturing and closing customers together, so it helps when you have a united understanding of who it is you’re chasing after.

Deliver Value Quickly

One of the fundamentals of inbound marketing is providing value to your target audience. One of the fundamentals of agile is moving quickly. Now that you have your buyer personas, this is where the rubber really meets the road in bringing the two methodologies together for your marketing success.

Use your buyer personas to identify opportunities to help them overcome challenges, answer tough questions and meet needs. Think about their daily lives and the obstacles they face. What content can you deliver today to help them tomorrow? Seek out ways to support your personas quickly.

Here are a couple of tips for integrating agile into your content marketing strategy:

1. Quality and Value? Yes. Perfection? No. While your content should always be high in quality and rich in value, it does not have to be perfect. When you really know your audience, you should be able to deliver content that they will find useful and relevant. Focus on their needs and challenges. Make it personal. Show them that you understand their concerns.. Provide actionable information and data they need to do their jobs better.
   
   But don’t worry about getting that content just right before publishing it. In today’s rapidly changing marketplace, there isn’t time for perfection. Identify a need, create content to address it, deliver that content to the right people as quickly as possible and move on to the next opportunity. Don’t get paralyzed by perfection. Instead, stay agile by quickly and continuously helping your target personas overcome challenges. Remember, they want your help more than they want perfect content.
2. Ask and Answer. Ask yourself the same questions your customers ask – then answer them. Create a list of frequently asked questions and use it to churn out content quickly that you already know your target market will love. You and your team are already answering these questions in emails, phone calls, and meetings. Why not document these answers in your content?
   
   Depending on the type of question, your answer may come in the form of a blog post, white paper, case study, video, infographic, or some other form of content. But if you keep your target audience in mind and focus on answering their questions, you should be able to deliver helpful, relevant content rather quickly.

Measure And Analyze Constantly

Alright, so you know your audience. You are creating content that you think will really help them. You’re delivering that content quickly. Now what?

Measurement and analysis are critical components of the agile methodology and any successful inbound marketing strategy. It’s not enough to simply churn out content that you think should be effective. No, you’ve got to go back and see just how effective it actually was. And you have to do it all. the. time.

The good news is that there are a million ways to measure your marketing efforts. The bad news is that there are a million ways to measure your marketing efforts. With so many options for what to measure and how to measure it, where are you to start?

Here a few simple things to focus on in your measurement.

• Traffic: Check in on your content regularly to see what pieces are doing well and which ones aren’t meeting expectations. Watch the traffic to the posts and pages, as well as the reach of your related social media posts.

• Engagement: As you monitor traffic to your content, also look at what people are doing when they see it. Are they filling out the forms on your landing pages? Commenting on your posts? Sharing your content with others? Claiming your offers? Clicking your CTAs? Opening your emails?

• Feedback: What are you hearing from your clients, your leads, and your target audience as a whole? And don’t forget your sales reps! Look for feedback about your content at every turn. What are people saying in their comments on your blog posts and on social media? What is your sales team saying about the content you’ve provided? What qualitative data can you pull from the feedback generated by your content?

Iterate And Improve Endlessly

Once you have measured and analyzed the effectiveness of your efforts, what do you do with that information once you collect it?

To really hit a homerun with a combined agile and inbound strategy, you must take that continuous flow of data and feedback you collect about your content and use it. This is another aspect of both inbound and agile that is absolutely imperative. You can not truly implement one strategy without the other.

Traffic + Engagement

When you review your content to see what kind of traffic it’s pulling in, take note of the following:

• What content is seeing high traffic and high conversion rates? These are obviously indicators that you’re doing something right. But don’t give yourself a gold star and move on just yet. Try to understand why that content is working. Who is it attracting? What might you have done differently in creating and/or promoting this content? Take good notes on these gold nuggets. Don’t let them become anomalies.
  
  While this knowledge is fresh in your mind, capture it. Take note of new content you can create to use the factors that you believe worked well in these types of content. Test your theories and see if you can identify some trends for creating effective content for your target audience.
• What content is seeing low traffic, but nice conversion rates? What these stats tell us is that the content and your conversion opportunity is working, but too many people aren’t missing the content altogether. Look closely at how it was distributed. Did it simply not get promoted enough? Perhaps it was put in front of the wrong people. Also, take a look at your headline text. Was there something about your title, subject line, header, or leading copy that could have turned off your target audience?
  
  Make adjustments according to your observations and iterate. That is, release a new version of your content with modifications. Then watch to see how it performs. Take note of improved (and hopefully not worsening) results based on your changes.
• What content is seeing high traffic but low conversion rates? This content is the inverse of the previous situation. You’re reaching people and they’re accessing your content. But something is amiss in your conversion opportunity. Possible culprits could be that your subject line or title doesn’t actually align with the content, the conversion opportunity doesn’t hold enough value for your audience or perhaps the placement of it made them overlook or miss the opportunity altogether.
  
  Again, this is your big chance to iterate. Look for ways to make that content better. It’s getting the traffic, all you need to do is find the formula to capture leads from the pool of people consuming your content. This is a great time to use A/B testing to see what tweaks work and what don’t.

Feedback

Any feedback is good feedback. Read those blog comments and social interactions. Pay attention to what your audience is retweeting and sharing. Ask your sales reps for their opinions, too.

Numbers will tell you a lot, but qualitative feedback is invaluable, as well. Listen to what your content consumers have to say and pivot accordingly. Is your content too long? Try a few shorter versions. Would video be more appealing? Give it a whirl. Do your targets crave more detail? Get down and dirty with more information.

Listen. Apply what you learn. Release modified content. Measure. Repeat.

There’s a lot that agile and inbound can learn from each other and there are so many ways they are naturally complementary. Savvy marketers will put the best of both methods to good use with nimble, quick, smart, ever-improving marketing movement. Just remember to keep pushing forward with content that is valuable for your target market and never stop improving it.

”We’ve gone in a different direction” means different things to different decision makers. And it doesn’t always mean never. In this article, Vickie K. Sullivan explains a few of the reasons why buyers give that excuse and what you can do to keep the door open for when the timing is right.

EXCLUSIVE:

Setting prices and running a virtual economy is complicated. But most game developers don’t have degrees in economics. Scientific Revenue wants to offload the task of dynamically pricing virtual currency in mobile games.

The result is a new expert source for dynamic pricing decisions that can make a significant difference in the money generated from the same base of players, said Bill Grosso, the chief executive of Scientific Revenue. His company tweaks prices and maximizes revenue for companies, and that’s crucial because many companies are having a tougher time surviving because user acquisition costs are rising steeply for free-to-play games.

Grosso said the revenue lift can be as much as 20 percent to 40 percent, depending on the game. Scientific Revenue gets a cut, but only if it moves the revenue needle more than 10 percent. As growth in the $30 billion mobile gaming market slows down to more mature rates, that kind of uplift is a big deal. A study by the Harvard Business School said that a 2 percent change in prices can lead to 10 percent more revenue.

As an example, many companies have a virtual currency that they sell for real money. That currency can buy a wide variety of goods in a free-to-play game. If a player has a history of spending a lot of money in games, you might want to offer them a $100 bundle for a lot of currency at a discounted price. But if a player is new or hasn’t spent much before, you might want to show them an offer of a $5 bundle.

In this case, both players could be paying vastly different amounts per unit of virtual currency, just as airline ticket buyers might be paying different amounts for the seats on a given flight. Business travelers, for instance, will pay a lot of money for last-minute seats with a lot of flexibility for cancellation.

Airline pricing isn’t a precise model for virtual currency pricing, but it shows that it can make sense to be smart about tailoring prices to different customers, based on who they are and their capability or willingness to pay. By contrast to airlines, game companies have different economics since their virtual goods carry zero additional cost to make more of them. They don’t expire, and can be instantly created. Yet you don’t want to flood your game world with virtual goods and cause deflation.

This makes sense in the world that has emerged. The game industry relies on real-time exchanges that bid on user acquisition. Attribution companies tell game companies where the users came from. Analytics providers do deep segmentation and predictions. Game developers have to optimize user acquisition, improve engagement, and prevent user churn.

Above: Scientific Revenue dashboard.

Image Credit: Scientific Revenue

“People were very recently focused on ad monetization,” Grosso said. “It’s only with the rise of cost-per-install (CPI), or user acquisition costs, that it has become very painful. People are now focusing on revenue optimization as an idea. When we started this in 2012, we were ahead of the curve. When I mentioned it to people in 2013, not many people said that they needed it immediately. Now the battle for users and eyeballs is more expensive.”

Scientific Revenue believes that pricing is complicated because people are complicated. People respond in different ways to prices at different times. So why should game companies offer the same prices to everyone? To maximize revenues, Scientific Revenue employs user profiling and tailored pricing.

Geographic pricing is one of the company’s specialties. In India, for instance, players are more price-sensitive. Game companies should sell virtual goods for lower prices in that market, compared to other territories.

“If you don’t price correctly, you don’t have access to a market of 1.3 billion people in India,” Grosso said. “A good side effect is retention. You have someone who now spends in a game, and they hang around longer. It’s not about raising prices to gouge people, but lowering prices because they have less disposable income.”

It’s also worth noting that people with high-end Samsung phones are much more willing to spend than people who are using less-expensive Indian phones.

Grosso’s team of 15 people — including two economists — has put together a cloud-based infrastructure that provides personalized, profit-maximizing prices for a company’s users. It handles complex functions such as player behavior data mining, data analysis, and real-time segmentation and per-user pricing so that developers don’t have to do it.

At his previous job, Grosso was the chief technology officer at Live Gamer, which did payment processing in free-to-play games. In watching companies launch on Live Gamer, Gross believed that most weren’t doing their pricing right.

He left the company, and while on a vacation, he cooked up the idea for Scientific Revenue in 2012. Chris Carvalho, the former chief operating officer at Kabam, is on the company’s advisory board, and former U.S. Sony PlayStation chief Jack Tretton is also on its board. Scientific Revenue raised a seed round in February 2014.

Rivals include New York-based Gondola. Grosso’s team is focused on mobile, as that’s the market where it wants to win first.

Building Relationships with your Leads written by Guest Post read more at Duct Tape Marketing

photo credit: 500 interns – NASA poster session via photopin (license)

You’ve invested time and energy in social media, content marketing, you’ve created a call to action that’s been generating leads, and your email list of contacts is growing. Now how do you generate sales from your current leads and expand your reach to attract new leads?

Let’s take a look at two effective techniques –influencer marketing and customer emails – and how they can help you build relationships with your leads.

Influencer marketing

Using key influencers to promote your brand to a wider market, should be an important part of your overall marketing strategy. Today’s key influencers are often bloggers, and building relationships with bloggers, within your niche, can be more valuable than money spent on traditional advertising channels. According to a recent survey, 81% of consumers say they trust advice from their favourite bloggers while only 33% trust ads.

Word-of-mouth marketing is very relevant and when word gets spread by industry influencers, there’s more potential for capturing the attention of new users and increasing your reputation.

Build a strategy around influencers

Most brands today understand the importance of content marketing, and 77% of marketers use blogging to increase brand influence. Once you’ve invested time and effort into your own blog, how do you spread your reach by connecting with other bloggers?

Software such as GroupHigh can help you identify focus areas for your target audience and find bloggers and social media influencers who will be relevant to your message. Once you’ve identified them, determine how to collaborate to the best effect. Building a successful campaign involves:

• Identifying your goals and understanding what you want to accomplish can help you decide on whom you want to work with and what approach you’ll take.

• Get creative. Everyone likes a good product review, but more than their attention, you want to get them involved. Sponsor giveaways for ‘best comments’ or solicit user-generated content and feature the ‘best of’ on your site.

• Provide high-quality images and suggest creative visuals that bloggers can use for their Instagram stream.

• Create share-worthy messages. Target a devoted niche and focus on content quality rather than traffic analytics.

• Research your competitors. Take the time to really analyse their successes.  What does a successful campaign look like?  Don’t be afraid to borrow ideas from outside of your industry either.

Realistic Expectations

It’s important to understand that blogging is a business too. Cooperation from bloggers isn’t always free, especially the high-level influencers. When you weigh the benefits, though, blogger influence often justifies the costs. Spending on influencer marketing might be an eventuality- as part of your overall social media marketing costs.

Connect with local bloggers (i.e. newspaper sites and community leaders.) This is valuable publicity, for free! Request backlinks to your site to drive traffic and boost SEO ratings. If you don’t earn a link, that’s OK, you still gained recognition and a boost to your reputation.

Craft Smart Correspondence

The other tactic for building relationships is connecting with customers through email marketing. Email lets you communicate your brand message in personalized format while providing leads the opportunity to click through and purchase.

Segment your email list. If you’re tracking analytics, you already know where you leads are coming from. Did they sign up through your latest Facebook ad, download your eBook, or were they referred by an existing customer? You can tailor your emails based on the specific marketing approach each customer responded to.

Other ways to segment include demographics and survey responses. The list goes on, depending on the product or service that you are selling. The point is that by breaking down your large list into smaller segments, you can send out targeted correspondence which translates to a higher likelihood of generating a response.

Personalize each email. Include details about past purchases and target items to customer interests based on those purchases. The more you demonstrate an understanding of your customers, the more likely they are to return and become loyal buyers.

Building relationships with your leads is the key to conversion. Building trust with influencers and maintaining communication through email marketing are effective methods of establishing these important relationships. And these are the relationships that create results!  

Courtney Capellan is a Digital Analyst for hotelmarketingWorks. When she’s not writing about marketing trends she enjoys writing fiction, practicing yoga and treasure hunting. Follow her on Twitter @courtcapellan

No matter if you’re a B2B or B2C marketer, lead generation is a necessary function of your marketing team. And it’s something we’re all trying to improve upon. A great way to bring leads to your website is through B2B blogging.

Content engages the client and if written well, is something they’ll share with others, which helps your company reach a bigger audience. According to the Content Marketing Institute, 62% of people feel good about a company that delivers custom content. But creating the content is only the beginning, you must distribute it and target the right individuals to drive qualified leads to your website.

Below, check out ways to drive more leads from your B2B blogging efforts.

Understand Your Audience

Knowing your target audience and what they search for to solve their problems is essential to great B2B blogging. Google Keyword Planner makes this data visible. Plug in keywords related to your industry and see how people search for your product or service. When you know this information, you can plan content that targets these keywords and answers the questions your prospects are searching for. Reaching more contacts, who are specifically searching in your industry, means reaching more leads.

Create Clickable CTAs

A call-to-action (CTA) is a great way to generate leads from content. Someone might click a link on social media and read your blog post, but are they really, truly interested in your product or service? Inserting a CTA that asks them to sign up for a newsletter or download an e-book is an easy way to find out. If they sign up for a newsletter, they’re at a minimum interested in keeping in touch with your brand. If they download an e-book, you know they are interested in educating themselves in your field, which makes them a good lead to target with future content.

Engage in Social Media

It’s a safe assumption that social media plays a role in almost everyone’s life. Using Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, and beyond, we interact with others in infinite proportions. And blogging is a great, easily shareable way to get leads to interact with your website.

Sharing your content on the company blog and social accounts is a great start, but there’s more to be done. Research the forums, groups or hashtags that are relevant to your industry and make sure your content is also shared there. Targeting people who are already knowledgeable of your industry is a great way to drive qualified leads. If you create an engaging headline people will click the link and visit your site. After reading, they may share your content on their personal social accounts or publish to other online forums. Not only is this free advertising, but it gets your message and brand in front of people you never would have reached otherwise.

Another great social option is to have employees’ personal accounts linked to the blog. When a post is published to the blog it can be set to auto-publish on multiple employee accounts. This not only gets your content in front of those already following your blog, but in front of individuals who may have never heard of your brand, but will be happy once they have.

Quote Thought Leaders

It’s impossible to know everything in your field and sometimes others say things better than you ever could. Quoting thought leaders in your industry solves those dilemmas and is a great way to spread valuable information from a reliable source. It builds trust with your readers. After quoting, it’s important to tag the thought leader when you publish your content to social media and you can even ask them to share your content. If the message is good, maybe they’ll tweet it out to their followers or share it on Facebook. Achieving this is huge. It comes across as a personal recommendation from a big name in the industry and allows your brand to reach thousands who are directly interested in your field of work.

Make sure you have a proper attribution model in place so you can track which content generates the most touchpoints. At that point, you know what is working, and what is not, and can adjust your content as you grow and develop as a company.

When you’re on the lookout for a new TV (or smartphone, or laptop), your first step is probably to use Google to see what other people have to say about different brands or models, right? You’re not alone. Fleishman-Hillard reported in 2012 that 89% of people do exactly that, and one in five will check out a brand on Facebook. All of that consumer chatter and social media messaging can make a salesperson’s job a little more complicated than it used to be. This infographic from Crimson Marketing shows how a business’s marketing department can ready its sales team with the information it needs to snag those internet-savvy buyers.

First off, marketing should be seen as a revenue center, not a cost center. In fact, marketing is actually an equal and complementary partner to sales. How is that possible? Look to the buyers – they are far more self-educated these days. Thanks to the internet, they can do their own research and make a purchase decision on their own before talking to a vendor. Marketers are more likely than sales reps to know what buyers are thinking or saying. The two teams should work together and share information. Sales reps have to learn to value the data that marketers can provide them about buyers. Marketers need to make sure that sales reps are on equal footing with their leads in brand and product knowledge. By pairing up with marketing, sales reps will get better at their jobs, which is a win for your company.

Here are three easy tips for marketers working with sales reps:

1. Listen: Listen to the buyers, that is. Collect data from message boards, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Amazon review sections, and other places where customers talk.
2. Mine Your Data: Pluck out the relevant information and pass it along to sales in a report that is clear and easy to understand.
3. Provide Some Guidance: Use your experience to help sales reps learn how to act on the information. For example: responding to customer questions or concerns online.

Are your sales and marketing teams sharing notes, or still working in isolation? Join the discussion below!