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It’s so easy to get caught up in the cycle of being ‘busy’ as an entrepreneur and never really getting anything done. If you feel like you’re just spinning your wheels, it’s important to slow down, get on a schedule and determine a plan for action.

Instead of spending a ton of time planning and talking about what you’re going to do, take action and get it done instead. This method can be used for important tasks like creating a sales funnel for your business. Digital entrepreneurs (especially) need to have an awesome sales funnel if they want to grow their businesses.

What Is a Sales Funnel?

A sales funnel refers to the buying process a customer or client endures before they actually feel confident enough to do business with you. Starting out, you may be attracting strangers to your business or website and that’s perfectly fine. A sales funnel will help introduce them to your business and allow you to build some credibility and gain their trust.

From there, you can gain even more trust by helping your ideal customer solve a basic problem. This could then lead up to a solution you offer to a major problem they have. When you think about it, we all go through a sales funnel process with companies.

It’s unlikely that you’ll make sales the first time a potential buyer encounters your business. This is why it’s important to have a sales funnel in place to walk them through the process of feeling comfortable and confident enough to buy from you.

Then, they may even become life-long trusted customers.

It took me years to understand what a sales funnel was and how to create one. Once I finally did, I took way too long to get everything set up. In this post, I’ll be showing you how you create a sales funnel in just one day. Then, you’ll be able to automate aspects of your business and start making more money. Here’s what you need to do.

Step 1: Determine Your Dream Client/Customer

Before you start to create a sales funnel, you need to know who you will market it to. Determine your dream client/customer by asking yourself who you want to serve most. This is more about the people you serve than it is about you, so get to know your dream client.

Where do they live? Where do they work? How much do they make? Do they have a family? What are their goals? What do they struggle with? What are they good at? What do they fear?

Of course, you can answer all of these questions hypothetically to create an avatar of your dream client. The more you know, the more specific you can be with your marketing and the solutions you offer.

Step 2: Develop Your Freebie Offer

Once you have a clear understanding of who you wish to serve, now you can create a freebie offer to get them on your email list. If you already have an email service provider, you should be able to track stats to see how your current opt-in offer is doing if you have one.

The average rate people should be opting in to your list at is 1.95%. This means out of all the people who visit your site and come across your opt-in offer to join the email list, 1.95% of them sign up and convert. These days, people are way more inclined to sign if you are clear about what your email newsletter will be about and if you can give them something free in return.

If you’re already at or above that rate and feel your current freebie offer serves your target audience, you can skip this step. However, if you just got super specific when determining your ideal customer or client, I’d recommend creating a new freebie offer and testing it out.

Your freebie should be simple and something you can create in 1-2 hours or less. Some of the best freebie offers include:

• Checklists
• Video Tutorials
• E-books or guides
• Worksheets

Realize that you don’t have to create this content from scratch either. You can simply repurpose content you currently have or expand on it. If you have a popular product/solution or blog post, create a freebie offer surrounding that. For example, I have a personal finance site and a very popular post about how we keep our food budget low each month. I created a 7-day meal plan guide with a few organizational worksheets to offer as a freebie. It’s been a great way to get people to sign up on my list.

Step 3: Set Up Your Follow-Up Emails

Once you get people on your list, you need to keep sending them emails to move them deeper into the sales funnel. But first, determine what your goal is for follow up. What do you want your audience to ultimately do? Do you want them to sign up for your program or course? Buy your signature product?

Each email you send in the funnel should bring them closer to taking this action. You can set your emails up to be automatically sent for a series of days after each person signs up and receives your freebie offer.

Plan 4-5 emails that will clearly:

• Help your subscriber to achieve their goals
• Clearly establish yourself as an expert in the niche (so you become the go-to expert)
• “Train” your subscribers to open your emails and click on the links inside

It’s important to find a balance between providing information and pitching offers. No one likes to feel like they’re being sold to so if you have offers you want your audience to test out, you still need to offer good information and value as well.

Here’s a process I like to follow with sales funnel emails:

• Email 1 – Send freebie offer, invite subscriber to take a quick 5-question survey to learn more about their needs and expectations (you can create a free survey with SurveyMonkey)
• Email 2 – Offer a deeper introduction of yourself. Share your journey and perhaps how you were once where your current subscriber is. Share why you started your business and how you plan to help them and serve
• Email 3 – Offer some valuable information in this email or a quick solution they can implement to solve a small, recurring problem. Ask for nothing in return as this will build trust.
• Email 4 – Offer some additional resources. These could be products or services you use or recommend or even things you’ve created yourself. Include testimonials or reviews from others too to demonstrate that they didn’t just work for you
• Email 5 – Lead by telling another story about yourself or your business and how it relates to your product or service. Overcome objections in this email and provide answers to some FAQs

These are just the basics. You can always add more to your funnel and incorporate the material you have whether it involves booking a free discovery call, promoting a recurring webinar you set up, or offering a fun challenge to your email subscribers.

Feel free to get creative and test things out.

Summary

To recap, you can definitely create a sales funnel in just one day. You need to:

• Determine your dream customer/client
• Develop a valuable freebie offer to get them on your list
• Create a series of emails that will help your subscriber come to know, like, and trust you and your business. Automate the emails so you don’t have to do it manually
• Once you’ve provided value upfront and have gotten your subscriber to let their guard down, pitch your offer and provide evidence that it is a proven solution.

Sure, this process may take you a few hours so you’ll need to block out time in your schedule to create your sales funnel. However, getting it done in a single day will provide so much relief and allow you to free up more time in your business so you’re not constantly chasing sales.

Have you considered how you would create a sales funnel?

Highly sought-after, highly influential, highly respected, highly compensated. These are some of the ways people describe your position as CEO or member of the executive staff. The descriptors may be accurate, but then there’s the rest of the story. Running a company is difficult, complex, disagreeable, stressful and often thankless. Add to that the pressures from above, below and all around, and it’s understandable why people holding the job paint a less rosy picture of it than those looking in from outside.

The truth is, there are many mistakes you must avoid when you reach the ranks of senior executive. While some are bigger than others, a few rise to the level of landmines — errors that can leave your results and legacy looking more like a crater than whatever you were trying to build.

Whether you’re new to the executive ranks or a seasoned CEO, here are five of the biggest ones and how to avoid them:

1. Not reiterating a clear statement of intended measurable outcomes.

Instead: Be crystal clear — especially with your team — about what you’re trying to accomplish.

With so much going on and so many internal and external pressures at play, it’s easy to assume that your team knows what you’re trying to do and how to communicate your intent downward. Your revenue and growth targets, the markets you’re trying to capture or infiltrate, the products and services you’re delivering — there are whole divisions, headed by very senior people, working on these very things! Is it really necessary for you to keep restating your own goals over and over again?

The answer is simple: Yes. Whether you run a division or the whole company, everyone needs to hear from you about the measurable, tangible things you’re intending to accomplish with your resources and their efforts. And while “everyone” includes your entire employee base on a regular basis, it includes your immediate team members even more frequently.

Your weekly or bi-weekly staff meetings should function as forums with the sole purpose of checking in on how their parts of the company are performing relative to your intended goals, and deciding whether any adjustments should be made today to stay on course for the future outputs you’re trying to produce.

2. Buying into the “At this level they should be able to” fallacy.

Instead: Manage with clear goals, specific feedback and consistent accountability.

Remember that moving up the organizational hierarchy doesn’t equal moving out of the realm of humanity. The people who work for you may be sophisticated, but they’re subject to the same flaws and failings as all human beings. They can become territorial, defensive, forgetful, cliquish and problematic in a host of ways. Since your success rests on theirs, it behooves you to acknowledge reality in your management of them.

Humans respond to supervision more usefully and predictably when they’re equipped with clear expectations of success, given direct and appropriate feedback about their performance, and held accountable to reasonable standards applied consistently to them and the people around them. These elements may manifest a bit differently for senior executives than newer managers, but they never go away. Work with your team to ensure that they each know what you’re expecting them to produce, how you perceive their progress and how you hold them responsible for results or lack thereof.

3. Allowing staffers to succeed or fail independently of each other.

Instead: Define success for all as team success.

When you finish setting individual goals, it’s tempting to turn each team member loose to chase those results. This sounds intuitive — and it’s certainly consistent with North American cultural norms around independence. But unfortunately, it’s not effective. For you to meet your goals, they all need to meet their goals. Setting your team up as independent actors puts them in competition when you need them in collaboration.

This solution here is easy: Make your problem theirs! Tell your whole team, “We succeed or fail together, and none of you are successful if my goals aren’t met.” You may even go as far as setting their bonuses and/or compensation based on your results. Your team may resist at first, but they’ll start sharing resources soon enough. Then, when there’s a tradeoff to be made between sections or divisions, your team will be debating what’s best for your outcome, instead of defending their disparate agendas and forcing you to play referee.

4. Buying into the “Trust equals letting me manage however I want” myth.

Instead: Make it your business to ensure the rest of the management team works like yours.

One of the biggest myths your team members are selling is that if you trust them, you’ll stay out of how they run their departments or sections. Again, this may be consistent with North American norms, but it’s absolutely counter to the aim of running a coordinated, nimble organization. If you don’t want to referee warring tribes with different cultures, it’s up to you to ensure you’re running just one tribe with just one culture.

Don’t abdicate your role in defining your direct reports’ management styles. Tell them you expect them to run their teams the way you run yours. Have them apply the principles above to their own teams: Run them with clear output statements, manage their reports well, hold those people accountable for their own teams’ successes and require all subordinate managers to manage in the same way. Remember, you’re not just the decider for your company or division, you’re the voice and the most active example of the culture. Promote a collaborative focus on clearly defined goals, and you’ll run an organization that achieves the outcomes that make it — and you — successful.

5. Having even the faintest suspicion that you’re overpaid.

Instead: Earn every dollar you make by producing a multiple of it for the organization.

Let’s be honest. On average, you and your colleagues get paid a whole lot more than most of the working population. That’s a reality, not an indictment. This fact is hurled at you in the form of an accusation regularly. Most likely, you’ve come up with a pretty good defense — in your mind if not aloud.

Don’t worry about doubts in others’ minds, but extinguish them from your own. How? Task your team with creating enough value each year to dwarf the size of your paycheck — and theirs. The leadership you serve believes it’ll see a Return on Investment for your salary. It’s your job to prove them right. By setting a precise agenda for your organization and a productive, collaborative tone for your culture, you’ll run an executive team that coordinates divisions or departments to deliver a return on your salary that may make the people writing your paycheck worry that it’s too small.

Previously published in CEO World Magazine.

90% of consumers trust in companies and services recommended by friends, relatives or people they know. Only 33% trust ads (Nielsen).

Refer-a-friend campaigns help brand’s gain trust since the referrers have already tested the product or service before referring them to their friends. This places refer-a-friend campaigns among the top of the most effective marketing strategies.

Market Force estimates that friends influence 81% of online consumers in the United States in making purchase decisions.

A joint study by Ogilvy/Google/TNS approximates 74% of consumers depend on mouth-to-mouth as the primary influence of their purchase decision. McKinsey further suggests word of mouth primarily influences 20 to 50 percent of consumers’ purchasing decisions.

The statistics point out the importance of why having a good refer-a-friend campaign is vital in buyer’s purchasing decisions for your business. We’ve explored some of the best refer a friend campaign ideas so you don’t have to. You’ll see how they can be a game-changer for your business.

Market Your Refer-a-Friend Campaign (Blast)

We’re going to start with the basics, but please don’t exit this article just yet. Having a refer a friend program and marketing it is how to get your campaign started.

Having an effective refer a friend campaign idea is not enough. You’ll need to market your referral program across many customers to make it known. To simply put it, be proactive, you’ll need to blast your refer-a-friend campaign as if you held a megaphone.

You cannot expect your customers to participate in your refer a friend campaigns unless they’re aware of it. You need to promote your campaigns actively to ensure that your customers are fully aware of the benefits they can avail through the participation in your campaigns.

If you are already providing a great service and awesome support, customers are probably already talking about you. If you tap into this word of mouth and implement a referral program strategy using your support channel, you have the potential to unlock a ton of referrals.

You can promote your campaigns via social media, emails, SMS and other platforms. Alternatively, brochures given to staff members to issue out to customers who visit your brick and mortar business can serve the same task. The point is, make the campaign known to as many customers as possible.

There are many well-made referral programs software out there. Here’s some top-notch refer a friend program ideas and examples you can learn from, as far as creative thinking goes.

However, let’s get into some effective campaign approach:

1. Social Gifting Concept

Social gifting is highly effective ‘refer a friend’ campaign idea. This is because your customers can truly show they care by providing benefits and a new product or business to their friends (a one-sided reward incentive).

In this campaign, the member does not get rewarded at all but the referred friend or the new customer gets all the benefits. If your customers feel that your product is really good and it is worthy of sharing with a friend, they will participate actively in the ‘social gifting’ campaign.

An example of a company that uses this model is a subscription based or in some cases eCommerce. Think of when you’ve seen a $50 gift card with a minimum purchase of $150. Why would anyone refer without receiving any reward? Well, this reward concept is based on someone who wants to share their experience with others, or a simply share a reward that is too great to not share with your friends. It could also be used to display a small token of appreciation to their friends, maybe limiting the quantity of these social gift distribution can help increase its significant.

This idea is a win-win for your business. Essentially, it’s the same as a discount code and a friends & family (F&F) discount offer. Give a big discount offer, however, take into consideration your average LTV and your margins to see what this incentive might be worth both for you and for referred customers.

The only issue with providing a steep discount in the beginning would be that they will always expect that type of discount. Providing an expiration date or incentivizing them to offer the same social gift to their friends and family can help increase more referrals and more opportunities for LTV increase.

2. Charity Donation Rewards

Not a lot of explaining needed with this type of reward. This technique serves the customers who are more motivated to donate to charities. The customers refer their friends who share a common interest of giving to charities. For example, donating on behalf of the customer or referred lead by assisting the Red Cross.

It doesn’t take too much effort for your members to share your program and both your member and their friends can contribute to the cause or charity.

3. Use Mystery Gifts as Rewards

Specific gifts are often the smart idea, but mystery rewards elicit excitement and anticipation. The customers who refer their friends will receive this mystery gift, and that makes the trend spread.

This idea, however, depends on your customers. The approach gives you the freedom to choose a wide range of gifts to reward customers. Some companies like Amazon, eBay have used this idea, and it has worked out well for them.

Obviously, setting expectations and the element of surprise needs to be backed up with something of that caliber. You’ll want to create that “I just received X, what did you get?” conversation going around to spark that next “I wonder what I’ll get” conversation to storm your business.

4. Subscription Credit

You can incentivize your customers with subscription or store credit for referring your products to their friends. It does not cost you much, as the credit can only be used to buy your products. It’s only the cost of the product that you lose out on but the customer feels happy about saving money on the purchase (and will likely pay for the following subscription fees).

These campaigns are particularly effective for selling software, courses, ebooks or other digital products. It might not even cost you a single penny (if you’re providing a free service or product anyway) but your customers get a lot of value for free, meaning they will happily refer your products to their friends.

Something to try:

Offer heavy discounts on your eCommerce shop and encourage customers to participate actively in your referral program. You can create tiered structure and offer discounts based on the number of referrals.

5. Reward With An Upgraded Service Or Product

By upgrading the services your customers are using already, you will win the loyalty of your customers. For instance, if one of your customers is using a SaaS tool, you can upgrade them to the premium tier when they refer your product to a friend. It won’t cost you anything extra, but you will get a new customer and keep your existing customers happy (and referring).

6. Recurring Benefits

Even if your loyal customers forget you, you should never forget them. Once your customer hits a certain target set by you, offer them benefits that they get to enjoy each month. For example, if a customer brings ten new customers in a month, you can offer them discounts or deals over upcoming months.

7. Exclusive Membership Programs

Going a step above by offering a tiered based reward. You can create special clubs for the customers who bring the maximum number of new customers for you. Offer them exclusive benefits that are available only to the club members. With a gym membership, for instance, this can include personal training credits, gift shop credits, or specialty items like a eucalyptus-infused towel every visit.

Even with a SaaS tool, you can upgrade your members to a higher tiered plan at no extra cost with dedicated customer support for your members VIP experience.

Being part of an exclusive program can grow as your referral program grows. You can create the top 5, top 10, top 50 member exclusive programs to spice up your members to get excited about the next reward type they can enjoy as a member.

8. Referral Contests

Referral contests also encourage a lot of customers to participate actively in your campaign and are a great idea driving customers to the brand. Offer a product which is high in demand for the winner of the contest. The product can be an expensive smartphone or tickets to an upcoming show or concert, depending on the demographics of your customers.

Offer something nice for the runner-up and the second runner-up as well. While some customers might not be able to get the big reward, providing gift cards to the mass or top 20-100 of your members who referred a specified amount of friends can be a great way to encourage referrals. Also, offer discounts or other benefits that don’t cost you anything to other participants.

A contest can create an entire army of customers who will work for you and bring new customers.

Bonus: Giving entries for shares in social media widens the campaign, and more people can learn of the programs as customers share to their friends in their social sites. The drive is suitable for cementing loyalty, if you want more people to participate in your refer-a-friend campaign, simply have them share with their networks and reward those who provided the most shares.

Conclusion

A refer-a-friend campaign is among the most effective of marketing tools. It is advisable to choose an idea that is desirable and discoverable. The campaign is a selling point and a way for new customers to join your brand. Making your refer-a-friend program discoverable, having a great landing page, and retargeting customers who visit the page and do not refer friends by giving more than another opportunity generates more referrals later.

As you can see, most of these ideas can be scalable and grow with your business. The more referrals you receive, the more ideas you can implement to reach to the next level.

If you’re involved in complex B2B sales, and if what you are selling is anything other than an absolute “must buy” necessity, then you all face the same top competitor, whatever you’re trying to sell, and whoever you’re trying to sell to.

It’s the status quo.

Until and unless your customer believes that their current situation puts their future business prospects at risk, they are most likely to conclude that staying with what they know – the lure of the familiar – represents their safest option.

After all, any course of action that involves change also involves risk. And until and unless the risk of sticking with the status quo significantly outweighs the perceived risk of implementing a new and unfamiliar solution, they are likely to “do nothing”.

There is psychology as well as statistics behind this. Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize-winning behavioural economist proved through his research that those in a position to make a decision are two-to-three times more motivated to change to avoid a current risk than they are to change in the hope of a future gain.

Breakthroughs, not increments…

So, offering an incremental improvement isn’t enough – you have to be offering a solution that has the potential to deliver a step-change, breakthrough outcome. Simply being slightly better than your conventional competition isn’t going to be enough, either.

If your customer concludes that they have to do something, and in the absence of any meaningful differentiation, they are likely to choose the cheapest, safest or most familiar option.

That’s fine if you are happy to compete on price. But not very helpful if you intend to compete on “value”. And please don’t for a moment think that adopting a “value added” strategy is going to help you.

Don’t “add value” – create it!

In my experience, most so-called “value-added” strategies turn out to be poorly disguised and often ham-fisted attempts to persuade prospects to pay a premium for additional functionality they are never actually likely to want, need or use.

Your smarter customers will see right through this sort of strategy and demand a discount to take account of the useless functionality you are misguidedly trying to load them up with. Not so much taking you back to square one as leaving you behind it.

The only way out of this dilemma is to return to the problem that your customer is trying to solve. And if they don’t have an acknowledged problem, then they surely have no need for your (or anyone else’s) “solution”.

Frustrating, important or critical?

You have to establish whether their problem is currently perceived to be frustrating, important or critical. If it is merely frustrating, while it might generate some customer engagement, they will probably conclude that they can afford to live with it. You need to recognise these situations and qualify them out early UNLESS you can transform their perception of the seriousness of the problem.

If they perceive the problem to be important, it will probably spark a serious evaluation of potential solutions. But even there is a real risk that even if they decide that they do need to take action, perhaps they can nevertheless afford to wait.

It’s only if and when a problem is perceived by the customer to be both critical and urgent that action is inevitable. Relatively few problems start out that way. Your role must be to convince the customer that this particular issue demands immediate action.

Aside from inherently critical problems, if you can associate what might otherwise be seen by your customer as an important problem with one of their strategic corporate initiatives, then that can also drive urgent action.

Start with your customer’s changing world

So where can you start? The best place to start looking is often outside your customer – in the environment that they operate within. What are the key, inevitable, unarguable changes that are happening to their world?

What are the implications? And what are the costs, risks and consequences of inaction? What is likely to be the fate of organisations and executives that choose to ignore these tides? Andy Raskin does a great job of helping organisations articulate this.

You need to highlight the inevitable need for change, to show why and how your approach is different, to prove how you can help your customer achieve breakthrough outcomes, and – even better – position the old-fashioned attitudes of your competitors as being part of the problem, not part of the solution!

Look inside their organisation

Of course, you also need to look inside the customer. What are your customer’s critical strategic initiatives, and how can you make a credible connection between your unique approach and capabilities and their chances of making those initiatives successful?

How can you help them to recognise and acknowledge needs, implications and consequences they may have missed or undervalued? How can you position your solution as being uniquely capable of enabling them to achieve their goals?

Change is challenging. It carries risks. So, if as sales people we believe that our focus is must be to enable our customers to recognise the need and value of change, it should be obvious that simply offering something that is marginally or incrementally better isn’t likely to cause them to change their behaviour.

In a nutshell:

• What are the critical changes that are happening in your customer’s external environment, and within their organisation?
• What bad things could happen if your customer were to fail to acknowledge and deal with those issues?
• Why and how is your approach to solving those problems different from their other options?
• How does your solution uniquely ensure that they successfully achieve those goals?

And if you are unable to articulate those things, how does that affect the chances that your customer will do anything and – if they do decide to change – the chances they will do business with you?

The monarch and the pipevine swallowtail are the Hermès and Louis Vuitton of the butterfly world – other butterflies imitate them. Non-toxic butterflies, through genetic mutation over generations, come to resemble toxic species so that predators are fooled into leaving them alone. The viceroy butterfly, for example, shares the monarch’s colors, and appears at the same time of year in similar habitats.

We find similar behavior in the global marketplace. Nike shoes are among the most counterfeited products on the market. The imitations, made in well-equipped factories in Putian, China, are in many ways indistinguishable from the real thing, and by some estimates one of every three Nike shoes on the market is a fake.

Products from luxury brands such as Louis Vuitton, Hermès, and premium watch makers such as Rolex and Panerai are also widely counterfeited. On the web you can find a large and growing underworld marketplace for knock off bags, copy pens, replica watches and many other products that are expertly copied.

I started to observe this global underground marketplace after reading this New York Times Magazine article on fake products. Here are some aspects of counterfeit brand strategy that puzzle me.

1. Imitations of many luxury brands are priced at about 2% of the genuine article, and the better imitations – some of which even experts cannot tell apart – are priced at about 5% of the real thing. From a marketing standpoint, this price differential is a real head scratcher. Why would the maker of a fake product forego up to 99% of the price the customer is willing to pay for the real thing? Generic pharma companies, for example, have learned over the years that it does not make sense to offer generics at 5% of a formerly patented product’s price, when you can charge 90% of its price and still capture a significant share of the market. Similarly, grocery stores have learned to price their private labels just under the umbrella of branded goods. So why do counterfeiters of luxury goods leave so much money on the table? Why not capture a greater share of the brand premium? One answer is they face stiff competition from other counterfeiters. And since their products are indistinguishable from those of other counterfeiters, price wars spiral out of control, cutting their margins.

2. Another puzzling aspect of this market is that unlike other products, prices appear to be cost rather than demand-supply driven. Take the delicately named “replica” watch market. In this market, the price for a copy of a $95,000 Patek Philippe is $288, and the price of a fake Swatch Irony is also $288. If a fake is free-riding on the brand equity, why does it not capture some of the premium associated with the brand?

3. Price variance, it turns out, is almost entirely due to the components. Again, in the watch market, a knock-off with a Swiss movement is priced around $100 more than the same watch with a Chinese-made movement, regardless of the value of the genuine piece it is knocking off. In other words, a fake Swiss watch with a genuine Swiss movement costs more than a fake Swiss watch with a non-Swiss movement. There are also clone movements that are reverse-engineered Swiss movements made in China, which are priced somewhere between the fake-fakes, and the real fakes. Price varies as a function of the components rather than demand for the brand or the original product being knocked off.

The makers of high quality counterfeit products have the skills and the ability to make pretty good products at reasonable prices. What they appear to lack is their own design capabilities and access to customers who are willing to pay for a product on its own merits rather than on the basis of the brand. If counterfeiters had their own design capabilities and customers were able to recognize quality and pay for it without recourse to the brand, would counterfeiters need to copy? Would they not make better margins playing in markets where pricing is driven by demand and supply rather than component costs?

It is very likely that the counterfeit explosion we are witnessing is a passing phase – a stage in the evolution of manufacturers in China who have mastered production technology but not yet the marketing and design techniques that will give them access to customers worldwide. In markets as in nature, mimicry is a matter of evolution.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by: Niraj Dawar, Author of TILT: Shifting Your Strategy From Products To Customers

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Why Behavior Scoring is the Missing Ingredient in Your Marketing Approach written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

With inbound marketing becoming ever more popular in recent years, a marketer might be tempted to think broad when it comes to their approach. After all, when anyone can happen upon your brand, it means that anyone’s a potential customer, right?

That’s not quite true. In fact, the number of leads that actually become customers is only around 10 percent. So that means you should really be focused on creating highly targeted marketing messages that are likely to appeal to that small sliver of the population, rather than trying to please everyone.

But how do you find those people? And once you’ve found them, what can you do to make sure you’re speaking to them in a way that really resonates?

That’s where behavior scoring comes in. When you understand the behaviors that are most often exhibited by your customers, you can begin to identify your most promising leads and refine your marketing messaging so that it speaks directly to them.

What is Behavior Scoring?

Behavior scoring, sometimes called lead scoring, is assigning a numerical score or grade to prospects based on certain behaviors they exhibit. You start by analyzing the behaviors of your best existing customers. Are there ways they interact with your brand that consistently result in conversions? Is there a certain page on your website they visit, social media platform they follow, or email newsletter they sign up for?

When you understand the behaviors of your existing clients, you can then create a “composite sketch” of your ideal customer. Those customers who do X, Y, and Z convert a high percentage of the time, so your prospects who do those same things are given a high behavior score. They’re the people you want to focus your marketing time and effort on.

People visit sites or interact with brands for all sorts of reasons. Let’s say you own a tree care company. You may show up in search results for an apartment-dweller looking for advice on tending to her indoor potted tree, a student thinking about starting a lawn care business who’s doing research on pricing in similar industries, and new homeowner in the area who wants to replace some of the older trees on their property. Only one of these people has the potential to become a legitimate client, and since you don’t get full biographical information on those who visit your website, tracking behaviors can indicate their level of seriousness.

The woman in the apartment might watch a short video on plant care your site and then disappear. The student might beeline to the pricing page. But the homeowner looks at several pages outlining services and pricing, plus checks out your testimonials. If this is activity you’ve seen from past customers, then you know this is a lead worth spending some time on.

Lower Your Customer Acquisition Costs and Increase Customer Lifetime Value

Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) and Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) are two critical metrics to track for your business. When you understand how much it costs to acquire your customers and how much value they produce once you have them, you can tweak your sales approach and pricing models to ensure your acquisition costs are covered and you’re still able to make a profit.

However, the reverse is also true: When you understand the behaviors that make someone a promising lead, you can lower CAC and increase CLV. By only marketing to those prospects exhibiting desirable behaviors, you stop wasting time on prospects who will never convert. This means that you’ll get more marketing bang for your buck overall, since you won’t spend dollars chasing those who would never become customers anyway.

Plus, as you begin to develop a more and more nuanced understanding of your customers’ behaviors, you can continue to refine your marketing approach to get even greater results and drive existing customers towards purchasing bigger and better products. All of this leads to an increase in overall CLV.

Understand What Resonates with Your Promising Leads

When you understand the actions of your ideal customer, you can create marketing campaigns that drive prospects to take those actions. Experimenting with website layout, calls to action, and your messaging and tone can all help to drive people who are interested in your business to take the steps that are likely to lead to conversion.

A/B testing is a particularly effective way to further refine your approach. Try running different variations of your web pages to see which gains the greatest traction.

Showing half of your hot leads one option and the other a variant of the same page allows you to understand the messaging and layout that works best. If there’s a significant difference in response to the two variations, that tells you something.

You then can do the work of analyzing the differences, identifying the aspects that made the one page so successful, and replicating that approach across other pages, platforms, and channels.

Further Refine Your Outbound Approach

Once you understand what resonates with your hot leads, you can move beyond inbound tactics and create advertising that’s highly targeted to those leads.

Facebook’s advertising platform offers business owners a number of ways to identify and target hot leads. With the Facebook Pixel installed on your website, you’re able to track visitor behavior—a key part of the scoring process. On the Facebook advertising platform itself, you can create lookalike audiences, groups with attributes that mirror those of your existing customer base, allowing you to target them with advertising.

All of this becomes a positive feedback loop. As your marketing approach is refined, you continue to attract more qualified leads. These leads in turn give you an even more nuanced picture of what your ideal prospect looks like, which allows you to further tailor your marketing approach. Over time, you generate greater and greater results.

Pass on the Leads that Will Never Convert

The fact of the matter is that there are plenty of leads who will never convert, no matter what you do. If you spend your time and energy reaching out to every person, the majority of your energy is being dedicated to people who will never convert.

That’s why a critical part of behavior scoring is not just assigning positive points to those leads who exhibit certain behaviors that often lead to conversion, but also taking away points from those who exhibit less-than-promising behaviors.

Leads who consistently delete your emails without reading, have only been to your website once or twice, or are in a location that your business doesn’t service are ones that you should not spend time pursuing.

Inbound marketing can sometimes make you feel like you need to be everything to everyone. In reality, the most effective marketing strategies—inbound and outbound—are those that speak directly to the small percentage of the population that actually need the solution your business offers. When you use behavior scoring to better understand the actions of your best customers, you can create messaging that resonates with the leads who have the best shot at conversion. All of this saves you time and money, and it makes your customers happier, because they know they’ve found a business that really gets them.

Summary: One of the earliest steps in my professional journey — a stint as an SAT  and ACT preparation instructor for college-bound students — has unexpectedly prepared me for training sales talent. Here’s what standardized test prep has in common with coaching sales professionals in high-pressure settings.

As a college freshman, choosing to teach SAT and ACT test preparation courses to high schoolers was pretty much a no-brainer. It offered scheduling flexibility and a convenient location less than a mile from campus. Plus, it paid well. I continued teaching part-time even after I graduated.

After several years of teaching SAT prep classes, I realized that how I taught had a direct effect on the success of my test-takers. If I communicated effectively, worked to actually understand my students, exhibited interpersonal skills, and demonstrated patience, my students tended to do better. I never forgot that lesson, and it became even more relevant after I entered the emerging, fast-paced software-as-a-service industry and started training salespeople.

Effective sales teams are always learning. However, it takes a willing, able mentor to teach people how to not only absorb facts, but also to apply them effectively to snag and retain clients. To teach effectively, it’s important to understand how people learn and how quickly they do so. The reality is that everyone learns at a different rate, and you can’t usually make James learn more quickly than Aubrey if that’s not his speed. At the same time, almost everyone learns faster by doing versus listening, so guided repetition with tons of feedback is key — no matter who’s in the student seat.

When you pair a trainer who has a strong desire to teach with salespeople who are eager to build their skills, you can jump-start any corporate sales team and keep the team members reaching for better “scores.”

Tips for Sales Leaders to Help Their Employees Grow

Take it from me: I helped teenagers navigate the ups, downs, and sideways of ever-stressful standardized tests. What I discovered along the way can help you create an enviable team of high-performing sales professionals.

1. Teach employees the issues your customers are facing.

Nothing’s as frustrating for buyers as a sales representative who has no idea how to use his or her expertise to solve problems. Unfortunately, this seems to happen a lot. A whopping 75 percent of purchasing agents reportedly believe B2B sales reps lack basic field knowledge of their industry. That should make sales managers everywhere shudder.

When I lead team sales training, we don’t just cover a product or service’s features and functionality; we cover the underlying business concerns our customers face. That way, they can extrapolate their basic know-how and use it to solve both anticipated and unanticipated issues when they go into real-world situations.

2. Stop taking ‘I understand’ for an answer. 

In my test prep days, I’d get plenty of head nods from students when I asked, “Do you understand?” Even if they thought they did, they were often mistaken. When I called them to the whiteboard to complete a problem, they inevitably stumbled. I would never have realized how little they absorbed if I had taken that answer at face value.

No matter what you’re teaching a group of salespeople, force them to practice it numerous times to help them internalize it. They’ll sometimes tell you they “get it,” but make them prove it by applying it to several different scenarios. Coach them along the way, and set the stage for consistency. Keeping your team members honest about how much they understand mixed with real-world feedback can increase sales performance by up to 6.2 percent.

3. Let salespeople test their mettle on actual deals.

There’s truly no substitute for real-world experience, whether you’re fiddling nervously before taking a mock SAT or attempting to close a crucial sale. But I’ve realized that I have two big advantages as a trainer that I didn’t have as a test prep instructor: I can pick my “students,” and I can coach them during the “test.” Use this to your advantage.

While it’s painful to put a potential deal at risk, you have to be willing to allow your representatives — at least the ones with a foundation in sales — to try things on their own. Ultimately, you can’t prepare for every contingency, and all the prep in the world only goes so far; at some point, you have to get out there and do it.

That’s not to say you should always leave your team members to their own devices. It’s just as important to work alongside your reps whenever possible — especially with prospects far along the critical path or those who are particularly strategic to your company.

However, allowing your sales talent the space to occasionally stumble will help them learn more quickly. After all, you’ve presumably hired strong talent and trained them effectively, and you shouldn’t worry about letting them spread their wings on a sales call. Afterward, review the live meeting or recorded session and go over what they did correctly and what they should work on for the next time.

RELATED: How To Build (And Scale) A Successful Sales Development Team

The Dos and Don’ts of Continued Sales Education

Do: Teach the ‘why’ in addition to the ‘what.’

Your salespeople will be far more effective if they understand the factors driving your organization’s success and failure. Instead of simply explaining what something is, talk about why it’s important and put it into context. They can then absorb this information for their benefit when on sales calls.

Do: Hire people who love learning.

The harsh reality is that not everyone is driven to improve his or her skills. Seek out individuals who want to better themselves; they’ll likely be more successful than their counterparts who are growth-averse. Ask all potential sales candidates what they’ve done lately to increase their skill set, even if it wasn’t in the sales realm. If you get a blank stare or a vague answer, you should pass on that candidate.

Do: Ask students to solve problems. 

When teaching test prep, I always felt like students were more engaged when a classmate taught something than when I did — they just paid more attention to peers. Sales is no different, and the student usually makes a better effort overall if he’s teaching someone other than himself. During our sales team meetings at Node, we often discuss specific challenges with prospects, and I encourage team members to guide themselves to potential solutions.

Do: Have more experienced sales students lead lessons (with a little guidance). 

Feel like you have a selling superstar on your hands? Request that he or she do some outside research, and then work on creating additional curriculum to teach to the team. This is a great way to enhance awareness. Who knows? You might just cover a topic you had never thought of or find a rising sales leader for your company.

Don’t: Teach a ‘one and done.’ 

Like it or not, we’re all at the mercy of the forgetting curve. We know that after an hour, people forget about 56 percent of what they learn. Within six days, that number reaches 75 percent. As a trainer, your job is to reinforce learning through guided repetition and pointed feedback. No matter how much everyone is tired of hearing something, repeat it again — and ask them to do likewise.

Don’t: Feel stupid saying, ‘I don’t know.’

You don’t have to be omniscient just because you’re teaching a subject. Occasionally, I wasn’t certain about the correct answer to an SAT or ACT problem. When that happened, I turned it into an exercise in which I taught students how to navigate these sticky situations to have the highest probability of success. Real-world situations are rarely black or white, and navigating the gray is a critical skill for salespeople.

Don’t: Be scared to let sales representatives loose.

As long as someone has demonstrated competence in a lower-stakes environment, let him or her go for the real thing. When active learners experience failure, they want to do better the next time. Sure, it’s hard to stand by and watch someone occasionally mess up (and if it happens often, you should reconsider whether he or she is properly trained). But until you touch the hot oven sans a mitt, all the parental admonitions in the world won’t (literally) burn the correct reaction into you. Besides, having a few battle scars is a required part of personal growth — whether in sales or in life.

As sales professionals, there’s always something to build or improve upon in our strategies, and this is true whether we’re just starting to build our training program or have decades of experience as a sales leader. If you have any useful tips you’ve discovered when training and educating sales talent, I’d love to hear about them.

The post Winning Sales Training Advice From a Long-Time Test Prep Instructor appeared first on Sales Hacker.

If you plan to start, buy, or a sell a business in 2019, it will be more important than ever to understand the landscape as technology and political factors continue to change the way businesses run. Read on for an outlook on how technology, the economy, and the political landscape will affect buying and selling businesses in 2019.

Technology is important; the human touch is irreplaceable

Technology has been the biggest game-changer in almost every aspect of how businesses operate, interact with customers, sell products, track inventories, and more. While there are nearly uncountable ways that technology can aid your business operations, processes, and interactions, with an increasingly automated and robotic world, the places where you can insert a human touch is invaluable. This is best utilized in a closer touch point, usually the customer service aspects of your business. Whether you sell directly to consumers or are in business-to-business sales, any opportunity to really interact with your customers at a level that’s meaningful to their business will be a differentiator in 2019 as businesses continue to automate.

We are not saying automation is uniformly a poor choice, but rather finding the most impactful interactions to maintain on a human-level will become increasingly important to customers.

The political landscape may help the economy and business owners

The current administration places high priority on reducing regulations in hopes that it will help pump more money into the economy with less restrictions on how and where funds can be spent. Additionally, as financial author Mark Thornton notes, the incoming congressional gridlock, with the democrats taking control of the House of Representatives, will also give way to positive effects for small businesses.

This could be very good news for business owners in 2019. Not only will the regulations continue to incentivize consumers to spend, but the stalemate that congress will likely find itself in will help the economy with each party being able to moderate the other. This prohibits policies that are too far on either side of the spectrum from being passed, and the checks and balances help keep a healthy and moving economy.

A strong job market puts emphasis on employee satisfaction

The unemployment rate in 2018 dropped to a remarkably low 3.7 percent, and The Balance predicts that trend will continue in 2019 reaching 3.5 percent. A strong job market means unhappy employees are more likely to search for another, more fulfilling, job. This may mean businesses looking to hire may need to offer higher wages, better benefits, and a positive professional culture. If you’re in the market to buy a business in this economy, current employee retention will be important to a smooth transition, and the threshold for what constitutes a happy employee may be higher than in recent years.

Banks are opening their checkbooks

Economic confidence will make it easy for small businesses seeking financing in 2019 to get a loan approved at a low interest rate. In fact, coming out of 2018, small business loan applications have seen approval marks and interest rates that are matching those seen previous to the 2008 recession. In November 2018 alone, over half of all small business loan requests were approved.

This is beneficial for those looking to buy or sell (or both!) a business in 2019. Those who plan to buy a business will have less trouble getting a loan approved than in previous years, and at a low rate. Additionally, anyone who may sell their business in 2019 will have a wider range of potential buyers. Those who may have been rejected by banks in years where they were being more stringent about who they would lend to may be more likely to have their loan request approved in the year to come.

2019 may be a great year to buy or sell a business

All indicators point to 2019 being one of the best in recent history to buy or sell a business. With banks happy to loan money, buyers will be able to get the loans they need at preferred rates and sellers will have a wide net of potential buyers. Additionally, ongoing deregulation will make it easier for this strong economy to continue in an upward trajectory. Furthermore, in the political landscape, 2019 will bring a divided congress for the first time with the current administration in power. This will limit either party’s ability to pass legislation that is too far right or left, and a moderate government is great for small businesses and the economy. If you’re considering buying or selling, 2019 is looking to be a great year to do so.

In folklore, a “highwayman” is a robber who preys on travelers as they journey on unfamiliar roads. In the online buying journey, the concept is realized anew in the form of fraudulent bots and crawlers that consume content, ad placements, clicks and dollars from advertisers — skewing analytics and falsely inferring buyer intent when none truly exists.

Here are three things to look for when choosing a buyer intent solution that is bot-immune:

The solution must have machine learning that accurately identifies the tell-tale digital footprints of a fraudulent device and flags them as a bot or crawler. It is critical that crawlers be identified at the device level so that non-crawler activity from major accounts is not ignored.

The solution must take a “wide capture” approach — one which leverages big data analytics, natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) to detect buyer intent signals across tens of thousands of technical, business, and industry publications. A “focused capture” approach — which detects intent signals only on a fixed, “in-context” set of publications — will generate far too few signals to allow for proper identification of fraudulent devices. Taking the former rather than the latter approach assures that the data to identify bots and crawlers is inherent in the intent data itself; your solution provider just has to know what to look for.

The solution must blacklist any digital ad placements to the specific devices identified as fraudulent, not just IP addresses. This capability means your ad will show up on real devices showing intent – not bots, crawlers, or the wrong target.

Our analysis shows that 30% or more of ad placement and buyer intent signals with bot and crawler prevention are routinely fraudulent — meaning 30% of your ad budget might end up in the pocket of a digital highwayman. But with he right buyer intent solution, you can rest assured that you’re targeting buyers with true intent instead of swindling bots and crawlers.

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Do you know which specific companies are currently in-market to buy your product?

Wouldn’t it be easier to sell to them if you already knew who they were, what they thought of you, and what they thought of your competitors?

Good news – It is now possible to know this, with up to 91% accuracy. Check out Aberdeen’s comprehensive report Demystifying B2B Purchase Intent Data to learn more.

How do you reel them back in again? The holidays are over, so they aren’t as motivated to buy … or are they? How can you nurture a lead that’s a couple of months old?

Let’s talk about how to do that.

Caption: Once you buy something Pusheen-related from Hey Chickadee, expect more Pusheen in your inbox.

Tip 1: A drip email campaign should be your first step, but not your last

If you’ve read approximately one article about lead nurturing tactics, odds are it will have told you to set up a drip email campaign. The good news is that this is great advice — drip email campaigns are decently effective.

The bad news is that most people stop there.

The benefits of a drip campaign are pretty great. Setting up an automated campaign means you can basically set it and go, trusting in the software and conditions you’ve set up.

For example, if someone bought because of a special discount you were offering, you can set up a week-long campaign to send a series of emails that remind them why they bought from you in the first place.

First email: Welcome to the family! We’re happy to have you here. This is what we’re all about.

Second email: Here’s a line of similar products! Don’t they look amazing?

Third email: Did you know that line of products will make you 10 years younger and you’ll never get fat no matter how many donuts you eat? Just sayin’.

Fourth email: Oh, and by the way, we’re offering 10 percent off for the next couple days.

Boom, done.

But … not actually done.

Since when has the best advice been to settle for one strategy? A drip campaign is a great start, and easy to customize and segment to your heart’s content. It’s also common advice because it’s effective — you’re sending emails to customers who have opted in for emails from you, so you’d hope they’d be interested in future products and sales.

However, the bottom line is, you should be combining that with other tactics. There are always going to be customers who don’t ever read your emails, who get annoyed by ad campaigns in their inbox, and may even unsubscribe for good.

If you stick to just one strategy, say goodbye to that lead forever.

Tip 2: Don’t forget about leads that didn’t buy

Just because someone didn’t buy from you during the holiday season doesn’t mean they aren’t a lead. In fact, this is the perfect time to try to convert them, because the holiday craziness has ended, and now you can suss out how interested they actually are.

There are a few different non-converted leads you can focus in on:

Abandoned Cart

They thought about buying from you, to the point where they added at least one item into their cart … and then they walked away. Why? You may not be able to find out.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t try again.

Try reminding them what they were thinking about through targeted ads, and perhaps offering a nice discount code that feels personal to them. Maybe they ended up buying from someone else. In that case, targeting them with an ad for a related product could work.

Engaged followers

Every social media manager knows that engaged followers are their bread and butter — the ones that like, comment, click through, or even share the brand’s posts. Some of these followers could really like your company, but weren’t convinced during the holiday season.

This also applies to those who open your emails, and even click on your content, but you still can’t seem to convert.

Try reaching out specifically to these leads. You can target based on what they’re showing interest in, send out a custom discount code, or ask them to take a quick survey that will give you a better idea of what they’re in the market for.

Action-based retargeting

This type of retargeting is a little more high-level, and takes some engineering, but it can be really effective.

For this to work, you need to think about what those leads are doing on your website, what they’re interested in, and why they’re interested. Then you need to create specific funnels that retarget based on those interests and needs.

Someone who visited your home page and then clicked away does not fall into this category.

Imagine you sell bespoke evening wear such as dresses or tuxedos. Consider someone who visited your dresses page, and then narrowed it down to formal dresses. They then visited a page about high heels, browsed around the jewellery, and then finally left the site without buying. It’s March. What are they looking for?

The answer is most likely that they’re starting to think about what they’re going to wear to prom, so try retargeting them with prom-specific ads. Show them examples of what will look good, offer an early-order discount code, or remind them of the deadline they need to order by to get the outfit in time for the dance. Get creative!

Caption: GrubHub gives it to you straight — if you ordered falafel from them, they’re going to recommend more Middle Eastern restaurants to you the next time.

Tip 3: Target the leads based on what motivated them to buy the first time

Yeah, it sounds simple when it’s all spelled out like that, but it’s surprising how often this doesn’t factor into the lead nurturing thought process.

The holidays are bound to be filled with impulse buyers, so see if you can reel them in again with another tempting impulse sale. Did they click straight through from an email campaign to buy? Try to replicate a similar campaign with your newest offerings.

Maybe they were a social media shopper. Did they love the free shipping on orders over $50 that you advertised to them on Facebook? Show them a new round of products with a similar deal and see if you can get them to engage again.

Whatever convinced them the first time, see if it will work again with other related products.

Tip 4: Harness the power of social media

Hopefully, you at least have social media fully integrated into your strategy — whether it’s a Facebook shop, Instagram shoppable tags, or even Snapchat’s virtual reality product feature, you should be putting your name out there on social media.

However, aside from posting content and targeting with ads, you should be using it to nurture leads.

There should be a wealth of new posts floating around from people who got your product over the holidays, so search regularly through posts that have tagged or hashtagged you. Make sure you interact with these posts — a like, comment, or even a feature on your own page will do wonders for your image, and the next time they want to buy, they’ll come to you.

Make sure you’re also responding quickly to private messages and making any negative experiences a priority to fix. Having an active community will do some of the work for you in terms of organic marketing, but you need to nurture it as well by being responsive and relatable.

Social media is also the ideal platform for retargeting. Experiment with your sponsored posts based on what your seasonal leads engaged with. See if you can draw them in again.

Caption: Customer surveys can be a bit bulky and unwieldy. But they’re great for lead nurturing because you learn so much about what people like and dislike about your brand.

Tip 5: Ask them about what they bought

When it comes to leads that bought during the holidays that you want to lure back in … instead of targeting them with ads, drip campaigns, or stalking them on their Insta, just try sending them an email asking for feedback.

Yeah, no tricks. It’s that simple.

Instead of gunning for the next sale, connect with them about the product they already bought from you. This indirect strategy has quite a few benefits:

• Brand awareness. This is the sneaky brand awareness that keeps you at the top of their mind without spamming them with ads. It reminds them what they got, potentially reignites their interest in other products, and lets them know you care about their experience.
• Profiling. You can learn more about what they liked and didn’t like, collect some demographics or interests, and build a more accurate customer profile.

• Free information. Whether or not they do actually end up buying from you again, that feedback is priceless information about their experience. Forgetting about the future sale for a second (just a second, I promise), you can potentially learn new information about your products or processes, or even get the chance to make a bad experience right.

• Incentivizing. To get them to give their feedback, other than the joy they’ll experience in telling you their opinion, incentivize them with a discount code or coupon — and there it is, you got them in the door again.

No coal in your stocking this year

Your holiday sales are fulfilled, your returns are processed, and you’re looking for some new leads to sink your teeth into. Congrats! You’re already starting the year off right. Santa would be proud.

How else do you nurture your leads? Are there strategies you use during the year that can be adapted to the post-holiday season?

Oh, hello there. Welcome to 2019. Have you emerged from your cocoon of holiday warmth? Judging by the leftover cookie crumbs on your face, the answer to that question appears to be “sort of.” No matter, the year is off to a blistering start as it always is in the world of sales and marketing. Perhaps you’re still wrapping up plans for the new year, or maybe you’ve hit the ground running right away. Wherever you are to kick off 2019 there are some trends you need to be aware of to be fully prepared.

Before we ticked over into the new year, CMO.com ran through a list of upcoming trends in the marketing space for 2019. It’s an instructive look at where we stand as we start the year, and will serve you well in your thinking for approaching the year.

Data, Data, and More Data

If there’s one takeaway from this decade (the 2010’s? the 10’s? twenty-tens? We need to workshop some better names) it’s that data rules everything—for better and worse. We kicked off this decade by opening the floodgates of data, more became available than ever before. It has taken to the end of the decade to realize the ramifications of this amount of information being available. We’ve gone from the Wild West of data to the handling of sensitive information becoming more scrutinized than ever.

What does this mean for marketing professionals? Most likely you won’t have to worry about congressional hearings related to your handling of billions of people’s personal information, so that’s good! But it does mean every organization needs to have a concrete plan for recording, storing, and analyzing data. At this point we need to think not about just capturing data, but how to sort through all the information to make better decisions.

So how does all of that relate to 2019 trends? Stacy Martinet, VP of marketing strategy and communications at Adobe says that it will play out in hiring trends. “Adobe’s Martinet said she wouldn’t be surprised if more companies begin to offer data/analytics training more broadly across the organization in 2019, as well as invest in their creative teams’ data and analytics competencies, specifically.”

Data is a powerful thing, but make sure your organization is fully prepared to handle all the information you capture.

The Need for Personalization

Now, more than ever, personalization is necessary for connecting with buyers. They need to feel seen, and like their specific problems are ones that your organization cares about solving. The upside of personalization being a trend in 2019 is that it dovetails beautifully with our other trend: data.

In the CMO.com piece, they quote Jason Heller, partner and global lead, digital marketing operations at McKinsey about this topic. He says “the single view of the customer is the single most important asset that a modern marketer can have, and it’s the core of their personalization efforts. It also becomes the core of their next-generation marketing ROI capability, as well.”

That’s an important point. Personalization is of course a goal for any marketer, but how do you personalize when your data can’t communicate across disparate systems? You have to find a source of truth that can handle these different sources and provide end-users with an intuitive way to personalize buyer interactions. To that end, Heller says his expectation is organizations will “work on building agile marketing execution models in which cross-functional teams can experiment, leveraging the data and technology stack to capture value.”

So the takeaways as I release you into 2019 are:

• There’s more data than ever
• You need to be prepared to properly manage all that information
• Personalization is a necessity
• Data and personalization can intertwine beautifully with the right systems in place.

That’s it! Go off and achieve all those resolutions you set. And if you don’t, well, there’s always 2020.

• Facebook's problems are set to deepen in 2019, according to a note from Pivotal Research analyst Brian Wieser.
• He said issues like data breaches and election meddling have only been made worse by management and regulation is now inevitable.
• The analyst said investors remain too optimistic about Facebook.
• Wieser added that advertisers might start abandoning Facebook because of its "toxicity" — and there might be trouble ahead in China.

If you thought 2018 was bad for Facebook, just wait for 2019.

That's the verdict of Wall Street analyst Brian Wieser, who predicts that Facebook's problems "seem likely to worsen" over the next 12 months as it continues to grapple with a "vast" list of issues.

In a note for Pivotal Research on Monday, Wieser wrote that Facebook is tackling issues including "complicity in a genocide," enabling political interference, and privacy scandals — all of which have been exacerbated by the "manner in which the company has chosen to address them."

Wieser believes that regulation is inevitable, and indeed, Facebook has said itself that it's ready to work with global lawmakers to introduce things like federal privacy laws in the US.

"The shape it [regulation] will take is unclear," Wieser wrote, "and the follow-on ramifications across the company — from managerial changes at the top to an imposition of new working processes in order to avoid future problems — could be significant, and potentially more expensive than the company (or most of the investment community) anticipates."

Wieser, who has been fairly bearish about Facebook's prospects recently, said the market remains too optimistic about Facebook and it could get a nasty wake-up call. "Investors have some appreciation of Facebook’s problems at this time, although even now we think some are too positive or otherwise looking past the scale of the risks," he explained.

Facebook advertisers might be deterred by "toxicity"

But perhaps most ominously for Facebook, Wieser thinks that advertisers are starting to take notice of the company's woes. More than 98% of the company's $40.6 billion revenue comes from advertising, and it's second only to Google in terms of market clout. But that might soon be under threat, Wieser suggests.

"The toxicity of the company may also deter commercial partners from choosing to work with Facebook, or otherwise make terms less attractive to Facebook," he added.

Read more: 15 photos we can't stop looking at that highlight tech's wild, apocalyptic year

The idea that Facebook's crises might unsettle advertisers is not new, and there is little evidence as yet that buyers are taking their money elsewhere. Facebook' ad revenue grew 49% to $10.1 billion in Q3 last year following scandals including the Cambridge Analytica data breach.

But it's not just reputational issues Facebook needs to worry about in terms of advertising, Wieser said. Apple shocked Wall Street last week with an earnings warning which partly blamed economic weakness China, and the US President Donald Trump's trade war, for a drop in its revenue forecasts.

And Wieser suggested that Facebook may not be immune to trouble in China. "Facebook likely generated $5-7bn from Chinese advertisers on its platform, whose spending trends might be impacted by economic trends in China or changes in postal regulations," he said.

Pivotal downgraded its price target for Facebook from $125 to $113. Business Insider has contacted Facebook for comment. 

SEE ALSO: The $450 billion wipeout: Apple's value has fallen by more than Facebook's entire worth in 3 short months

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I’m sure we’ve all received a customer survey—whether it be from a store after we’ve made a purchase or from a doctor’s office after a recent visit. These are common, and businesses find a ton of value in the resulting data. However, if we look at the success of this type of initiative and try to translate it into a sales and marketing function, there’s an interesting opportunity that organizations of all sizes are beginning to capitalize on: sales team surveys. Maybe your sales team has hit a wall or maybe they’re entering a new market. A survey can uncover gaps in strategy and identify potential areas of need before problems arise. When we look at using sales surveys through an inbound marketing lens, there’s a massive opportunity to identify weaknesses in content, answer more customer questions before they’re even asked, and find cohesive strategies for sales and marketing teams to collaborate more effectively.

Identify Weaknesses in Content Strategy

Sales enablement is defined by HubSpot as the technology, processes, and content that empower sales teams to sell efficiently at a higher velocity. A sales survey can prove to be beneficial for all three of these facets, especially the content piece. Salespeople are interacting with customers on a regular basis and are an incredible source of knowledge when it comes to customer needs, desires, and pain points. It just so happens that these needs, desires, and pain points are the perfect foundation for building quality content that aligns with the appropriate stage of the Buyer’s Journey. Using an internal survey, you can uncover true gems in the responses that can alert marketing teams of specific content needs. As an example, if salespeople are saying that prospects are consistently asking how their company compares to another in the industry, a vendor comparison matrix or similar piece of decision stage content seems like the perfect solution. If a common sales survey response is that customers are asking for reviews or about other companies your organization has worked with, this screams a need for case studies. These types of gaps in content are perfect opportunities for sales and marketing to collaborate.

Sample Questions to Ask in Sales Surveys

Now that you have an idea of how to interpret responses and translate them into actionable next steps for content, let’s take a look at some highly effective sales survey questions. If you use these in your next survey, I recommend that you tailor them to your specific organization, industry, and team:

• What is the most common question that customers ask during negotiations?
• Is there a particular product or service that is misunderstood or needs frequent explanation? If so, which one?
• Who is the toughest competitor that you come up against in sales? What are they doing well?
• On a scale of 1-10, how advanced in the subject matter would you say most prospects you speak to are?
• What type of content would help you close another sale in the next month? Why would this help?

Ongoing Content Collaboration Between Sales and Marketing

As a first step, it’s always a great idea to complete a content audit. In this spreadsheet, lay out what the content is, what stage of the Buyer’s Journey it serves, and how the content is beneficial. As new content is created, be sure to add it to this master list so you always have an up-to-date picture of what content is available to the organization. This document is also the starting point for an ongoing sales-focused relationship between sales and marketing departments. When gaps in content are identified, your organization should have a mechanism in place for sales teams to let this feedback be heard. I recommend repeating sales surveys on a quarterly or biannual basis because organizations inevitably change and evolve over time. Marketing will also utilize this content in a variety of campaigns, and along with the data they collect, sales should also communicate what type of content is helping close deals and what content is performing below expectations. With these two unique channels of measurement, it will become abundantly clear what type of content should be further developed.

Bonus tip: Leveraging a tool like HubSpot CRM can allow sales teams to track engagement with attachments and documents that are sent to prospects and customers.

E-commerce is unique when it comes to the marketing realm in that you generally have hundreds or thousands of different pages, and are trying to promote some or all of them, as opposed to other sites whose digital marketing funnels may be concentrated on only one or two pages for their final conversions. However, one thing that still holds true is that content marketing is key for making your e-commerce pages more prominent and appealing. We’ve curated a list of information from professionals across the e-commerce world, that you can use to start improving your content right away.

Collaborating With Your Content Marketing

A lot of people make the mistake of thinking that they are an island, especially in e-commerce. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that any other company out there is either competition or not relevant to you. However, this isn’t the case, and for companies just starting out, making a connection early on can be a key way to expand their audience.

Kristen Youngs, co-founder of Coaching No Code Apps says that “One of the best things you can do when it comes to content marketing is creating high-value pieces for other e-commerce businesses. Your reach can only go so far without other marketing efforts added in. When you write content for other companies, though, you can reach their audiences, too.” The key to making this happen is finding other businesses that are in your niche but aren’t direct competitors. This way, when you pitch an effective content piece, you have a new lead magnet to expand your offerings and if you do this frequently enough, you can potentially reach thousands or even millions of people you’d never otherwise have the chance to.

Using Customer Support

Statistically speaking, 84% of people trust online reviews as much as they do recommendations from their friends or inner circle. As a result, you want to make sure that you are able to include customer impressions and reviews into your content to keep them moving through the sales funnel.

Tamara Wilson, Digital Marketing Manager at DPMnyc, says that using social proof is a key way to improve your efforts. “This is imperative because no matter how much you spend on influencer marketing, your customers will always be your best ambassadors,” she adds. Every business is different, but you want to make sure early on that you have a plan to try and encourage people to leave positive reviews either on your site directly or via different platforms.

Writing Around Your Difficulties

David Alexander, designer, developer, and digital marketer at Mazepress, explains that in e-commerce, marketing can be difficult due to the commercial nature of all the product descriptions. “The best approach to alleviate this is to work on finding ways to add unique value to these product pages on the website and this involves re-writing product descriptions, expanding them and adding unique sections that competitors haven’t thought of,” he adds.

How exactly do you tackle this issue of creating content that is effective, but not overly promotional? As a start, you can create content marketing via a blog by using articles like buyer guides, FAQs, and other guides. These allow you to write in a long-form format. Long-form content will help your pages rank in Google better.

Optimizing Your Snippets

Every piece of content that you write is a dual purpose. You want it to read well so customers are more likely to complete and even share it, but you want to make sure that you have optimized it properly for SEO purposes so that it is more likely to appear in Google searches. When crafting the material “behind the scenes” of your e-commerce content marketing, you need to work towards both these goals.

James Boston, co-founder of Paperlust, says that most SEO professionals know about the value of rich snippets, but not necessarily how they connect into content marketing. “They need to be a clear, concise description of a product or services, not a keyword laden signal to the search engines,” he says. The focus here is to make sure that your keywords are naturally incorporated into things as opposed to trying to stuff as many of them in as possible. Google’s algorithm was adjusted to try and deprioritize these a while ago.

Influencer Marketing

Many people may follow an influencer on social media for their own personal interests, but aren’t aware of exactly how much they stand to benefit from an influencer partnership. In essence, by working with an influencer to promote your product or service, you add their audience to your own. Even the smallest-scale influencers can bring in between $30,000 and $60,000 a year.

Rex Kimball of Mirex Marketing says that regarding influencer marketing, that “there are some FTC
regulations on this; specifically the influencer should be clear to their audience that they have received compensation for promoting the product or that their posts and reviews are sponsored.” However, he adds that it can still be effective if you choose someone who is an ideal match for your target audience.

Using Low Volume Keywords to Your Benefit

Content marketing and SEO tend to go hand-in-hand a lot of the time, so professionals in one area are often thinking about the other. In general, content tends to go better if you target a more specific niche—especially in e-commerce. What you may not realize is the same thing applies to keywords. Geoffrey Scott, payments consultant at Motile, reminds us that “plenty of businesses make a living off of niche keywords and content. You’re going to struggle to ever rank your website for women’s shoes, but
young women’s fashionable rain boots might be just the ticket to success.”

Ideally, you’re going to find that ideal balance of a keyword that still has some demonstrated search volume, but isn’t completely dominated by some of the larger competitors in your e-commerce space. You want to use keyword research tools like Ahrefs to try and find the ideal option.

Using Customer Stories for Information

We mentioned how using social proof like customer reviews and impressions is a great thing to use to improve your content, but this is only the tip of the iceberg. Ryne Higgins, E-Commerce Manager at Peacock Alley, suggests doing things like encouraging them to “post their picture on Instagram, create a video in which they tell their story, or invite them to contribute a guest post to your blog. Curating customer-created content amplifies customer loyalty and can increase your reach to new leads.”

However, the catch of this method is that you need to take the initiative on cultivating these stories, and this tends to be a bit more involved than asking for a review or testimonial after a customer has a positive experience. Places to start include inviting customers to connect over social media, monitoring social media mentions for customers with unique or detailed viewpoints, or even integrating a platform for them to share input right into your site.

Use Authenticity

While we’re talking about all these lofty initiatives, it’s important that you’re trying to also communicate the right brand values through your content as well. Two of the biggest things you should be looking at are transparency and authenticity. This applies especially for e-commerce, where there are natural barriers to interaction you may not see in a brick-and-mortar retail setting.

Cooper Hollmaier, technical SEO manager at Visiture, explains that to make an authentic connection through your content, “customers want to know all about your brand story, what differentiates you from the competition, and that you’re being transparent with the experience a previous customer has had.” This applies across many different mediums, just make sure that this comes off as supplementary to your content’s main topic, rather than promotional.

Don’t Be Afraid to Recycle

Many small businesses struggle a lot when it comes to budgeting for their content. This can take a number of different forms, from not having the time to write a weekly blog article to not having the money to pay professionals to handle your content creation. One way to cut down on this pressure is to make sure that you are getting the most out of all the content you create by finding ways to recraft and repurpose it.

Janil Jean, Head of Overseas Operations at Logo Design Guru, explains how “this
does not mean copying the same content but rather make little changes to present in another form. A long-form article can be converted into infographics, later on into a slide deck and so on.” One very successful idea is creating video content that is a shorter version of your written content. This is because customers are naturally more likely to watch a video to its end than read a full article, even if the time involved is similar.

Understand AIDA

Umar Brimah, Co-founder & CMO of Cedar + Black, closes the discussion by explaining that it’s best for you to keep the principle of AIDA in mind when it comes to your content marketing efforts. AIDA stands for Awareness, Interest/Desire, and action. When it comes to awareness, he recommends optimizing content for video views and engagement with the two ads using the same post ID. Regarding interest and desire “This step can be combined or split into two steps depending on your goals. Use captivating copy, influencers, and FOMO to create something desirable. Then retarget 25% -75% of your most engaged users with this ad,” Brimah shares.

For action, the key thing you want to do is make sure that you give your audience something tangible to work with, like potentially redeeming a code. Another good action to encourage is submitting content of them using your products. This is because user-created content helps boost engagement metrics while creating free promotions.

One major way to put AIDA into action effectively is to make sure that you have a formal social media calendar. This will allow you to prep for occasions like holidays or product announcements well ahead of time, as well as avoid making mistakes like potentially reusing an idea for a social media post that one team member may have done, but another may have not been aware of.

Overall, content marketing has expanded so much that there are a variety of different options you have in order to improve your efforts. The best thing you can do is a combination of two things.

1. Sticking to the fundamentals of creating effective content.
2. Using as much customer data as you can get to determine what topics to cover and what adjustments to make.

Put those goals in combination with what we’ve been talking about, and you can start using these lessons to raise your e-commerce conversions.

As we enter the New Year, it’s important that you analyse what lead generation strategies worked in the past and how they can be optimised and improved to generate more leads for your business this year.

When talking about lead generation, there’s a difference between leads and qualified leads. With qualified leads, these are generated by targeting a specific audience, an audience that you know is in need of your solution or asset. This usually results in a higher chance of converting targeted leads into actual customers.

One of my favourite quotes is “The only place SUCCESS comes before WORK is in the dictionary.” by Mary Smith. This rings true when talking about lead generation for businesses. There’s lots of work involved to achieve a successful lead generation strategy that converts at such little costs.

Let’s face it, targeted lead generation all depends on your approach.

To help you, I’ve outlined four lead generation strategies that are bound to generate you more subscribers and customers.

4 Lead Generation Strategies to Implement Today

#1 Content Upgrades

Offering your audience a little extra something after reading a blog post is a great way to win them over. One of the most successful content upgrades is providing your users the ability to download a resource related to that specific article. For example, a checklist for social media marketing if the article is about social media marketing failures.

Adding content upgrades throughout the articles is a fantastic lead generation strategy that has worked for many businesses. If this isn’t something you’re doing, you could be missing out on potential prospects that may be interested in what you have to offer.

#2 Offer Free Trials

Depending on your business, offering free trials to your service helps move the prospect halfway through to becoming a customer. Allowing them to try out what you have to offer and find the value increases their trust in your business and will likely become a happy customer if they continue finding the service useful. For a successful trial marketing strategy, you’ll want to follow these five tips to convert your trial marketing users into paying customers.

#3 Exit-Intent Popups

Exit-intent popups are a very creative lead generation tactic and they work extremely well. I’ve deployed this strategy on many sites and the results have been a success. An exit-intent popup gets activated once visitors attempt to leave your website. The popup usually consists of some sort of lead generation offer to capture their details before leaving. They are a fantastic strategy and if you go that little further to personalise your exit-intent popups, you’ll likely see even more of a success.

#4 Quizzes

Quizzes are one of the most used lead generation strategies as the success rate tends to be very high. They are very captivating and sometimes tend to encourage sharing, increasing the chances of lead generation.

The best way to generate leads from a quiz is by allowing users to begin the quiz without needing to enter any contact information until the very end where they’d see the answer. A simple request for their email address in return of sending them and revealing the answer usually works well.

• Sales teams adopting AI are seeing an increase in leads and appointments of more than 50%, cost reductions of 40%–60%, and call time reductions of 60%–70% according to the Harvard Business Review article Why Salespeople Need to Develop Machine Intelligence.
• 62% of highest performing salespeople predict guided selling adoption will accelerate based on its ability rank potential opportunities by value and suggest next steps according to Salesforces’ latest State of Sales research study.
• By 2020, 30% of all B2B companies will employ AI to augment at least one of their primary sales processes according to Gartner.
• High-performing sales teams are 4.1X more likely to use AI and machine learning applications than their peers according to the State of Sales published by Salesforce.
• Intelligent forecasting, opportunity insights, and lead prioritization are the top three AI and machine learning use cases in sales.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning show the potential to reduce the most time-consuming, manual tasks that keep sales teams away from spending more time with customers. Automating account-based marketing support with predictive analytics and supporting account-centered research, forecasting, reporting, and recommending which customers to upsell first are all techniques freeing sales teams from manually intensive tasks.

The Race for Sales-Focused AI & Machine Learning Patents Is On

CRM and Configure, Price & Quote (CPQ) providers continue to develop and fine-tune their digital assistants, which are specifically designed to help the sales team get the most value from AI and machine learning. Salesforces’ Einstein supports voice-activation commands from Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, and Google. Salesforce and other enterprise software companies continue aggressively invest in Research & Development (R&D). For the nine months ended October 31, 2018, Salesforce spent $1.3B or 14% of total revenues compared to $1.1B or 15% of total revenues, during the same period a year ago, an increase of $211M according to the company’s 10Q filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The race for AI and machine learning patents that streamline selling is getting more competitive every month. Expect to see the race of sales-focused AI and machine learning patents flourish in 2019. The National Bureau of Economic Research published a study last July from the Stanford Institute For Economic Policy Research titled Some Facts On High Tech Patenting. The study finds that patenting in machine learning has seen exponential growth since 2010 and Microsoft had the greatest number of patents in the 2000 to 2015 timeframe. Using patent analytics from PatentSight and ipsearch, IAM published an analysis last month showing Microsoft as the global leader in machine learning patents with 2,075. The study relied on PatentSight’s Patent Asset Index to rank machine learning patent creators and owners, revealing Microsoft and Alphabet are dominating today. Salesforce investing over $1B a year in R&D reflects how competitive the race for patents and intellectual property is.

10 Ways Machine Learning Is Revolutionizing Sales

Fueled by the proliferation of patents and the integration of AI and machine learning code into CRM, CPQ, Customer Service, Predictive Analytics and a wide variety of Sales Enablement applications, use cases are flourishing today. Presented below are the ten ways machine learning is most revolutionizing selling today:

1. AI and machine learning technologies excel at pattern recognition, enabling sales teams to find the highest potential new prospects by matching data profiles with their most valuable customers. Nearly all AI-enabled CRM applications are providing the ability to define a series of attributes, characteristics and their specific values that pinpoint the highest potential prospects. Selecting and prioritizing new prospects using this approach saves sales teams thousands of hours a year.
2. Lead scoring and nurturing based on AI and machine learning algorithms help guide sales and marketing teams to turn Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) into Sales Qualified Leads (SQL), strengthening sales pipelines in the process. One of the most important areas of collaboration between sales and marketing is lead nurturing strategies that move prospects through the pipeline. AI and machine learning are enriching the collaboration with insights from third-party data, prospect’s activity at events and on the website, and from previous conversations with salespeople. Lead scoring and nurturing relies heavily on natural language generation (NLG) and natural-language processing (NLP) to help improve each lead’s score.
3. Combining historical selling, pricing and buying data in a single machine learning model improves the accuracy and scale of sales forecasts. Factoring in differences inherent in every account given their previous history and product and service purchasing cycles is invaluable in accurately predicting their future buying levels. AI and machine learning algorithms integrated into CRM, sales management and sales planning applications can explain variations in forecasts, provided they have the data available. Forecasting demand for new products and services is an area where AI and machine learning are reducing the risk of investing in entirely new selling strategies for new products.
4. Knowing the propensity of a given customer to churn versus renew is invaluable in improving Customer Lifetime Value. Analyzing a diverse series of factors to see which customers are going to churn or leave versus those that will renew is among the most valuable insights AI and machine learning is delivering today. Being able to complete a Customer Lifetime Value Analysis for every customer a company has provides a prioritized roadmap of where the health of client relationships are excellent versus those that need attention. Many companies are using Customer Lifetime Value Analysis as a proxy for a customer health score that gets reviewed monthly.
5. Knowing the strategies, techniques and time management approaches the top 10% of salespeople to rely on to excel far beyond quota and scaling those practices across the sales team based on AI-driven insights. All sales managers and leaders think about this often, especially in sales teams where performance levels vary widely. Knowing the capabilities of the highest-achieving salespeople, then selectively recruiting those sales team candidates who have comparable capabilities delivers solid results. Leaders in the field of applying AI to talent management include Eightfold whose approach to talent management is refining recruiting and every phase of managing an employee’s potential. Please see the recent New York Times feature of them here.
6. Guided Selling is progressing rapidly from a personalization-driven selling strategy to one that capitalized on data-driven insights, further revolutionizing sales. AI- and machine learning-based guided selling is based on prescriptive analytics that provides recommendations to salespeople of which products, services, and bundles to offer at which price. 62% of highest performing salespeople predict guided selling adoption will accelerate based on its ability rank potential opportunities by value and suggest next steps according to Salesforces’ latest State of Sales research study.
7. Improving the sales team’s productivity by using AI and machine learning to analyze the most effective actions and behaviors that lead to more closed sales. AI and machine learning-based sales contact and customer predictive analytics take into account all sources of contacts with customers and determine which are the most effective. Knowing which actions and behaviors are correlated with the highest close rates, sales managers can use these insights to scale their sales teams to higher performance.
8. Sales and marketing are better able to define a price optimization strategy using all available data analyzing using AI and machine learning algorithms. Pricing continues to be an area the majority of sales and marketing teams learn to do through trial and error. Being able to analyze pricing data, purchasing history, discounts are taken, promotional programs participated in and many other factors, AI and machine learning can calculate the price elasticity for a given customer, making an optimized price more achievable.
9. Personalizing sales and marketing content that moves prospects from MQLs to SQLs is continually improving thanks to AI and machine learning. Marketing Automation applications including HubSpot and many others have for years been able to define which content asset needs to be presented to a given prospect at a given time. What’s changed is the interactive, personalized nature of the content itself. Combining analytics, personalization and machine learning, marketing automation applications are now able to tailor content and assets that move opportunities forward.
10. Solving the many challenges of sales engineering scheduling, sales enablement support and dedicating the greatest amount of time to the most high-value accounts is getting solved with machine learning. CRM applications including Salesforce can define a salesperson’s schedule based on the value of the potential sale combined with the strength of the sales lead, based on its lead score. AI and machine learning optimize a salesperson’s time so they can go from one customer meeting to the next, dedicating their time to the most valuable prospects.

Email is still among the most effective B2B marketing channels, but that doesn’t mean game-changing marketers are using the same email tactics that worked in 2014.

There’s little question that email drives results or revenue. According to a Chief Marketer study, email is the largest source of new leads for 53% of marketers. Additionally, 58% of respondents said email is the highest-ROI channel for leads.

Key decision-makers’ inboxes are cluttered with emails, making their tolerance for poorly-executed messages low. According to research cited in Fast Company, an estimated 80% of messages that hit an executive’s inbox are a “total waste.” In 2019, B2B marketing organizations should adopt new email marketing playbooks and methodologies to drive qualified leads and increase ROI.

While demand marketing trends may come and go, one thing that’s going to remain valuable to B2B decision-makers is relevant content – content tailored to priorities, pain points and psychographic characteristics. The best B2B email subject lines are adapted to lead personality types.

Writing B2B Email Subject Lines by Personality Type

Aja Frost, Senior SEO Strategist at HubSpot, recently proposed appealing to personalities in a blog titled “How to Sell to 4 Different Personality Types.” She writes,

“If you want to consistently win deals, you can’t sell how you’d like to be sold to. You have to adapt your strategy to the buyer’s personality type.”

Frost outlines four main personality types; assertive, amiable, expressive and analytic. We’ll describe those four personality types and offer suggestions to adapt B2B email subject lines to effectively target them.

The 4 B2B Personality Types

Type #1: Assertive

Assertives are goal-oriented, competitive, Type-A personalities who are impatient and characterized by self-assurance. Sell to this personality with well-prepared answers, succinct content and data-driven comparisons.

Presenting succinct, data-driven information is likely to resonate with assertive personality types as they don’t respond well to emotion, opinions or testimonials.

Type #2: Amiable

Amiable personality types value interpersonal relationships and want to win the respect of others. They’re great listeners, but slow to make decisions. Amiables respond best to vision statements, efforts to build rapport and personal promises.

Type #3: Expressive

Expressives, much like amiables, are people-persons who are deeply concerned with the well-being of others. They’re creative, spontaneous and driven to make decisions based on intuition and emotion.

Type #4: Analytic

Analytics are the most logical, calculated and least expressive of the four personality types. These individuals are invariably prepared and often conduct individual research during their path to purchase. Avoid making grandiose claims, but also, present carefully-curated data and comparisons to this group. While you can’t rush analytical personality types, you can successfully employ marketing psychology concepts to emphasize critical pieces of information, like clustering information together or anchoring your key point first.

Adapting B2B Email Subject Lines to Personality Type

According to Convince & Convert, 35% of email recipients open an email based on the subject line alone. Email marketing success depends, in part, on the ability of the B2B marketer to make a powerful first impression and form an immediate connection by strategically crafting email subject lines. Personality types have a drastic impact on how business leaders perceive emails and, ultimately, how they perceive down-funnel messaging.

• Marketers may love using punchy exclamation points, but this strategy may fall flat when delivered to the analytically driven.
• The data-driven, factual subject lines that resonate with assertive and analytical types, may feel cold and impersonal to amiable and expressive types.

To help you increase the open and click-through metrics of your email marketing campaign, approach writing and segmenting email subject lines by personality type.

Learn more about the importance of psychographic and individual characteristics in B2B marketing here: A Useful Template to Develop B2B Buyer Personas.

Using progressive profiling techniques and behavioral analytics software to group your prospects and leads into one of the four personality-type profiles will allow B2B marketing teams to get the right message to the right person at the right time.

44 Winning B2B Email Subject Line Formulas

Email marketing is a channel that plays a vital role throughout the entire B2B sales funnel – from newly-won leads to existing customer loyalty marketing efforts.

To inspire you toward crafting personality-driven email subject lines, we’ve created 11 B2B email subject line formulas for hypothetical B2B marketing scenarios, and four personality-type variants for each.

Formula #1: Webinar Invitation

The Hypothetical Webinar: Your organization is hosting a webinar about cloud compliance technologies tailored to leads at the top of the sales funnel. The webinar will focus on the basics of your product and why it can solve customer pain points.

• Assertive Subject Line: Can You Beat the Top 3 Cloud Risks?
• Amiable Subject Line: You’re Not the Only One Struggling with Cloud Compliance
• Expressive Subject Line: Simplifying the Cloud Builds Happier Teams
• Analytic Subject Line: Compliance is a Top Pain Point for 37% of ITDMs

Formula #2: New eBook Promotion

The Hypothetical eBook Email: Your professional services firm specializes in technology consulting. You’ve created a new mid-funnel eBook in conjunction with a research firm that describes a 10-year outlook for the retail industry and steps retailers should take immediately to prepare for industry tech disruption.

• Assertive Subject Line: Experts Predict 10 Disruptive Retail Tech Trends
• Amiable Subject Line: How Real Retailers are Preparing for Tech Disruption
• Expressive Subject Line: Can You Survive the Coming Retail Tech Disruption?
• Analytic Subject Line: By 2020, 75% of Retailers will Use AI

Formula #3: Product Update

The Hypothetical Product Update Email: Your organization specializes in embedded engineering and internet-of-things (IoT) products. You’ve recently made a significant strategic switch to offer consulting services as a value-add to your customers, and you’re emailing an announcement.

• Assertive Subject Line: IoT is Complex. We’ll Help You Win.
• Amiable Subject Line: Announcing Expert IoT Pros to Guide You
• Expressive Subject Line: Announcing IoT Pros Committed to Your Success
• Analytic Subject Line: Announcement: Acme Hires 10 IoT Experts

Formula #4: Social Media Connection

The Hypothetical Social Media Connection Email: Your social media software-as-a-service (SaaS) company periodically sends out emails to newly-generated leads to invite these organizations to engage with your brand on social. The email emphasizes the value of your social presence with links to your company content on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

• Assertive Subject Line: What You Missed on Acme’s Social Last Week
• Amiable Subject Line: Acme Social: Real Client Wins and Expert Advice
• Expressive Subject Line: [First Name], Let’s Connect on Social to Help You
• Analytic Subject Line: Acme Social: Use Cases, Expert Insight and Research

Formula #5: Confirmation Email

The Hypothetical Confirmation Email: Your research firm is sending an auto-reply email to people who register for your upcoming live event, a one-day conference for accountants.

• Assertive Subject Line: Get the Most Out of Accounting World ’19
• Amiable Subject Line: How to Prepare for Accounting World ’19
• Expressive Subject Line: Accounting World ’19: Thanks for Joining Us!
• Analytic Subject Line: Registration Confirmed: Accounting World ’19

Formula #6: Thank You

The Hypothetical Thank You Email: Your email deliverability technology company recently released your annual study; a significant endeavor offering best-in-class insights into the state of email. You’re sending a thank you email targeted to mid-funnel leads who download the eBook, with a link to the resource and an invitation to keep engaging.

• Assertive Subject Line: Ready to Turn Your eBook into Advantage?
• Amiable Subject Line: Your eBook: We’re Here to Help You
• Expressive Subject Line: I’d Love to Help You Hack Your eBook!
• Analytic Subject Line: Your eBook: Deliverability Drops 5% Year-Over-Year

Formula #7: Welcome

The Hypothetical Welcome Email: Your corporate financial services firm sends a thank you email to new leads who opt-in to receive email updates about your organization, new products and original content.

• Assertive Subject Line: [First Name], You’re In! Make the Most of Acme
• Amiable Subject Line: [First Name], Acme Has Helped 30,000 Brands
• Expressive Subject Line: Welcome, [First Name]! Why Customers Trust Acme
• Analytic Subject Line: [First Name], What to Expect from Acme Financial

Formula #8: Re-engagement

The Hypothetical Re-engagement Email: Your logistics company periodically sends a re-engagement campaign to marketing qualified leads who disengaged over the last couple of months.

• Assertive Subject Line: [First Name], Can Acme Logistics Help You Win?
• Amiable Subject Line: [First Name], Logistics is Overwhelming. Can We Help?
• Expressive Subject Line: [First Name], Acme Logistics Misses You!
• Analytic Subject Line: Acme Logistics Consistently Ranked #1 by XYZ Research

Formula #9: Tutorials and Tips

The Hypothetical Tutorials and Tips Email: Your medical equipment organization has curated an extensive library of expertly authored tutorials and tips for leads at the top of the funnel. When new leads engage with premium content resources and meet qualifying parameters, you send an email inviting them to view a password-protected library of premium content.

• Assertive Subject Line: [First Name]’s Exclusive Invite to View 1,500 Expert Tips
• Amiable Subject Line: [First Name], I Promise You’ll Love Our Exclusive Tips
• Expressive Subject Line: [First Name], Can I Show You Our Insider Exclusives?
• Analytic Subject Line: 1,500 Tutorials on Patient Safety from Real MDs

Formula #10: Case Studies

The Hypothetical Case Study Email: Your organization specializes in enterprise technology, including sophisticated cloud solutions. As marketing-qualified leads approach sales readiness, you send an email featuring three industry-relevant customer success stories and testimonials.

• Assertive Subject Line: How 3 of Your [Industry] Peers Win with Acme
• Amiable Subject Line: [First Name], You’ll Love 3 Real Acme Customer Wins
• Expressive Subject Line: 3 Customers Discuss Partnering with Acme
• Analytic Subject Line: The Acme Difference: 3 [Industry] Case Studies

Formula #11: Survey Requests

The Hypothetical Survey Request Email: Your technology company makes a broad range of solutions for the enterprise application, including software and professional services for data warehousing. Once per quarter, you send an invitation to complete a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey to all current customers.

• Assertive Subject Line: Answer 1 Painless Question and Enter to Win $500!
• Amiable Subject Line: How Did We Do? Let Us Know and Win $500
• Expressive Subject Line: Did We Earn Your Loyalty? Quick Survey + $500 Giveaway
• Analytic Subject Line: Are You Satisfied? Answer 1 Quick Question ($500 Giveaway)

Unlocking the Best B2B Email Subject Lines

B2B marketers have more access than ever before to understand their prospects and customers as individuals. Between behavioral analytics applications and rich trails of data left online by user behavior, it’s possible to paint a clearer picture of customer priorities, pain points and individual motivations.

Email still works at every stage of the funnel. To stand out in a crowded inbox, marketers must employ new techniques to craft relevant subject lines. By tailoring your content to resonate with the four distinct personality types, you will achieve better open and click-through rates.

How much are poor-quality leads costing your B2B marketing organization? Integrate research has found that B2B teams are filling their marketing and sales databases with bad leads. For research and expert advice, download the free “Cost of Bad Leads Report” and start building a cleaner database today.

2018 felt like the year of podcasts. Almost four seasons of BUILD later, I find myself reflecting on the diverse selection of topics discussed along the way. I personally had the opportunity to host Season 3 of BUILD which centered around the increasingly popular GTM model of product led growth (PLG). Over the course of three months, I interviewed thirteen thought leaders about how they have leveraged product led growth to build some of the best software businesses. Innovators such as Fareed Mosavat of Slack, Kieran Flanagan of Hubspot and many others shared their strategies on how to thrive in the product led era.

I gathered my favorite quotes from Season 3 that capture the essence of product led growth. For a deeper dive into what PLG means and how it can play out, be sure to re-listen to your favorite episodes of Season 3 or check out our latest book, BUILD: The Product Led Growth Edition.

Scott Maxwell OpenView Venture Partners, Founder & Partner “By adopting a PLG strategy, companies have been able to use their own products to create a steady pipeline of satisfied users and hand raisers, which they can then convert into paying customers. In addition to being highly effective, PLG also reduces overhead costs by eliminating the need to spend so much on traditional marketing and sales activities. It really is the proverbial win-win.”

Lynn Tsofilias BigPlay Strategies, Sales & Customer Success Leader, Advocate and Coach “Really understand from the customer’s perspective on why they signed up for your solution, not how you measure success or the features you want them using. You want to understand their company goals. Are they using the solution because they want to save money? Are they doing it because they think they want to make money? Are they trying to save time? What are the keys things they define as successful and check marks they need mark off while using your product?”

Shaun Clowes Metromile, Chief Product Officer “Model out your early stage retention and think about it at levels of granularity that seem minute. You should model out your early stage engagement and retention in terms of days or even minutes. Look at retention from minute one to minute two and examine every single click that users are making or everything they’re typing in the very first stages of engaging with your software. Every single one of those steps is probably a massive source of friction in ways that would really surprise you.”

David Apple Typeform, General Manager US & VP of Customer Success “Taking over the customer success team, I was eager to own a KPI. I wanted to own net retention…But after a while, I realized that actually did more harm than good because other departments saw retention and just said, ‘I don’t have to worry about retention because customer success is going to deal with that.’ And when I tried to bring up projects that require collaboration with product or with marketing, it would be hard to get them to prioritize it because retention was not one of their KPIs. Now the whole company owns retention and my role is more as a champion of retention. I still analyze it and report on it, but we all work together to try to drive retention.”

Kieran Flanagan Hubspot, VP Marketing/Growth “There’s a lot of value in the production of valuable content; people are still knowledge-thirsty. That tends to convert into MQLs. But there’s also a cohort of people who want to use your software for free, who want you to demonstrate that you have valuable problems that you can solve through your software prior to them taking the decision to upgrade and pay money…There’s a place for leads and MQLs, and there’s a place for product qualified leads, and they can live in harmony together as well.”

Fareed Mosavat Slack, Director of Product, Lifecycle “Successful freemium businesses are naturally viral and collaborative. Using the product naturally draws other people into it. You can’t block this kind of growth, so allowing people to use it for free drives adoption and broad appeal. Getting folks to even pay a single dollar or bring out a credit card is a big area of friction. So if your product relies on collaboration or network effects, it’s pretty important that you reduce the friction as much as possible to get people in there and understanding the basic value proposition.”

Kevin Gaither ZipRecruiter, Senior Vice President of Sales “Always be looking to hire people that are better than yourselves, and I can’t emphasize that enough. It can be intimidating to specifically look for somebody who can do my job better than I can do it. But if you continue to look for those types of people to the point where it can be uncomfortable, in the end your team will have the greatest business impact.”

Darius Contractor Dropbox, Growth Engineering and Product Leader (former) Facebook Messenger, Head of Growth “Think about your product as a series of reactions for the user. So, for instance, they come to the homepage, and they’re going to have some kind of reaction. They can say, ‘Hey, this product is for me or not for me,’ or what have you. And then having signed up for the product, they could say, ‘Hey, I should share this. I shouldn’t share this. I feel uncomfortable.’ Whatever it is at that point. Thinking about your viral loops in terms of reactions is really powerful.”

Peter Reinhardt Segment, CEO & Co-Founder “There is a precursor to being product led which is to be customer led. Most PMs and most people who think about product do not go deep enough into customer problems. Ask your customer 10x more questions than you feel comfortable with.”

Morten Primdahl Zendesk, Co-Founder “Our driving principle in creating Zendesk was this product should be so simple, you can just sign up and use it. Keep it simple and reduce all the friction you can. We saw people sign up for Zendesk and 5 minutes later submit their first support ticket by email. The simplicity of the product drove lots of interest.”

Eric Siu SingleGrain, CEO “You’re not going to build a repeatable machine in one day or even one week. You need to keep at content marketing and SEO. People are impatient, which is why they want to put the dollars toward paid advertising. They just want to see returns really quickly. However, if you build a good content foundation you will experience sustainable long-term growth and it will drive down your advertising costs, because you’ve got your own audience now.”

Bob Sherwin Wayfair, Head of North America Marketing “First and foremost, the most important thing we try to emphasize is being operationally excellent. Constantly on the lookout for removing waste in processes, how to make today, this week, this month, the best possible for the business.”

Steli Efti Close.io, CEO “As a new company, you just have to ask yourself, “What do we stand for? What do we stand against?” Because it’s easy to stand for things. It’s easy to say yes to things. It’s much harder to say no to certain things. Especially in the early days, that focus really creates differentiation.”

 

The post Insights to Ignite Product Led Growth appeared first on OpenView Labs.

One of the most difficult parts of social media marketing is actually proving its ROI. It’s easy to throw numbers around – likes, new followers, comments and so on – but how do you actually prove your return on investment from social media? 

How do you demonstrate that your work is bringing in revenue or helping the brand reach its marketing and business objectives? 

In this post, I’m going to share some of my best and most effective tips, tricks and tools to help prove your social media ROI. Let’s go.

Vanity Metrics vs. Actionable Metrics: What’s the Difference?

“Vanity metrics” is a term that’s thrown around a lot, but what does it actually mean in the context of social media marketing, and how is it relevant to measuring and proving your ROI?

What Are Vanity Metrics?

Vanity metrics, as the name suggests, are metrics that might make you feel good about yourself – such as generating a bunch of likes on an update or having a large number of fans and followers – but if the metrics aren’t actually relevant to your specific social media marketing objectives (usually, the one’s management or clients ask for), then they are simply vanity metrics. They might look good on paper (or that PDF report you have to send regularly), but in the grand scheme of things, they don’t really matter much to the bottom line. 

Or, another way to look at vanity metrics is as metrics that don’t show a direct ROI, such as clicks, traffic and conversions made, which are “actionable metrics”. 

This isn’t to say that followers, likes, comments and so on aren’t important or relevant. In fact, depending on what your marketing objectives are, they might even be the most relevant stats you have. But in most cases, businesses care much more about results that they can actually understand from their point of view: a surge in traffic to their website, people signing up to their email list, social media fans buying their products or services or inquiring about them and so on. 

Because of this, the way you prove your social media ROI, depends on your objectives:

• For objectives like brand awareness, engagement and so on, you can prove ROI simply by reaching objectives (for example, if your objective is to generate 200 new followers in 30 days, then you’ve proven ROI by reaching that goal). Alternatively, you can also assign these types of metrics a certain value. For example, a new follower might be worth $5, while a like could be worth $1.
• For quantifiable objectives like conversions and sales made, you can be much more accurate about actual return on investment, as conversions and sales have a much clearer monetary value 

How to Establish Your Social Media Marketing Objectives

Whatever your directive is – and what results you’re supposed to achieve – you should always establish clear objectives beforehand and run them by your manager or client. The clearer you are about this from the start, the easier it will be to prove ROI and avoid any misunderstandings. 

The SMART goal-setting template works perfectly in this situation:

• Be specific about what you want to achieve, down to the last detail
• Make sure your goal is measurable and you know what KPIs you need to track so that you can actually prove your ROI 
• Consider your goal carefully to make sure it’s actually attainable and you’re not shooting too high, which will mean you likely won’t be able to prove your ROI (consult your past analytics and results and use your gut instinct to ascertain whether a goal is truly attainable or not) 
• Any social media objective should be relevant to that businesses’ marketing objectives – if the brand wants to raise awareness of their company, then your social media goals should reflect that
• And finally, every goal should be time-bound – in other words — it needs a deadline! 

In short, SMART stands for:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable 
• Relevant
• And time-bound 

Establish your KPIs

As I mentioned before, one of the essential aspects of a good objective is that it needs to be measurable. 

Once you’ve set an objective and decided that it is in fact, measurable, you should also take the time to establish the exact KPIs you’ll need to monitor in order to prove the success of your objective. Below is a list of the most important and relevant social media KPIs: 

• Engagement: likes, comments, shares and retweets and so on
• Reach
• Traffic back to website/landing page
• Conversions made: people signing up for a list
• Leads generated 

When your campaign starts, you should also start carefully tracking the relevant KPIs to monitor your performance and optimize it as you go along. Plus, it will help you measure your social media success.

Here are 3 useful social media tools to help you track these KPIs and prove your social media ROI:

1. Google Analytics & the Google Campaign URL Builder

Google Analytics can be one of your best friends when it comes to proving social media ROI. It can track what your social media traffic is doing on your website, as well as tell you how many conversions you’ve generated. 

To start leveraging Google Analytics to its full potential, make sure to create relevant conversion goals first. You can set up to 20 different conversion goals by going to Admin and clicking on Goals:

As you can see above, you have multiple options for templates so that you can measure all kinds of conversions:

• Making a reservation or an appointment
• Buying or paying for something
• Signing up for your email list
• Checking out your contact page
• Playing a certain media, and more 

Select the template you want to use (although you can also start from scratch) and follow the instructions to set up your conversion goals. As I mentioned earlier, you’re not allowed unlimited goals, so you might have to replace older ones that are no longer relevant whenever you have a new goal to track (like a new service you’re offering, or a different email list). 

Once you’ve created your goals, you’ll be able to track them for all of your traffic including, of course, your social media traffic. 

Then, when you head over to check your social media traffic in Google Analytics, you’ll also see a conversion rate for each of your social networks which will help you understand the quality of your traffic and help you focus on the social networks that drive results. 

Better yet, you’ll be able to see actual ROI from social media conversions. However, in order to have this information, you need give your conversion goals a monetary value when you set them up. For example, an email sign up might be worth $10, while buying something from you could be the average product or service price. 

Another way to leverage Google Analytics is to use UTM tracking links on your social media – you can create them using the Google Campaign URL Builder:

Using UTM tracking links will allow you to really narrow down your findings, much more so than Google Analytics can on its own. For example, you can see which Facebook groups brought the most traffic or what kind of results a specific social media campaign brought in (traffic, conversions, etc.). 

Once you’ve set up these tracking links and started using them, you can track them in your Google Analytics account, under Acquisition – Campaigns. 

2. Agorapulse

Agorapulse has several useful features for tracking social media ROI and success, beyond the usual social media analytics: 

• A social media ROI calculator for Facebook Pages
• A built-in UTM link builder with dynamic features

First, let’s look at the ROI calculator. The tool uses 3 metrics to help determine an accurate ROI:

• The number of engaged fans
• The impressions you’ve generated
• And the link clicks you got on your Page

The tool starts out with default values for each ($1/€1 for an engaged fan, $5/€5 for impressions and $1/€1 for clicks); it syncs its data on a daily basis and automatically generates your ROI value, broken down as seen in the screenshot below:

That said, you can always customize the monetary values for each in order to more accurately report your results: 

Discuss these values with clients/managers/etc. to come to a mutual agreement over the value of these metrics and you’ll then be able to automatically generate a Page’s ROI any time you need it. All that’s left to do is keep an eye on your results so you can change up your social media strategy when needed if you’re not getting enough positive results. 

Beyond that, you also have access to social media analytics for multiple major social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.), as well as the ability to export your reports. That said, the feature that I most want to talk about is the built-in UTM builder; this option will appear every time you upload a new update with a link:

Once you turn on UTM tracking, you can customize the parameters to your liking and even add extra parameters beyond the usual suspects (source, medium and campaign). And like before, you can track the results with your web analytics. 

This feature will allow you to easily add UTM tracking links (and shorten them automatically if you’ve also connected your Bit.ly account) to each and every link you share; even better, if you’re sharing a link to multiple networks and want to save quite a bit of time, you can select the “Dynamic” option under “Type” and Agorapulse will automatically select the correct social network, medium and profile and them to each UTM link.

To sum up, you can use these UTM tracking links in a variety of ways, when it comes to measuring your results (as they are also excellent tools for testing your social media):

• To see where exactly your traffic is coming from (not just the social network as a whole but specific traffic sources, such as groups, updates and so on) 
• To see exactly how many conversions you’ve generated and what your ROI is from these conversions (but, as I mentioned before, you also need to set up the right conversion goals in Google Analytics) 

Beyond that, you can get creative and use them in other ways too. For example, bra company Brayola often uses shortened UTM links whenever they direct people to their products, sales, offers, etc. within ad comments:

This way, they’re not just tracking results from the actual ad, but also from any comments happening. After all, it’s still an ROI from social media and by using the UTM links they can actually track to see if that comment helped them make a conversion or sale. 

3. Cyfe

As you might recall from earlier, it’s good practice to monitor your social media KPIs all the time, in order to optimize your campaigns on the go – with the goal of improving your results so that you can reach your objectives.

You can do so very easily with a business dashboard such as Cyfe. Basically, it’s a dashboard that you can connect to your social media analytics (Twitter Analytics, Facebook Insights, etc.) and use it to constantly monitor the KPIs you want. 

You can pull data from your social networks by using their pre-built widgets; click on “add widget” and then on Social Media to see what options you have:

As you can see, you can track pretty much any major social network (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, etc.), as well as your Bit.ly shares and clicks and Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook ads. 

Once you’ve taken the time to set it up, all you have to do is log into your dashboard to see how your results are evolving – use it not just to monitor these results, but also to help you put together your ROI and social media reports, using the data provided for the relevant social network.

Conclusion

With the right tools at your disposal and a strategy put in place to help you calculate your ROI, measuring your social media success doesn’t have to be the challenging feat that it might appear at the first sight. All you have to do is remember the steps you need to take in order to accurately measure your ROI:

• Setting SMART objectives for your social media campaigns and strategies
• Establishing what KPIs you’ll need to track in order to measure your objectives’ success
• Clarifying what conversions you need to focus on and setting up the right conversion goals in Google Analytics
• Leveraging useful tools to help you track your social media metrics and KPIs and calculate your ROI

What are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced when having to prove social media ROI? What is your strategy like and what types of tools do you use?   

The post Social Media ROI: How to Prove Your Efforts Are Paying Off appeared first on Convince and Convert: Social Media Consulting and Content Marketing Consulting.

B2B companies are in the midst of 2019 business planning—examining the past year and planning for the year ahead. One of the main metrics considered is revenue. Besides profit, annual revenue is typically the best way to judge a company’s size, health, and viability.

If revenue is the vibrant plant flourishing, leads are the seeds nourished to grow. Effective management of leads is the critical indicator of increasing revenue. In this post, I explore why lead management is so crucial and how it directly affects annual revenue.

Precursor to Revenue

With B2B marketing, leads are typically of higher potential revenue with fewer opportunities coming in monthly, especially compared to B2C mass marketing. Each individual lead is more important because, in the end, it brings in more revenue. We aren’t talking about leads that will generate $20-$50 in revenue. We are talking about leads that have the potential to bring in $5,000 to $50,000 to $500,000 in ongoing revenue.

Being that there are fewer leads, with each lead representing a significant amount of money, every lead needs to be responded to quickly and taken seriously. Additionally, it’s essential that the sales team builds and reinforces credibility throughout the whole lead nurturing process. If the lead follow-up is not done optimally or haphazardly, this will have a dramatic negative impact on revenue(not to mention the credibility of the company and the overall reputation of the firm in the industry).

Plan for Success

One of the biggest struggles we see in B2B companies is a complete lack of faith in B2B marketing leads from the sales team. We aren’t sure why this is, but it is counterproductive to revenue generation.

There needs to be an element of faith and positivity among the sales team that inbound and outbound leads being generated from B2B marketing efforts—website, social media, direct mail, etc.—are worthwhile. Positive sentiment from the sales team about these marketing leads ensures they will plan for success. They will prepare for sales calls, follow up with items promised, etc. These leads are already pre-qualified, so half of the work for sales is already done. Particularly in the case of B2B website leads – they should be considered hot leads.

There are many instances in which sales teams don’t trust the leads being generated by the marketing team and, therefore, the leads are not a priority for sales. Once the sales team starts seeing the leads are quality and many have closed, they will pay attention to every lead being generated.

Establish A Process

Once there is positive thinking about lead generation and quality, the B2B marketing and sales teams must establish a standard operating procedure on how to respond to leads.

• Who receives the leads?
• What does the follow-up message look like?
• What thought leadership content is employed to nurture leads?
• What’s the call to action?

All of these questions need to be addressed so that every lead is responded to within one business day. The greatest indicator of how a company will serve a client is how organized, thoughtful, and responsive the sales process is. This is the client’s first interaction with your firm – it must, absolutely MUST, be handled properly.

Increased Revenue In 2019

Paying close attention to leads will help your firm maximize revenue in 2019 and beyond! As you determine a plan and process, bring your B2B marketing and sales teams together to ensure everyone is on the same page. Coordination, a positive attitude, and a refined process will ensure your B2B company is maximizing its revenue potential.

According to the Business Development Bank of Canada, the coming decade will belong to employees.

The laws of supply and demand will put employees in charge of who they will work for, because there will be more jobs than appropriate talent. Companies will be in search of talented staff.

The most effective way to attract the best and brightest will be to provide workplaces that embrace and stay current with technology, are socially and environmentally responsible, are inclusive, that produce goods and services of value and have built a corporate culture that supports and celebrates the team.

These concepts have been floating around for more than a decade. In principle, they make sense, but making them a reality within your company is another matter. The guidebook is still being written.

We invited an executive coach, Ron Bremner, to join us for a Conversation That Matters about the role of leadership in building and sustaining a corporate culture for the 21st century. See the video at vancouversun.com/tag/conversations-that-matter.

Simon Fraser University’s Centre for Dialogue presents Conversations That Matter. Join veteran Broadcaster Stuart McNish each week for an important and engaging Conversation about the issues shaping our future.

Please become a Patreon subscriber and support the production of this program, with a $1 pledge here.

All businesses need to prove that their products are valuable; simply declaring it to customers will do little to grow the business.   The window to prove your solution is worth the investment and is becoming increasingly brief.  If there’s a

Are you looking for a way to make money online but have no products or services to sell? Or, perhaps, you do have an excellent product or service but lack the skills and resources to promote it!

Affiliate marketing could be the solution you’re looking for.

It allows merchants (also often called advertisers) to promote their products and services without allocating significant resources to marketing.

It also enables affiliates (sometimes called publishers) to make money without maintaining product inventories, investing in services, or supporting customer relations.

This solution is not new. The first merchants to turn to affiliates in order to promote their products were CDNOW in 1994 and Amazon in 1996.

CDNOW — which was acquired by Amazon in 2002 — silenced their affiliate program in 2012, but Amazon’s program remains an attractive opportunity for many online marketers.

As shown in our recent overview of affiliate marketing in the U.S., there are thousands of merchants out there ready to pay a commission in order to obtain more:

• Product or service sales
• Leads generated
• Subscribers to their clubs or newsletters
• …and even inbound calls

In the U.S., the number advertisers using affiliate marketing is expected to reach 80% by 2020, while the market is expected to be worth $6.8 billion.

You too can become a successful player in this market.

If you have your own products or services, you can recruit affiliates to promote them and pay a commission on every sale or lead they generate.

If you are an affiliate or publisher, you can find products and services to promote and earn a commission on every “qualified action” that you generate for the advertisers that you market.

In both cases, the best way to start is by understanding what affiliate marketing is and how it works, and I’ll explain everything in the following lines.

Affiliate Marketing Definition

Affiliate marketing can be defined as the process of promoting another party’s products or services on a commission.

Geno Prussakov provided a more in-depth definition in A Practical Guide to Affiliate Marketing, describing it as:

Performance-based marketing, whereby affiliates promote a merchant’s product or service and earn a commission on every visit, subscription, or sale they send to the merchant.

As the definition reveals, affiliate marketing provides for a great partnership opportunities between merchants and their affiliates (publishers). The merchant sells more, and their affiliates earn commissions on the conversions that they generate.

How much the parties earn depends on the affiliates’ performance. That is why affiliate marketing is often referred to as “performance marketing”.

The main parties involved in affiliate marketing are the two already mentioned above: the merchant and their affiliate.

However, neither could make a profit without a third-party, namely the customer (or consumer)

A fourth party comes into play quite often and intermediates the relationship between merchants and affiliates: the affiliate network.

There is also an affiliate manager that plays an integral role, and that would be the fifth party.

To better understand the role of each of these five parties, let’s review them one by one below.

The Parties Involved in Affiliate Marketing

1. The Merchant

They are the party creating or bringing a product or service to the market. They can be a wholesaler or a retailer, a manufacturer like H&M, a web hosting provider like Bluehost, or a software developer, to give just a few examples.

Whether they create the products themselves or buy them from their suppliers, the merchant owns the respective products and services. They handle transactions and related logistics (payments, packaging, shipping, etc.) as well as customer service.

In affiliate marketing, they are the “employer” or the party willing to share their profit with the publisher who will help them sell more.

They decide what type of actions they will compensate for and how much. They do it through their affiliate program. The latter serves as a foundation for the business arrangement between the merchant and their affiliate. It supports such vital elements as tracking, reporting, payments, and much more.

Affiliate Marketing Payment Models

• Pay-per-sale or Cost-per-sale (abbreviated as PPS or CPS)
• Pay-per-lead/Cost-per-lead (PPL/CPL)
• Pay-per-call/Cost-per-call
• Pay-per-click/Cost-per-click (PPC/CPC)
• Pay-per-view/Cost-per-view (PPV/CPV)
• Pay-per-install/Cost-per-install (PPI/CPI)

The last three payment models have been associated with unwanted, even fraudulent activities, so they are rarely used these days. Pay-per-call models are most effective for high-consideration and/or high-value sales (of products or services).

The most popular and effective payment models these days are PPS and PPL, or paying affiliates for sales or leads that they refer.

Some merchants only agree to pay commissions on completed sales. However, quite a few merchants also understand the value of leads and agree to reward them accordingly.

Many merchants actually combine the two payment models, rewarding both sales and leads.

It goes without saying that the commissions on leads are smaller than the commissions on sales.

2. The Affiliate

Often referred to as publisher (or sometimes an “associate”), the affiliate is the one who markets the merchant’s products or services.

They choose what products and services to promote and what methods and techniques they use to attract potential customers and convince them to buy.

Depending on the tools and strategies used, there are several types of affiliates. You’ll find the complete list in Geno Prussakov’s Quick Start Guide to Affiliate Marketing and this post of his.

The most popular types include content, coupon, data feed, display, loyalty, social media, and video affiliates.

For a merchant, it is preferable to work with affiliates who fall into several of these categories at the same times.

This means the affiliates will use several marketing methods and channels to reach target customers and generate leads and sales.

Affiliates have a lot to gain by combining various marketing techniques and strategies, too. They will have an easier time convincing merchants to accept them into their affiliate program and they will be able to reach out to a wider audience, drive more sales, and earn more money.

3. The Customer

The customer (or consumer) is the one who completes the sale, the one driving profit to both the merchant and their affiliate. They are the target for both merchants and especially affiliates.

To reach them and convert them, the latter may use product or service reviews, rankings, how-to tutorials, unboxing and other videos, display ads, social media posts, mobile app placements, paid search (if allowed by the merchant), and many other marketing techniques.

It is important to note that buying through an affiliate link does not bring about additional costs for the customer since the merchants’ retail prices already include affiliate marketing costs.

On the contrary, some affiliates actually enable the consumer to save money by sharing their profits with them. Common examples here are coupon and loyalty (especially cashback) affiliates.

4. The Affiliate Network

They are the intermediary between the merchant and the affiliate, the party bringing merchants and affiliates together and providing both of these parties with the technology to power their relationships.

For merchants, an affiliate network means an opportunity to list their products and services where publishers can see them and apply to become affiliates.

For publishers, the same network becomes a huge database of brands, products, and services from where they can choose the ones to promote in order to make money.

Some popular affiliate networks nowadays are CJ Affiliate, Rakuten LinkShare, ShareASale, Pepperjam, and ClickBank.

4. The Affiliate Manager

Just as any serious marketing campaign, the merchant’s affiliate program must be managed. Affiliate manager is the person who is tasked with overseeing and developing the merchant’s affiliate marketing program.

We will discuss the specifics of what affiliate managers do in the “How Affiliate Marketing Works from the Merchant’s Perspective” section below, but at this phase let’s emphasize that affiliate program management may be either insourced or outsourced (to an OPM agency like AM Navigator, for example).

Now that you know what affiliate marketing is and what parties it involves, let’s dive into how affiliate marketing works.

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

There are two main perspectives to affiliate marketing: the merchants’ and the affiliates’. Let’s review them separately.

How Affiliate Marketing Works from the Merchant’s Perspective

Once a merchant decides to turn to affiliates to market their products or services, they need to start planning and setting up their affiliate program.

This does involve some costs. The good news is that the costs are easy to keep under control and often lower than the cost of any other marketing campaign.

You’ll find answers to most questions related to setting up and managing an affiliate program in the following work by our very own Geno Prussakov:

• Online Guide to Affiliate Marketing for Merchants compilation of blog posts and articles
• Affiliate Program Management – An Hour a Day bestseller and a must-read for every merchant or affiliate manager
• Affiliate Marketing – Advertising LinkedIn Learning video course

If you are a merchant ready to start your own affiliate program, these three resources will provide you with most of the information you need.

If you need further guidance, a quick search on this blog will help you locate helpful posts, and you can always drop a comment and ask for the information you need directly. The total number of affiliate marketing posts on our blog, actually, exceeds 1,400 content pieces.

Also, be sure to avoid the 8 mistakes Geno warns about here!

In order to set up their affiliate marketing program, a merchant will have several important aspects to take care of and related decisions to make:

1. Platform Choice

Merchants basically have two options: to build their affiliate program on an “in-house” platform using paid tracking/management software, or to join an affiliate network and pay for access to the network’s technology and resources.

More and more merchants nowadays seem to use both tracking software and affiliate networks.

2. Creative Inventory

No matter if they manage their program in-house or through an affiliate network, merchants will need to provide their affiliates with banners, text links, video materials, product data feeds, and any other useful marketing collateral.

Some may find it helpful to create different landing pages or tools to enable their affiliates to create their own links and banners. These will bring about additional costs, but they will save the merchant or their affiliate manager a lot of time and effort.

3. Program Management

Marketing products and services through affiliates is not easy. It means setting up affiliate marketing agreements, putting together program’s rules and policies.

An even more important part will be recruiting and activating affiliates, as well as monitoring their performance.

Small merchants often try to manage everything themselves. Others pass on the responsibilities to one of their in-house staff members.

There are also merchants who prefer to outsource the work to an experienced affiliate marketing manager.

There are no universal dos or don’ts. What works for one merchant may not work for another, so it is important that merchants take all aspects into account.

They should pay special importance to the specifics of their products and services and to their budget and resources.   

Once these aspects are taken care of, the merchant and their affiliate program manager will have to create the program’s structure (sometimes also called “program’s terms”). It is basically a set of rules and processes that govern the collaboration between the merchant and their affiliate.

Among the aspects it should cover, the most important ones are:

• Affiliate performance tracking specifics – whether or not the merchant will use cookies to track the leads and sales their affiliate generates, what cookie-less solutions they will use, and, if they use cookies, what life the cookies should have.
• Payment model and terms – what commission to pay, for what actions, when, and how.
• Locking period – A waiting period some merchants set for cases when their clients cancel orders or request refunds, to avoid paying commissions on those transactions.

These details, along with others, are the ones that influence a publisher’s decision to affiliate themselves with a particular merchant.

Once the affiliate program structure is in place, and the program is set live, the merchant will have to recruit affiliates. The methods would range from announcing the new affiliate program to existing customers to employing tools that can help you find your competitors affiliates, to at least 20 more affiliate recruitment techniques and approaches.

The publishers in the respective network can ask to join the merchant’s affiliate program. It is up to the merchant or their program manager whether they accept applications automatically or they review and vet each of them individually. Merchants may also set specific auto-approval or auto-decline rules (be they based on the affiliate’s geography, in-network ranking, status, feedback, or anything else).

Once a publisher is accepted as an affiliate, they can start using the creative tools made available to them and their own marketing methods and tools to promote the merchant’s products or services.

How Affiliate Marketing Works from the Publishers’ Perspective

Things are a little simpler on the publishers’ end.

As mentioned above, there are several types of publishers or affiliates. The difference between them lies with the specifics of their actions and the tools and techniques they use to promote the products and services of the merchant they’re affiliated to.

No matter to which category the publisher belongs, before becoming an affiliate, they have to choose the program to affiliate themselves with and apply. It can be an in-house program or a network-based program — there’s virtually no difference between how the two function.

1. Choosing an Affiliate Program

Before deciding whether or not to affiliate themselves with a certain merchant, publishers should consider several important aspects, discussed in depth in Geno Prussakov’s earlier-referenced Quick Start Guide to Affiliate Marketing:

• Merchant website ease of use and traffic leak potential (toll-free numbers, live chat, etc.). If a website loads slowly or is difficult to navigate, it may chase visitors away. Toll-free numbers and live chat options may convert leads into sales, bypassing the affiliate’s commissions.
• Merchant reputation and reliability. Publishers should affiliate themselves with reputed merchants who live up to their end of the deal. Otherwise, they risk losing sales commissions and/or not getting paid.
• Price competitiveness. Some merchants have such high prices that selling their products or services is close to impossible. Others create replicas of their websites featuring much higher prices to cover affiliate payouts. Publishers should focus on promoting merchants with competitive prices.
• Market saturation. Some merchants are in very competitive niches, while others already have a huge number of affiliates. A beginner to affiliate marketing will have a hard time selling and making money in a saturated market.
• Commission amount.  The first impulse publishers have is to affiliate themselves with the merchants that pay the highest commissions. However, this is not necessarily a smart approach. Sometimes, it makes more sense to promote products or services that pay lower commissions but are easier to sell. Other times, it is preferable to promote a merchant that rewards both sales and leads, even though with lower amounts, than to promote a merchant that rewards sales only.
• Commission recurrence. All publishers should look into whether the merchant they affiliate themselves with will pay them a commission for all sales they drive, or only for new customer sales. It makes sense to earn a commission on every sale.
• Terms and conditions. These are the rules of the affiliate marketing program, the ones dictating when and how affiliates get paid, what actions they can take in their marketing efforts, and more. These influence which sales and leads qualify for a commission and which don’t. Therefore, they should be carefully reviewed by every publisher before they apply to become an affiliate.
• Conversion rate. Some merchants do a better job converting leads into sales than others. Publishers should look for merchants with high conversion rates, and even value the conversion rate more than the commission they could earn. Why? Because selling hundreds or thousands of products and earning a low commission is preferable to selling a couple of products with a high sales commission.
• EPC (earnings-per-click). This metric allows publishers to figure out how much money they could earn by driving traffic to a merchant’s website. Although a higher EPC could mean more money, some websites and merchants are much easier to promote than others.
• Reversals and lock-in periods. Some merchants will not pay their affiliates for orders that get canceled, product refunds, or service cancellations. To cover for such situations, they set a waiting period for the due commissions. In most cases, order cancellations and refund requests have nothing to do with the affiliate’s performance, so merchants who refuse to pay commissions on these transactions are not always desirable partners.
• Performance tracking solutions. For affiliates, it is important to work with merchants who use effective tracking solutions. Otherwise, they risk losing money. Cookies-only tracking solutions, for example, are ineffective due to the increasing popularity of ad-blockers and private browsing solutions to name just two of the threats. Publishers should affiliate themselves with merchants who use cookie-less tracking methods as well.  
• Creative resources and tools. As explained above, it is the merchant’s duty to provide their affiliates with some promotional materials, such as banners, text links, videos, and more. Some merchants provide numerous alternatives, while others focus on the basics. There are also merchants who invest in tools that allow their affiliates to create the materials they need. For publishers, it is important to have access to text links and banners for specific products or services or to be able to create them themselves. Therefore, the resources a merchant makes available should weigh heavily on the publisher’s decision of whether to join a particular affiliate program.

2. Becoming an Affiliate

Once a publisher has found the programs they want to join, they still need to apply and get accepted. Some merchants allow any registered customer to create their own affiliate link and use it to draw other customers. Many, actually, actively encourage this by placing a respective call-to-action on the order confirmation page — so that the customer can grab a unique tracking link and share it with their friends and followers.

Other merchants expect more from their affiliates and have specific rules in place. The publishers interested in promoting their products or services will have to prove that they meet those rules.

3. Promoting the Merchant and Getting Paid

Assuming that everything is in order and the publisher is accepted as an affiliate, it will be up to them how they market the merchant’s products and services as long as they play by the merchant’s rules or their Terms of Service agreement.

They can use content, ads, videos, apps, incentives, and various combinations of these in their marketing campaigns, but only as long as these marketing methods are permissible by the merchant. They can do the promotion through their own website or on the social networks, through their profiles, social media groups, forums, or paid advertising. But, as mentioned in the foregoing, they should also, first, double-check what is okay and what is not. This will help everyone, saving the possible future headache of reversed affiliate commissions.

The important thing to keep in mind is that the only limit to how much money an affiliate can make is their performance. Some may earn a few hundred dollars from affiliate marketing, while others earn hundreds of thousands, some – even millions, and then there are some that get acquired for a billion.

The Bottom Line About Affiliate Marketing

Whether you’re a merchant or a publisher, affiliate marketing could be your ticket to success.

Sure, true (and lasting) achievement doesn’t happen overnight, and it is never possible without learning, hard work, and perseverance.

You will need to find your way and figure out what works for you and what doesn’t, but you’re already on the right track, and we’re here to help. Don’t hesitate to ask questions and share your concerns in a comment below and we’ll do our best to answer as soon as possible!

The post What Is Affiliate Marketing and How Does It Work? appeared first on Affiliate Marketing Blog by Geno Prussakov.

As the new year approaches, many of us are considering which bad habits we’d like to leave in 2018. But what is a bad habit really? If you asked your mother, she might say swearing or eating with your mouth full. But a top sportsperson or a virtuoso musician would say a bad habit is more like poor form or technique which keeps you from reaching your potential.

This is the crux of bad habits for marketers too. Something minor which keeps you from reaching your potential. This could be as simple as focusing on the the wrong metrics or overestimating certain platforms.

Quite often this comes from one of two things. These are trying to emulate other brands and cutting corners. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with sharing best practices or trying to make your processes more efficient.

However, these things become problematic when you start doing them thoughtlessly. Just doing something because everyone else seems to be doing it is hardly a reliable route to success. The difference between efficiency savings and cutting corners should be fairly self-explanatory.

Today I’d like to walk you through what I think some are the most common bad habits among marketers. I’m also going to try and focus on some of the ones which are the most damaging in terms of wasted time or resources.

Let’s go!

Influencer Marketing; Forget Followers

Influencer marketing has been one of the stand-out trends of the last twelve months. Rightly so. It’s an effective way to increase your brand awareness and reach new customers. However, if not done properly, influencer marketing can also be a tremendous way to throw money away.

When creating an influencer strategy for the first time, many marketers put far too much onus on follower counts. Now, obviously, I’m not about to tell you to disregard follower numbers completely. But too much emphasis on this will cause you problems down the line.

Many influencers pay bot networks to gain extra followers. That means that their follower count isn’t necessarily a good indicator of the number of potential new customers.

Additionally, if you pay an influencer X amount of money to reach their Y number of followers, it’s hard to chase them up if you don’t see an upturn in sales. They’ve technically fulfilled their end of the bargain after all.

The key to overcoming this is focusing on outcomes from the beginning. With the right tools, you can select influencers with particular audience demographics or who get particular results. You can then come to an arrangement to pay them based on your desired outcomes, rather than paying to reach their audience and hoping for the best.

SEO; Backlinks at Any Cost

The fact that backlinks improve your search ranking is most one of the basic principles of SEO. Afterall, other sites linking to your content indicates authority and insight. This, in turn, lets the search engines know that your sight is valuable for their users.

However, what many marketers continue to forget is that this requires both quantity and quality. Too much emphasis on quantity at the expense of quality will quickly ruin your search engine rankings.

The bad news is that good SEO takes time and effort. I won’t give you a complete beginners guide today. Plenty of guides exist already. All I want to impart is that trying to take shortcuts will have the opposite effect to what you want.

That means no buying backlinks. There are sites out there which claim to get you thousands of backlinks for cash. While this is tempting, you have to forget that the search engines aren’t stupid. Buying backlinks violates Google’s guidelines, so they’re on the lookout for it.

If you suddenly acquire thousands of mysterious backlinks, chances are you’ll get blacklisted and your existing SEO ranking will swiftly drop. Just don’t do it.

Contests; Set and Forget

Contests have been another of the big marketing trends in 2018. Many brands have began using them to create new leads and drive sales. Part of the appeal of contests is that there’s a perception that you can set them up and forget about them.

It’s an appealing delusion, but it’s a delusion all the same. If you take a set and forget attitude, you might be lucky and find that you’re getting a lot of competition entries. However, all the luck in the world is unlikely to see these converting into qualified leads, much less sales.

So, instead of setting and forgetting, once you’ve got your contest up and running, and it’s attracting entries, it’s time to start thinking about sales funnels. Just like any other marketing tool.

It’s tempting to think that there are tools out there which will make sales for you in the background, but those tools are incredibly rare. Even the most highly sophisticated automation requires a certain amount of checking in and refining.

Contests, unfortunately, are no different.

Wrapping Up

Obviously, no one article is ever going to outline every single thing you’re doing wrong. The best I can do is try and point you towards some of the areas you’re likely to be slipping up. You may have noticed that these bad habits usually come from applying strategies uncritically.

This is an important lesson to keep in mind moving into the new year. You’ll have noticed a slew of blogs circulating about the top marketing strategies to implement in 2019. What I’d like you to take away today is that blindly implementing these trendy strategies is unlikely to yield the results you’re hoping for.

It’s easy to believe the spin around the hottest new techniques of the day, and indeed many of them offer great potential. However, the thing to remember is that nine times out of ten, they will still require you to put in work and focus on the right performance indicators to reach their potential.

That way you can make 2019 your best year yet.

As many of you know, I have been spending a fair bit of my time on K12 Computer Science Education over the last decade. The good news is that over that time period, there has been massive progress in getting computer science into our K12 schools in the US.

And if I had to pick one single thing that has been the biggest catalyst for that, I’d point to Scratch, the brainchild of Mitchel Resnick and his Lifelong Kindergarten lab at MIT’s Media Lab.

Yesterday was a big day for Scratch, and therefore, for K12 CS Education around the world. The Scratch team launched Scratch 3, a major release which brings a number of important new features and functions to Scratch. Here is the Scratch Team’s blog post on Scratch 3.

The three big improvements to Scratch in this new release are:

1/ Scratch everywhere. It used to be that you could only run Scratch in a browser. Now you can run it on touch devices like tablets. This is a big deal as many early elementary school classrooms tend to use tablets not computers.

2/ Extensions. The Scratch team has made Scratch extensible via a new element called Extensions. Examples of Extensions are the Lego Mindstorms Extension, or the Google Translate Extension, or the Amazon Text to Speech Extension. I am excited to see all of the amazing Extensions that will get built using this new feature.

3/ New characters, sounds, and backgrounds. Most kids use Scratch to build games, animations, and other fun experiences. Scratch is fun!!! So Scratch 3 brings a massive expansion of creative elements that kids can use to create the things they want to make.

Obviously Scratch can’t and won’t be used to make things like operating systems, machine learning models, transaction processing systems, etc, etc. But the people who will be building those things in the next ten years will have likely gotten into programming via Scratch.

Scratch is the on-ramp to computational thinking, coding, programming, and whatever word you want to describe the essence of computer science education. It makes something that seems so daunting really fun and approachable. And that is why I think it is the single biggest catalyst for K12 Computer Science Education.

And it just got a lot more fun and a lot more powerful.

Me: “Can I make a suggestion”
Suspect: “Sure”
Me: “Based on everything you’ve said, in my opinion and do tell me if you disagree, I believe we should agree to end the demo early, we’re not a good fit and here’s why….”

Here’s what happened…

4 weeks ago, I was due to run a Discovery Call with my suspect (someone I wasn’t sure was a prospect just yet), Sharon.

The Discovery Call was in the calendar for 11am and due to finish at 11.30, unfortunately Sharon was running 20 minutes late and she struggled to get on our Zoom screenshare

At the start of our call I asked, that given there was only 10 minutes left of our allotted time if she had a hard stop to which Sharon confirmed she had 45 minutes until her next meeting and that we were good for time.

On the call I started to get a feeling it was a bad fit… Here’s what I heard:

• The sales team are all ‘seasoned’ with 10+ years in the role.
• The team, collectively have missed targets two years running
• Sharon has had success as a sales manager in another division and been moved across to ensure this year is a success. She has 11 months to turn this team around.

I dug deep here and asked how she planned to turn this misfiring team around. In Sharon’s credit and I quote she is prepared to ‘rewrite the rule book and ‘shake things up’ a ‘complete revamp is needed’ she will ‘pull out all the stops’ to ensure come next October they hit targets.

Great. Just want I wanted to hear.  

I asked Sharon if she was prepared to start recording and coaching calls – “yes, without a doubt”. However, she felt her team needed telephone coaching first “How do you mean?” I asked.

Sharon explained the two weaknesses of her team are that they’re afraid of the phone, “It’s a graveyard on the sales floor” and when they do sell (she referred to it as order taking) they have no commercial acumen and never upsell. Opportunities are never maximised.

Sharon therefore wanted to coach her team to pick up the phone.

I started to think this team weren’t ready for a conversation intelligence platform. My concerns were then confirmed when I asked how she planned on coaching the team. She replied that her management style was to incentivise the team by providing chocolate bars and walking on to the sales floor delivering praise verbally for everyone to hear.

That is not coaching.

My goal had now shifted, I was no longer looking to secure a demo, I wanted to qualify my suspect out. At this moment Sharon interrupted me. She said she had to go, something had happened that needed her attention immediately. We’d only had 10 minutes of call time. She said I’ll be in touch, I want to see a demo. The she was gone.

If I’m honest, I half expected to never hear from Sharon again. To her credit an hour later she sent me a calendar invite and screenshare link for a demo. If she hadn’t have said she was prepared to rewrite the rule book and pull out all the stops, I’d have been 100% confident this demo wasn’t worth either of our time but she’d dangled a carrot that this was perhaps worth 30 more minutes of my time.

I therefore did what I normally do ahead of a demo, I replayed the call back in Refract and made a situation slide documented ‘what I heard’ on the Discovery Call. (Slide below)

At the start of the demo I took Sharon through my ‘what I heard’ slide and got her to confirm everything there was accurate:

I was 5 minutes into the demo and Sharon said ‘my team wouldn’t like their calls recorded, they would feel like I was micro-managing them’

I replied with the following

“If I’m honest Sharon, given what I’ve heard, I’m surprised you say that and here’s why…

You’ve told me you want to record calls, understand what the team are saying in their conversations and use that insight to coach your team to success, you also want to capture and profile what good looks like to drive excellence across the team.

You’ve explained that everyone in the team you’ve inherited has been in their role for 10 years or more and that they all lack the knowledge, capability and confidence to pick up the phone and upsell”

Sharon, given they’re in sales and sales people by nature are competitive and proud, if they’re not hitting targets and haven’t for 2 years, how many of your team do you feel would turn down call recording when its intention is to help them improve, sell, earn commission and to be successful”

Sharon replied “all of them”

I was stunned.

I shared with her that in an assessment of over 2 sales people only 6% were found to be ‘elite’ and the other 94% could all improve.

Before I could ask if she had any ‘elite’ sales people she said, “everyone in my team could improve”

I asked how she planned on helping her team improve their sales conversations without listening to their calls.

“I can’t… but before I listen to their calls, I need them to actually pick up the phone”

I said that was a fair point, but I just played back to her the conversation we’ve effectively had and pointed out I’d have lost my job at every company I’ve worked for if I never picked up the phone. I then asked if she felt she had the right team to ensure come October 2019 she’d hit her targets

“no, I don’t… but because they’ve been here for more than 10 years they have too much knowledge and if I sacked them we’d lose that knowledge” (the knowledge they’re not using on the phone)

At this point I said ‘Sharon, can I give you some advice [she said yes], a great way to capture and share knowledge is by recording and sharing calls, making them available for new hires too’

Sharon then said ‘I understand what you’re saying but at the same time, sales people are just bullshitters, I need my team to just continue bullshitting and we’ll hit targets’

That comment irked me – I fundamentally disagreed with it and I told her that as well. I know first-hand you can, if you want improve your sales skills and the impact coaching can have, I’ve actually written a post that demonstrates using real data how coaching has improved my sales skills.

At this point, we were 10 minutes in I’d decided this was a waste of Sharon’s time and mine. This was a bad fit prospect.

“Sharon, based on everything you’ve said, in my opinion and do tell me if you disagree, I believe we should agree to end the demo early, we’re not a good fit and here’s why….”

I then explained that it sounds to me like her team are fixed in their ways, they’re not going to start picking up the phone and they’re not going to accept call coaching – despite not hitting targets for 2 years. It feels like the company isn’t ready for a platform like ours and problems run deep.

Sharon agreed, I could see in her face she knew she’d taken a big challenge on when she moved divisions and that she really did need a new approach and shake up.

I wished her well and my parting advice that if anyone in her sales team, who hasn’t hit targets for two years and would refuse to have their calls coached shouldn’t be in her sales team and she agreed.

We ended the call positively and she said she hoped to call me in 3 months time and revisit Refract. We shall see…

A few years back I'd have carried on, feeling like I had to complete the demo and I'm positive my prospect would have been too polite (or perhaps 'British') to suggest this was indeed a waste of time.

When you find yourself on a demo with a 'bad fit' prospect do you 'pull the plug', or do you 'Keep Calm and Carry On' just out of professional courtesy and 'just in case' - likewise, if you're on the receiving end of a demonstration do you simply sit through until the end, not really paying attention or do you suggest you're a bad fit and that the demo should finish early?

You have a business that specializes in providing a B2B service or product. But all your keyword search terms return results that are B2C. The unpleasant outcome? High bounce rates, irrelevant traffic, and low conversion percentages. So, how can you attract the right kind of audience via search? Read the full article at MarketingProfs

Editor’s Note: This article was first featured on LinkedIn here.

There’s a good reason why half the companies on the Fortune 500 list in 2000 are no longer there today; but you don’t even need to go back that far to see the impact of disruptive change and how it can lead to the downfall of once-great organizations.

Remember BlackBerries? Or, heaven forbid, PalmPilots?

Not long ago, those handheld devices dominated, yet it’s amazing how quickly we’ve forgotten the original PDA or how we’ve somehow managed to live without that little keyboard on the BlackBerry.

We weren’t the only ones who found their disappearance unimaginable. When news broke in 2006 that Apple was developing a phone, can you guess what Palm’s CEO Ed Colligan was quoted as saying?

“We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here, figuring out how to make a decent phone…PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.” 

Walking in was only the beginning. To be fair, poor Ed wasn’t alone in minimizing the disruptive threat Apple represented. Even RIM’s co-CEO Jim Balsillie saw the iPhone as “kind of one more entrant into an already very busy space” and mistakenly went on to say, “In terms of a sort of sea-change for BlackBerry, I would think that’s overstating it.” 

Quite the understatement there on Jim’s part. 

Of course, they aren’t the first or last CEOs to get it wrong. Right on their heels in 2008, BlockBuster’s then CEO Jim Keyes said to the Motley Fool that Netflix wasn’t “even on the radar screen in terms of competition.” Well, we all know how that ended.

The business landscape is littered with the carcasses of companies whose leaders misread the tea leaves of disruption, or those who ignored the peripheral players in their space until it was too late. Others didn’t catch the change in the prevailing winds of customer preferences, instead holding fast to their historical assumptions and relying on their market dominance and scale.

While it’s one thing to see new entrants coming and react too late, it’s another to be blindsided by entirely new business models. Recent examples abound of companies and industries that felt mistakenly secure about the moat they’d built to protect themselves from land invaders and traditional competitors when, all the while, disruptive newcomers were swooping in overhead. Just ask any taxi owner in NYC who’s lost over 70% of their market share to Uber and Lyft and seen the value of a medallion fall 90% in what’s felt like a New York minute. 

Too Big to Fail? Too Hard to Change.

Large incumbent firms that recognize disruption and fear its impact still face another kind of dilemma: their own scale, complexity and fixed ways of doing things become the real obstacles to change. Compared to the momentum of disruptors, the incumbent’s inertia is of little match. It may be said that where there’s a will, there’s a way, but that way is often not obvious and always uphill for large, traditional organizations.

The “Incumbent’s Dilemma” — an increasingly prevalent phenomenon for successful companies — is the painful recognition that the assets, products, processes, or business models that once made your company a success don’t guarantee success in the future and may actually hold you back. What got you here not only won’t get you there but may actually prevent you from getting there. The Incumbent’s Dilemma manifests itself in a hesitance to go on the offensive or to disrupt your own business model, especially if it involves cannibalizing current revenue streams.

I recall Doug Leone, the famed venture capitalist at Sequoia Capital, warning of this malaise. He said boards need to be vigilant about stopping successful CEOs from getting into a “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mindset. Instead, he believes healthy paranoia is a good thing and “if it ain’t broke, break it” is the secret to inoculation against disruption.

The dilemma faced by incumbents comes about as a result of sunk costs and all the legacy processes and policies, silos and systems, models and mindsets that build up like scar tissue inside an organization over time.

While the nature and degree of the Incumbent’s Dilemma differs across industries, traditional organizations are often weighed down by some common features, including:

• • Extensive physical footprints or assets in a world that’s increasingly virtual
  • Well-defined processes that are efficient but not agile
  • Stagnant channels and long-term established partners that become less relevant as your business ecosystem expands and new players or marketplaces emerge
  • Multi-year product cycles in the age of continuous delivery
  • Rigid hierarchies and conformist cultures against the growth of the gig economy
  • Legacy systems and silos of information in a world of real-time response
  • Industrial-era regulation

Only an objective eye by discerning leaders can decouple the return on these various “assets” today versus the opportunity cost they represent tomorrow.

Ironically, another contributor to the Incumbent’s Dilemma is a tenured workforce. While experienced professionals certainly offer a range of benefits, an over-abundance of them heightens the risk of rusting from the inside out. Diverse and innovative ideas often come from infusing new blood into an organization. Otherwise, a form of intellectual stagnation or, worse, a collective arrogance that you “know the business better than anyone” can take hold.

There is no more damning internal manacle than that of a legacy mindset.

It isn’t so much that these new (digital) disruptors have lower barriers to entry (although they often do); it’s that incumbents have much higher barriers to exit. Simply put, it’s really hard to change how you’ve always done things to embrace a whole new world order. However, that’s exactly what digital transformation requires. 

A Failure to Act: The Incumbent’s Demise

Success is indeed a seductive mistress whose charms can lead companies to ignore the stealthy forces of disruption. It can also lull you into believing that you truly understand your customer’s needs and desires. The founder of ServiceNow, Fred Luddy, reminds us regularly at our board meetings how important it is to pay attention to what customers like about new competitors and to avoid sticking our heads in the sand to that reality.

A now almost classic example is the reimagining of the hotel as we know it. Forever the bastion of the hospitality industry, the legacy hotel giants didn’t anticipate the turning tides until AirBnb attacked them on a front they never even thought to protect. After all, hotel chains had a mass-market product, a solid customer base and consistent physical presences all across the world. Why should they have worried?

To any major hotel chain (with billions of dollars of real estate on their balance sheets), it was inconceivable that a room in someone’s house would be a threat. To Fred Luddy’s point, what they missed is that AirBnB wasn’t selling a room: they were creating an “experience” that allows people to “live like a local” in any corner of the globe, all while unlocking a new form of economic empowerment for homeowners worldwide.

Beyond a new experience, AirBnB’s model offered customers a whole new way to access accommodations with transparency and personalization that met changing customer expectations. AirBnB eliminated the need for third-party website bookings, the clunky check-in lines, and the sterile and often charmless experience of a beige-clad hotel room. 

Axing the concept of “sameness,” AirBnB gave customers an array of hosts and homes to choose from, a concept that was lost on many legacy hotel executives: “Our guests don’t want the AirBnB feel and scent,” Christopher Norton, EVP of global product and operations at the Four Seasons, said while speaking to Fast Company.

His point is right for some; however, with 5 million listings and an average of 2 million people staying in an AirBnB each night, it clearly works for many. Comparing AirBnB’s “service” to a traditional hotel room is like apples to oranges. Instead, what AirBnB has done is set a new bar in the “experience economy” for incumbents and disruptors alike. 

One-Click “Complexity”

Another blindspot for incumbents is the overestimation of how complex or difficult it is to do what they do. In large organizations, processes are formed, added to, and altered over the years, which artificially inflates the difficulty of execution. When you live in a world of opaque and complex processes, it’s hard to appreciate the degree to which technology platforms have eliminated the need for middle-men and the many steps they perform. 

Think about how inconvenient and clunky it was to transfer funds or wire money in the past. Now compare that to the instantaneous and entirely self-serve “process” of Venmo today – a palpable difference in the customer experience.

In June 2018, Amazon beat out Walmart to purchase PillPack for nearly $1B, their fourth largest acquisition. PillPack allows users to buy medications online in pre-made doses. On the day of the announcement, pharmacy providers Walgreens, CVS Health, and Rite Aid collectively lost $11B in stock.

When Walgreens CEO Stefano Pessina heard of the deal, he said he’s “not particularly worried” about the PillPack deal: “You see, the pharmacy world is much more complex than just delivering certain pills or certain packages.” Sounds like Stefano might do well to take a hard-learned lesson from the book of Jim Balsillie.

The message here: don’t underestimate the degree to which customer expectations have irrevocably changed. Equally, don’t overestimate how complex your business is, especially when compared to how simple it could be in the hands of the “one-click” Amazonians.

Disrupt Thyself

In essence, incumbency comes in many forms and is as much a mindset as it is a business model. Overcoming the Incumbent’s Dilemma requires prying open the window of change, taking bold and daring risks, and embracing a world where assets can quickly become liabilities and power has shifted to consumers whose expectations have irrevocably changed.

Past success is only a predictor for future success when companies and their leadership are vigilant about disruptive forces and are adaptable to change. As soon as inertia or complacency sets in, vulnerability follows, especially if an aggressive disruptor is on the horizon (and they always are). 

While history can be a harsh judge of leadership, there are only two real predictors of successful transformation: (1) an acknowledgment that there’s a problem and (2) a desire to do something about it. 

Looking back, Ed Colligan, Jim Balsillie and others failed to acknowledge their problem, until it was too late. 

To avoid a similar fate you need to ask yourself what the major vulnerabilities in your business model might be? Where does the vision for your organization fall short of the expectations of all your constituents? What are your elements of incumbency? 

Perhaps most importantly: How willing are you to bravely face the future and disrupt your own business before someone comes along and does it for you? 

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