The title of this post isn’t meant to be rhetorical. I’m serious. If sales managers can’t coach, won’t coach, or don’t know how to coach their people, then who is?

Back in the day (I have enough gray hair now to use that expression), sales managers were the ones responsible for developing their people. Many took great pride and satisfaction in mentoring those under their charge to greatness. Today, not so much. Sales leaders are consumed by large administrative burdens, buried in crap by their companies, and playing firefighter-in-chief instead of sales squadron leader. Way too many managers are attempting to “lead” (I use that word very loosely here) their teams via email while their eyeballs are glued to CRM screens. Honestly, it’s pretty sad. It’s also having a devastating effect on sales performance and the personal and career development of salespeople.

As a young sales pup, I benefitted greatly by being mentored and coached by sales managers, other executives, and by veteran salespeople in companies where I worked. These people invested in my development. They showed me how to prepare for and conduct sales calls. They taught me how to pack for a business trip, where to get the best shoe shine (pre-1999, the TWA Concourse at STL Lambert was known across the US as the top spot), and they modeled for me how to deal with difficult customers. I owe much of what I know about sales and much of the success I’ve experienced to those who coached me.

In Sales Management. Simplified. (coming in October), I share stories of the specific ways various managers and executives coached me — in the office, on trips, pre and post-sales calls, for big presentations. But you don’t need to wait until October to begin coaching salespeople! Dave Brock and I are in the midst of leading a free 90-day survival course for sales managers. The good folks at OpenView Venture Partners / OpenView Labs asked us to write weekly posts, share other relevant material, and to facilitate a webinar specifically focused on sales coaching. This upcoming one hour session is free, not just for OpenView’s portfolio companies, but to the public as well.

In my typical mellow, non-confrontational style, I am going to gently point out the biggest time suckers and distractions keeping sales managers from coaching their people, and make the strongest case I can that in order to truly improve sales culture and results, sales leaders must reallocate their time to high-value, revenue-driving activities. And yes, that means that spending time with sales reps, whether by phone, in your office or their cubicle, riding shotgun in the passenger seat, along on a sales call, or in sales team meetings, is more valuable than staring at your CRM screen, pounding out emails at 4:30 in the morning, or sitting in on non-sales related corporate conference calls!

Please join Dave Brock and me this coming Thursday, August 20th, at Noon EDT, that’s 9:00 am out in lovely Orange County where Brock lives (and continually boasts about the weather). Click here for more info and to register.

Here’s a post from the current OpenView series that may just whet your appetite enough to put Thursday’s webinar on your calendar: Your #1 Priority as a Sales Manager (Plus 3 Things to Stop Doing Now)

No, coaching isn’t soft, or just some nice to do sales management activity that you may or may not get to depending on workload. Frankly, it’s one of the very highest uses of a sales leader’s time and very best ways to drive improved sales results.

Editor’s note: This is the sixth post in a new series devoted to helping new sales managers survive and thrive in their new role. For more essential tips and tactics, sign up for our free email course, The First 90 Days: A Sales Manager Survival Course.  

By now, Mike and I have hopefully made it clear that we think sales coaching is critical. But, in case we haven’t yet, let me reiterate that coaching is the highest leveraged activity a sales manager can undertake. With that as the basis for this post, Iet’s address how and how not to coach.

What Coaching Is and Is Not

First, let’s be clear with what we’re trying to achieve through coaching. The goal of coaching is to maximize a term member’s ability to perform in their current role. While we might also look to develop team members to step into bigger responsibilities in the future, the primary focus of coaching is the current position.

Coaching is not a performance review! It’s not that thing HR forces us to do annually. If we do a good job in coaching, that annual performance review should be easy. We’re not trying to ‘fix people’ either. We aren’t shrinks, we aren’t trying to change people or look at deep rooted issues, we’re just trying to help them perform their jobs as well as possible.

Coaching is as much about finding people doing things right as it is about correcting the things they are doing wrong. Too often we think coaching is about correcting deficiencies or errors in performance. But we can have even greater impact by finding something a team member has done really well and coaching them to keep up with it. For example, “Mike, you did a particularly good job executing that sales call today. Did you notice how your preparation helped you…?”

Effective coaching focuses on helping the sales person learn or discover what impacts their effectiveness, positively or negatively. These may be behaviors, attitudes or skills — we will want to coach each of these.

Finally, coaching is a lot about teaching and learning. This is important, I’ll come back to it later.

Coachabilty

To have an impact with coaching, the person has to be coachable. They have to be open to learning, discovering and improving how they perform. If a person isn’t coachable, we’ll have zero impact, regardless of how great our coaching skills are.

When a person isn’t open to coaching, they’ve essentially made the decision to stop learning and growing. Ultimately, the uncoachable person has no place in the organization. While they may be performing well now, at some point they’ll be left behind because they won’t be willing to learn, change or adapt.  

But, be cautious leaping to the conclusion that someone’s uncoachable. Part of the problem may be the coach. We may be doing the wrong things or we might not be doing things in a manner that is effective for the individual. That’s our problem as managers to fix, we have to find a way to coach each individual.

Coaching Frequency

Too often, managers think of coaching as a kind of meeting. People try to schedule “coaching sessions” but, when the press of everyday business is on, the first meeting to be cancelled is the always coaching meeting.

We’re most effective when we integrate coaching into what we do every day. Since we’re already conducting deal, pipeline, territory, prospecting, account and sales call reviews every day (or at least I hope so), it should be fairly easy to incorporate teachable lessons into these daily activities.

Coaching throughout daily reviews provides an awesome way to kill two birds with one stone — we can achieve business management objectives and coach our team at the same time. Incorporating coaching into everyday activities also improves timelines. Think of the difference in coaching a sales call, “Jill, let’s talk about that call we just made,” versus “Jill, do you remember that call you made a month ago…” Our coaching will have much more impact if we’re talking about what we just observed versus something we observed weeks or months ago.

When we incorporate coaching into normal daily routines, we turn coaching frequency on its head. We have the opportunity to do a little coaching for each person every day! Think of the impact that will have on your sales organization.

How to Coach

There’s a ton written about coaching, but it ultimately boils down to two techniques: directive and non directive coaching. Directive coaching is all about telling the person what they should be doing while non directive coaching helps the coachee discover and learn what they should be doing on their own.

Since non directive coaching encourages team member to learn on their own, it’s a more sustainable and impactful technique.

Good non directive coaching is based on asking really great questions — focusing on deal strategy, improving the results of sales calls and so forth. Just think of how powerful great questions are when talking to a customer. Great questions get the customer to open up, think differently and consider different approaches. Great questions engage the customer. Apply the same skills used to question customers to come up with questions for your team.

While I’m definitely a proponent of non directive coaching, certain cases call for taking a directive approach. For instance, in very high risk situations where there’s little room for error or in situations that require immediate action, we simply don’t have the time needed for non directive coaching.

No matter which technique you choose, remember that the best coaches use a variety of methods and are able to adopt the technique to the the individual and the specific situation. So, build an arsenal of coaching tools. Learn how to coach non directively, learn the power of questions, learn when to be directive. Leverage a mix of techniques to improve and don’t get locked into one approach, instead use whatever is appropriate.*

Don’t Worry About Making Mistakes

You’ll make some terrible mistakes as you start coaching and throughout your management career. But, don’t worry too much, it’s a learning process. Own the mistakes, laugh with the salesperson and move on. The magic about coaching is it’s a learning and discovery journey — both for the coach and coachee.

Want to learn more about sales coaching? Be sure to join Mike Weinberg and me for a sales coaching webinar August 20. You can register here.

*For a brief guide on coaching techniques and how to use directive and non directive coaching, email me: at dabrock@excellenc.com. I’ll be glad to send a free copy.

More Tips for New Sales Managers

Get caught up by reading any previous posts in the series you may have missed:

1. So You’re a New Sales Manager: The Biggest Change to Expect
2. Your #1 Priority as Sales Manager (Plus 3 Things to Stop Doing Now)
3. 10 Questions for Assessing Your Sales Reps (& What to Do Next)

The post How (and How Not) to Coach Sales Reps: An Inclusive Guide to Sales Coaching appeared first on OpenView Labs.

It might make sense that when an advertiser pays to place an ad on a site they would want to know on which site their ad is being placed.

But hey, this is the new age of advertising, man, not everything has to make sense all the time – like advertisers paying for ads that nobody sees. Which happens about half of the time.

But thankfully, we’re not here to talk about viewability (there’s enough people doing that for us). We’re here to talk about transparency – the notion that an advertiser might want to know where their ads are ending up.

Strictly in terms of total 2015 media bombardment, if viewability is the golden boy star athlete, and ad fraud is his annoying, occasionally forgotten little brother, then transparency is the weird uncle who was last seen on a dubious solo trip to Myrtle Beach and hasn’t been heard from since.

In other words, no one really talks about it anymore.

Which is a shame. Transparency is really important.

Forget Viewability, Let’s Talk About Transparency

Transparency assures advertisers they run ads on the sites they want, on the sites where their target audience lives, and not on the sites that could be considered – “ahem” – inappropriate.

And even if the ad is placed on the site the advertiser wants, there’s often questions about whether or not the ad was even viewable (dammit, I guess we do have to talk about viewability).

But the reality is that transparency talks usually happen at the negotiation level between the advertiser and their ad tech partner, and as such they can be a bit “hush hush.”

It can get awkward:

Advertiser: “So… how transparent are you?”

Ad tech partner: “We are fully transparent, here is our available site list.”

Advertiser: “Oh, that’s impressive and all but.. how do I know if my ads will actually run on these sites?”

Ad tech partner: “You’ll just have to trust us.”

Advertiser: “Oh.”

Ah, trust. If there’s one thing the advertising industry (and business in general) hasn’t historically been very good at, it’s garnering trust.

So what’s an advertiser to do?

Programmatic Tries to Save the Day

For a while, it seemed as though advertisers wouldn’t have to do anything. Technology played its hand and a solution was born: programmatic advertising.

Programmatic technologies allow advertisers to select inventory from a range of sites in an automated fashion on an open market, theoretically providing greater transparency into where ads are being placed and the price the impressions are being sold for.

That technology was predicted to supplant the traditional methods of negotiating with ad tech partners directly because it offers efficiency. Yet, it hasn’t and doesn’t appear like it will. While programmatic buying may provide efficient variety, advertisers will always have a need for specificity.

So the transparency question remains.

In recent years, a lot of work has been done to assuage advertiser fears that they don’t know where their ads are being placed, and wouldn’t approve if they ever found out.

Many ad tech partners have come out as “premium” ad networks, offering 100% transparency coupled with a shiny selection of well-known, reputable publishers that would make any advertiser giddy.

But just because a partner might claim 100% transparency, doesn’t mean it actually happens. And maybe they do have a glitzy list of publishers they buy inventory from, but that doesn’t mean an advertiser’s ad will actually appear on those sites.

How to Tell if Your Ad Tech Partner is Transparent

Luckily, there are a few ways to know if an ad tech partner is truly transparent. Here’s what an advertiser can look for/ask about:

1. A site list of “possible publishers” is a great place to start, but see if the ad tech partner can manually check each site for available impressions before the campaign runs. Then, the partner should be able to whitelist/blacklist any sites the advertiser wants/doesn’t want.
2. Does your partner offer post-campaign site reports that not only include which sites were hit, but the breakdown of total impressions served and the percent viewed and clicked?
3. See if they accept third-party tracking tags. These tags can figure out exactly where ads ran, which adds veracity to the post-campaign reporting.
4. A pre-bid verification tool. This will guarantee value by evaluating publisher reliability and pricing so the advertiser ensures viewability at the best prices available.
5. A viewability sensor. Even if the ads are placed on sites the advertiser wants, they may not be viewable. Having technology that optimizes for viewable placements in real-time while the campaign is running is crucial to determining the value of a campaign.

You see, transparency isn’t about micromanagement, nor is it really even about trust.

Transparency is about value.

If an advertiser doesn’t know where their ads are being placed, then they can’t determine the reasons behind the ads’ success or failure.

As the old saying goes, if it can’t be measured, it can’t be managed.

And in this case that’s probably true.

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Just as you might want to know where your ads are being placed, you always might want to know what’s going to happen in the world of mobile advertising. Find out by downloading our free “2015 Mobile Advertising Forecast” eBook.

Download Now

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GUEST:

Would you say marketing is art or science? I’d say the best campaigns involve a little of both: You need art to inspire, and you need science to analyze and measure. Influencer marketing is no different in that it involves a blend of strategy and creative, but the reason it works so well has less to do with numbers and far more to do with human connections.

That doesn’t mean influencer campaigns can’t have quantifiable goals and meaningful data, of course. At my firm, we rely on our proprietary systems to track stats and metrics across all social platforms, which makes ROI easy for clients to view and share. Still, while we prioritize evidence-based results, we know it’s the human element that drives our success.

Entrepreneur and investor John Rampton recently claimed in Entrepreneur that the answer to taking the guesswork out of influencer marketing lies in enterprise technology. The idea is that smarter software will not only automate every aspect of the campaign process, it will streamline pricing for brands, which Rampton describes as historically “largely arbitrary” with “no correlation to an actual value.”

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From VentureBeat

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As head of a business focused on connecting influencers with brands and agencies, I can tell you there’s nothing arbitrary about how we set our pricing. Our rates are based on the particulars of each sponsorship: the number of influencers working on the campaign, the complexity of the program itself, the specificity of the required demographic, the platforms involved, the targeted audience reach, etc. For spokesperson campaigns we use a pricing algorithm that pulls a number of factors into account, including monthly page views and visitors, level of influence, location, niche specialties, demand, and more. We either pays influencers a flat fee, or we take a percentage of the total amount negotiated, similar to a talent manager.

Rampton also points out the emerging app model for communicating with influencers, which reduces human communication to zero:

Now influencers can receive push notifications for campaign opportunities, making it as simple as selecting “yes” or “no” when they want to opt in or out of an opportunity. Entire campaigns can now be run through an app without the influencer ever having to speak to an agent or manager.

The problem with this approach is amplified with the following:

Companies with enterprise technology have created brand-safe gateways that essentially remove human error from the equation. The enterprise acts as a moderator between the brands and the influencers to get the correct messaging in place. Once this occurs, through an API token, the enterprise takes over the influencer’s account and launches the messaging on their behalf, guaranteeing safety in both the messaging and its launch timing.

When brands supply the message, the creative, and take over the publication process, the influencer is essentially reduced to a billboard location. The power of human storytelling is removed from the equation, along with the credibility that drew audiences in to begin with.

These days, everything from purchasing decisions to ongoing brand loyalty is rooted in conversations and community. With 92 percent of consumers saying they trust word-of-mouth recommendations and reviews above all other forms of advertising, the belief that brands need to maintain ironclad control over their messaging is rapidly becoming outdated. Audiences respond to influencers, but these key individuals won’t be influential for long if their voice is lost in favor of corporate shilling.

While activating the right relationships online can be a powerful strategy, brands are missing the big picture if they aren’t allowing influencers to be their authentic selves. I’m all for tools that improve efficiencies, but I don’t believe in eliminating human conversations. From the important campaign information that gets communicated when we actually talk with an influencer to the response from audiences when that influencer shares his or her unique content, a sense of connection is what it’s all about.

Danielle Wiley is CEO of content marketing firm Sway Group.

As the ecommerce market has evolved, customers have become more and more aware of the companies attempts to fulfill their needs and make them happy. Nowadays, customers are not looking for a plain shopping experience because they buy with their heart and soul, and they want to be surprised. Considering these aspects and the competitive market, why don’t you take a step forward and adapt your business to the latest trends from the retail market?

Even though every business is different, with its audience and target, there are some tips you can personalize and apply on your ecommerce website to make it appealing and to stand out from the retail crowd. Don’t be just a drop in the ocean, but the bee’s knees in your industry.

Before doing any optimization experiments, there is one main aspect to set up: integrate a conversion rate optimization plan in your online marketing strategy.

#1. Focus On Micro Conversions

Sometimes, with the sole purpose of obtaining great results in a short period, we experiment too many activities on the same time and try to directly fulfill the biggest goal of your business. Even though you are 200% sure that everything is going as planned, somehow the results you’ve expected are not showing. That’s why working with small steps and objectives will prove to be a good way to plan your business: have in mind the business goal and design SMART objectives to build up your way to the big elephant.

Micro conversions represent one important step in transforming website’s visitors into paying customers. Before persuading them to place an order on your e-shop, try to connect and make a relationship with the target audience. The numbers speak for themselves: the average conversion rate worldwide is about 2% so most traffic doesn’t result in macro conversions.

A micro conversion is an action visitors do before they invest money in your ecommerce website and buy a product. Depending on the conversion rate optimization goals and what you want visitors to do, a micro conversion could be to:

• Look at a specific page or product
• Click on a Call-to-Action button
• Use the search bar
• Combine multiple search filters
• Download a paper, PDF, guide or ebook
• Subscribe to newsletter
• Join an email list
• Engage with the social media buttons

How to get micro conversions?

The main point of having micro conversions is to know as much as you can about the current traffic, create a personalized on-site experience and take visitors down a journey of their own choosing. In this way, they’ll be more willing to give you their email and start a connecting with them at a more personal level.

One way to get leads and investigate the customers’ behavior is to create a personalized pop-up survey. For example, if you own an electronics retail website, design an on-exit intent pop-up survey on the cart page to investigate why visitors leave without placing an order and ask for the email addresses.

Once the visitors give their email addresses, and you know their answers, start solving the problems you’ve found and interact with a personalized content strategy. Nurture the leads and transform them into loyal customers and raving fans of your business.

#2. Use Weather Segmentation

Everybody knows that weather influences our moods and it can trigger a certain state of mind. Marketers have started to acknowledge the importance of this insight on their business not long ago.

Nowadays, considering the evolution of mobile devices and diversification of communication channels, weather segmentation has become an even more efficient tactic to approach visitors. People have changed not only their shopping habits, but their entire lifestyle and weather effects which channels visitors use to prospect the market and to make purchases. When it’s cold or raining, people tend to spend more time indoors, surfing the internet, using their laptops and mobile devices. Therefore, it’s the perfect time to surprise visitors with the right message: “It’s time to jump into new cozy sweaters. 10% discount today!” – if you’re a fashion retailer.

Weather segmentation isn’t a stand alone feature and it can be combined with several other segmentation criteria to fully create a personalized experience. For example, with Marketizator, you can combine the visitor’s location with the weather conditions to create a pop-up banner for a travel agency:

#3. Use time pressure

Time pressure has become an increasingly feature in the ecommerce market and it is the ultimate trick to make people convert faster. Whether the conversion is a downloaded free ebook, a product purchase or just a click on a button, users will act on the spot if they know the offer is only temporary. Why? Because time pressure gives them exclusivity to a certain product or service. Knowing that a product is only available for two hours or that you have a 10 % discount if you place an order in the next day creates a feeling of urgency. Having the scarcity concept, as Robert Cialdini calls it, in mind and putting it into practice in the conversion rate optimization strategy is one way to increase the performance of your ecommerce website.

Why is time pressure such a great conversion trigger?

When it comes to rarity and time pressure, the actual thought of losing something motivates people to want it even more and have it as soon as possible. It’s as old as the hills that rare things, unique belongings are more valuable than mass objects everybody can buy from every corner shop. That’s why when visitors realize it could be their last chance to buy that special something, they tend to hurry and immediately make the decision to purchase it.

One way to use the scarcity effect in ecommerce is to emphasize how many people are looking at the same product in the same time. Create an A/B testing experiment and see the results for yourself. In the variation, simply add the text “{ONLINE} visitors are looking at this product” with the dynamic text replacement feature from Marketizator.

Combine time pressure and promotions for a great combo: give customers something extra if they order from your online store in a specific period. People love free stuff, and it’s a good way to spread the word about new products. Here’s one example that will make it understand how to use scarcity:

Wrapping it up

Include out of the box ideas in the conversion rate optimization plan and take actionable steps to provide a personalized on site experience for your visitors. Define attainable goals, drive up A/B testing experiments to see which version of your website brings more conversions, use web personalization to create dynamic pop-ups and investigate customers behavior with branching logic surveys. Combine them to get micro-conversions, persuade visitors through scarcity and customize their journey using weather segmentation.

You can use these techniques with Marketizator and have all the necessary features under the same roof. Create a forever free account and see the results for yourself.

Consider these nine factors when pricing your SaaS products for maximum business results and higher conversion rates.

Keep on reading: The Science of SaaS Pricing for Higher Conversion Rates

Several of the great success stories of corporate ethnography have 3M engineer Richard Drew as their protagonist. In the 1920s, Drew spent several days at an auto assembly plant, observing how the workers were using his company’s sandpaper. Two-tone cars were all the rage at the time, and Drew serendipitously noticed that the plant workers were laboriously and often unsuccessfully using newspapers to shield the painted portion of the car while the second color was applied. That alerted him to a need and ignited the idea for what became 3M’s keystone product: masking tape.

When it comes to discovering unmet customer needs and innovation opportunities, there’s no substitute for in-the-moment, in-context observation for making meaning out of the complex weave of emotion and rationality that drives consumer behavior. That’s why ethnographers often follow subjects around or even temporarily move in with them to note the compensations, workarounds, and rituals associated with some specific product, task, or routine.

But unless ethnographers are willing to spend weeks on end with their subjects, their presence inevitably introduces some behavioral change in the people they’re observing. After all, if you’re a teenaged girl, are you likely to buy condoms for your boyfriend with an ethnographer tailing you around? If you’re her mother, might you hold back from purchasing those Cheetos or Oreos, or hesitate to strip off your bra the moment you get home from work? If you’re her father, will you be tempted to tune into NOVA instead of the latest episode of Hoarders?

At the same time, technologies like selfie sticks, Fitbits, and wearable video cameras are making people comfortable monitoring their own calorie consumption, sleep patterns, heart rate, friends, family, and daily experiences. This is leading some companies to investigate whether they can obtain comparable or at least good enough ethnographic insights in faster, cheaper, and more scalable ways by using simple mobile ethnography apps to equip people to observe themselves. These apps typically enable people to upload media files, tag their location, and provide brief responses to open- and closed-ended questions that are tailored for each project.

Why use them? At C Space, we’ve conducted more than 800 mobile journaling and ethnography projects on behalf of over 240 clients since 2010, and have seen the power of bringing consumer experience to life for our clients. Product and package designers can see how people open, store, and use their purchases “in the wild.” Manufacturers and retailers can jointly learn what shelf sets, aisle layouts, signage, and promotions are capturing attention and changing shoppers’ behavior in the moment. Marketers and innovation specialists can immerse themselves in the sights, sounds, and emotions of consumers’ daily lives, surfacing opportunities to make their products and services more emotionally resonant and durable. Customer experience initiatives can benefit from longitudinal studies capturing consumers’ every touch point with the brand.

In myriad tangible and intangible ways, consumers’ self-ethnographies help employees throughout an organization get to know customers as real human beings, not merely as data points. And that living, breathing knowledge builds corporate empathy, which, we’d argue, is ultimately the key to business growth.

But to achieve these benefits, mobile ethnographies must be well designed. (The screenshots below, from our mobile ethnography app at C Space, give a sense of how this sort of activity is captured.)

 

 

One of the biggest challenges companies are finding in getting their customers to become their own ethnographers is that it’s difficult to remember to step out of the moment to capture it. We’ve found that companies have greater success getting people over that hurdle when they give people short, focused assignments, particularly those that capture moments of strong emotion.

For instance, consumer insight specialists for Procter & Gamble’s Secret asked a number of women to use our mobile ethnography app to upload photos or videos illustrating the scents that brought them pleasure over the course of a week, and then to write a few sentences explaining what these pictures meant to them. The resulting images of Play-Doh, newly painted birdhouses, and freshly mown grass led product developers far from the types of scents normally associated with deodorants and antiperspirants. The stories accompanying these pictures highlighted the ways in which, over the course of an ordinary day, the women appreciated the power of scent to fleetingly elicit other times and places. That insight drove the development of a new sub-brand for the Secret line, Destinations, which promises scents that evoke locales and seasons. Not only did Destinations advance from insight to concept development to market launch in record time, but it exceeded its sales forecasts.

Similarly, to help market researchers understand the effectiveness of store layouts, we asked people to document what captures their attention or changes their behavior when they are in the grocery store. Some assignments focused on a particular product, as when we asked people: “On your next trip to buy toothpaste, show us what confuses you, surprises you, annoys you, or simply captures your attention in the oral care aisle.” In another, designed to explore what prompts people to make impulse purchases, we asked consumers to submit photos and narratives showing us what was on their shopping list, what captured their attention in the store, and what unplanned purchases they ended up making.

In both cases, the assignment was clear, the duration short but intense. Asking for images enabled us literally to see what is breaking through the visual noise of the aisles. Connecting those images to participants’ reflections on why they deviated from their plans or routines and why they made the impulse purchases they made adds a depth and texture that we could not have gotten had we asked participants to rely on their memory sometime later in a survey or even if we’d sent a professional ethnographer shopping alongside them.

“But isn’t this atypical of the normal shopping experience,” the seasoned market researcher might object? And it’s true – asking consumers to install a smart phone app to chronicle and interpret their own processes and rituals falls outside the realm of normal behavior. Still, that doesn’t invalidate the insights that spring from this approach. In fact, there are unique benefits to this kind of enforced mindfulness for researcher and subject alike, especially when they are one and the same person.

“I thought I mostly bought healthy food until I photographed what was in my pantry and refrigerator,” one consumer told us. “Now I’m wondering if I can’t figure out what’s healthy while I’m racing through the grocery store, or if I’m just lying to myself.” That kind of epiphany is gold for the manufacturer of food or, in this case, of weight loss products, informing the design and content of consumer education and behavioral support materials. But it can only happen when the consumer is both a participant and observer of her own life.

While the assignments might be specifically focused in support of a specific product or project, the insights gained from this kind of emotional self-reportage can resonate with creative professionals, marketers, and researchers across a company. That’s what Hallmark found when it turned to self-ethnography to yield a deeper, more empathetic and more individualized understanding of the 85 million+ American moms who are so essential to the Hallmark brand. “We hope that experiencing their real moments will help Hallmarkers recognize that our core consumers aren’t ‘moms with kids,’ but are real individuals,” observes Nancy Cox, Hallmark’s manager of consumer understanding and insights (CU&I).

With that goal in mind, the greeting card and media company equipped members of its long-established online consumer communities of women advisers with a simple ethnography app, which they used to conduct a variety of projects.

When asked to record the sounds of daily life that made them happy, for instance, they generated hundreds of submissions over the course of a single, wonderfully noisy week. They used their phones to record and upload thumping washing machines; the whirr of dishwashers; the opening door signaling someone’s return home; and, of course, laughing babies. What became apparent from their accompanying commentaries was that all of these sounds created happiness, or at least satisfaction, for these women, many of whom were juggling families and work outside the home. They created a feeling that no matter how demanding or volatile other aspects of their lives were, things were at least operating as they should within the domestic world in which they had some measure of control.

These sounds were then used as ambient background in an immersive exhibit at the company’s Kansas City headquarters entitled “Real Moms, Real Moments.” Created by the CU&I team and designed to inspire creative professionals, marketers, and researchers, the exhibit, which more than 600 Hallmarkers toured over a three-week period, featured an array of interactive, sensory-rich simulated areas of a consumer’s home. For example, by “answering” phones, exhibit visitors heard moms describe the differences that make a house a home. Hearing these women talk about the aromas, sounds, and warmth of a home helped further humanize their words.

Employees were also invited to sit in a comfortable chair while browsing excerpts from multimedia diaries of 20 moms who used a mobile app to record their thoughts and experiences during the course of a workday and a non-workday. The serendipitous input — one mom raving about Bollywood theatre, another sharing the fact that she was pregnant and afraid to tell her family because of heartbreak from a prior miscarriage – illustrates the intimate, contextual nature of this approach.

Beyond sights and sounds, ethnography apps also generate GPS location data, which some companies have used to discover some surprising insights. For instance, a major toy manufacturer developing an app to provide parenting tips asked women to share moments of success (children’s problems solved, crises averted) and moments in which they were desperate for suggestions and help. Contrary to the hypothesis going in, the project revealed that the parents’ moments of need arose not outside the home — like, say, when the child was having a temper tantrum in the mall — but inside — when they were trying to come up with a new hairstyle for their fashion-conscious daughter or cook a meal that their picky child would actually eat.

Hospitality companies are also deriving quick, highly actionable insights by combining GPS information with the experiences and rituals that travelers and guests are recording and sharing with them. How far from the hotel do solo travelers tend to go at night, and how does that differ by gender? What do frequent travelers do when they first check in to their rooms? Some lay out their toothbrushes on facecloths so that they need not touch the counter (suggesting that hoteliers should either provide toothbrush stands or reassurances about their hygiene practices). Others inspect the walls and ceilings for leaks. Indeed, the video one nonplussed man shot of the creepy stain behind his bed almost put Psycho to shame. The geo-tracking data that came with it enabled our client to identify the specific property in need of some fast upgrades.

Longitudinal data can be as, if not more, valuable than actual longitude. For example, California health-insurer Healthnet enlisted 40 of their online community members to document their insurance renewal journey over the course of three months during the 2014 Open Enrollment Period. While technically more of a diary than an ethnography exercise, this project illustrates the benefits of having long-term relationships with consumers who are equipped with ethnography apps and willing to share some aspect of their lives in an ongoing way. Take a look at the accompanying timeline below (which is in no way unusual – we’ve collected dozens like it), and you can see how the customer experience can change dramatically over time and how clearly it suggests opportunities for improvement.

 

“While we’ve always paid attention to our internal processes, this approach allowed us to hear and directly witness our members’ emotional as well as operational experience,” explains Guy Hadnot, Healthnet’s Director of Customer Experience. “And what we learned was sobering. We found that our members didn’t so much actively renew as just “stay” with us, and largely because of price. They were apathetic renewals, not actively positive ones, which meant that they’re at-risk renewals.”

Healthnet acted quickly and systematically on this insight. They shared out the findings from this in an immersive, internal cross-functional Action Setting workshop, where they mapped out changes in advance of the 2015 Open Enrollment period. Healthnet hopes that on the strength of the insight gathered through this longitudinal process, they’ll retain and expand the company’s member base despite an increasingly competitive pricing environment.

“You just can’t get this depth of insight in a one-off focus group or survey,” Hadnot notes. “And the icing on the cake is that even after the renewal journey was complete, thanks to the ongoing relationship we had with them, we could partner with our members to help us improve the process.”

Having consumers chronicle and interpret their own lives helps to mitigate the embarrassment potential of being observed by a stranger, face-to-face in real time. But it can nonetheless feel invasive to know that intimate data – what you’re seeing, where you are, how you feel — is being collected, often by people you’ve never met. So just as in live ethnography, researchers have to earn the trust of the people from whom they’re hoping to learn.

But how do you do that? Playback and dialogue turn out to be key success factors. The diligent and often intimate disclosure by citizen ethnographers should never be transmitted to a black hole, lest once-willing “subjects” quickly feel unacknowledged. What’s more, when consumers document their days for remote researchers, it’s crucial that we close the loop, testing our interpretations with them. Saying “Here’s a pattern we’ve observed” not only demonstrates the kind of reciprocity that’s inherently motivating but helps us understand if we’re drawing valid conclusions.

Family members, friends, and others in the “subject’s” immediate circle can also provide a reality check. When consumer-ethnographers fall victim to the quest for “social desirability,” presenting themselves as healthier eaters, more frequent exercisers, or more disciplined shoppers than they typically are, we can ask them to pass the phone to their spouse to comment on the accuracy of what’s being reported.

Ultimately, the outcome of consumer-conducted ethnography is not just to reveal unmet needs and innovation opportunities, but to humanize customers for the brands that serve them. And you don’t need a Ph.D. in anthropology for that; anyone with a smartphone and a sincere desire to learn from can do it.

Every day almost 183 billion emails are sent; we must love email. In spite of the fact that we can phone each other, write letters, use Skype, send instant messages, or meet each other face-to-face, we appear to prefer email.

Yet, email has significant limitations. There is no tone of voice and no body language – two essential components in human communication. Even so, we appear almost to prefer email to other kinds of communication.

Now, new research has the answer. A study conducted at California State University used a series of experiments investigating the use of email and voicemail in two different scenarios – normal work style messages and romantic messages. In both instances, the researchers found that email triggers a greater emotional arousal in the sender than does voicemail.

In other words, as senders of email we feel more aroused by using email than we do by using the telephone.

However, the study also found that the emotional content of emails was more negative than that of voicemails. This was the case whether or not the messages were work-related or romantic.

For the first time, this research reveals why we are almost addicted to email. It makes us feel emotionally aroused when we send it.

But we have to realize that the recipient is more likely to feel negative than if we were to use the telephone. The emotional content of email messages in the study had more negative emotional words than the content of the voicemails.

So, we feel good by sending emails, but the person to whom we are writing is more likely to feel negative than if we had picked up the phone.

Why do we love emails?

The researchers have come up with an interesting argument as to why we seem to prefer sending emails and what triggers that increased emotional arousal in the sender. With emails, you can edit things, go over them, rewrite them, and so on. That means as the originator of the email we are more engaged with the message itself, leading to more arousal. However, with voicemails it is a one-hit situation – the same as phone calls. You cannot edit what you say in a phone call, and hence we appear to have a lower engagement with the content and, therefore, feel less aroused by it.

This argument clearly has merit, and it explains why the content of an email is less emotionally positive than phone calls. When we go over and edit what we are saying in an email we can refine it so that it says exactly what we want – removing, therefore, all those positive emotional “filler” words that we use in speaking. Recent studies have shown that “um” and “er” in normal conversation carries emotional value. They appear to indicate alertness, and this transmits high emotional value to the recipient. When we edit our speech and cut those words out, we become less emotionally engaging to the listener. With emails, we edit out such wording, which we might include in a voicemail, and, therefore, the message we send is perceived more negatively.

How to overcome the limitation of email

So, what can you do if your emails make you feel good but are likely to cause the recipient to feel negative? Email breeds email; if you are sent an email, you are more likely to reply by email. So, step one in ensuring you trigger the positive emotions you want is to stop and think for a moment before you reply. Would it be better if I picked up the phone? Do I have to reply via email? Think before replying is one answer.

Another thing to do when you have to use email is to write conversationally. Avoid editing and over-writing. Instead, just write what you would say to the person. This will help you raise the amount of emotional wording in your email, thereby improving the way it is received. It might even be a good idea to get something like Dragon Naturally Speaking and simply dictate all your emails.

How to make emails work in marketing your business

To discover how to use email effectively you need to read Chapter 4 of my latest book, Sales Genius.

Two weeks ago I told a client that his team needed to go back to the playbook I helped them build and the planned dialogues therein. He said, “To you those words are easy, but to our people they sound aggressive.” He’s not wrong. It’s contextual and cultural. I get it. But I don’t know anyone who uses softer direct language than I do.

I don’t believe salespeople will say words that make them feel bad about themselves. But you do have to ask for your dream client’s business.

Even a Child Can Do It

We teach small children to close by showing them how adults exchange value. We trade them dessert for eating their dinner. We offer to read them a story in exchange for their going to bed on time. We show them grown up human beings trade value for value to get what we want. And they quickly learn to mimic what they see.

Children then become better closers than the grown ups who trained them to close by being far more persistent (if you have children, you’ll remember this painful period). Children ask for what they want. If they hear the word “no,” they ask again. Given another “no,” a child will ask “why not,” trying to understand how they need to change their pitch to get what they want.

When a child doesn’t get what they want, they’ll change tactics. They’ll change from happy and eager to angry and distraught. No matter how young they are, they look for a new angle to get what they want rather than giving up.

Beat the Ask Out of Them

But over time, we train children to give up. They go too far and ask for things we can’t give them, and we have to say “no.” In the pre-teen years they ask to do things we can’t allow, and so we say “No. Are you out of your mind?!” They offer to trade value, like good grades or a clean room, but there is no exchange. We then teach them to take “no” for an answer. We teach them to give up. We say, “Stop asking! I am never going to allow you to . . .”

You Still Need to Ask

Closing isn’t a popular topic anymore. Very few people teach closing, and very little is written about it. This is unfortunate because most salespeople aren’t great at closing, whether that means asking for their dream client’s business at the end of the sales cycle or some other commitment earlier in the sales process. But you still need to know how to close.

You need to know how to say the words, “I very much want your business. Can we go ahead and get started?” I know salespeople who have never said the words “I really want your business,” believing that would somehow alienate their dream client or make them less consultative. But their prospective clients want them to ask. They want to give their business to someone who wants it. No prospect knows that they have to ask their salesperson if it’s finally okay to buy from them.

You also need to know how to say, “If there is nothing else you need us to change, your signature right here is all I need to get to work.” Too many salespeople leave the paperwork with their client or email it, hoping that their dream client will sign it of their volition. These salespeople are horrified at the thought of asking for a signature.

Ask Again

A lot of salespeople are horrified by the idea that they have to ask a second time if their dream client says “No, we’re not ready to buy,” or “We need some time to think this over.” A child would persist and say, “What do you need to think about,” so that they could figure out how to change the value proposition. But grown ups say, “Okay, when would you like me to call you back,” allowing their dream client to try to sort things out for themselves—making the one person responsible for helping them sort things out, the salesperson, completely irrelevant.

If any part of this makes you uncomfortable, you likely already have a problem closing—and asking for all the other commitments you need.

• What language do you confidently use to ask for the commitments you need?
• How do you persist when your dream client says “no” or says they need time to consider your offer?

The post Do You Remember How to Close? appeared first on The Sales Blog.

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SPONSORED:

This sponsored post is produced in association with Sailthru.

With more than 2,000 companies across the marketing technology landscape, it’s daunting to figure out exactly which products and services you really need — particularly if you’re focused on customer retention. As – recent Gartner study reveals, 80 percent of a company’s future profits will come from 20 percent of its existing customers.

Unlike more mature technology sectors, marketing tech does not yet have a consistent, established “stack” of components. If you’re trying to hone your results around customer retention — driving up customer lifetime value, purchase frequency, and average order value — that challenge gets even harder as it’s rooted in establishing strong relationships with each individual consumer.

Foundational to any good marketing tech stack is a solid CRM solution or Customer Data Platform. Without this, the rest will crumble. David Raab gives a great overview of CDPs, which as he says, “exist because marketers need to coordinate customer (and prospect) interactions across channels.” As such, it’s imperative to choose a partner that is modern, nimble, and collaborative around the unique needs of your business.

On top of that base, the technologies you’ll need when putting an emphasis on customer retention may vary depending on the size of your company and your run rate, but there are some constants. Below we outline the essentials — but know this going in: it’s critical to ensure that you’ve chosen a partner that can pull and aggregate data from multiple channels to ensure you benefit from a single customer view.

1. Email

Email is an essential component of any marketing strategy. One reason is that it works — really well.

Customers actually like getting weekly emails from brands they care about. For mid-size companies, a recent VB Insight study showed that email campaigns delivered, on average, a 246 percent return on investment. No wonder 84 percent of marketers consider email a crucial tool.

While email marketing can be expensive, it’s easy to get started. There are a multitude of cheap tools for small volume. It’s important to remember, however, that email marketing in a silo — much like any channel — will not deliver on the promise of its potential. It’s critical that email be informed, in real time, by data coming from individual users via onsite, mobile, social, and other channels, which is why marketing clouds and multichannel marketing platforms have made tremendous acquisitions in this space over the last few years. It’s best to look for someone who makes cross-channel, informed email easy.

When you’re ready for more sophisticated analytics, audience segmentation, personalization tools (see below), and behavioral predictions that indicate when an individual customer will open email, click through, and purchase, services like Sailthru can provide even greater ROI through a channel that is still tablestakes for every marketer.

2. Social media tools

As essential as email is, it can’t be counted on to reach every customer. That’s why it’s vital to incorporate social channels into your martech stack. Millions use networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest daily, making them highly effective platforms for engaging customers and deepening your relationship with them.

To manage social media, you’ll not only need automation tools, but also identity matching technologies such as Gigya to ensure that the data you glean from social informs marketing on other channels.

3. Mobile

No business can afford to treat mobile as a second thought in today’s multi-screen world, especially when it comes to retention marketing. It’s how you can stay connected to your customer base, wherever they are. But how you engage on mobile must respect the user and their preferences, and be sensitive to location. As well, smaller screens and short attention spans mean brands must be absolutely relevant or risk being ignored.

At all costs, avoid the mistake many companies make when they put increased attention on mobile. Many treat it as an island, but like all other channels, mobile must be integrated into an effective cross-channel approach to remain meaningful to your customers. Relevancy is critical to success in managing the mobile experience and ensuring that you’re engaging users based on their individual patterns rather than pushing communications to them just because you can.

4. Personalization

The age of broadcasting generic messages and hoping that they’ll find a few receptive listeners is over. Personalizing messages to your customers’ or subscribers’ individual interests is the key to increasing their engagement.

To do that, you need a technology partner that can do more than just add the person’s first name to the subject line or salutation at the top of your email. You need to be able to address your audience based on far more than demographics alone — you must engage with their stated or implied interests, preferences, and behaviors, then deliver different messages to each individual. Today you can personalize the ‘When, Where and What.’ By that we mean: timing, content, message, offers, and channels to either drive or prevent a specific action (like purchases or opt-outs).

5. Customer Insights

Data is the lifeblood of any modern organization. You don’t necessarily need to hire a data scientist or invest major capital in building a sophisticated “big data” platform with artificial intelligence and deep learning algorithms. But you do need to collect data and have a plan to make use of it.

The earlier you build analytics and insights into your strategy and start working with the data that consumers are providing — however small your datasets may be when you begin — the quicker you will understand the real financial value that data provides as a business asset. While many see data as becoming more cumbersome and less actionable as it increases in volume, when done right, data is a living entity that improves itself over time, getting smarter and more insightful as it grows.

There are three methodologies for developing insight from a volume of data that enable brands to optimize revenue through marketing: 1) real-time campaign stats 2) longitudinal testing, and 3) behavioral predictions. Think real-time data, long-term testing and predictive analytics are already commonplace? According to Domo, only 5 percent of marketing professionals strongly agree that they can access the data they need in real time, while an Econsulting study reports that the same percentage of marketers rate their ability to make improvements in their customer experience based on data-driven insights as “excellent.”

The 5 percent of marketers who have access to data are reaping the benefits. Take Country Outfitter, a digitally and data-savvy team (a part of Arkansas-based Acumen Brands). Working with Sailthru — an integrated customer data platform, advanced email service provider, personalization engine and customer insights tool — the brand was able to consolidate vendors, house data more efficiently, and gain access to real-time stats, longitudinal measurement tools, and behavioral predictions. The revenue gains have been significant: 80 percent gain in incremental revenue, 109 percent increase in email purchase conversion, 72 percent lift in email revenue, and 24 percent lift in purchase per click.

Pulling it all together

Forward-thinking marketers understand that there is massive revenue potential that can be tapped by simply improving the customer experience and relevancy at the individual level. Now the question is what providers to choose, and whether to assemble your own stack or buy into one of the big “marketing clouds” that purport to address all of the above components and then some.

This question is complicated by the fact that — sadly — marketing clouds don’t necessarily eliminate the pain of integrating multiple tools with one another. Most of the big marketing cloud providers like Adobe, Oracle, and Salesforce grew their offerings through acquisitions, and the more recently acquired components may not be perfectly integrated, if it was ever possible. For instance, they might try to action marketing messages off of different back-end databases — thus eliminating one of the potential benefits of an integrated solution (a single, integrated database).

You might consider building proprietary marketing tech solutions in one or more of the above categories, but be forewarned, it’s not for the feint of heart, will require deep pockets for the build, and a constant influx of cash in order to support innovation on par with emerging leaders.

With the right tech stack, the rest is up to you: ensuring that the right messages get to the right customers to keep them coming back, spending more, and advocating for your brand.

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On the front page of a Cuban newspaper recently there was an item about a two-story home in the old city of Havana that crumbled—and that in the course of its collapse, killed four people. This is a harsh glimpse the physical reality facing many of the buildings across Havana and elsewhere in the country. But it’s also a metaphor for much of the Cuban economy. Cuba is, in many ways, an economy stuck in time and at risk of further unraveling.

Cuba’s economy got a jolt in December 2014, when U.S.-Cuban ties were restored. The U.S. embassy in Havana has reopened. Some travel is easing. Pope Francis will visit in September. So on the surface, it might appear to be full steam ahead for business and beyond. But in order to understand where Cuba may go, we need to understand where its economy, its people, its governance, and its marketplace have been.

Cuba’s growth domestic product per capita in 2015 is approximately what it was in 1985. The short version of Cuba’s recent economic history is that it peaked in the last quarter of 1984 and began a slow slide during the second half of the 80s. It then suffered a catastrophic plunge in the first four years of the 1990s. To the extent that we can estimate, a third of the economy disappeared during this time and a slow recovery followed. There was a spike in the 2000s when Venezuela began to provide petroleum at deeply discounted market prices, and that peaked just before the 2008-09 financial crisis.

After 2009, the Cuban economy really didn’t recover. For the most part it has remained at the alleged 2% growth rate, but given the unreliability of statistics from Cuba, it’s likely a lot closer to zero. That’s grim.

Cuba’s population, now shy of 11.2 million, is shrinking and rapidly aging. Cuba has been below the demographic replacement age since 1978. This is not a good scenario for productivity and economic growth. For that, you need people who are in the prime of the workforce. That’s not the Cuban demographic story.

Cuba is closing primary schools and opening homes for the elderly, closing pediatric wards and opening geriatric wards. That’s a burden for growth, but also creates business activity and opportunity: Cuba suddenly needs to build retirement communities. Cuba projects a population of 10.8 million in 2030. It is about to go from around two million people over the age of 60 to 3.25 million in 2030.

But it isn’t all bleak. Cuban life expectancy is approximately what you would expect in North America and Western Europe. That means levels of education are good. It means there is access to basic, quality healthcare. It doesn’t mean that you can have a banquet every day, but that basic nutritional needs are met. There are opportunities for sports. These are the kinds of things that contribute to well-being and that require lots of effective institutional arrangements.

When you put all these pieces together around education and health care, it’s clear that Cuba is likely a champion of investment in the development of human capital—but for the last 50 years it has an extremely low economic return on this investment. If you invest in human capital, whether in your company or in your country, sooner or later it will pay off if you have the right set of incentives. In other words, you need the right organizational design so that all these well -trained, well-educated people will be able to do their work. That’s what Cuba doesn’t have. But it does have a colossally well-trained work force. It is probably the best, most well-trained workforce at the cheapest labor-market price that any international investor could find anywhere in the world. You could find such first-rate people in Singapore, but they wouldn’t be cheap.

This is true despite the country’s very poor infrastructure. In Cuba, there are seven computers per 100 people — one of the lowest ratios in the Americas. Internet access in Cuba is very expensive. Consider that the median monthly salary in Cuba, when converted into dollars, is a bit below $20 a month. Then think about what you pay for a service like Netflix. For many Cubans even at a discount, half your monthly income would go to Netflix.

So how does Cuba make money? Its current principal source of revenue is the export of healthcare services by means of sending physicians, nurses, and healthcare technicians to countries like Venezuela and Brazil—an item that it has yet to record in its published official statistics. Cuba’s main resource to engage in the world is no longer sugar cane. It has tourism—beach and sun and one of the communist world’s last Jurassic political systems—but the real asset is the brains of its people. It could be an ideal location for healthcare organizations, but also for those in applied sciences, biotechnology, and pharmaceuticals.

We know two things about biotech in Cuba. One is that the quality of applied science seems to be first rate. And secondly, the business model for Cuban biotechnology has been laughably bad. They know how to make new products. They don’t know how to market them effectively. That’s a solvable problem, yet they haven’t been able to do it, and so a partnership with a European or a Canadian or a U.S. pharmaceutical company could be a great asset in the future.

Have the doors opened to U.S. company investment? Well, no. The power to authorize U.S. business investment in Cuba still rests with the U.S. Treasury Department Office of Foreign Assets control (OFAC)—and the fact is this agency’s documentation contains the exact same formulation that it had before December 17. Economic transactions, trade, and investment with Cuba remain prohibited unless they are specifically authorized by OFAC. The Government of Cuba must also authorize each and every foreign investment from any country, and it has yet to authorize one from the United States.

A lot of people get hung up on the issue of travel between the U.S. and Cuba. JetBlue recently launched direct commercial flights from New York. But there have been charter flights from Miami to Cuba since the late 1970s. OFAC has made particular determinations authorizing different airlines as charter flights for many years for various travel programs to Cuba, especially for cultural, educational, and religious groups.

There has been a U.S. embargo on economic transactions with Cuba since 1960. There are still restrictions on American tourist travel. Going to the beach is something that the neither the President of the United States nor OFAC can authorize. It requires an act of U.S. Congress. Congress decided in 2000 that it wanted to prohibit beach tourism and it didn’t want the president to have any discretion whatsoever on this point. Now, while more people will be allowed to visit, they still can’t go to the beach.

On the exports side, President George W. Bush authorized U.S. agricultural exports to Cuba in late 2001 under presidential discretion, which exceeded $5 billion between 2002 and 2014.

But, oddly, U.S. agricultural exports to Cuba declined by over one-third (if you compare January-June 2014 to the same months in 2015) since the President Obama’s announcement. The boom in U.S.-Cuba trade has yet to materialize.

Cuba does have a private sector, which it calls it the “non-state sector.” It includes mixed enterprises (foreign firms and state enterprises) and a “self-employment sector.” In a population just shy of 11.2 million, there are over 500,000 people who have self-employment licenses, according to President Raúl Castro’s report to Cuba’s National Assembly in July 2015. The rule of thumb among Cuban scholars who study this is for any one license there are on average four lawfully-hired employees. That would amount to over two million people in the self-employment sector. One reason why the average number of employees is four is because, once you reach five or more employees, your tax rate goes up. The Cuban government’s tax collection system is primitive. There is no personal income tax in Cuba. There is no corporate tax in Cuba. There is no value added tax in Cuba. There is no sales tax in Cuba. But there is a tax on the number of your employees. This tax system discourages economic and job growth.

The Cuban government has a list of occupations that are authorized by name; everything else is prohibited or reserved for state-run enterprises. Authorized occupations include plumbers or electricians. These are skilled workers, but the list rarely includes those who studied at the university. Thus in a country that has invested so much in the development of a human capital, it says in effect: if you attended university, then you’re going to work for the state.

Let’s say you go to the medical school at the University of Havana. Healthcare is a state sector, it’s not private activity. So what if you decide you want to make more money? You might realize that the one useful skill gained from your time at medical school is learning English. So, you quit as a physician and become a maid at a tourist hotel. You earn more money because your most marketable asset turns out to be that you can communicate in English.

This is a tragedy for the individual and for the society. It turns incentives about acquiring skills upside down. You do have people with university training in the private sector, but often not working in the profession for which they trained. There are some exceptions—for example you could be a tutor in the private sector, but you cannot be a classroom teacher. You can, in the private sector, teach foreign languages, but you cannot teach mathematics.

Thus the private sector is tiny. There is also foreign investment, although not a lot. The 2014 foreign investment law finally authorized wholly owned foreign enterprises, but thus far without exception they are all joint ventures with the government.

Cuba’s trade reveals its international partners. In 2013 in U.S. dollar-equivalents, Cuba exported $343 million to China and imported $1.5 billion from it. In contrast, it exported $81 million to, and imported $614 million, from Brazil. Cuba exported $2.3 billion to, and imported $4.8 billion from, Venezuela, its top partner. But China matters in one decisive way. The Chinese government strongly advocates that the Cuban government should reform its economy to achieve a faster, wider market opening. That’s not the way you might have guessed China would be advocating, hut in fact China’s role in Cuba is to try to persuade the Cuban government to emulate its own market opening.

The extraordinary competence of Cuba’s political leaders is sometimes easy to miss. They’re colossally impressive in the management of politics. They’ve remained in power. Who would have known that all communist regimes in Europe would collapse, but that only Cuba and four East Asian regimes would survive?

Cuba has a really, really well-educated and cheap workforce, as well as substantial evidence of entrepreneurial potential. If its political leaders can manage to lift constraints on investment, create the right incentives, and reform its tax code, the country could really boom. But that’s a lot of change to expect for the insular government of an island nation that’s otherwise stuck in time.

The title of this post isn’t meant to be rhetorical. I’m serious. If sales managers can’t coach, won’t coach, or don’t know how to coach their people, then who is?

Back in the day (I have enough gray hair now to use that expression), sales managers were the ones responsible for developing their people. Many took great pride and satisfaction in mentoring those under their charge to greatness. Today, not so much. Sales leaders are consumed by large administrative burdens, buried in crap by their companies, and playing firefighter-in-chief instead of sales squadron leader. Way too many managers are attempting to “lead” (I use that word very loosely here) their teams via email while their eyeballs are glued to CRM screens. Honestly, it’s pretty sad. It’s also having a devastating effect on sales performance and the personal and career development of salespeople.

As a young sales pup, I benefitted greatly by being mentored and coached by sales managers, other executives, and by veteran salespeople in companies where I worked. These people invested in my development. They showed me how to prepare for and conduct sales calls. They taught me how to pack for a business trip, where to get the best shoe shine (pre-1999, the TWA Concourse at STL Lambert was known across the US as the top spot), and they modeled for me how to deal with difficult customers. I owe much of what I know about sales and much of the success I’ve experienced to those who coached me.

In Sales Management. Simplified. (coming in October), I share stories of the specific ways various managers and executives coached me — in the office, on trips, pre and post-sales calls, for big presentations. But you don’t need to wait until October to begin coaching salespeople! Dave Brock and I are in the midst of leading a free 90-day survival course for sales managers. The good folks at OpenView Venture Partners / OpenView Labs asked us to write weekly posts, share other relevant material, and to facilitate a webinar specifically focused on sales coaching. This upcoming one hour session is free, not just for OpenView’s portfolio companies, but to the public as well.

In my typical mellow, non-confrontational style, I am going to gently point out the biggest time suckers and distractions keeping sales managers from coaching their people, and make the strongest case I can that in order to truly improve sales culture and results, sales leaders must reallocate their time to high-value, revenue-driving activities. And yes, that means that spending time with sales reps, whether by phone, in your office or their cubicle, riding shotgun in the passenger seat, along on a sales call, or in sales team meetings, is more valuable than staring at your CRM screen, pounding out emails at 4:30 in the morning, or sitting in on non-sales related corporate conference calls!

Please join Dave Brock and me this coming Thursday, August 20th, at Noon EDT, that’s 9:00 am out in lovely Orange County where Brock lives (and continually boasts about the weather). Click here for more info and to register.

Here’s a post from the current OpenView series that may just whet your appetite enough to put Thursday’s webinar on your calendar: Your #1 Priority as a Sales Manager (Plus 3 Things to Stop Doing Now)

No, coaching isn’t soft, or just some nice to do sales management activity that you may or may not get to depending on workload. Frankly, it’s one of the very highest uses of a sales leader’s time and very best ways to drive improved sales results.

The post The Law of (Content) Attraction appeared first on Copyblogger.

I visited Google a few weeks ago and, after almost getting arrested, my mind was blown.

First, Claudia wandered into the garage where they were actually making or fixing the driverless cars. When they finally realized she was wandering around, security had to escort her out.

We got scared and we thought we were going to get in trouble or thrown out.

Then we met with a friend high up at Google and learned some of the things Google was working on.

Nothing was related to search. Everything was related to curing cancer (a bracelet that can make all the cancer cells in your body move towards the bracelet), automating everything (cars just one of those things), Wi-Fi everywhere (Project Loon) and solving other “billion person problems”.

A problem wasn’t considered worthy unless it could solve a problem for a billion people.

So now Alphabet is aligning itself towards this strategy: a holding company that owns and invests in other companies that can solve billion person problems.

It’s not divided up by money. It’s divided up by mission.

I want to do this in my personal life also.

Just analyzing Larry Page’s quotes from the past ten years is a guidebook for “billion person success” and for personal success.

—

Here are some of his quotes (in bold):

“If you’re changing the world, you’re working on important things. You’re excited to get up in the morning.”

To have well-being in life you need three things:

A) A feeling of competence or growth.

B) Good emotional relationships.

C) Freedom of choice.

Being able to wake up excited in the morning is an outcome of well-being.

Feeling like every day you are working on a billion-person problem will give you those three aspects of well-being.

At the very least, when I wake up I try to remember to ask: Who can I help today?

Because I’m a superhero and this is my secret identity.

—

“Especially in technology, we need revolutionary change, not incremental change.”

Too often we get stuck in “good enough”. If you build a business that supports your family and maybe provides for retirement then that is “good enough”.

If you write a book that sells 1000 copies then that is “good enough.”

You ever wonder why planes have gotten slower since 1965? The Dreamliner 787 is actually slower than the 747.

That’s ok. It’s good enough to get people across the world and save on fuel costs.

It’s only the people who push past the “good enough syndrome” that we hear about: Elon Musk building a space ship. Larry Page indexing all knowledge. Elizabeth Holmes potentially diagnosing all diseases with a pin prick.

Isaac Asimov wrote classic science fiction like “The Foundation Series” but it wasn’t good enough for him. He ended up writing 500 more books, writing more books than anyone in history.

Larry Page keeps pushing so that every day he wakes up knowing he’s going to go past “good enough” that day.

What does your “good enough” day look like. What’s one thing that moves you past that?

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“My job as a leader is to make sure everybody in the company has great opportunities, and that they feel they’re having a meaningful impact and are contributing to the good of society.”

Whenever I’ve managed companies and have had the small opportunity to be a leader I’ve judged my success on only one thing:

Does the employee at night go home and call his or her parents and say, “guess what I did today!”

I’m not sure this always worked. But I do think Larry Page lifts all his employees to try to be better versions of themselves, to try to surpass him, to try and change the world.

If each employee can say, “who did I help today” and have an answer, then that is a good leader.

Empowering others, empowers you.

—

“Lots of companies don’t succeed over time. What do they fundamentally do wrong? They usually miss the future.”

The stock market is near all time highs. And yet every company in the original Dow Jones market index (except for GE) has gone out of business.

Even US Steel, which built every building in the country for an entire century, has gone bankrupt.

Never let the practical get in the way of the possible.

It’s practical to focus on what you can do right now.

But give yourself time in your life to wonder what is possible and to make even the slightest moves in that direction.

We’re at maybe 1% of what is possible. Despite the faster change, we’re still moving slow relative to the opportunities we have. I think a lot of that is because of the negativity… Every story I read is Google vs someone else. That’s boring. We should be focusing on building the things that don’t exist.

Sometimes I want to give up on whatever I’m working on. I’m not working on major billion person problems.

And sometimes I think I write too much about the same thing. Every day I try to think, “What new thing can I write today” and I actually get depressed when I can’t think of something totally new.

But I am working on things that I think can help people. And if you are out side of people’s comfort zones, if you are breaking the normal rules of society, people will try to pull you down.

Larry Page didn’t want to be defined by Google for his entire life. He wants to be defined by what he hasn’t yet done. What he might even be afraid to do.

I wonder what my life would be like if I started doing all the things I was afraid to do. If I started defining my life by all the things I have yet to do.

—

“Many leaders of big organizations, I think, don’t believe that change is possible. But if you look at history, things do change, and if your business is static, you’re likely to have issues.”

Guess which company had the original patent that ultimately Larry Page derived his own patent (that created google) from?

Go ahead. Think a second. Guess.

An employee of this company created the patent and tried to get them to use it to catalog information on the web.

They refused.

So Robin Li, an employee of The Wall Street Journal, quit the newspaper of capitalism (who owned his patent), moved to China (a communist country), and created Baidu.

And Larry Page modified the patent, filed his own, and created Google.

And the Wall Street Journal got swallowed up by Rupert Murdoch and is dying a slow death.

—

“I think as technologists we should have some safe places where we can try out new things and figure out the effect on society.”

A friend of mine is writing a novel but is afraid to publish it. “Maybe it will be bad,” he told me.

Fortunately we live in a world where experimentation is easy. You can make a 30 page novel, publish it on Amazon for nothing, use an assumed name, and test to see if people like it.

Heck, I’ve done it. And it was fun.

Mac Lethal is a rapper who has gotten over 200 million views on his YouTube videos. Even Ellen had him on her show to demonstrate his skills.

I asked him, “do you get nervous if one of your videos gets less views than others?”

He told me valuable advice: “Nobody remembers your bad stuff. They only remember your good stuff.”

I live by that.

—

“If we were motivated by money, we would have sold the company a long time ago and ended up on a beach.”

Larry Page and Sergey Brin wanted to be academics. When they first patented Google, they tried to sell to Yahoo for $1 million (ONE MILLION DOLLARS).

When Yahoo laughed them out the door, they tried to sell to Excite for $750,000.

Excite laughed them out the door. Now an ex-employee of Google is the CEO of Yahoo. And the founder of Excite works at Google. Google dominates.

Money is a side effect of trying to help others. Trying to solve problems. Trying to move beyond the “good enough”.

So many people ask: “how do I get traffic?” That’s the wrong question.

If you ask every day, “How did I help people today?” then you will have more traffic and money than you could have imagined.

—

“Invention is not enough. Tesla invented the electric power we use, but he struggled to get it out to people. You have to combine both things: invention and innovation focus, plus the company that can commercialize things and get them to people.”

Everyone quotes the iconic story of Thomas Edison “failing” 10,000 times to get the electric lightbulb working.

I put failing in quotes because he was doing what any scientist does. He does many experiments until one works.

But what he did that was truly remarkable was convince New York City a few weeks later to light up their downtown using his lights.

The first time ever a city was lit up at night with electricity.

That’s innovation. That’s how the entire world got lit up.

—

“If you say you want to automate cars and save people’s lives, the skills you need for that aren’t taught in any particular discipline. I know – I was interested in working on automating cars when I was a Ph.D. student in 1995.”

Too often we get labeled by our degree and our job titles. Larry Page and Elon Musk were computer science majors. Now they build cars and space ships.

David Chang was a competitive golfer as a kid, majored in religious studies in college, and then had random gopher jobs in his 20s.

The gopher jobs all happened to be in restaurants so he became familiar with how the business was run.

Then he started probably the most popular restaurant in NYC, momofoku. A dozen or so restaurants later, he is one of the most successful restauranteurs in history.

Peter Thiel worked as a lawyer in one of the top law firms in NY. When he quit in order to become an entrepreneur, he told me that many of his colleagues came up to him and said, “I can’t believe you are escaping”.

Escaping the labels and titles and hopes that everyone else has for us is one of the first steps in Choosing Ourselves for the success we are meant to have.

We define our lives from our imagination and the things we create with our hands.

—

“It really matters whether people are working on generating clean energy or improving transportation or making the Internet work better and all those things. And small groups of people can have a really huge impact.”

What I love about this quote is that he combines big problems with small groups.

A small group of people created Google. Not Procter & Gamble. Or AT&T.

Even at Apple, when Steve Jobs wanted to create the Macintosh, he moved his small group to a separate building so they wouldn’t get bogged down in the big corporate bureaucracy that Apple was becoming.

Ultimately, they fired him for being too far from the corporate message.

Years later, when Apple was failing, they brought him back. What did he do? He cut most of the products and put people into small groups to solve big problems.

Before his death he revolutionized the movie industry, the computer industry, the music industry, TVs, and now even watches (watch sales have plummeted after the release of the Apple Watch).

All of this from a guy who finished one semester of studying calligraphy in college before dropping out.

Studying the history of Apple is like studying a microcosm of the history of how to create big ideas. Larry Page is recreating this with his new corporate structure.

—

“We don’t have as many managers as we should, but we would rather have too few than too many.”

The 20th century was the century of middle-class corporatism. It even became a “law” called “The Peter Principle” – everyone rises to their level of incompetence.

One of the problems society is having now is that the entire middle layer of management is being demoted, outsourced, replaced by technology, and fired.

This is not a bad or a good thing (although it’s scary). But it’s a return to the role of masters and apprentices without bureaucracy and paperwork in the middle.

It’s how things get done. When ideas go from the head into action with few barriers in the middle.

To be a successful employee, you have to align your interests with those of the company, come up with ideas that further help the customers, and have the mandate to act on those ideas, whether they work or not.

That’s why the employee who wrote much of the code inside the Google search engine, Craig Silverstein, is now a billionaire.

Where is he now? He’s an employee at online education company, The Khan Academy.

—

“If you ask an economist what’s driven economic growth, it’s been major advances in things that mattered – the mechanization of farming, mass manufacturing, things like that. The problem is, our society is not organized around doing that.”

Google is now making advances in driverless cars, delivery drones, and other methods of automation.

Everyone gets worried that this will cost jobs. But just look at history. Cars didn’t ruin the horse industry. Everyone simply adjusted.

TV didn’t replace books. Everything adjusted. The VCR didn’t shut down movies.

The Internet didn’t replace face to face communication (well, the jury is still out).

—

“What is the one sentence summary of how you change the world? Always work hard on something uncomfortably exciting!”

Not everyone wants to create a driverless car. Or clean energy. Or solve a billion person problem.

But I have a list of things that are uncomfortably exciting to me.

They are small, stupid things. Like I’d like to write a novel. Or perform standup comedy. Or maybe start another business based on my ideas for helping people.

Every day I wake up a tiny bit afraid. But I also try to push myself a little closer in those directions. I know then that’s how I learn and grow.

Sometimes I push forward. Sometimes I don’t. I want to get more comfortable with being uncomfortable.

—

“I do think there is an important artistic component in what we do. As a technology company I’ve tried to really stress that.”

Nobody knows what the definition of Art is.

How about: something that doesn’t exist except in the imagination, that you then bring out into the real world that has some mix of entertainment, enlightenment, and betterment.

I don’t know. Something like that.

Certainly the iPad is a work of art. And the iPad has created works of art. And when I first saw a driverless car I thought, “that’s beautiful”.

I’m going to try and put my fingerprint on something today. And maybe it will be art.

—

“The idea that everyone should slavishly work so they do something inefficiently so they keep their job – that just doesn’t make any sense to me. That can’t be the right answer.”

We’ve been hypnotized into thinking that the “normal life” is a “working life”.

If you don’t “go to work” then you must be sick or on the tiny bit of vacation allotted to you each year.

What if everything you did you can inject a little bit of leisure, a little bit of fun into it.

I have fun writing, except when I think I have to meet a deadline (work). I have fun making a business that people actually use except when I think about money too much (work).

When you are at the crossroads and your heart loves one path and doesn’t love the other, forget about which path has the money and the work, take the path you love.

—

“We want to build technology that everybody loves using, and that affects everyone. We want to create beautiful, intuitive services and technologies that are so incredibly useful that people use them twice a day. Like they use a toothbrush. There aren’t that many things people use twice a day.”

What a great idea for a list of the day!

What are ten things that can be invented that people would use twice a day?

—

“You need to invent things and you need to get them to people. You need to commercialize those inventions. Obviously, the best way we’ve come up with doing that is through companies.”

I was speaking to Naveen Jain, who made his billions on an early search engine, InfoSpace.

He just started a company to mine rare earth minerals on the Moon.

But his real goal is extra-planetary colonization.

Somehow we got around to the question of why have a company in the middle of that. He has billions. He can just go straight for the colonization part.

He said, “Every idea has to be sustainable. Profitability is proof that an idea is sustainable.”

—

“You may think using Google’s great, but I still think it’s terrible.”

K. Anders Ericsson made famous the “10,000 hour rule” popularized later by Malcom Gladwell.

The rule is: if you practice WITH INTENT for 10,000 hours then you will be world-class.

He then wondered why typists would often reach a certain speed level and then never improve no matter how many hours.

After doing research, its because they forgot the “With intent” part. They were satisfied with “good enough”.

You have to constantly come up with new metrics to measure yourself, to compete against yourself, to better the last plateau you reached.

Google is great. But it can be better. Having this mindset always forces you to push beyond the comfort zone.

Once they changed the way typists viewed their skills (by recreating the feeling of “beginner’s mind”) the typists continued to get faster.

—

“We have a mantra: don’t be evil, which is to do the best things we know how for our users, for our customers, for everyone. So I think if we were known for that, it would be a wonderful thing.”

Many people argue whether or not Google has succeeded at this. That’s not the point.

The point is: Values before Money.

A business is a group of people with a goal to solve a problem. Values might be: we want to solve a problem, we want the customer to be happy, we want employees to feel like they have upward mobility, etc.

Once you lose your values, you’ll lost the money as well. This why family-run businesses often die by the third generation (“Shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations).

The values of the founder got diluted through his descendants until the company failed.

I spoke to Dick Yuengling about this (CEO of the largest independent beer maker and a fifth generation business).

His family found an interesting way to solve the problem. The business is not inherited. Each generation has to BUY the business from the generation before it.

To do that, each generation needs its own values, its new way of doing things that keeps the brand fresh and ongoing.

—

“I think it is often easier to make progress on mega-ambitious dreams. Since no one else is crazy enough to do it, you have little competition. In fact, there are so few people this crazy that I feel like I know them all by first name.”

Our parents have our best interests at heart and tell us how to be good adults.

Our schools have our best interests.

Our friends, colleagues, sometimes our bosses, sometimes government, think they have our best interests.

But it’s only when everyone thinks you are crazy that you know you are going to create something that surprises everyone and really makes your own unique handprint on the world.

And because you went out of the comfort zone, you’re only competing against the few other people as crazy as you are.

—

“You know what it’s like to wake up in the middle of the night with a vivid dream? And you know that if you don’t have a pencil and pad by the bed, it will be completely gone by the next morning. Sometimes it’s important to wake up and stop dreaming. When a really great dream shows up, grab it.”

For every article I’ve ever written, there’s at least ten more I left behind in the middle of the night thinking I would remember in the morning.

I have to beat myself in the head. I . Will. Not. Remember….Must. Write. Down.

It’s hard to wake up. And that’s the only thing worth remembering. It’s hard to wake up.

—

“I have always believed that technology should do the hard work – discovery, organization, communication – so users can do what makes them happiest: living and loving, not messing with annoying computers! That means making our products work together seamlessly.”

This is a deep question – who are you? If you have a mechanical hand, is that “you”?

Conversely, if you lose a hand, did you lose a part of you. Are you no longer a complete person? The complete you?

If an implant is put into your brain to access Google, does that effect who you view your self to be?

When books were invented, memory suffered. We no longer had to remember as much, because we can look things up.

Does that make our brains less human?

I bet memory has suffered with the rise of Google. Does this mean our consciousness has suffered?

When we created fire, we outsourced part of our digestion to this new invention. Did this make our stomachs less human?

With technology taking care of the basic tasks of our brain and body, it allows us to achieve things we couldn’t previously dream possible.

It allows us to learn and explore and to create past the current comfort zone. It allows us to find the happiness, freedom, and well-being we deserve.

—

“Over time, our emerging high-usage products will likely generate significant new revenue streams for Google as well as for our partners, just as search does today.”

This is it. This is why Larry Page has re-oriented Google into Alphabet.

Don’t waste your most productive energies solving a problem that now only has incremental improvements.

Re-focus the best energies on solving harder and harder problems.

Always keeping the value of “how can I help a billion people” will keep Google from becoming a Borders bookstore (which went out of business after outsourcing all of their sales to Amazon).

How does this apply to the personal?

Instead of being a cog in the machine for some corporation, come up with ways to automate greater abundance.

Always understand that coming up with multiple ways to help people is ultimately the way to create the biggest impact.

Impact then creates health, friendship, competence, abundance, and freedom.

Oh my god, this answer is too long. And believe it or not, I cut it in half.

If I can just wake up every day and remind myself of these quotes by Larry Page I know I will have a better life.

But this is also why he created Alphabet and put Google underneath it.

To save the world. To save me.

---

Read More: How To Be The Luckiest Guy On the Planet in 4 Easy Steps. 

Read More: The 100 Rules for Being an Entrepreneur 

The post 20 Things I’ve Learned From Larry Page appeared first on Altucher Confidential.

There are thousands of great freelance content writers bidding for your custom. Google searches prove it. Many will have their own plus points and specialities; some may offer cheap prices for blogs. When you’re searching for freelance help, it can be difficult to dig deep into their skills. In truth, every business is different, and there isn’t a writer on the planet that could comfortably cover every niche. If you’re disappointed with your writer’s performance, or you need a new voice for your brand, run through this checklist to figure out which content producer is the best fit for you.

Knowledge is Power

When content marketing was in its infancy, the emphasis was on quantity, not quality. Unscrupulous marketers would order hundreds of cheap articles on a subject and post them, rapid-fire, onto a blog. Many marketers had no intention of actually presenting an article worth reading, so it didn’t matter that so many didn’t make sense. As inbound techniques have matured, marketers have become smarter. They know they need to attract human readers and assert authority on a topic. If you hire a ghostwriter to produce content, they should be able to write confidently about your sector, and without excessive corrections or rewrites. We tend to write for business and IT clients, as well as small businesses. We don’t take on work from businesses that are vastly outside our specialities, unless we have the knowledge to write confidently about them.

Take-Away: Lack of knowledge leads to lack of depth in content. If your writer is faking, your readers will see right through it. Look for a writer that specialises in your niche and ask to see portfolio examples.

Turnaround Time and Deadlines

When we work with a client, we give an estimated turnaround for each chunk of work. This gives our clients chance to prepare for the delivery of that content or schedule other marketing activity around it. We’re not always spot on with these estimates, but we keep in contact and adjust deadlines when necessary. Naturally, timescales slip, and the scope of a project can change. Sometimes people get ill or have to deal with emergencies. Occasionally, things just take a long time. But you should be able to rely on your content writer to stick to hard deadlines you’ve set, barring illness and Acts of God.

Take-Away: If you find that content is always delivered late, and it’s affecting your own workflow, explain this to the writer clearly. Ask them to suggest a different way of working that would be mutually acceptable, such as pushing deadlines back, or breaking work down into smaller deliverables. It may be that your writer doesn’t realise the time pressure you are working to.

Availability For Work

We’re a small company, and we don’t outsource, because we like to work one-to-one with clients. If we don’t plan around our holidays, work gets delayed. Our clients have been given a list of our expected Out of Office days for the whole year to avoid that kind of disruption. If your freelance writer is taking sudden holidays, or disappearing for a week with no contact, it may be a sign that they are too busy to take on more work. Any small business can suffer from being over-burdened, and rushing causes quality to decrease.

Take-Away: Your freelance writer should be available for ongoing work, if that’s in scope, and should let you know if they’re planning to be away from the computer. If they don’t, consider whether they are as committed as you expected.

Quality vs Cost Savings

People often ask me what a typical price for a writer is. It varies so much that it’s impossible to say. You could probably buy an article for £1 from a content generator, but it would not be a particularly good investment. You could spend £500 on serialised content for a particular sector or niche. When it comes to human writers – rather than computer-generated content – quality and cost are directly related to each other. A good quality content writer may be cheap initially, but will soon have more work than they can manage. Raising the price helps them to moderate demand. On the flipside, a content writer that isn’t as specialised will need to drop their price slightly to get work, which means their articles will be a whole lot cheaper. The tip here is not to work on price comparison alone, but to find a content writer that adds value, and whose content pays dividends. If you spend £20 on an article that generates £100 in sales, that’s a good investment. If you spend £200 on an article that generates £2,000 in sales, you’re quids in. Conversely, you might buy 100 dreadful articles for £100 and get your site de-listed from Google.

Take-Away: Look at value, not cost. A perfect blog writer, totally in tune with your brand, could attract thousands of customers. That’s the writer worth paying for.

Pros and Cons of Outsourcing

Many businesses work well with ‘content mills’ – large agencies that farm out writing work and take a cut of the fee. This is not an arrangement we offer. We don’t outsource to a team, and we have personal relationships with our clients. If you suspect you will need a broad range of articles on varying topics, potentially with very short turnaround, a content mill could give you the response that you need. In all other cases, we would advise caution if the company outsources since you may not get consistency over time.

Take-Away: Agencies provide a convenient way to get quick content about anything. For consistency or niche topics, choose a company that does everything in-house.

Find a Content Writer Today

If you’re looking for a small business writer, or someone to write about technology and cloud, I might be the perfect person to take on your content production. If you want someone to write about fine wines or medical journals, I may not be the right choice. The principle of quality and best fit always applies, regardless of cost, and it should be the deciding factor. To find the perfect writer, look for someone in your niche. Review examples, look at value, and probe your chosen writer for their ideas and experience. Read published articles they’ve written (under their own name, ideally), and review the standard of grammar. During the project, continually communicate, feedback and adjust the project requirements until you’re happy with the way it’s ticking over. And if something’s wrong, feedback and negotiate to find the right balance for all. Once you find the perfect content writer, they’ll be worth hanging on to. The right person is out there. You just have to find them.

When it comes to emotional brand engagement, one thing for sure is consumers ultimately vote with their wallets. That’s a market truism Whole Foods discovered after being the target of a New York Department of Consumer Affairs investigation last month. The bottom line of that inquiry? Nine Whole Food stores routinely overcharged on pre-packaged products.

Whole Foods’ bottom line? The company reported disappointing quarterly results and cut its sales forecast. Total sales increased 8% but its stock took a nosedive, losing nearly 11%, dropping to $36.39 in after-market trading after posting those results. That noted, in this year’s January Customer Loyalty Engagement Index, natural food stores ranked as follows:

1. Whole Foods
2. The Fresh Market
3. Trader Joe’s
4. Sprouts Farmers Market

“Trust” turns out to be the second-most important driver for the category. That’s preceded by “Wide Range of Healthy Sustainable, Organic Foods,” and is followed by “A 1st Class Shopping Experience” and “Real Value and Added-Value,” with consumers’ highest expectations for – you guessed it – “Trust.”

The first rule of brand engagement is “don’t disappoint the consumers when it comes to their expectations,” because if you do, it usually shows up on the bottom line, or in this case the check out line. Whole Food same-store sales were + 1.3%, less than half of what Wall Street was expecting.

Walter Robb, co-CEO of Whole Foods, said during an earnings call, “By any measure the audit had a significant impact on our sales. Trust was broken and has to be rebuilt.” Smart. Brands with high engagement are six times more likely to be given the benefit of the doubt by consumers in uncertain circumstances – just like the one here. So it might have just come down to showing some contrition and taking care of the problem.

But co-founder and co-CEO John Mackey apparently saw it differently. He said, “We don’t think our track record is any different from any other supermarket. These were inadvertent errors. It went viral in the media and we feel we were victims.”

Which kind of breaks another couple of rules of brand engagement: “Never disdain differentiation and/or compare your brand to everyone else,” and “Try real hard not to blame your customers for your mistakes!”

Find out more about what makes customer loyalty happen and how Brand Keys metrics is able to predict future consumer behavior: brandkeys.com. Visit our YouTube channel to learn more about Brand Keys methodology, applications and case studies.

Aligning your sales process with the buyer’s journey is not much of an option anymore—not if you want a top-tier B2B sales organization or even an above average one.

Unfortunately, many sales teams still try to use a structured sales process even after the market dynamics have changed so dramatically. Here’s an example:

1. Discover the buyer
2. Qualify the opportunity
3. Assess pain points
4. Present the solution
5. Handle objections
6. Negotiate
7. Close

However, when we look at a typical B2B buying process, the differences jump out:

1. Discover need
2. Conduct research
3. Identify solutions
4. Evaluate solutions
5. Narrow selections
6. Validate
7. Decide

The big problem is misalignment. At any given stage, especially early in the engagement, buyers come to the table educated and expect certain responses and information from the seller, but the seller does something different—something in line with their structured sales process. Buyers are on step four or five of their journey, while sellers are on step one or two of their process.

An example of misalignment…

The buyer has done extensive research, calls and asks for product information and pricing not available on the seller’s website.

Instead of responding to the request, the seller explains he really can’t do that yet because he doesn’t know enough about the buyer’s needs, and instead suggests a discovery session. The seller is trained this way—not to provide detailed product information or pricing until he understands and qualifies the buyer. He sees the buyer as “jumping ahead.” The request is outside the steps in his structured sales process.

For the buyer, this is like slamming on the brakes—a real turn off. Instead of perceiving the seller as helpful, the buyer sees the seller as getting in the way of her research—her buying process. It’s hard for sellers to recover from a situation like this.

How to get better alignment with buyers

A great way to look at the B2B buying process: it’s like a train moving slowly through the station. As a seller standing on the platform, you need to be willing to jump on and ride for a while. You can decide to jump off before leaving the station, or elect to stay on board. But in all cases, asking buyers to stop the train or “back up and start from the beginning” is not a good strategy.

Let’s take a look at a few adjustments sales teams need to make to gain better alignment with buyers.

Connect by being helpful

Respond quickly to buyer requests in a positive way. Slide into their situation and get in step with their cadence.

“Yes, I can send you more detailed product information. And I can give you a range on the pricing to give you an idea of the costs involved. I would need to know a little more to provide accurate pricing. Do you mind if I ask a few questions so I can make sure I give you what you’re looking for?”

Make step one in your sales process: “Identify where buyers are in their buying process”

The first thing is to determine how far along buyers are in their journey.

“Can you tell me a little about where you are in your search and selection process? It will help me provide you with the information you’ll need.”

“What solutions have you considered or looked at so far?”

“Can you talk about any ways you’ve tried to address the issues internally without going to an outside solution?”

Buyers are almost always open to talk about their situation and share their journey with you, as long as you are playing ball by responding positively to their requests and being helpful.

A couple of key points:

Don’t talk about your products at this point—other than positive responses like “yes, our solutions can address those challenges.”

Don’t pound them with interrogative questions—especially low-level questions on specific issues.

Do share some outcomes you bring your customers such as “On average, we’re able to save our customer about 25% of the time they spend searching for and gathering sales materials.”

Backfill information as you get it

Once you understand where buyers are in their journey, you can begin sharing additional helpful information and asking deeper questions to uncover the goals they have and the challenges they’re trying to address. You can quickly qualify and advance the opportunity forward if you and your company are in a position to help the buyer.

Trying something new can either be fun and exciting, or it can be unfamiliar and frightening. How you perceive new experiences, people, and products, all depends on how it has been presented to you.

If your company is launching a completely new product, the sales team must learn how to sell that product to a new buyer who doesn’t know anything about it yet. You could be an early-stage startup launching your minimum viable product or an established business trying something new, but everyone goes through the same struggle:

How do you effectively build a sales strategy to target new buyers and succeed in this new market?

Take a minute and think of the many famous product flops — from New Coke to the Apple Newton. Sometimes the failure was a marketing problem, sometimes it was a product problem, sometimes it was a sales problem, and sometimes it was all three combined. In every case, the business leaders made a misstep in how they introduced and sold the product to the market.

As a sales leader, it’s up to you to prepare your team and help your new product become a success — even before it launches. Here are the 4 steps every business must take before starting to sell to a new market.

Step 1: Listen And Learn

Long before you start selling your new product, you have to educate yourself and your sales team about the future new market. Start by reading the best content available on the subject, attend industry conferences, and learn as much as possible about the market you’re hoping to break into. Then, once you understand the basics and you’ve learned the jargon, you can start to dig deeper and learn about the real issues and underlying motivations of your new target customers.

Reach out to friends, acquaintances and potential prospects in your target market and ask lots of questions. Learn what their job is like at a high level, what they experience day-to-day, what is important to them in their roles, and how they define success. Then, start learning about the difficulties and struggles they face in their jobs. Once you have a sense of common pain points, then you can look at the economic impact of those struggles for the business. Ideally, your product can solve one or more of the common problems in the industry, and you’ll know your new product has a fighting chance of success. The goal is to hear prospects say: “If you can fix this, I’ll buy your product.”

Step 2: Build Your Reputation

You can’t just jump into a new market and start selling instantly. Sales leaders don’t always want to rely on marketing, however, approaching a new market needs….marketing. Sales and marketing alignment is especially important when trying to sell a brand new product. Your marketing strategy should be specifically focused on educating the market about your product and why buyers need it. Sales reps will then be selling to prospects based on the promises made by your marketing team, so make sure your marketing is aligned with product capabilities and initial sales talk tracks.

Great marketing helps your sales team by starting the selling process long before the first sales engagement even happens. A new product marketing campaign should start by building relationships and credibility in a new space before the product is released. Marketing should reach out and partner with other well-known companies in the industry to get third party and social validation to boost your company’s profile. That way, when your team starts selling the new product, they’ll be approaching buyers who may have heard of your company and will give reps a chance to pitch the product.

Step 3: Back To Sales Basics

Once it’s finally time for your sales team to pick up the phone and start selling the new product, remember that you’re all starting from scratch. Instruct your reps to start off with the basics — listen more than they speak, ask lots of questions, and learn as much as possible about prospects on calls. DON’T have reps talk about product features, but instead tell them to listen to the struggles of the prospects and relate to their needs. Reps don’t have a solid talk track to rely on yet, so they must be flexible and adapt as needed to buyers.

Instead of trying to fake expertise in the space, coach your reps to be honest with prospects and admit that this is a new product offering. In the sales and marketing book Crossing the Chasm, the authors explain that a certain subset of the market is willing to take a risk on a new product, but most people will not. You need to be upfront with buyers and explain that you’re giving them early access to a fantastic new product, in exchange for their feedback and input. This will ensure that they won’t be let down when they use your product, and they’ll be excited to help you shape the future and build a product they love to use. Once you close a deal with these early-adopters, you’ll be on the track to success.

Step 4: Identify Your Ideal Customer

The first customer is truly the hardest one to win, the second customer gets a little easier, and the third is even easier. However, not every deal is a good deal — so don’t get desperate. Once you sell to that first customer, try to sell to a second customer in the same niche as the first. For example, if you sell to a SaaS company in Austin, keep selling to that market. You should start to build a reputation within that small market, and stay 100% focused on pleasing those specific customers.

You want your first customer to be able to act as a reference for your second customer. People always want to talk to someone who has experienced a similar problem and see how your product was able to solve it. If you’re focused on selling to your ideal customer, it will be easy for reps on your team to say: “We just sold our product to a company that was experiencing this exact problem. We’ll be happy to put you in touch.” Never underestimate the power of a customer success story to close a deal.

By following these 4 steps, you’ll be able to prepare your sales team to sell to a market that now knows who you are, and experiences a problem that you can solve. With the right preparation, the launch of your new product will be a huge sales success.

If your technology firm is like many others, it grew by happenstance. You offered valuable expertise that attracted a core group of clients and you built your business within these accounts. As clients referred your company within their professional network, business rolled in. Or, perhaps you just landed one or two lucrative contracts that grew your business at a healthy pace.

In fact, growth came so naturally to your technology firm that you never had to develop your marketing muscle. Your website was nothing more than an electronic brochure, attracting little attention and not working hard to generate leads. It did nothing to expand your firm’s visibility beyond your existing network.

And then one day your sales plateaued or even spiraled down as you lost a large contract. The phones stopped ringing and you were dead in the water. That’s when you realized your firm would not grow and could even face revenue declines if you continued to rely on passive marketing.

If this describes your firm, you’re not alone.  Typically, when the light goes on, and technology firms realize marketing is essential to their survival and growth, they tend to test out one marketing tactic after another. They send emails and newsletters to purchased lists, cold call potential prospects, network at conferences, gamble money on pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, print up glossy brochures and even revamp their websites. Sadly, these firms rarely achieve measurable results.

Putting The Marketing Puzzle Pieces Together

You must take a holistic view and build a foundation and structure to create a technology system. The same is true for a marketing strategy. Success calls for an integrated approach that boosts your firm’s visibility and adds credibility to your expertise. It brings all the critical marketing tactics together—the website, thought leadership, social media, email marketing, and more—like pieces of a puzzle. And when the puzzle comes together, you’ll see a picture of your firm increasing visibility and credibility online and in person.

Some of the marketing puzzle pieces serve as the essential foundation for technology firms. Others are optional and you can add them once the foundation is in place.

Online Visibility Marketing Must Haves

1. Lead Generating Website

As the hub of all marketing activity, a technology firm’s website has to do the heavy lifting.  It needs to be optimized for the search engines to attract your target audience. Once visitors land on your site, they must find informative content and easy-to-navigate landing pages filled with tempting offers. These pages entice them to part with their contact information and become a lead. A simple ‘Contact Us’ page will not suffice.

2. Thought Leadership

As a professional firm, your expertise is what keeps you ahead. So, it’s essential to show your thought leadership by freely providing educational content. There are many different formats through which you can do this: blog posts, e-books, white papers, webinars and more.

3. Social Media

Social media is an essential piece of the marketing equation. That’s because it works as an online stage for networking with other professionals, and you can also use it to amplify your content. Also, the more your website’s content is shared via social media, the more likely it is to rank higher in the search engines. Higher rankings make it easier to attract visitors without breaking your budget on pay-per-click ads.

4. Lead Nurturing Emails

Just because someone gives you their contact information, does not mean that they are ready to sign on the dotted line. It may not be the right time, or they may not yet feel comfortable with your firm’s abilities. So, you need to nurture your leads and stay top of mind by sending a series of emails with useful information that softly sells.

Online Marketing Pieces To Accentuate Visibility

Once you’ve built a foundation for online visibility, there are some other content formats and tactics you may want to explore. Content includes books, webinars, videos, and podcasts. You’ll discover that you can repurpose the content you’ve already developed, such as blog posts and e-books, into some of these items.

And, finally, it’s time to consider adding paid advertising, such as pay-per-click (PPC) to your toolbox. PPC now may be successful because you’ll be spending money to draw people to a website that successfully drives conversions.

Offline Marketing Pieces

While much of today’s marketing is online, there are still some compelling offline opportunities. Speaking engagements, for example, are invaluable in promoting your firm’s visible experts as thought leaders. Also, in-person networking will never go out of style. You can use publicity to secure radio interviews and television appearances that put you in front of a large audience. And, finally, you may need a brochure or display materials to convey your message during a sales call or at a trade show.

The term ‘follow the money’ was made famous in the 1976 drama documentary All the Presidents Men, and has been used variously as the basis of journalistic articles ever since. Its purpose is to follow the money trail to get to the root cause of an issue.

It happens also to be one of the four primary duties for Chief Marketing Officers. However, if you have ‘Marketing’ in your title, regardless of what it’s attached to, these are your ultimate responsibilities, and ‘following the money’ is the subsequent proof of your existence. Your duties are:

1. Establish the Brand
2. Generate Demand
3. Manage Demand
4. Follow the Money

Branding has gotten a lot of attention in B2B over the last ten years or so, as traditional agencies, to generate more revenue, jumped on the band wagon of brand measurement and improvement for B2B. And yet, without ‘following the money’ and reporting on the results, what has Marketing achieved? Maybe the brand is being established, but what does it mean if you can’t point to related financial results?

Generating demand (the easiest chore) can be a money pit, if the results are not guiding the 2-15% of a company’s yearly revenue spend (on marketing).

Managing demand – lead management is getting more attention because of the explosion of vendors now saying they’re in the business of lead management. But we all know that the granddaddy of modern lead management originated with CRM and all other programs and services can be attributed to the CRM family tree.

Following the money can be the focus of both the sales and marketing departments. In this case I make an argument that without following the money, Marketing acts with good intention, but can’t prove that its actions have measureable results for every dollar spent on lead generation.

Since the 2007 recession there have many articles, white papers, e-books, blog entries and traditional books written on Marketing ROI (see the bibliography at the end). The discussion has not been about the need to measure, but on how to go about it, and will anybody do it.

I assume that anyone who wants to measure marketing will find the tools and the wherewithal to do it. It isn’t that difficult anymore. It all comes down to the ‘wanna factor.’ Does Marketing wanna follow the money?

If Marketing wants to measure lead generation programs, it starts with:

1. Isolating lead generation into campaigns.
2. Closing the leads out with results (75-80% of leads can be followed-up and reported; at any given time 20-25% can be unresolved in the pipeline).
3. Reporting on lead disposition and running the numbers; it’s just an exercise. James Lenskold’s book Marketing ROI will give you the simple formulas.

If you cannot rely on salespeople to close out the leads, close them out yourself. If begging and pleading doesn’t work, look at sales results to see if there is a match between the lead and a recent purchase. You can use an inside marketer (or salesperson) to call the unclosed leads. You can give the leads to an outside service. If you ‘wanna,’ you will find a way to get the campaign measured.

In the final analysis, before you lose your job because you can’t measure marketing’s contributions to sales, ‘following the money’ is your only choice as a marketer going forward.

Alexis de Tocqueville said,
“If you really want to do something, you’ll find a way. If you don’t, you’ll find an excuse.”

Excuses abound for managers who are afraid of ‘following the money.’ I find that there are two reasons why people don’t do something:

1. They don’t know how.
2. They don’t want to.

If we can help marketing managers learn how to ‘follow the money,’ most will do it because we normally do those things that are in our own best interest.

Email and marketing automation software is used to nurture leads and automate your marketing so that you can provide personalized attention to your clients in a scalable way.

It also lets you categorize leads in such a manner that you can tell right away whether they are simply “interested” or “sales ready”.

Samples of email and marketing automation software include email management programs that segment lists and target specific emails to distinct customer groups.

They are a helpful way of dividing your prospects according to where they are in the sales timeline so that you can optimize your approach depending on their willingness to buy at any particular moment.

Another example of email and marketing automation software are lead nurturing programs. This is software that can warm up leads with a series of customized emails.

In most cases, they start with an introduction of your business and the product and services you are promoting and gradually builds towards asking for the sale.

Social Media

This may appear very obvious, however social networks cost you absolutely nothing unless you’re utilizing it to market, meanings that complimentary off-site promo for your start-up.

In short, concentrate on visual marketing. Usage platforms such as Instagram and Pinterest to stand out of customers and potential purchasers. Share attractive-looking images, not simply of your services and items, however likewise of your employee, business occasions and other elements of your company that your customers may be thinking about.

In addition to your own blog content, keep in mind to share fascinating short articles and videos you discover throughout the web on your social profiles. Curated content occasionally carries out much better than your very own content, and can likewise permit you to develop relationships with other companies.

Eliminate the obstacle in between you and your audience by choosing not to be simply another faceless business entity. Make use of the human aspect to your benefit.

Personalized Emails

Email and marketing automation software programs can be used to trigger personalized emails based on your leads’ behavior online.

This software looks at what visitors to your pages do once they get there, then uses “bots” that give programs automated responses tailored to each visitor’s actions so that you can appeal to precisely what they are looking for on your website.

Automated Report Generation

Marketing analytics software are tools you can use to generate reports and measure the success of different elements of your marketing strategies. It typically tracks all of your marketing activities and automatically creates rich reports so that you can have the tools you need to direct future marketing strategies.

One examples of marketing analytic software is closed-loop reporting. This type of program ties your leads back to specific marketing initiatives. This is helpful in calculating the actual return on investment for each specific marketing strategy.

Another type of marketing analytics are programs that analyze your web traffic to determine which sources are generating the most and best leads.

This lets you to focus your efforts on those sources that are working the best, and limiting your expenses on those programs that are failing to provide a good stream of prospects.

Tracking Your Competition

Competitor tracking software includes programs that analyze your competitors’ online metrics. Knowing and understanding the performance of your competitors in the marketplace is every bit as important – if not more important – than understanding your own business’s performance.

You can use these tools to make decisions that will guide your company past your competitors and more effectively dominate the marketplace and capture a bigger share or customers.

Outbound Marketing and Its Limitations

Outbound marketing is based on things you do offline to generate sales leads. These can include networking with other industry professionals, attending trade shows, participating in seminar and webinars, creating email blasts aimed at purchased lists, cold calling potential customers, using outsourced telemarketers, and print, television, radio and billboard advertising.

These are called “outbound marketing” because you are taking pushing out into the world so that you can hope to find potential customers. But outbound marketing isn’t always as focused as inbound marketing. And, ultimately, it may be less effective because people have become so inundated with being bombarded with marketing messages throughout their day that they tend to ignore nearly all commercial messages.

In addition, advances in technology enables people to tune out, fast forward or skip over most outbound marketing that they have no interest in. For these reasons, outbound marketing is far less effective and consequently less desirable as a marketing investment opportunity than inbound marketing.

Visibility is the most important advantage armies have in battle. From ancient Rome to Iraq, victory and defeat on the battlefield is decided by an understanding of the terrain and knowledge of where each side’s troops are positioned on it.

History’s greatest generals all understood this principle, and avoided conflict when they lacked the visibility they needed to make informed decisions.

In ancient times, generals relied on cavalry and skirmishers to give them the information they needed to prepare for battle. Now, we have airborne surveillance and satellites that give commanders precise, detailed views of the battlefield and everything on it.

Visibility is just as important to sales leaders as it is to military commanders. Effective sales leaders have full visibility into their team’s performance, and use that information to constantly adjust and improve their approach to selling.

However, rather than horses or spy planes, sales leaders rely on Sales Operations to provide them with the intelligence they need. Sales Operations has to go well beyond simply reporting the state of the sales team. Their job is to go a step further and identify what’s relevant — what do managers and VPs need to know?

Just as the most effective intelligence officers are able to sift through reams of data to pinpoint what’s relevant and what’s not, top Sales Operations teams are able to boil sales performance down to the most relevant metrics that give sales leaders a clear course of action to streamline their team’s performance.

Here’s the best way to think about what metrics are most relevant for your sales team:

Forward-Looking Metrics

Some sales work requires constant monitoring. Managers need to have a good pulse on how their team is spending its time so they know where their reps are most in need of coaching and enablement. More importantly for Sales Ops, weekly metrics serve as leading indicators for how well you can expect your reps to fare in the coming weeks and months.

Several examples of weekly metrics that Sales Operations should be able to produce are:

• Lead flow – are your reps getting enough leads to fill their pipeline?
• Activities – are reps putting in enough work to be successful? Are they working too hard on certain stages of the sales process (is there room to streamline the process)?
• Opportunities created – Are enough new opportunities being created for reps to hit their quota? Are opportunities moving out of the process too quickly? Too slowly?

The specific metrics that matter most to your sales team will vary depending on the makeup of your organization, but think of these weekly metrics as the low-level, tactical information managers need to break down individual performance and identify the levers that individual salespeople need to pull to improve performance.

These metrics are the early red flags that warn you of larger problems to come. However, while it’s important to know the details behind your firm’s performance, be careful not to get lost in the weeds. Sales Ops teams that spend all their time to investigate minor nuances in sales performance lose their value.

It’s the same principle as generals who ask their cavalry to scout every feature within a 500 mile area — there’s so much ground to cover, they end up getting lost and missing the important intelligence that will actually help them win. Sales Ops leaders need to identify crucial metrics for themselves, and stick to highlighting the information that will help win battles.

Retrospective Metrics

While tactical information about sales performance is essential for daily operations, Sales Ops should also inform the strategic direction of the sales team. This requires analyzing higher level results-based metrics — data that reflects the outcome of sales efforts and pinpoints team-wide trends that have the greatest impact on revenue acquisition.

Examples of results based metrics that your team should review monthly are:

• Lead to opportunity conversion rates (is your team qualifying leads effectively)?
• Pipeline sourced quality (Is your team wasting time on bad opportunities? Are they qualifying out good opportunities)?
• Sales cycle (How long does it take to win deals? Is there any way to shorten the time between opening and closing opportunities?)

Your monthly metrics should inform the high-level strategy of your sales team.

What needs to happen to make your overall sales process more effective? What are the essential takeaways that can inform the direction your sales team needs to take? Do you need more training and tools? Do you need to add headcount, or are there places you can work more efficiently? The monthly metrics should answer all those questions, and shape your sales strategy over the long run.

Sales leaders need a combination of predictive, tactical information and in-depth, retrospective data to make the right management decisions. It’s up to the Sales Ops team to identify the metrics that will give them the visibility they need.

You know what's frustrating for salespeople? The knowledge that good fit inbound leads are leaking from the sales funnel due to poor marketing processes, bad messaging, or inadequate support. Few things are worse than a closed-lost deal, but this might be one of them.

To patch up any gaps your organization might have in your marketing or sales funnels, consult the below infographic from ReachLocal. Do an audit of your website -- is contact information prominently displayed on each page? Are all incoming calls getting answered or returned within an hour? Are you prioritizing hot leads over cold, and regularly reaching out to good fit opportunities?

If any of these points is a stumbling block, get together with marketing leaders and plug up the holes once and for all. A lead is worth its weight in gold, but not if it escapes from the funnel before a salesperson gets involved.

Like it or not, you will always need to develop and implement your own plan for prospecting.

One of the primary reasons that salespeople have a hard time sticking with the discipline of prospecting is that they are forced to use a process that doesn’t align with their sales strengths. Human nature dictates that people will avoid discomfort -- and salespeople are especially adept at avoiding activities that make them feel uncomfortable.

Prospecting is not a one-size-fits-all activity. A little experimentation is required to find the approach that best suits your personality, your skills, and the goals you need to achieve.

To determine the prospecting strategy that will work best for you, ask yourself the following questions.

1) How much prospecting must I do?

To begin, you need to quantify the challenge you face. How many leads do you need? Be specific. Start with your quota and work backward. Look at your sales history, and calculate your close ratio over the prior 12 months. What percentage of your sales opportunities did you convert into orders? Don’t inflate this number. It’s important to be accurate and honest with yourself.

Once you have your close ratio in hand, use that to calculate how many prospects you will need in order to meet your quota. The last step is to estimate what percentage of those leads will flow in from marketing activities and what percentage you will need to develop through your own efforts.

The percentage of leads that you have to develop -- the lead deficit you need to make up -- will give you a pretty good estimate of how much time you must to devote to prospecting. Having this information in hand will let you determine whether cold calling or some other prospecting activity is the optimal strategy to achieve your prospecting goals.

A rule of thumb that I suggest to my clients is that the percentage of time that a salesperson needs to devote to prospecting is approximately equal to the percentage of the lead deficit she needs to fill. For instance, if you are a new salesperson, your lead deficit might stand at 100%, in which case you will need to spend 100% of your time on prospecting until it begins to shrink. An experienced and established salesperson might have a 30% lead deficit. She will probably fill two-thirds of that deficit with repeat business and referrals, leaving a 10% gap. That salesperson would then need to spend about 10% of her time on prospecting.

2) What am I good at doing?

It’s essential to align your prospecting activities with your sales strengths. This may seem obvious, but I work with a lot of companies that have rigid sales procedures that fail to take advantage of the strengths of their individual salespeople.

In fact, not everyone has to be good at all forms of prospecting. Take cold calling. Success in cold calling, or the lack thereof, can be due as much to salespeople’s temperaments as their skills. And no amount of training can change that.

I worked with a great salesperson at one company who was painfully shy. He was not going to pick up the phone and cold call a potential customer. He was skilled at using referrals to build his pipeline. Fortunately, he worked for a manager who showed flexibility in letting his people determine how they could best meet the challenge of prospecting.

Some people are comfortable with cold calling. Some are not. Others might be stronger in creating emails that get noticed. Or perhaps they are adept at connecting through LinkedIn. Maybe they have created a strong industry presence through a blog or speaking at conference. Or perhaps they are really strong at tapping customers for referrals.

The point is to identify a method that will work for you consistently and put it to use every day. Prospecting is a skill that improves with practice. In his book Talent Is Overrated, Geoffrey Colvin describes research demonstrating that individuals who are successful in a particular endeavor are not naturally gifted or innately skilled in that field. Instead, these experts are skilled at consistently practicing their craft at high levels and at improving their performance by closely monitoring and learning from their past performance. This discipline, known as “deliberate practice,” has been popularized with the shorthand saying that it takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to master any skill.

What this means is that great salespeople are not born that way. It takes an investment of time over a long period to become really expert at prospecting. Choose the specific skills that you want to become expert in, and start practicing them on customers.

3) What prospecting activity is the most effective use of my sales time?

The ultimate decision about which method to employ should depend on which one gives you the best return on the time you invest in it. This means that you have to measure your results against the time you spend on prospecting. You have to track the actual amount of time that you spend on prospecting, and the number of leads and qualified sales opportunities you generated during that time.

Let’s say that you have a 20% lead deficit to fill, but it requires 50% of your available selling time to develop the required number of sales leads. You have a problem. You either need to change the prospecting method you are using, or you need some coaching and guidance on how to improve what you’re doing. If you have to make 50 phone calls to develop one new lead while John, sitting in the cubicle next to you, develops five new leads from 50 phone calls, then you need to ask for help. Shadow John and listen to him make his calls. Have John or your sales manager listen to you make calls and provide some feedback. (Remember that a crucial part of deliberate practice is learning from past performance to improve future performance.)

Prospecting, as performed by salespeople, is entrepreneurial. If a company employs you, you should consider your territory to be a franchise. Your employer is the franchisor, and you are the franchisee with the sales rights within a certain territory. You are the owner of your territory of potential customers, no matter how that territory is defined. And, just as in standard franchising agreements, if you, as the franchisee, do not invest the resources to deliver on the potential within your territory, then the franchisor can terminate your franchise and replace you with another entrepreneur.

It’s up to you as the franchise owner to do whatever it takes to build a profitable business in your territory.

Small business owners commonly face this issue. They may have a marketing budget, but if that doesn’t create enough leads, what are they going to do? Go out of business? Of course not! Maybe the weak willed ones would give up and throw in the towel. But most entrepreneurs are more tough-minded that that. They will steel themselves and go out and undertake the activities necessary to generate sales leads.

That could mean going door to door or joining the local chamber of commerce. It could mean attending networking events or researching a list of local prospects and then committing to making a certain number of cold calls every day before 9 a.m. They might not like doing these activities, but sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do.

And so it is with you. Start your prospecting with the activities that are best aligned with your strongest capabilities. But if those activities aren’t generating enough leads, then you have to try something else -- even if it means picking up the phone and making cold calls. (As Shakespeare said, “Ay, there’s the rub.”)

Editor's note: This is an excerpt from the book Amp Up Your Sales. It is published here with permission. Purchase the book on Amazon.

AMP UP YOUR SALES: Powerful Strategies that Move Customers to Make Fast, Favorable Decisions by Andy Paul. © 2015 Andy Paul. All rights reserved. 

Published by AMACOM Books www.amacombooks.org. Division of American Management Association 1601 Broadway, New York, NY 10019.

Sales is goal driven. It always has been, and probably always will be. Most salespeople begin each month by setting goals for themselves — they sit down with their manager, commit to the number they plan to hit, lay out a few personal development goals they want to complete, and then set to work trying to achieve them.

You’d think sales teams would be good at setting goals for themselves by now, but the reality is only 67% of reps hit quota — which means that either their goals are way off, or they aren’t doing the right things to hit them.

When you begin looking into why so many salespeople fall short, an answer pops up quickly — most goal setting frameworks don’t help you plan effectively. Frameworks like S.M.A.R.T. are effective for defining a goal, but they lack an essential component — the steps you need to take to hit the goal, or in a sales context, the plan for getting from $0 bookings at the beginning of the month to full quota at the end.

Jill Konrath, author of Agile Selling: Get Up to Speed Quickly in Today’s Ever-Changing Sales World suggests that sales reps resolve this problem by using personal bests.

To avoid getting off track on the road from 0% quota attained to 100%, total sales goals should be broken into measurable increments. You make iterative improvements by measuring specific metrics (such as sales cycle, connect rate, and win rate), and striving for a daily “personal best” on those metrics.

This approach resolves two major problems that sap sales performance:

1. It breaks down the psychological weight of bearing a quota by reducing the problem to achievable daily goals for sales reps. Daily call quota suddenly has meaning when each dial can be connected directly to your bookings results.
2. It helps reps to identify the specific steps in their sales approach that cause them to lose deals. This prevents them from continuously losing opportunities and missing their bookings goal for the same reason, while simultaneously helping to keep track of their performance towards goal.

On top of that, a recent study showed that the highest performing sales organizations consistently measure individuals against their quotas, and each rep is held responsible for their results. Having a clear process around goal setting and progress will help to promote this culture of accountability that leads to greater team success.

Here’s how to use the worksheet (and, more importantly, how your reps can use it to improve their sales performance):

-Enter personal quota (for the month) in cell B2

-Enter Average Sales Price (ASP) for individual reps in cell B3. If they don’t know it (or you have new reps on the job), get the team’s ASP and enter it here. If reps struggle to win enough deals to hit quota, work with them to find target bigger opportunities and increase their ASP.

-Once your reps enter their quota and ASP, the Input and Daily Activity Goals will populate automatically. The logic of each of these numbers is as follows:

• Calls: Calls are simply the number of times they will need to pick up the phone over the course of the month to hit their number. The formula included in the worksheet assumes they connect on 20% of their calls.
• Connects: Connects are defined as a conversation with the target prospect — not a gatekeeper or someone else at the account the rep is calling. The worksheet assumes 30% of connects result in new opportunities.
• # New Opps: New Opps are defined as sustained contact with a company with a chance to earn a new deal. The worksheet assumes 20% of the connects reps make convert into live opportunities.
• Daily Activity Goals- The daily activity goals are calculated by dividing the call, connect, and new opps totals by the number of working days in the month.
• Daily Tracking- Reps enter the number of Calls, Connects, and New Opps they create each day, and the worksheet will automatically fill in their progress towards daily activity goals.

By encouraging reps to monitor each of these metrics they progress towards quota, they can quickly identify where they need to improve performance and focus their energy on the areas that will have the greatest impact.

Constantly monitoring performance metrics and understanding the impact that one number has on the rest will both make your reps better salespeople and keep them on track to hit your goals, month after month.

As your team gathers more data, each rep can customize the worksheet to their own connect rate, opp conversion rate, and win rate to reach an even more accurate number. Work with your reps (or your friendly neighbor Sales Ops) to help them get to the right numbers.

It’s time to talk about a big sales and marketing problem most companies have struggled with for years. I’m not talking about lead generation, market share, or customer retention, although it does impact each of those things and so much more. I’m talking about the chasm that separates Sales and Marketing.

Here’s a look at a typical day in the life of both Sales and Marketing.

The Day of a Marketer

A marketer works hard to generate leads for the sales team. She optimizes conversion opportunities throughout the company’s website, sends email campaigns, creates landing pages and uses them to deliver exceptional gated content. Her work brings in a steady flow of leads, which she passes on to the sales team. The more the better, right?

This marketer also toils away to create valuable marketing content and sales support resources. She emails the sales reps about new content as it is finalized and uploads it to the company’s Dropbox so everyone can access it. Success!

Her blood pressure escalates and she has to resist the urge to throw things – heavy things – when she learns the sales reps have barely even touched the leads she has been generating for them and that they have never even looked at most of the content she created. It’s frustrating, to say the very least.

Bottom Line: Marketing feels their work is undervalued and often ignored.

The Day of a Sales Rep

On the flip side, a sales rep spends her day traveling, responding to immediate requests of prospects, communicating with clients, working with her manager to do whatever it takes to close the sale – hers is a life of constant chaos and change.

She often has immediate needs for content to send to prospects. However, this often makes her frustrated because the materials she has access to are outdated or – worse yet – she can’t find anything at all that aligns with what she needs. This often means she creates content on the spot, which requires time she simply doesn’t have. She wonders why Marketing doesn’t produce the content she needs.

To top it off, throughout the day, she constantly receives notifications from Marketing about new leads she is supposed to follow up with, which adds pressure to her already stress-filled day. She doesn’t have time to stay on top of communication with the prospects she’s currently nurturing, let alone a new list of leads every day. Besides, when she has taken the time to follow up in the past, the leads weren’t qualified and it ended up being a waste of her time.

Bottom Line: Sales doesn’t feel adequately supported or understood by Marketing.

Sound familiar? I bet it does.

Unfortunately, this situation is extremely common in today’s businesses. Marketers are not alone in their feelings of being undervalued and ignored.  Did you know that as much as 80% of leads produced by marketing will never be acted upon by a sales rep? And according to the American Marketing Association, a staggering 90% of selling content is never actually used in selling.​

Sales reps, too, are justified in their frustration. According to the CMO Council, instead of selling, sales people spend upwards of 40% of their time creating their own messaging and tools.​ Also, only 27% of the leads sent to sales by marketing are qualified first.

Pretty bleak statistics, right? So why is this happening? It’s that chasm I mentioned earlier between Sales and Marketing – that’s why. These two teams are disconnected in a big way and it’s taking a toll on the companies they work for.

It’s time to close the gap and align Sales and Marketing for good. While you would probably agree, you may not fully understand why it’s so important or what you can do to help. I hope to change that in the remainder of this blog post.

Why Sales and Marketing MUST Align

Reason #1: Customers Notice

As many as 57% of customers feel that salespeople are poorly prepared or not prepared at all for initial meetings. Could it be that these sales reps didn’t have the resources needed to properly prepare for these initial meetings? After all, these first meetings with prospective customers are important to sales reps – they are key milestones in the sales process! The vast majority of sales reps would certainly want to be prepared for them so they could be as successful as possible. They just didn’t have the content they needed to prepare.

Sales reps need content to effectively engage prospects and close sales. But not just any content will do. They need content that speaks directly to the needs, challenges and preferences of prospects. And they need to be able to access the most current versions of it whenever they need it.

What You Can Do

Take the first step toward Sales and Marketing alignment and talk to the sales reps directly. Work to clearly understand the challenges they face throughout the sales process. Ask them about the gaps they see in your marketing content. Try to understand how they need to access content and when and where they need it most. Attempt to learn what marketing support has worked and what has not – and why. Listen to their feedback and list the ways you can better serve your sales reps.

One strategy I like to use is asking sales reps to write down questions they frequently receive from prospects. Then, use this list of FAQs as a list of content you can create to directly support the sales reps the next time they encounter such inquiries.

The important takeaway here is that marketers can take the first step toward Sales and Marketing alignment by starting a simple conversation with sales reps. Just ask them what they need and work out a way to deliver it.

Reason #2: Sales Saturation

When Sales and Marketing aren’t aligned, inefficiencies are bound to happen. Like the examples given above, chances are pretty good that Marketing is delivering leads that Sales will never touch. With the increase in adoption of marketing automation platforms and their ability to help marketers do more than ever before, marketers are capable of generating a lot of leads. That’s great. What’s not so great is when they just pass them all along to sales.

Why is this such a problem? Sales saturation. What’s that, you ask? It’s simply when sales reps are given more leads than they are physically able to follow up with. Here’s an example:

Let’s say you’ve been striving to reach a lead generation goal of 20 leads per rep per week. That sounds great! That is, until you learn that each rep typically has about two hours per week to follow up with leads and each lead typically requires about 30 minutes of follow up time. You now realize that each rep has the capacity to follow up with just four leads each week. You have been working hard to send them 20.

See the problem here? In this scenario, you would be sending them 16 more leads than they can physically handle. Every. Single. Week.

What you thought was great marketing success was actually sales saturation. And it was leading to neglected leads.

What You Can Do

As the previous example mentioned briefly, one of the first steps in solving this problem is by talking to your sales reps and Sales leadership to understand the realistic number of leads each rep can follow up with each week. Then adjust your lead deliver accordingly.

Now, this doesn’t mean you should try to generate fewer leads. Not at all. Instead, it means you may need to nurture them and better qualify them before passing them on to Sales.

More work for marketing? Perhaps. But wouldn’t you prefer that you work was actually used? By nurturing leads before handing them off to Sales, you increase the chances of the leads you deliver actually becoming customers.

On average, nurtured leads produce a 20% increase in sales opportunities versus non-nurtured leads. What’s more, companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more leads that are truly sales-ready. Even better – they produce these leads a third of the cost of companies that aren’t so great at lead nurturing.

Invest some time in better understanding Sales and each rep’s capacity for following up with leads. Then refine your lead nurturing process to improve the quality and rethink the quantity of leads you deliver to sales.

Reason #3: Wasted Revenue

When sales reps spend time searching for or creating content, this not only duplicates the efforts of marketing, it also pulls them away from important sales opportunities. And those wasted opportunities add up to wasted revenue – lots of it.

Consider this: A study by IDC found that by saving a single sales rep just 60 minutes of prep time each week, a company could realize additional revenue generation $300,000 or more per rep! In a company with just 10 reps, that’s $3 million each year. If you’ve got 100 reps, that’s a staggering $300MM per year.

If just 60 minutes of prep time can translate into $300,000 in revenue, just imagine how much potential revenue is wasted in your organization as sales reps struggle to find the content they need.

What You Can Do

Clear out the clutter. As you work to build a better relationship with your sales reps and establish more frequent, meaningful communication, look for ways you can reduce the clutter – in both of your lives.

Quite often, technology can help here. There are apps available today to help manage content. Anything from Google Drive to Basecamp, Dropbox to Salesforce – any number of tools can serve as a virtual marketing library for your content. Each one is available anywhere and on any device with an internet connection so sales reps should have no problem getting the content they need whenever they need it.

If you can commit to making only the most current versions of content available in this marketing library, ask your sales reps to also make a commitment. Ask them to retrieve these up-to-date versions of content whenever they need to use it – instead of using outdated content stored elsewhere or creating their own.

Close the gap between Sales and Marketing. Take the first step by reaching out to Sales to better understand their challenges and needs. Work together to better serve your customers. Sure, it will improve your business and probably increase revenue, but it will also improve your workplace happiness, and can you really put a price on that?

How are YOU closing the gap between Sales and Marketing? Share your advice in the comments section below.

I’m about to head out on to Lake Minnetonka and wanted share this before I hit the water.

It’s funny, especially with all the “buzz words.”

Many businesses still don’t have a consistent understanding of a lead — what it is, when it is, and what they should do with it. Different departments use different language to refer to the same thing, or refer to different things with the same language. In fact, only half of sales and marketing teams worldwide even agree on what defines a qualified lead.

This pandemonium can cripple your demand generation programs. When either low volume or low-quality leads are passed to sales each month, conversion is low as well. Not only that, but CMOs and CFOs have a hard time establishing common goals and service level agreements (SLAs) when they don’t even share the same definition of a lead. According to MarketingSherpa, as many as 73 percent of all B2B leads are not sales-ready.

So what exactly is a lead?

The specific definition of a lead will depend on your business model, but there are some things that a lead is probably not:

● A site visitor

● An impression

● A click-through

● A purchased contact

All of these things, loosely defined, are prospects (and they might not even be that). A lead, on the other hand, falls along the continuum between prospect and deal. It could be an individual consumer, in the case of B2C marketing, or a business contact, in B2B marketing.

“A lead is simply where someone has raised a hand by completing some level of contact information and submitting that information to a company,” says Michael Ferree, Director of LeadsCouncil. “We can argue that many things are leads, but the question really is, did the person express interest in your product?”

Ferree is right: Leads distinguish themselves by performing a particular action that shows intent or interest in your products or services. You can even take that a step further by saying that leads have initiated communication between themselves and a business. In other words, they’ve given you permission to contact them. This stands in stark contrast to the interruptive tactics associated with batch mailings and purchased lists. It also bodes well for your lead-to-close ratio, since a person who has volunteered their information will be much more receptive to a sales conversation.

Great Scott, it’s Sir Walter’s Scott’s birthday! Born in 1771, the Scottish poet and novelist is the author of such classics as Ivanhoe, Rob Roy, and The Lady of the Lake. He also introduced into English words from German, Norse, and of course Scots that we still use today. Here are eight of our favorites.

berserker

“The support of the two Berserkir would be of the greatest advantage to him.”

Illustrations of Northern Antiquities, 1814

Scott introduced both berserker and berserk into the English language. Berserkers were ancient Norse warriors known for their “savagery and reckless frenzy in battle” (perhaps due in part to the ingestion of hallucinogenic mushrooms). They would also wear bear or wolf pelts in battle, hence their name, which translates from Old Norse as “bear shirt.”

Cedric

“On this singular gorget was engraved, in Saxon characters, an inscription of the following purport:—’Gurth, the son of Beowulph, is the born thrall of Cedric of Rotherwood.’”

Ivanhoe, 1820

Cedric the Entertainer can thank the Scottish poet for his name. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, Cedric was a mistake for the Old English Cerdic. The name Cedric peaked in popularity in the 1960s, says the Baby Name Wizard.

cold shoulder

“Ye may mind that the Countess’s dislike didna gang farther at first than just showing o’ the cauld shouther.”

The Antiquary, 1816

The next time someone gives you an icy reception, warm up by imagining Scott uttering his invented idiom in Highland brogue. The Online Etymology Dictionary says that while cold shoulder began in a literal sense, it was also often used “with a punning reference” to a “cold shoulder of mutton,” which was considered a “poor man’s dish” and perhaps something served to “an unwanted guest with deliberate intention to convey displeasure.”

coven

“The witches of Auldearne, according to this penitent, were so numerous, that they were told off into squads, or covines, as they were termed, to each of which were appointed two officers.”

Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, 1884

While coven meaning a gathering of witches was first used in the 1660s, it was Scott’s use that popularized the word. Coven might be a variation of covent, a Middle English word for “convent,” a community of nuns.

expletive

“We omit here various execrations with which these honest gentlemen garnished their discourse, retaining only such of their expletives as are least offensive.”

Guy Mannering, 1815

The word expletive has been around since the early 17th century, but Scott was the first to use it to mean a profane, vulgar, or obscene oath. The word comes from the Late Latin explētīvus, “serving to fill out,” which reflects an earlier sense, a word or phrase that has no meaning but is only added to “fill out a sentence or a metrical line.”

freelance

“I offered Richard the service of my Free Lances, and he refused them.”

Ivanhoe, 1820

Who’d have thought contractors and consultants had something in common with medieval mercenary knights? When Scott first used freelance, he was referring to such adventurers who offered their services in return for payment, with the idea that their lances were free to the highest bidder.

By the 1850s, says the OED, freelance also referred to “a politician or controversialist with no fixed affiliation to a particular party or viewpoint,” and by 1899, someone who works as a freelancer.

nixie

“Why performed in such a solitude, and by what class of choristers, were questions which the terrified imagination of the adept, stirred with all the German superstitions of nixies, oak-kings, wer-wolves, hobgoblins, black spirits and white, blue spirits and grey, durst not even attempt to solve.”

The Antiquary, 1816

A nixie is a kind of water elf or fairy. The word comes from the Old High German nihhussa, “water sprite.” Nixie also refers to, in American English, a piece of mail that’s undeliverable due to an incorrect or illegible address. This sense comes from nix meaning none or nothing.

sporran

“I advise no man to attempt opening this sporran till he has my secret.”

Rob Roy, 1817

A sporran is a fur or leather pouch worn at the front of the kilt as part of the “the traditional dress of men of the Scottish Highlands.” The word ultimately comes from the Middle Irish sparán, which might come from the Late Latin bursa, “bag.”

In November 2014, a former ZocDoc employee said she would be filing a lawsuit against the company.

The anonymous employee said the company, which lets you find and book doctor's appointments from your computer or mobile device, was a "frat house."

"There were things the men who worked there could get away with saying like 'you aren't bubbly enough,' 'you look hot today,' 'That secretary is a c---,' etc.," she said in an anonymous rant on Kinja that is no longer online.

"It was just accepted."

In addition, the former employee claimed, men openly discussed their female colleagues' bodies, the company's upper management treated women differently from men, and the building had a rodent infestation.

ZocDoc, which was founded in 2007, is one of New York's biggest startups. Last year, reports said the company was seeking to raise $152 million at a $1.6 billion valuation, adding to the $97.9 million war chest it's amassed over the years. Its institutional investors include DST Global, Goldman Sachs, Khosla Ventures, Founders Fund, and SV Angel.

The former employee who said she would file a lawsuit against the company did not end up taking ZocDoc to court. 

But since then, more than half a dozen other former and current employees have spoken with Business Insider to discuss their experiences at the company, which mirror the woman's original complaints about ZocDoc's company culture. These former employees asked not to be named, citing non-disclosure agreements they signed while working for ZocDoc.  

Some of the issues they cited are typical in many sales departments and startup offices: employees work long hours, there's significant employee burnout and turnover, and the staff is dominated by immature-sounding men (in Silicon Valley, there's actually a term for this: "bro-grammers.").

Other issues seem ZocDoc-specific and troubling.

"A catcall mentality throughout the office"

ZocDoc's headquarters occupies two floors of a building on Broadway in New York City's SoHo neighborhood. One floor houses the sales team; the other is for the company's other departments, like product and customer service.

Former employees tell Business Insider that the two floors are culturally segregated, and ZocDoc's problems are contained to its sales floor. ZocDoc's salespeople contact doctors to sign up for ZocDoc. 

Several former employees told us about a "hookup culture" at ZocDoc, catalyzed in part by company happy hours.

"There would be a catcall mentality throughout the office," a former employee tells Business Insider. "It felt like a college party every day. There was no line between after-work party and work."

Another former employee describes ZocDoc's sales floor as a "meat market," and says that the majority of the sales floor's hires are good-looking people fresh out of school.

One former saleswoman says she was "lucky enough" to work for a female manager. 

"She kind of understood that we needed someone who was able to give us training and look at us for our sales skills versus our gender," she told Business Insider. "Some of the sales floor people, mostly men — even managers — would objectify the women."

For instance, this former ZocDoc saleswoman says, she would take an alternate route to ZocDoc's lunch room to avoid being subjected to her male colleagues looking at and making comments about her body or her outfit, like "your shirt is a little too tight or your skirt is a little too tight," she says. 

This same former saleswoman also says that when ZocDoc makes new hires, the company sends out pictures of new employees and that male colleagues would make comments about their appearance by saying things like, "Oh, we have a bad batch today."

Male colleagues would make comments about the appearance of other new hires, saying things like 'Oh, we have a bad batch today.'

Other former ZocDoc saleswomen shared similar anecdotes with Business Insider. 

"I would definitely recommend any male out of college to go to ZocDoc to build their sales acumen, but girls I would steer away 100%," a former salesperson told Business Insider.

Another female former employee says what happens at ZocDoc isn't abnormal for a sales company. Based on her experiences at ZocDoc and other companies, she says, these places target and attract recent college grads who crave competition, energy, and most importantly money.

"Sales isn't the safest career path for any woman and it's obviously not the most stable," she tells Business Insider.

"Of course [young, male employees] are going to womanize and gawk at the only two women on the sales floor. Of course they don't know what an actual office environment is supposed to look like and how they're supposed to act."

"Churn and burn"

On the sales floor at ZocDoc, employees say there's a phrase used over and over again: "churn and burn." Former employees say this phrase indicates the competitive, often stressful nature of work in ZocDoc's sales division.

"They are full steam ahead," one former salesperson told Business Insider. "They have this arrogance in the company where the human capital is of zero value."

A former employee at ZocDoc told Business Insider that employee turnover at the company is high. The company recruits and brings in batches of new employees regularly because so many end up leaving or quitting, the employee alleges.

"I have never seen anything like it in my life," this former employee says. "And I’ve been in sales for 11-plus years. It’s mind blowing the amount of people that leave or get fired."

 

When new sales hires start at ZocDoc, they go through a training program called Med School. One former salesperson tells Business Insider that she started her Med School class with 30 new hires.

Most of them were gone in three months, and now, a year later, there's only one other person from her training program left. 

"To be there for a year is an accomplishment," she told Business Insider. "Either you are really crazy or you’re doing really well."

One former employee says the stress of working at ZocDoc led her to seek out professional psychiatric care.

"I never used any psychotropics until I worked at ZocDoc," she says. "I went to a psychiatrist, and I was put on Prozac."

This person left ZocDoc several months ago. She says she's no longer on Prozac, either.

"It was bizarre. It was really really depressing," she recalls. "I honestly don't know how I lasted that long."

Because of the hours that people on the sales floor work, one former employee says some ZocDoc salespeople took cocaine or Adderall. 

"There was a lot of cocaine around the office — because you know, you gotta come in and cold call from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., take an hour commute home, go to sleep and then wake up in the morning and do it all again," he says.

There was a lot of cocaine around the office — because you know, you gotta come in and cold call from 7 am to 8 pm, take an hour commute home, go to sleep and then wake up in the morning and do it all again. 

Other former employees corroborated this story. 

"All the employees were on Adderall, pretty much. There was one salesperson who was promoted and is no longer there as of two weeks ago, but he was giving other employees Adderall and coke," a former salesperson told Business Insider. 

A company spokesperson provided the following statement to Business Insider when reached for comment:

"We hear time and again from our team members that ZocDoc is a great place to work. We try every day to uphold a positive culture that encourages people to speak up and use their voices to make our company better.

"We have a long-standing policy against any forms of unlawful harassment or discrimination and never condone illegal drug use.

"Our sales team is an important engine of the company and, like any maturing sales organization, is evolving. Over time, we have strengthened our recruiting and training programs and continue to emphasize and support quality performance."

Who's running this place?

Former employees say ZocDoc's founders and CEO are open to speaking with employees, offering "office hours" and one-on-ones for employees who have questions or problems. They are aware there are problems on the ZocDoc sales floor, but they haven't done much to fix them, former employees say.

"Getting to know the founders and CEO definitely made the job a little more bearable because they understand the stress behind it," one former employee says. "However, they don't really care or want to fix the turnover issues, or any other issues for that matter."

Other former employees echoed this sentiment. CEO Cyrus Massoumi, according to one former employee, is "extremely aware of the problems with the hiring and firing."

Interestingly, ZocDoc has been named a "best place to work" by Crain's for several years in a row and one of the 50 best small- and medium-size companies to work for by Fortune. These rankings are determined, in part, by employee surveys administered by anonymous, independent third parties. 

In addition, 30% of ZocDoc's leadership team and 40% of the company's entire team are women. For comparison, at Google, 22% of the company's leadership team and 30% of its entire staff are women. 

A bigger issue

Two of the former employees who Business Insider spoke with say that while ZocDoc's sales floor does have a problematic culture, the stressful, male-dominant environment is not specific to just the one startup. Rather, that culture exists on the salesfloors (and elsewhere) at plenty of tech companies, the two ex-employees said.

Startups have repeatedly earned a reputation for being environments dominated by young men fresh out of college with no experience leading companies. 

At a 2012 SXSW talk called "Adding Value as a Non-Technical No Talent Ass-Clown," Matt Van Horn, then an executive at social media startup Path, told stories about sending "bikini shots" of women to the company's co-founders and talked about using campus recruitment as a way to "attract the hottest girls." 

"Van Horn wasn't even 10 minutes into the talk [when] several clearly irritated women (and a couple of men) had gotten up and walked out," says Mother Jones' Tasneem Raja, who attended the talk. "I joined them." 

The "brogrammer" and frat-house mentality extends beyond employees. 

Female entrepreneurs seeking funding for their startups are both ignored by investors who say they don't invest in women because they “don’t like the way women think" and hit on when they're trying to present their pitch decks and talk business.

In May 2014, Valleywag published emails sent by Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel in 2009 and 2010, while he was an undergrad at Stanford. Spiegel's emails to his fraternity brothers, littered with obscenities, describe women as sexual objects.

A month later, Tinder's former vice president of marketing Whitney Wolfe filed a lawsuit against her former employer. In her complaint, she alleged that Tinder co-founder Justin Mateen "repeatedly called Ms. Wolfe a ‘whore,’ including in front of CEO Sean Rad, and he told Ms. Wolfe that he was taking away her 'Co-Founder' title because having a young female co-founder makes the company seem like a ‘joke’ and ‘devalues’ the company." Wolfe later settled with Tinder and IAC, its parent company, for just over $1 million.

"I've been through three different sales companies and they were all like a 'frat house,'" one former ZocDoc salesperson told Business Insider.

"You'll see people giving high fives, chest bumps, chant, or just 'bro out' as if they won the winning goal in a game," this former employee added. "That's what all sales really is anyway, playing a sport and winning."

SEE ALSO: Sex, lies, and eggless mayonnaise: Something is rotten at food startup Hampton Creek, former employees say

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