If you’ve been in the tech or startup world for any longer than a few years, you’ve probably read (or heard countless people quote) Marc Andreessen’s 2011 Wall Street Journal essay, “Why Software is Eating the World.” It’s a brilliant piece and few would argue that Andreessen’s core theory hasn’t proven true. Software has taken over — and will continue to take over — virtually all significant aspect of our lives.

Along those lines, there’s a related — and equally disruptive — shift that’s happening: old, human-powered sales processes are being devoured by automated, machine-powered marketing platforms. Or, to put this trend in Andreessen parlance, Marketing is eating Sales.

Consider these numbers:

• By 2020, Gartner predicts customers will self-manage 85% of their relationships with companies without ever directly engaging a human (hello, Marketing…).
• In the next 3–5 years, more than 50% of respondents to an Economist survey said Marketing will own the customer buying experience. By comparison, less than 20% of respondents said sales will own that experience.
• As of January 2015, there were nearly 2,000 vendors of marketing technology services. Even Accel Partners’ highly vetted and carefully curated list contains 600 entries.

And that’s just the beginning.

As adoption of technology and automation continues to expand, Marketing will become an even more dominant part of the buyer journey. In fact, as buyers grow accustomed to getting personalized information on-demand without the help of a human sales rep, they’ll demand more of those types of hyper-relevant automated experiences, and much less human interaction. (After all, none of us long for the days of human toll collectors on the Golden Gate Bridge, do we?).

Three Key Drivers of Marketing’s Rise

Today, the Marketing and Sales funnel is changing rapidly. There are more channels than ever before and more interactions within each channel. As a result, marketers must assume responsibility for a greater portion of the sales process. But it does come with a new challenge: with the explosion of marketing channels and data, the complexity of marketing has increased geometrically.

In this new world, there are three key drivers that will continue to influence Marketing’s rise up the food chain:

1. The evolution of the Internet and mobile. It’s easy to overlook how much has changed in just 10 years. In 2005, the world hit a milestone with 1 billion Internet users. Ten years later, that number has tripled to more than 3 billion. And by 2020, that number is expected to exceed 4 billion. But even those numbers underestimate the pervasiveness of the web. Thanks to the explosion of mobile (and, in the future, wearables), people are always online. This changes how Sales and Marketing operate in very fundamental ways.
2. More channels = More complex buyer’s journey. As I mentioned above, the modern buyer’s journey — whether it’s for a consumer or business product — traverses a complex path through multiple channels and platforms en route to a sale. Whether it’s social media, email, user reviews, or the good old-fashioned telephone, there are countless ways to connect with customers (and them to us). This has turned Marketing into a bi-directional, social operation that requires the constant delivery of highly personal — and contextually relevant — campaigns.
3. The adaptation of human behavior. In tandem with our connectedness and the complex nature of the modern buyer’s journey, human behavior is changing, as well. For proof of that, just look at millennials — a group that comprises one-fourth of the U.S. population and boasts $200B in buying power. In this generation, word of mouth, authentic user reviews, and social media play an increasingly important part in driving sales. According to one study, 91 percent of millennials say they’d consider buying a product if a friend recommended it. This trend is another big win for Marketing, which has long been responsible for brand awareness and customer advocacy.

How These Trends Impact the Future of Marketing

Each of these trends increases the burden on Marketing, and requires more involvement from various disciplines under the modern marketing umbrella — which now includes nine unique roles, according to Slack’s CMO, Bill Macaitis.

Ultimately, more automation and connectedness means that the humans — whether B2B customers or B2C consumers — win. The more marketers (and their machines) deliver intelligent, authentic, personalized experiences that address consumers’ unique interests, the easier it will be to make the best decisions about products and solutions.

In many companies, Marketing’s impact on revenue generation is finally being acknowledged — a once unimaginable goal for marketers who were saddled with the “cost center” label. As a former VP of Marketing myself, and now as the CEO of a company that serves some of the best marketing teams in the world, I can’t wait for a day when all marketers see their hard work tied to revenue.

So, to my fellow marketers, I say: Bon Appétit!

The post Why Marketing Is Eating Sales appeared first on OpenView Labs.

One of the fastest-growing and most prevalent ways to attract and convert leads is through interactive marketing. Since BuzzFeed’s successful introduction of interactive quizzes, the model has been seen across industries as a way to connect with potential clients.

And there are statistics to back this new investment. A study by Demand Metric found that interactive content creates conversions 70 percent of the time, while passive content only does so 30 percent of the time. There are many types of interactive content that span across budgets, and it’s important to be engaging with your prospects. Here are a few options for getting started:

Utilize Free Resources

Visual content in general receives more attention; in fact, 40 percent of people respond better to visuals than plain text. You don’t have to be a graphic designer to make custom images. With sites like Canva, it is simple to create infographics, quizzes, Facebook ads, and more.

There are plenty of other options as well, like video. Eight out of the top 10 most shared Facebook posts feature a video. Polls are another option that allow an easy way for visitors to engage. There are free options, such as Wedgies, to get started. You can track your analytics, interactions, and more through their online interface. Experiment with different types of content to see what works best for your business.

Step Up with Premium Interactivity

Clickable infographics, quizzes and calculators are great for getting prospects involved in your brand. When they are able to physically interact with the content and see results, it encourages a relationship. Take this quiz about Netflix as an example. Dish Insider appeals to an entertainment-focused crowd, where Netflix is a popular topic. The quiz is funny and engaging, drawing people to interact with the website.

This quiz was created with SnapApp, a subscription service starting at $1,500 per month for ten pieces of content. This can be a large chunk of the marketing budget for small teams, but with case studies that show $1.3 million in net new sales pipeline in just 120 days, it is hard to deny that it is an effective system.

Hire a Firm for Visual Storytelling

If the budget is available, there is no more effective method of interactive marketing than having expert designers create your content. There’s a lot to keep in mind when creating a visual story: content, interactivity, design, text and brand cohesiveness, so it’s important to use a professional. Here are some examples of the most effective visual stories currently online.

While individual infographics and polls can boost responsiveness, there is a clear difference between having interactive aspects of a website, and a website being completely interactive. Visual stories draw prospects in during every step of their journey and encourage site involvement. Being able to effectively create a visual story is not an average skill for any marketing team. While the pricing can range in the thousands of dollars, when you really want to make an impact, it is best to reach out to design experts who can guarantee your story delivers its goal.

Visuals have become increasingly more important in digital marketing. From infographics and simple quizzes to entirely interactive websites, there are ways to connect with visitors across all budgets that have proven to increase engagement.

Lead generation is one of the fundamentals of business. So why is the perfect formula so elusive? For generations, people have been tinkering with all the available tools, years of advice from more experienced business experts and scraping together every potential lead they can find. Success seems almost random, at times.

The truth is pretty simple: there is no perfect formula. Past methods work sometimes, other times they don’t. Modern tools can help, sometimes they don’t. It is all based entirely around the circumstances of the person finding the leads, the time they put into it, and what they are starting with. Not to mention the current state and trends of the industry.

Unfortunately, just because there is no exact science to lead generation, it doesn’t mean the process is any less crucial. Without leads, you won’t have a customer base. Without a customer base, you don’t have a business.

What Can Be Done?

Lead generation is going to ebb and flow, and there will be times when you have a more solid list. Maybe instead of focusing so much on getting the leads themselves, you should be putting more energy into cultivating the ones you have.

You could find an endless supply of leads, and still end up with zero to show for it. The trick is knowing how to build on those leads, converting them into customers. The magical benefit? Once you have those customers, you have a new avenue for (you guessed it) more leads! Referrals are an almost infinite resource, after all.

Here are some ways that you can take those leads, turn them into sales, and in turn get more leads.

Make It Easy To Sign Up Online

In this day and age, there is no reason someone should have to go into a brick and mortar store, or call a hotline, in order to set up an account. Confirm one? Possibly. Want to go into a store to, say, try something on? Alright. But have to? Absolutely not.

There is nothing quite as frustrating for a customer than going onto a site thinking they can buy what they need, or sign up for something, and finding there is no way to do so. It takes literally minutes to set up a simple storefront or sign up form. There are plenty of tools that will let you do it.

When you make it easy for them, more leads are going to convert to sales. Then they are going to tell their friends, “Hey, you can get this off of the website!” It takes a couple of seconds for them to send a link to a buddy, then a few minutes for that buddy to check out the link and decide to make an impulse purchase.

You just have to hook them. Use simple bait.

All you need is a simple lead generation software which is pretty easy to use. I prefer GetResponse because I find it most user-friendly. They have a neat Facebook and WordPress integration too!

Provide Ways To Contact You Personally

One reason behind the growing popularity of startups is the personal touch. Customers, in particular B2B services, like being able to communicate right with the head of the company. It makes it feel like their needs are being met by a real person, not a faceless corporation.
You can benefit from the same idea by simply making yourself available. Provide your personal email address, or send emails from the company from it. Set up calls, or offer online chats.

Communicate through social media pages as yourself, not your brand. People will be drawn to that personal touch.

Diversify Your Social Media Strategy

Social media might be one of the best lead generation tools ever created. Someone can comment on your page, and immediately hundreds or thousands of friends will see it on their feed. Then there are the low-budget advertising options that spread your visibility even further.

But which social media platform is the best?
None of them; social media is about your marketing tactics and engagement, not which will somehow provide the better metrics. Creativity and perseverance will turn any platform into the right one for your particular company.

It is best to diversify your social strategy by having at least two platforms that are kept active, and a couple that are used for more narrow marketing.

For example:

• Twitter: Used for hashtag marketing, direct customer outreach, and influence connections (high activity).
• Facebook: Used for community building, content sharing, website CTA, and paid social advertising (high activity).
• Google Plus: Used as a business calling card and for local customer attraction (low activity in some niches).
• LinkedIn: Used for direct communication from CEO with other industry leaders, and B2B networking (moderate activity).

Of course, the exact platforms will depend on your needs and strategies. But gone are the day of only maintaining a single profile. The strengths and weaknesses will play out depending on your plans moving forward.

Whichever social media platforms you are most active on, be sure to somehow consolidate your activity on your site to expand your social media circles to your site visitors as well as add some trust signals to your website. Here are some ways to do that. For example, SiteGeek imports their users’ Twitter reviews of each hosting package (Click “Twitter” tab to see those).

Create Incentives For Referrals

Dropbox had an awesome promotion that gave users free storage space for referrals. Since Dropbox is a limited service without a pro account, this gave plenty of people the incentive to invite friends, family, and coworkers.

Creating an incentive for referrals, whether that is a free item, a discount, or even “points” toward something larger, is an easy lead generation tool with immediate benefits. Just make sure the incentive doesn’t cut into profits, and you are getting more than you are losing.

Stand Behind Your Product With Free Samples

Free samples are another fantastic way to catch new leads and make them into customers. It shows that you are willing to stand behind your product and that you believe in what you have to offer. People will appreciate your confidence, and get a taste of what you have to offer.

Then there is the industry standard. Tangible products are somewhat less likely to have free samples these days. But services are pretty much expected, with free trials par the course for both big and small names.

Create a 14-day free trial, or run a free sample promotion through your social media page.
If you don’t have a tangible product to send, consider sending free print-outs, booklets and brochures. Depending on your niche, you can come up with some genius ideas like free recipes (convincing people to buy more!), cheat-sheets and checklists. You don’t even have to manage printing and shipping yourself. There are incredibly low-cost solutions companies whose specialty is handling everything for you.

Have any lead generation or building tips? Let us know in the comments!

Image via Shutterstock

We’re kicking off Lifehacker’s 10th anniversary celebration with a simple list: 10 things every computer user should know how to do, complete with the Lifehacker guides that show you how. Whether you’re a tech nerd or feel completely lost with computers, these are useful for everyone.

Read more...

Guest author David Friedman is the cofounder and CEO of Ayla Networks.

Big data is one of the greatest economic opportunities of our time.

It’s also incredibly vague. You’ve probably been in conversations where the different participants were using “big data” to refer to (a) large amounts of data; (b) data sets that exceed the capabilities of traditional databases; or (c) the software tools employed to analyze the data sets in the first two definitions.

One of the most significant benefits of the Internet of Things is the fact that it will vastly expand our ability to monitor and measure things taking place the real world. A shop-floor manager knows that a small whining sound in a motor might mean trouble. A typical homeowner will also know that the ventilation system in your dryer can clog up with lint and create a safety hazard. Data systems are finally giving us an ability to understand these problems with precision.

The challenge, however, is developing systems and business models that make that information valuable. Think of smart thermostats for a moment. During a peak power emergency, utilities and third party energy service companies will want exact updates on power consumption every minute: Being able to precisely fine-tune power and maximize savings can be the difference between a normal summer day and a debilitating brownout. But between the hours of midnight and 4 am, the need for information is far less urgent: The data will mostly be valuable to determine long-term trends.

Now think from the consumer’s perspective. Data updates even at, say, 15-minute intervals would lead to overload. It wouldn’t just be worthless: it would create nuisance that would detract from its value. Instead, consumers probably just want a monthly summary which points out a few trends.

I talk to people all the time about the “data value” challenge. The below list is a summary of the general categories of data and the opportunities manufacturers and service providers are pursuing. 

The Five Kinds Of Big Data

Status Data

Are the air compressors for the cold storage unit working? Did one just suddenly drop in performance? Status data essentially providers consumers and or businesses with an ongoing EKG of the world’s things. 

Status data is the most prevalent, and most basic, type of IoT data. Virtually everything will generate data like this as a baseline. In many markets, status data will be mostly used as raw material for more complex analyses, but in many markets it will have a significant value of its own. 

Look at what Streetline had done for parking spots. The company has created a system that notifies subscribers about open parking spaces. Sure, the long-term data helps city planners, but to most consumers the immediate status data is the most important thing. 

Location Data

Where is my product? Did it make it to its destination? Location is a logical extension of GPS. GPS is great, but it doesn’t work well indoors, in crowded spaces or in rapidly changing environments. Someone trying to track pallets and robotic forklifts will want real-time information. 

Agriculture, which could become an early IoT market, will make extensive use of location data because owners have to track equipment across huge geographical areas. While we’ve already seen the debut of consumer products so people can locate their keys, a larger markets exists for serving commercial and industrial customers, particularly where there are numerous assets to track, few employees, and need to track things in real, and near-real, time. Developing the Foursquare for paint warehouses is a huge opportunity. 

Automation Data

Consumers are rightly skeptical about automation. You don’t want to be stuck in a dimly lit office or a chilly hotel room because some building management system care more about saving a few dollars than your comfort. Automation also creates security issues. 

Nonetheless, automation is inevitable. No one is going to sit with their finger on the thermostat to save $4.75. Likewise, lighting systems that depend on human interaction fail. (Some smart-lighting manufacturers want to use their sensor data to tell store managers when new checkout lines need to be opened.) The challenge will revolve around carving out applications and rules of conduct. 

Actionable Data

Think of this as status data with a follow-up plan. Buildings use 73% of the electricity in the country and a good portion—up to 30%, according to the EPA—is wasted. Why? Energy is a secondary issue for most building owners. They want to fix it but worry that the cost, time and headaches will outweigh the benefits. 

There are two ways around this problem: automation (see above) that can change the immediate state of a system, and persuasion that can get people to change their behavior or make long term investments. Opower has helped pioneer a solution to the persuasion problem by showing consumers and businesses how they compare to their neighbors along with data. According to their own studies, persuasion data can cut energy consumption by 2 to 3 percent. 

Creating A Feedback Loop With IoT Data

Do you know what your customers think? You may believe you do, but you're probably wrong. In the near future, manufacturers will analyze data from their connected products to better understand how their products are used in the wild. Most companies right now have no idea how their products are used. They get shipped through distribution, bought at retailers, and end up at homes or offices. The user and the manufacturer rarely, if ever, communicate. 

IoT will create a feedback loop from consumer to manufacturer, where product builders will examine real-world behaviors—with the appropriate levels of privacy, security, and anonymity—to encourage continued product improvements and innovations.

Update: Due to an editing error, the "Automation Data" section was mislabeled.

Photo by Jakob Montrasio

Why risk losing a sale because of your image? Is there any chance that the deal you just lost didn’t have anything to do with your product, your company or your preparation? Is there any chance, even just a little, that it had something to do with your image?

It would be great if all that mattered was doing a good job, but whether you like it or not, your credibility with your customer is affected by your image. With the right image, you can convey confidence and credibility before you ever say a word. So, what is your image?

Your image is how you seem to your customer. It is how you represent yourself. It’s what you wear and how you wear it. It’s what you say and how you say it (or write it). It’s your mannerisms, gestures, posture, smile or anything else that affects the way the other person perceives you. And now, to make things even more difficult, it is the way you portray yourself online. I’m not suggesting that we all need to have the same image, just that we need to be thoughtful about how the image we portray is received by the people we want to influence.

Ask yourself these questions about your sales image.

How do I look?

What do the clothes I wear, and the way I wear them, say about me? Does everything fit? Am I a wrinkled mess? Are my shoes and clothes appropriate? Is my hair neat? Am I well groomed? What about my car? Do I have to apologize when people get in?

How do I come across?

How do I sound? Is my voice pleasing? Do I sound enthusiastic and energetic when I speak? Do I convey the passion I have for helping people find a solution to meet their goals? Do I sound confident and knowledgeable? Do I know myself, and how to best communicate with others?

What is my online reputation?

Can customers and prospects easily find me? If they do, what will they see? Will it be embarrassing? Is the information complete and up to date? Is my online image building people’s confidence in me? Does it show that I am knowledgeable and can add value? Am I open and welcoming when people want to connect? Do I post interesting content? Do I stay in touch with the people in my online network?

If your image is not what you want, don’t worry, you can hack your way back.

Here are three hacks to change your sales image.

1. Your Look

Take control of the way you look. If you are not a fashionista and don’t know what to wear to give yourself confidence and authority, it’s OK. Starting with clothes that fit well will make you look and feel more confident right off the bat. If you think you need a little more help than that, I bet you have a friend who has been dying to restyle you. If not, contact an image consultant like I did. I recommend Kathleen Audet of Your Authentic Image.

2. Your Style

Be aware and in control of your personality. Think about how to make the people around you feel comfortable. Think about the tone and volume of your voice. Think about the words you choose. Make eye contact and smile. Find an appropriate balance between serious and funny. If you still aren’t sure, find out what others think about you and the way you operate. Ask those closest to you for some tough feedback. You can also get an idea for yourself by recording your calls and videotaping yourself presenting. Finally, if you want to seem confident, you need to be confident. Do your homework and show up prepared, and your confidence will shine through.

3. Your Brand

With Google and social media, your online reputation is increasingly important. Google yourself and see what you find. That is what your prospects will find. Think about what you are posting on social media and whether it is helping or hurting your reputation. Make a distinction between your business and personal social media. Steer clear of posting controversial political statement or unprofessional pictures of you and your friends. Make sure your social profiles, especially LinkedIn, have a professional photo. If you aren’t sure how to do it, read 10 Ways to Commit to LinkedIn.

The goal is to be successful. Don’t let your image or your reputation be the reason you can’t close the deal.

Learn more sales tips with this free ebook below.

Ever had a promising opportunity fizzle, fade and disappear on you? There’s nothing more frustrating.

In the high-value, complex B2B deals of today, there is always the danger this could happen. To try and prevent this, there are some early critical steps you can take in order to give you the best chance of winning the deal.

1. Uncover your buyer’s decision criteria
2. Identify your buyer’s key players
3. Have an effective strategy for dealing with enemies

Establish the buyer’s decision criteria

The first thing you must do is understand how you and your competitors are being measured. Uncover the buyer’s decision criteria and you’re well on the way to clarifying that picture.

Never guess or assume you know – but peek inside the customer’s mind and discover your relative competitive strength. Try these questions:

• What are the most important criteria in your purchase decision?
• How is the decision going to be made?
• How was the decision criteria formulated?
• Can you prioritize these decision points by each key player involved in the decision process?

Who’s calling the shots?

Once you develop insight into both the formal and informal decision processes, you should be able to determine which people will have the most influence, and understand the customer’s Political Structure as it relates to your opportunity.

Remember the people with whom you need to be aligned are not always the people at the top of the hierarchy. The key questions to ask here are:

• Who are the most powerful people involved in this decision and do they want me to win?
• Why would they want me to win? What’s in it for them?
• Are they willing to influence or change the formal and informal decision criteria for me?
• Are they willing to get involved and have they the ability to create or maintain a sense of urgency for this project?

Know where you stand with key players

It is important to recognize the status relationship that you can build with key players in the buying process. Establishing and developing the right relationship with the right players for the opportunity you are pursuing can be invaluable to your success, now and in the future. There are five different relationships you can establish:

• Mentor
• Supporter
• Neutral
• Non-Supporter
• Enemy

As the names suggest, some relationships are positive and others less so.

We always place a huge emphasis on identifying and winning over the Key Players in a deal. Supporters and Mentors are critical to your success. Neutral and non-supportive Key Players have to be identified and perhaps swung to your cause.

That leaves one tricky customer – your Enemy

Ignore Enemies at your peril. Enemies inside the customer who are influential Key Players could potentially derail a deal which you’re confident of winning.

Today, B2B customers are becoming more and more hesitant to sign off without the consensus of everyone on the buying decision team. This means any Enemy on the decision team has more veto power than ever before. You need a strategy to deal with them.

How to handle an Enemy

It’s never going to be easy, so start by getting help. Ask your colleagues, supporters, and mentors, internal and external to the customer, to give you advice and aid. They may be able to help bring the Enemy on-side, or neutralize their influence, or at least they can possibly give you valuable insight which can help you avoid making a bad situation worse.

It’s usually very hard to bring an active Enemy around to your perspective. We’re not saying don’t try, but understand it’s a tough battle to win. Any active Enemy will usually feel that your offering will harm the company, or themselves personally, and they may well be actively supporting your competitor.

Often the best you can do is seek to neutralize the person. Prevent them from hurting your deal. As part of this you can meet with them personally to discuss their objectives and argue your side, or you can invite them to key meetings so that you and your Supporters can together try to influence them.

Always be careful which approach you take. In trying to change an Enemy’s mind, you can instead reinforce their opposing position. This is why you should always first and foremost seek advice and guidance. And find out why they’re against you.

Three reasons an Enemy may be against you

Here are the three main reasons an enemy may be against you, and how we recommend you take steps to neutralize them.

1. They have Product or Vendor Bias

In this case, they are simply not inclined to vote for your solution. You can either seek peaceful co-existence, acknowledge their position and strive for mutual respect, or try to change their mind. As previously warned, beware trying to change minds. It can increase resistance.

2. You have misaligned Agendas

If your agendas are misaligned, you may be able to remedy the situation. Try to clear up any misconceptions. Or agree to disagree and isolate the cause and impact of the misalignment, in a way that it will not prevent the deal.

3. They have a Personal Conflict

This is a tricky situation when personal conflicts are involved. In this case, you can change your approach to present a more palatable face to the issue, or you may need to change the individual or individuals working the deal on your side.

A deal where you have to neutralize an Enemy can be tough. But if you seek help and follow a careful strategy, it’s not a lost cause.

Do you know any other strategies for dealing with active Enemies in a deal?

Don’t be shy, comment below!

Have you ever thought about using live streaming app Periscope for a social HR campaign? We recently interviewed Lars Schmidt, founder of Amplify Talent and employer brand strategist at Hootsuite to find out more. You can hear it below or read an unabridged version of this article at Link Humans, enjoy!

What is Hootsuite Open Source HR?

Open Source HR, or #HootHROS if you want to put that in hashtag form, was really a campaign that we put together.

Pretty amazing that @Hootsuite has made their #HR open source. #HootHROS #HCIchat

— Namely (@NamelyHR) July 23, 2015

Ambrosia Vertesi, HootSuite’s VP of Talent, is a good friend and she’s the person that brought me in. She and I have a very similar ethos around the world of work and particularly around social HR and trying to share and help people understand some of the value and advantages of bringing Social into HR operations.

Being a leader in social HR is one of Hootsuite’s talent groups’ objectives, and so they really want to be able to lead the way, but also show people the way. It’s one thing to lead the way [but] it’s another to do that and bring everybody along with you. That’s really been ingrained in their culture, including their organisational culture, for years.

When I came in, we started having a conversation around how we might bring the idea of Open Source inside of HR, and ultimately where we landed is the concept of Open Source HR. The idea is that we want to start working out loud on some of the projects that we’re doing, where really the whole HR team is empowered to share some of the things that they’re working on, what they’re learning, where’s they’re finding inspiration.

What we’ll also be doing is creating a series of case studies that will really go into a lot of detail on particular HR projects or recruiting projects that we’ve developed within Hootsuite, but beyond just saying, “Hey, here’s a thing we did” and really breaking it down to say things like, “Here’s where the idea came from. Here’s how we pitched it internally. These are what the expected outcomes are. This is how we executed it. This is what the actual outcomes were” and then ultimately even, “Here’s what we got wrong.”

Just saw the final copy for the new #HootHROS case study from @derekisley – the best global recruiting dashboard I've seen. Can't wait!

— Lars Schmidt (@ThisIsLars) July 22, 2015

We want to really be open about that, especially around social HR. There’s a degree of risk-taking that I think takes place, which is a good thing, but it also means you are going to fail and you are going to get some things wrong – we think it’s important to be able to share that too. It’s not all unicorns and roses – you’re able to say, “Yeah, we thought this was going to be how this would turn out and some of these things were right but actually some of these things were wrong.” That’s going to be a key part of each case study we do.

Are you showcasing best social HR practices to inspire Hootsuite’s clients?

[We’re trying to inspire] the clients and then the HR community as a whole. I hear you say, “best practice” – a quote Bill Boorman uses all the time is:

Test practice, not best practice.

…which I think, particularly when you’re kind of at the leading edge of trying to do some things that haven’t been done before and experiment in certain ways, it takes a track record of success before I think things really get to become best practice.

Much of what we’re doing in the space tends to be test practice because there isn’t really a precedent. You’re just trying to figure out. You have a hunch, you’re not just blindly saying, “Let’s just do this” – you have a feeling what the outcome may be, but until you actually do it, there’s no way to really know.

What is the difference between social HR and social recruiting?

To me, social recruiting is a subset of social HR – even within recruiting you’ve got different subsets: you have social sourcing which is using social media to find talent; you have employer branding which one might argue sits either in recruiting or in HR, so that could be linked to either.

I think social HR is the idea of having your entire team being open to sharing on HR, sharing best practices, and even interacting within your organisation. One of the things that’s really unique about Hootsuite’s HR team, and this is a testament to Ambrosia’s leadership within that group, is that HR within Hootsuite is looked at as an innovation-driving function within the team. It’s very well-established and well-respected as one of leading teams that takes risks and tries new things.

I haven’t really encountered that in many organisations where HR has that earned rep of being a den of innovation within an organisation, particularly like Hootsuite, so Ambrosia and her team have really done a tremendous job of positioning, by taking risks, by really embracing social HR, and also getting the rest of the organisation to adopt some of their approaches that I think you don’t typically find.

What was operation Follow the Sun and where did you get the name from?

The story of Follow the Sun started at South by Southwest.

Ambrosia and I were at Craig Fisher‘s TalentNet conference and we were having a conversation, Meerkat had just launched. We were using Meerkat to live stream a live podcast that we were doing. We were talking about the employer branding possibilities of live-streaming in general.

A few weeks later, Periscope came out and that was right around the time that I came on to Hootsuite. Ambrosia and I were having a conversation around how we could use Periscope to really convey the global scope of Hootsuite. We were operating in nine different offices and we wanted to make sure we could help prospects get a sense of that global footprint and the unique culture within Hootsuite. We thought live streaming would be an interesting way to do that.

The idea for Follow the Sun was we wanted to start in Singapore and actually work our way East, around the globe throughout the day, showcasing a different office every hour on the hour. So we started in Singapore, we moved to Bucharest, moved to London, to Boston, to São Paulo, all the way over to the headquarters in Vancouver. We wanted to literally Follow the Sun as it turned around the earth – using that same approach to showcase different offices, and some of our peeps from office to office throughout the day.

What were the objectives with this campaign?

It was something that was still fairly new. Obviously Periscope had just come out, so we wanted to develop some proficiency in Periscope. We wanted to go from a branding standpoint but also we wanted to get some of the team involved in using it. We wanted, from an employee branding standpoint, to raise awareness for our global operations, and also some of the unique culture that we have, and obviously showcasing our talent within some of the offices around the world. I think outside of that, we really wanted to kind of get people to start understanding that we’re going to start using the Hootsuite Life channel on Periscope to do these kind of things.

Other than that, really to not screw up. We listed that as an actual outcome. I think this is actually the first branding campaign that ever happened on Periscope, particularly of a global nature like this, so it was a pretty complex operation, with lots of different people using it. We used LastPass to actually allow all of the broadcasters to log into Periscope using the Hootsuite Life account.

So, we’re doing this complex, global, choreographed effort with people who, many times, had not used Periscope before, [and] also using an account that was not their own and getting access to that through LastPass. There’s a lot that could have gone wrong, but I think we were pretty pleased that it went relatively smoothly.

You started talking about Meerkat and then switched to Periscope?

Within Hootsuite, we never really activated anything on Meerkat. I think when both came out, the organisation got together and we decided that Periscope would be something that we would be focusing our efforts on. Meerkat, surprisingly, actually weathered that storm in terms of the API being cut off, fairly well. I think they’ve tried to establish more of a niche with musicians and live music – I know Madonna debuted one of her new tracks on Meerkat. Meerkat’s demise is not quite there yet.

But, I think organisationally, it would make more sense, it would be easier for our community to follow along with us if we went with one and focused on that, and that was Periscope.

When you did this global campaign, how many people were Periscoping?

There were nine people. Every office had one point person that was the broadcaster – so viewers were actually able to get a physical look at the office space, see some of the people. Even though there’s one broadcaster, many times there would be other people who would come into play and answer questions from the audience. The format [they did] was like an AMA on Reddit – the broadcaster would be taking people around but they’d also be answering questions, coming in on Periscope as the tour was taking place.

In terms of results, can you share what you’ve achieved?

We had over 5,000 viewers for the live broadcast, which was pretty good. It’s kind of hard to tell, “Is that a lot?” “Is that a little?” We had that broken down actually by office.

If you’re familiar with Periscope, you can “heart” something if you like it – if you tap the screen it pops a little heart up. We had a little over 11,000 hearts across the nine broadcasts. Our Periscope Hootsuite Life channel gained about 230 followers. Not much lift on the Hootsuite Life account on Twitter. We thought we’d get a little bit more, and we also saw a slight lift in career site visits and applications immediately after the broadcast.

Live broadcasting isn’t new. There were apps like Socialcam and lots of other apps that allowed you to do that even years ago, but I think the market wasn’t necessarily ready for them. The timing I think is right now, where you’re starting to see broader adoption, and because it’s so easy to just share a live broadcast. I think it really makes it very easy to connect with fans and audience and ultimately, people you’re trying to potentially hire.

[Tweet “Periscope makes it very easy to connect with people you’re trying to hire. #smlondon”]

What did you learn and were there any HR takeaways?

We definitely got some things wrong in the broadcast. We didn’t know at the time that once you show a live broadcast on Periscope, it can then be watched within 24 hours. If somebody misses the live broadcast but they’re there within 24 hours they can still see the video. After 24 hours, it’s gone. We didn’t know that. So we kind of positioned, and our intent was that we were going to save the tweets that people sent out when the broadcast went live and compile them in a blog post. So then, we thought those videos would be accessible, and people could watch them. Well they weren’t, and so we were putting together the blog post, we were clicking the links, and it was saying, “Broadcast not found.” Then we realised, you know what? It’s not available.

When you’re doing a Periscope broadcast, you can also save the video to your phone and your camera roll, which we had people do as a backup. The problem with that is, it doesn’t show the chat window coming up and it doesn’t show the hearts.

Most importantly, since it was kind of an AMA format, the broadcaster was answering questions that were coming in from the chat window. So if you had that video saved to a camera roll, you can’t see those questions. So it’s kind of a weird experience to watch that video after, and we weren’t really able to use that. That was something we got wrong, we didn’t realise that.

I think another thing that we learned, certainly from an HR standpoint, is that we could have done a better job at directing the broadcasters to have a stronger call to action around hiring. Specifically sharing some of the open positions they had in each local market. I think that would’ve been a great opportunity from a recruiting perspective, because as you have local fans watching the local broadcast and they get excited about the Singapore office or the São Paulo office and say, “Hey I might wanna work there,” we didn’t really give them any guidance on the kind of positions we were hiring, or how they could apply and I think, particularly from an HR standpoint, a recruiting standpoint, that was a missed opportunity.

What will happen in the social HR space over the next 3 years?

I’m curious to see how virtual reality continues to mature. Oculus is obviously getting a lot of buzz. There will be more platforms coming on the market soon. I think if virtual does become fairly mainstream, I think that there could be some really interesting implications for recruiting and hiring with that.

I think we’re also starting to see, this is something I’m really happy about, a shift in approach around job descriptions. As much as I think recruiting has evolved over the last couple years, and particularly in recruiting technology, job descriptions, for the most part, haven’t. They’re probably one of the least evolved tools we have in recruiting, so I’m starting to see more visual job descriptions, more dynamic job descriptions, more video job descriptions, and most importantly, mobile-optimised job descriptions as well. I think that we’re still somewhat limited by our ATSs in that evolution. So hopefully their capabilities will start to evolve more rapidly to allow for this.

My hope is that job descriptions will look pretty different than they do today in 3 years time.

As a designer, I create images day in and day out. I can quickly rattle off the long list of reasons to create visuals for your thought leadership:

• generate more content
• repurpose existing content
• promote an idea in more channels
• craft more compelling stories
• simplify complex ideas
• grab attention
• enhance audience’s memory retention
• add a level of authority… wait, what?

If you’re skeptical by that last one, let me say I was initially a bit surprised myself.

After sharing a couple of pull quote images I designed for a colleague’s blog post, she admitted to struggling during the writing process.

Her reaction to the graphics was a boost in confidence. “When I saw the graphic you did with my quote,” she said. “I thought, ‘Wow. I wrote that and it’s not bad at all.’”

The Psychology Behind Visual Authority

Once upon a time before the digital revolution, producing visuals was a very expensive endeavor.

Publishers only commissioned photographs, graphics and video for information that was worthy of such space, time and resources.

For those alive before the internet, digital cameras, smart phones or free photo-editing software – GenX and Baby Boomers – the idea that graphics equal authority is deeply embedded.

Users with less experience online will give more authority to content with graphics, even poorer quality images. While it’s true that someone is still clicking on those spammy banner ads, ask yourself if that persona aligns with your targeted audience.

And then, there are the Millennials. Growing up in a world of quick and cheap graphics, they have come to expect all content to contain graphics.

For them, a lack of visuals raises a red flag. They will likely be savvier than other generations in spotting a better quality visual, and the level of confidence they assign to your visuals will directly relate to the level of skill that went into production.

With Great Power, Comes Great Responsibility

While polished graphics can add authority, make sure your visuals are backed by valid, sourced material to avoid compromising your reputation.

Always follow these guidelines to ensure your credibility:

• When visualizing quotes, confirm the exact statement and original source. Keep a record on hand for easy reference.
• When incorporating facts or statistics, include your source(s) within the graphic and either include a URL or be ready to provide a link to it upon request.
• When incorporating or curating external graphics, respect their copyright. Confirm that it can legally be published for your intended use and review sourcing requirements.

Today’s buyers demand more from brands’ content. Download The Buyer 2.0 Content Strategy Checklist to read more tips on enhancing your content marketing and visual storytelling strategy.

By now, reading and writing an email is a pretty mundane thing. We send and receive over 100 billion business emails per day (and that’s not even including all those “Yes, I’m alive and eating my veggies – don’t worry” emails to your mom). Email is second nature to us, and with an ROI of 4,300%, it’s also a safe marketing bet.

But do you remember the last time you received an email and got excited? Inspired? Blown away?

We do.

All of these emails came from apps we use and love. Coincidence? Nope!

Let us elaborate.

Why Apps Can (and Should) Send the Best Emails

As interactive pieces of software that live on one of the most personal tech devices out there, apps are a treasure trove of behavioral and profile data. This puts apps in a great position to send incredibly personalized and perfectly timed emails.

And when we say “incredibly personalized,” we mean more than just “Hi, [first name].” We’re talking about apps that dynamically customize an email’s content so it resonates with each recipient.

And when we say “perfectly timed,” we mean more than just emailing people when they’re actually awake. We’re referring to apps that send delightful things to their users’ inboxes at the right time in their relationship with their brand.

That’s why apps send the best emails ever.

4 Examples of Absolutely Rockin’ App Emails (With 12 Takeaways!)

Now that we’ve vouched for the awesomeness of app emails, it’s time to share some examples. Whether it was their impressive design, their spot-on message, or their opportune timing, the following app emails totally knocked our socks off.

1. Etsy’s “July 4th Holiday Inspiration” Email 

Why We Love This App Email

• The subject line is short, sweet, and relatable because we all have a tendency to procrastinate from time to time (been there, done that, right?)
• Delivered on July 1st to inboxes, just in the nick of time!
• The email’s layout of colorful, cascading images is pleasing to scroll through
• Festive text is used to both organize the email and help convey the theme
• Decor images deep link to relevant app screen while food images drive people to Etsy’s online blog thus allowing users to connect with Etsy on multiple channels
• The CTA is unique and exciting
• The email is not blatantly promotional; instead, it focuses on creating an Independence Day to remember
• The email was segmented and sent only to app users living in the United States

Coordinating a get-together can be stressful – even in the summertime. There are about a million things you need to consider if you want to throw that Pinterest-perfect weekend soiree for your friends and family. How should I decorate? What should I cook? Which games will we play? What about dessert?

Last month, Etsy’s app stepped in to help make party planning less painful. A few days before July 4th, Etsy sent its US-based app users a complete Independence Day guide, which was chock full of inspiration, ideas, and American patriotism designed to pump us up for the upcoming holiday.

The bright and cheery visuals immediately captured our attention, the clever national anthem references filled us with pride, and the collage of both in-app products (party supplies) and website content (recipes) showcased Etsy’s versatility. This email was designed to inject creativity into its users events, not just sell handmade goods. That’s why there are no prices listed – this email is not selling in-app products, it’s selling the experiences you can create with them. 

As an added bonus, who doesn’t love a fun CTA that breaks the traditional “Shop Now” or “Buy Now” mold? Etsy’s “Cue the Fireworks” CTA makes you want to celebrate and throw one heck of a party.

Key Takeaway #1: Segment your audience by profile data

Getting your targeting right is essential to earning a high email open and click rate. By segmenting users based on profile fields (like “location” or “country”), you can ensure your seasonal emails don’t seem stale or out of place.

Key Takeaway #2: Use high-quality images

A beautiful picture is better than a thousand eloquent words. Make stunning visuals an essential part of your email.

Key Takeaway #3: Showcase your brand/app’s experience

Don’t simply send an email that looks like a product catalog. Instead, pair things together to paint an aspirational picture of what people can do with your app.

2. Reserve’s “New App Feature Alert” Email  

Why We Love This App Email

• Subject line is succinct and highlights Reserve’s goal of improving its app based on feedback
• Prominence of Reserve’s logo and use of brand colors and typeface builds brand recognition
• The header image and text completely encapsulate what the email is about (dining out happily with friends)
• The copy is to the point, easy to read, and centers on the user benefits of this new app feature
• Minimal text, a single image, good use of white space, and one main CTA give this email a razor-sharp focus
• By proudly announcing new app features, this email elicits re-engagement and drives app traffic

Apps are not static; they continually evolve with their users and the mobile landscape. But how do you inform people about a new app feature or a cool new upgrade? Do you wait for them to stumble upon it when they re-launch your app? Or, can you take a more proactive approach?

Reserve’s app brilliantly uses email marketing to unveil big new features. For example, when Reserve added check-splitting functionality to its dining concierge app, it sent the above email announcement to its users.

We love this email because everything about it, from the minimalist design to the brevity of the copy, is centered on a clear purpose: to create awareness about a feature release and consequently encourage people to try it out in their app. There’s no jargon, distracting visuals, or secondary offers. This email isn’t full of corporate verbiage – it sounds polite and human as it describes how effortlessly you can dine out with others. After all, we do expect apps to know us, listen to us, and speak our language.

Key Takeaway #4: Announce major app changes via email

One popular use case for emailing your audience is to inform them of significant app updates. When a new feature rolls out, actively tell people how it’s going to improve their lives and make your app better. Invite your users back into your app to test out the new functionality, submit feedback, or give additional suggestions. Make sure your users know that their opinions matter.

Key Takeaway #5: Write concise copy that resonates with your audience

Don’t be afraid to keep your app emails simple. Just because you can make your emails long, doesn’t mean you should unnecessarily. Find one main point you want to drive home and communicate it plainly in a tone and voice your users will understand.

3. Zillow’s “Upcoming Open Houses” Informational Email  

Why We Love This App Email

• The subject line sums up the email ever so nicely (it answers the “What?” “Why?” and “Where?” questions)
• This email was delivered around 5:00 PM on a Friday, just as people start thinking about their weekend plans
• Every important detail about the open houses is listed in a clutter-free chart
• Bold font colors make time-sensitive information stand out right away
• The CTA teases new in-app content to drive app launches

Lets face it: although we love our apps, we don’t spend every hour interacting with them. As a result, we’re bound to miss things here and there, which can suck – unless apps email us with important news in real-time.

That’s exactly what Zillow did. Even though this email doesn’t have a groundbreaking design, it earns a ton of points in our books for being one of the most useful and relevant emails we’ve ever received.

How? Because Zillow paid attention to the types of properties we searched for and the neighborhoods we browsed inside its app. Then, it used that in-app behavioral data to find similar listings (less work for us!) and emailed them to us as soon as those properties scheduled open houses (so convenient!). Plus, the email was neatly organized and contained all the key details about each piece of real estate.

In short, Zillow’s app uses email to make sure latent app users never miss out on important in-app events. It monitors new listings and emails them to interested buyers as soon as they see a dream property match.

Key Takeaway #6: Segment your audience by in-app behavior

People turn to apps when they want to efficiently accomplish a specific task. So, pay attention to what your users do inside your app. What screens do they visit? What do they click? What actions do they take? Use this data on in-app activity to segment and personalize your email campaigns.

Key Takeaway #7: Provide real value

App emails don’t always need to be self-promotional. Send emails that are intrinsically valuable in solving your users’ problems. Send emails that help users achieve their goals.

Key Takeaway #8: Surface the freshest in-app content

If your app is a content hub (like a lifestyle, news, or media app) you know that things change quickly. Information goes out of date and new information rises to the forefront. Turn to email marketing to keep your users in the loop of key in-app happenings so they never loose out on taking action.

4. Keep’s Action-Eliciting “Welcome Gift” Email 

Why We Love This App Email

• Email header is conversational and gets us to reflect on our initial app browsing experience
• The horizontal and hexagonal arrangement of images is a clever way of displaying Keep’s expansive product portfolio without taking up precious page space
• This email is both welcoming and nurturing because it encourages new users to complete a key in-app event (i.e. make their first purchase)
• It’s well designed and well branded
• The copy is straightforward, crisp, and strategically placed above the fold (so it’s visible without needing to scroll)
• It passes the “blink test” with flying colors

Welcome emails can be so… dull. Often, they just regurgitate an app’s benefits and contain nothing compelling for the recipient.

Keep’s refreshingly user-centric welcome email smashes this mold. Right from the get-go, Keep creates a wonderful first impression by giving new users a gift. And who doesn’t like free stuff?

This email starts off by posing an innocent question, which gets us to think about our very first app interaction. Then, as we’re reminiscing about all the cool products we checked out inside the app, we’re given a discount code to spur the purchase. This is a great tee up that can turn new users into valuable customers at the onset.

What’s more, the unique arrangement of images nicely borders the email body and draws the reader’s eyes to the main message. It’s also an ingenious way to showcase the diversity of Keep’s curated collection without making the email seem too long. Needless to say, we’re huge fans of the clean and crisp layout because it’s easy to digest, easy on the eyes, and it makes it easy to remember the key point.

Key Takeaway #9: Give welcome emails a bigger purpose

Don’t send dry and pointless welcome emails. Make them action-oriented and gently nudge new users into converting. For example, give them a discount code, a freebie, or another enticing promotional offer.

Key Takeaway #10: Put your main message above the fold

What’s the most important thing you are trying to tell your app users? Put this above the fold in your email so people see it right away without needing to scroll down.

Key Takeaway #11: Never underestimate the design importance of whitespace

Brands can get fairly creative with their email designs, but you should always be mindful of preserving whitespace. Whitespace creates balance and harmony between the elements in your email.

Key Takeaway #12: Use the blink test

If you stared at your email for 3-5 seconds and closed your eyes, could you remember what it’s about? Use the blink test to evaluate whether or not you’re effectively getting your point across. Then, tweak as necessary.

Send App Emails That Wow

Apps need email. Email marketing allows mobile marketers to send users longer form content and it also helps you reach latent users who have disabled push notifications. Put another way, apps need email to retain their users and build deeper relationships.

But email marketing also needs apps because apps have the power to send the best emails.

With rich in-app behavioral and profile data at your fingertips, there’s simply no reason to send app emails that are just okay, average, or meh.

Customize your content. Fine-tune the messaging. And nail your timing. Send app emails that rock.

Your app has conquered the smartphone. Now own the inbox too.

Europeans and the rest of the world love diesel, Americans not so much. Here the diesel is considered a dirty fuel despite the emergence of clean diesel in the last few years.

Diesel and gasoline-powered cars are quite different in the way they drive, typically diesel cars have a lot of torque, and need lower revs, although many now have turbochargers and produce torque at low revs. Diesels typically don’t rev much past 5K and for this reason don’t offer the sportiness of many gas-powered equivalents. Diesel technology has been around for years and is very popular among European car buyers.

The German manufacturers, Audi, VW, Mercedes, and BMW have most of their models available with a diesel engine option. Here in the US Diesel power is typically available in larger pickup trucks and heavy machinery. The diesel internal combustion engine differs from the gasoline powered Otto cycle by using highly compressed hot air to ignite the fuel rather than using a spark plug (compression ignition rather than spark ignition). In the true diesel engine, only air is initially introduced into the combustion chamber.

Diesel is more efficient and currently is cheaper in most states than regular gasoline. Diesel cars return much better EPA numbers and several offer in excess of 50mpg.

So let’s take a look at 6 of the Fastest Accelerating Diesel Powered Cars, some of which are available in the US and some are not.

Audi A6 TDI

Numbers: 428 lb ft, 0 – 60 in 5.3 seconds.

Audi’s A6 is a bit of a sleeper with only 240 hp, however, a the TDI’s whopping 428 lb ft will have it surging through license losing speeds via its silky smooth eight-speed automatic gearbox.

BMW 335d xDrive

Numbers: 465 lb ft, 0 – 60 mph in 4.9 seconds.

This has the excellent 3.0-litre twin-turbo straight-six diesel engine that producing 308 bhp and 465 lb /ft of torque. You can only get one with BMW’s all-wheel drive system, xDrive, and the wagon shown above is not available here.

Audi A8 4.2 TDI

Numbers: 627 lb/ft, 0 – 60 in 4.8 seconds.

The not available over here Audi A8 4.2 TDI is almost as fast as the S8 and has more torque, 627 ft lb to be exact. Also like the S8 it doesn’t look fast, but put your right foot down and it surges forward effortlessly.

BMW M550d xDrive

Numbers: 546 lb ft, 0 – 60 in 4.7 seconds.

Another glorious car not available her in the US. Anyway, this car has huge reserves of power from the 3.0-litre twin-turbo straight-six and xDrive all-wheel-drive. 546 ft lb of torque is available from 2,000 rpm. It’s not an M5 but it’s close.

Audi R8 6.0 Quattro V12 TDI

Numbers: 738 lb ft, 0 – 60 in 4.2 seconds.

Powered by a Hungarian-built twin-turbodiesel V12, this car will do 60mph in 4.2sec, 100mph in less than 10sec, and more than 190mph flat out.

And the fastest is……………………………………….

Trident Iceni

Numbers: 700 lb ft, 0 – 60 in 3.7 seconds.

Under the curvaceous bodywork lies a 395bhp 6.6-litre V8 turbodiesel engine developing 700 lb ft of torque. Coupled with a six-speed automatic gearbox, it is able to propel the Iceni from 0-60mph in 3.7 seconds and on to a top speed of over 190mph.

For many companies, the “why” in building out a sales development team is not the concern. Sales development teams have proven themselves to be efficient and predictable revenue models with scalable results. Executives know why they need an SDR team.

The problem is the “how.”

Despite their knowledge of the benefits of sales development, many execs continue to push back for various reasons. We don’t have the budget. We have Marketing handling lead nurturing. We don’t want our prospect’s first conversation to be with anyone but the VP of Sales or CEO.

But the answer to these objections is simple: specialization. No matter the size of your team (or your budget), or who you currently have nurturing new leads, implementing a sales development process is attainable through specialization. Having a rep focused solely on prospecting and one-on-one conversations with prospects, at least for a few days a week, will make an impact on your overall value.

Take it from Chris Flores. Chris started as Namely’s one and only sales development rep (behind the CEO and Sales Director) and has quickly risen in the ranks since then. As an advocate for sales development, we asked Chris to share his experience starting from the bottom and working his way up, and here’s what he had to say:

1. Where was your first job as a Sales Development Rep?

Namely! I was the first Sales Development Rep in the door, so I was responsible for prospecting new companies, high volume cold calling and emailing, and booking demos for our Sales Director. As the first SDR, I also evaluated the sales technology we still use today, helped recruit and train new SDRs, and maintained our CRM and library of resources.

2. What was the company’s history with sales development?

Before I joined Namely, our Sales Director and CEO were prospecting and closing business — they did it all.

They quickly realized the need for a specialized sales rep to help tackle the lead generation process, so that they could focus on qualified opportunities.

3. Was there a set career matrix for SDRs?

There was no defined matrix, other than the next step being the Account Executive role. As we grew, though, we realized people in Sales Development can grow into Senior SDRs, Team Leads, Managers, or pursue other careers throughout the company.

4. Where are you now?

I am currently the Manager of Inside Sales at Namely. I have 15 direct reports and follow the ABH rule, Always Be Hiring. I’m responsible for the Sales Development Team’s Recruiting, Hiring, Training, Productivity, and Quota Attainment. I also head up all things Sales Infrastructure and Operations.

We have built a well-oiled Sales Development Team together and I love every second of it.

BONUS! : What is one piece of advice you would give to someone entering their first job as an SDR?

Give yourself a constant reminder of how you can be successful. My reminder is a quote by Mark Cuban,

Work like there is someone working 24 hours a day to take it all away from you.

I hope your heart skipped a beat after reading this, because mine does every time!

—

Take this success story as proof that all it takes is one good SDR to get the ball rolling. Through specialization, Chris was able to scale Namely’s sales process from a single SDR to a team of reps who know exactly how to go after prospects with agility, tenacity, and efficiency.

Want to learn more about the “How” and “Why” behind implementing a sales development team? Check out our newest eBook focused entirely on on building your very own revenue-generating, sales development, customer acquisition machine.

The post Started From The Bottom, Now We’re Sales Development Leaders appeared first on SalesLoft.

One of the hottest online trends of the summer has been the sharing of live streaming video via apps Periscope and Meerkat. Everywhere I turn I see people shooting videos of themselves (and accompanying scenery) and sharing it via Twitter and Facebook.

This phenomenon of everyday broadcasting is turning mobile phone users into solo broadcasters, sharing everything from weekend athletic events and nightclub action, to bicycle riding and scenic beach scenes. It’s nirvana for attention seekers. And it’s expected to grow: new data from Cisco shows that globally, consumer internet video traffic will be 80 percent of all consumer Internet traffic in 2019, up from 64 percent in 2014.

And it’s not just you and I using live streaming video apps, either. Already, brands and companies are tapping into the power of live streaming video to build fans and followers for the brands, and it’s certain to become a part of the digital social marketing landscape for a long time into the foreseeable future. Let’s take a closer look at one specific platform: Persicope.

Background

In a nutshell, Periscope is a live video streaming app for Android and iOS that gives you the ability to share what you’re doing in real time to your audience of followers and a global Periscope audience.

Periscope emerged in startup mode earlier this year, and almost as quickly, Twitter quietly bought Periscope for $100 million to boost its platform’s video capabilities. By the end of May, Periscope had been relaunched by Twitter in both iOS and Android versions.

On Periscope, you can watch live streams from people you follow, or just go to the global stream to see videos from those outside your follower list who are sharing live streams. Instead of just reading a blog post or a tweet about someone’s day in Central Park or a ride on Casey Junior at Disneyworld, you can actually see a video around this activity. It’s taking real-time content and turning it into TV of the future.

Of course, many celebrities are using Periscope to broadcast their own lives to their many fans, and even pop star Katy Perry was quoted earlier this year saying “you’ve got to embrace the future or you’re left behind … I embrace them mostly as long as they’re not obtrusive.”

Periscope Features

It’s so simple, even your kids can figure out how to work Periscope. You simply go to the Periscope app, press the red button to start, write in a ‘Broadcast Title’ and choose to note your location or to add it to Twitter. Once you start broadcasting, your followers will be notified, and they can jump to your stream to watch and send you fluttering hearts (akin to FB ‘likes’).

Other features include:

• 24 hr. replay – Once you stop your broadcast, you can choose to make it available for up to 24 hours after for those who missed the live stream. Or you can also turn off your replay function at any time.
• Private broadcast – You can choose to do a live stream on a private basis to only one or more specific followers. Simply press the Private button at the top before you go live and choose the specific followers you want on the broadcast.
• Sharing on Twitter – As mentioned above, to share your stream on Twitter, all you need to do is tap the Twitter bird icon before you start. As you live stream, you’ll tweet a link that looks like this below.
• Getting Notifications – Periscope will notify you when one of your Twitter followers goes live with their own stream. That way, you can try to catch them live, whether they are at the beach or at the golf course. Of course, you can always turn off notifications, and Periscope recently announced the ability to mute notifications of those you follow. You’ll still see their broadcasts appearing in your feed, but you won’t receive push notifications when they go live.

With the amount of video streams being shown, finding viewers and streams usually is best done with hashtag searches and friends of friends’ searches. An aggregate site called WatchOnPeriscope gives you the chance to see latest and greatest Periscope streams across the USA (and other countries as specified) from your desktop or mobile. It displays users in a block format, and can also pinpoint your stream via location on your phone.

Uses in Content Marketing

How is Periscope being used for content marketing? Well, Periscope users are generally using the live streaming app in two ways:

1. Talking directly to the camera like in a video blog, or…
2. Streaming an event or activity, with the audience getting the chance to see the event or activity firsthand and in real-time.

Vertical Measures CEO Arnie Kuenn noted on Content Marketing Institute’s blog in June that using Periscope in your content marketing is an excellent way to share company speeches or live events to spread your content. You can even live stream your company’s PR events from one location to employees and media watchers across the world.

Here are some examples of real brands using Periscope that can get you to thinking about using live-streaming apps in your content marketing.

In June, hamburger chain Wendy’s used comedians Rhett & Link to use Periscope with Wendy’s followers. The comics advertised Wendy’s iced tea drink and following the Periscope chat, Wendy’s site received nearly 4,500 web visits, with an additional 1,200 social media posts before and after the Periscope stream. In doing this, Wendy’s wins at content marketing.

Friend of Vertical Measures and Sales Lion Marcus Sheridan has jumped onto Periscope to share with his many followers insights and tips on how to build your business leads and conversions using Periscope and video marketing tactics.

UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) is using Periscope in its content marketing efforts by offering behind-the-scenes weigh-in action before fights. This helps build the brand and elevate the fighters’ presence on social media.

How Brands Can Use Periscope

If you’re a brand looking to grow your online, mobile audience, look to the ways below to find out how Periscope could fit into your everyday marketing practices.

• Test out using Periscope for a webinar. Instead of subscribing with their email addresses, viewers will tune in using their mobile phones. Your team can promote the event on social media before the webinar (Periscope-ar?), and your speaker can answer comments and questions in real time. Think of it as a Twitter Chat that is live streamed.
• Get your company’s CEO to share Periscope streams of his or her travels. Sharing a glimpse into your CEO’s business travels could humanize your company in certain cases, or add to your CEO’s overall social media presence.
• Launch a new webcast or podcast series using Periscope promos. Build up followers prior to launch.
• Offer behind-the-scenes glimpses of new product launches for your small business.
• Set up weekly company sessions on Periscope. Share stories of the company’s work during the week, and help to make your brand more human with the people in your company. You’ll be surprised at the social media love you’ll gain.

A social media revolution is taking place right in the palm of your hand. Our phones are the tubes and Periscope is the network. The screens are in the hands of your followers. Will the rapid growth of Periscope affect its speed of evolution? Will Periscope be a capable partner in content marketing, or will we be onto the next NEXT big thing in two years’ time? Let’s place that concern to the side for now, and work some magic with live video streaming in your branding efforts and content marketing campaigns!

Content Marketing Quick Start

Our 29-page DIY workbook is jam packed with information that will help you tangibly understand the basics of content marketing 101, as applied to your business.

Across the B2B industry, product marketing efforts are suffering. In fact, according to an AcuPoll study, more than 95% of new products launched by established companies fail each year.

Poor launch timing, inaccurate messaging, inadequate testing, and lack of process and coordination all contribute to this rather depressing reality.

But take heart: if you’re struggling to see success in your product marketing, here are four fundamental steps on how to start running more effective product launches in no time.

1. Know Your Target Audience Like the Back of Your Hand

If you don’t have well-developed marketing personas in place before your product launch, you run a major risk of distributing ineffective content and wasting staff time and company resources. Knowledge is power, and the more attuned you are to your audience, the better. This process starts with identifying your audience’s specific pain points, which can vary among different roles within a company.

For example, pain points for a C-suite executive would likely be much different than those of a manager. The executive would likely be more concerned with budgetary constraints and urgency for a high-priority, cross-departmental solution. A manager, however, might be challenged with ineffective communications or technology overload, and therefore more concerned about individual workflow and bottlenecks to daily operations.

A word of caution: many B2B marketers tend to target the C-suite in their messaging, working off the assumption that the executive is the decision maker. But it’s a new day for product marketers. The truth is, 81% of non-C-suite employees influence B2B purchasing decisions. Resist the temptation and don’t miss out on this enormous market opportunity—do your research to ensure you aren’t leaving out key personas in your launch strategy.

Don’t stop at just pain points, however—dig even deeper to find out how your target audience makes purchase decisions, what their current brand preferences are, and what kind of content they interact with the most.

Your product marketing efforts need to focus on these distinct personas or your campaign will ultimately fall short. Your sales team can be an invaluable resource to you in this process, as they likely have the greatest access to your target audiences and have become intimately familiar with their daily challenges and frustrations. Work together to better understand your audience and refine your messaging to be an irresistible solution that speaks directly to their needs.

2. Identify Your Value Props and Write Crystal-Clear Messaging for Each

B2B product marketing has some pretty clear—and critical—distinctions from B2C product marketing.

B2B marketing is all about clearly communicating how your product solves acutely felt business challenges. It doesn’t necessarily require flashy GIFs or viral, consumer-focused videos (although it never hurts).

Identify customer pain points by asking some of the following questions:

• Does your product fix a broken business process? Which process, and how does your solution solve it?
• Does your product address an urgent need? What is the need and why is it urgent?
• Is the problem already widely addressed among other competitors in the marketplace, or is it an emerging solution?

The answers to these questions will help you begin to identify value propositions for each of your personas.

Once you’ve identified your value props, the next step is to create coherent messaging for each.

When it comes to product messaging, I like to follow the “3 C’s” approach: Clear, Consistent, Concise. Your prospective customers will have short attention spans (only eight seconds, in fact), so the key is to very quickly communicate what acute problem you are solving within their business operations.

If your messaging doesn’t immediately communicate value specific to their needs, you’ve lost them already. No pressure.

3. Schedule Strategic Content across the Buyer’s Journey

Sixty percent of people are inspired to seek out a product after reading content about it. This is especially true in the B2B space, as B2B buyers conduct an average of 12 searches before ever visiting a specific brand’s website. This statistic underscores the importance of identifying the content to send at each stage in the buyer’s journey.

In order to schedule content strategically, you’ll first need to map out each stage of the buyer’s journey (this can vary from company to company and product to product).

Now consider key content within each stage that could help drive a lead into the following stage, all the way up until they’ve made a purchase. To do this effectively, we recommend the content pillar approach. This strategy makes your campaign less reactive and more targeted around a central theme specific to the needs and challenges of your audience. Save yourself the headache and plan ahead.

Below is the basic framework of a pillar strategy for your product launch.

The Appetizer Asset

This asset should go out early in the campaign as your top-of-funnel content. It should be in a selected format that covers a broad topic revealing a major insight, such as a Slideshare or infographic embedded into a blog post. The goal of the Appetizer is to drive people to download the gated Entree and enter into the next buyer stage: lead generation.

The Entree Asset

The Entree is your pillar asset that functions as your gated lead-generation tool. Pillars often take the form of eBooks or whitepapers, and are tailored around a theme of particular interest to your target audience(s). This is the core asset that all other supporting content is built from. This actually saves your team from having to regularly scramble for new content ideas, and keeps your campaign succinct and focused. The Entree asset then drives leads toward a product-centric Dessert asset and enters the next buyer stage: nurture.

The Dessert Asset

Your Dessert asset should be product-focused and will target bottom-of-funnel nurture activity. This asset describes how your solution specifically solves your target audience’s pain points related to the pillar theme. This is when the messaging for your value props becomes especially critical, as the lead is looking for clear solutions to their problems. This asset can be in the form of a one-page sales sheet, webinar, video, or demo. The goal is to convert the lead into a qualified buyer that can be transitioned to your sales team and into the final stage before purchase: sales enablement.

Below is a simple infographic highlighting some common content types associated with the basic stages of the buyer’s journey.

4. Track Progress and Measure Effectiveness

Once you’ve identified key content for each buyer stage, it’s critical to identify key metrics that will track progress on your product launch. Currently, 17% of marketers in a Demand Metric study said they have no content effectiveness measurements in place, and 49% are using only basic metrics such as clicks or downloads.

Without proper metrics, it’s impossible to know the real ROI of your marketing efforts. Given all your blood, sweat, and tears to get to this point, that would be a real bummer.

Here are some key metrics to get you started on measuring success:

• Web traffic
• Internal content utilization
• New prospects database
• Marketing qualified leads
• Sales-accepted leads
• New customer acquisition
• New revenue
• Leads and revenue by product launch and/or asset

These four fundamental steps should get you on track to crush your next product launch.

Mastering your money has a lot more to do with psychology and mindset than we might think.

That's what Napoleon Hill preached in his bestselling 1937 book, "Think and Grow Rich," the culmination of his intensive study of over 500 self-made millionaires.

Self-made millionaire Steve Siebold, who has interviewed 1,200 of the world's wealthiest people during the past three decades, agrees. As backwards as it sounds, getting rich often has less to do with the money than the mentality, he writes in his book "How Rich People Think."

Here are 21 mindsets of the wealthy that you could adopt today:

Mandi Woodruff contributed reporting to this post.

SEE ALSO: 17 things keeping you from getting rich, according to a journalist who spent his career studying millionaires

Rich people believe poverty is the root of all evil

... while average people think money is the root of all evil. 

According to Siebold, there's a certain shame that comes along with "getting rich" in lower-income communities. 

"The average person has been brainwashed to believe rich people are lucky or dishonest," he writes. "The world class knows that while having money doesn't guarantee happiness, it does make your life easier and more enjoyable." 

Rich people think selfishness is a virtue

... while average people think selfishness is a vice. 

"The rich go out there and try to make themselves happy. They don't try to pretend to save the world," Siebold told Business Insider. 

The problem is that middle class people see that as a negative — and it's keeping them poor, he writes. "If you're not taking care of you, you're not in a position to help anyone else. You can't give what you don't have."

Rich people have an action mentality

... while average people have a lottery mentality. 

"While the masses are waiting to pick the right numbers and praying for prosperity, the great ones are solving problems," Siebold writes.

"The hero [most people] are waiting for is maybe God, government, their boss, or their spouse. It's the average person's level of thinking that breeds this approach to life and living while the clock keeps ticking away." 

EDMONTON – The furor over a New Democrat candidate’s remarks about leaving Alberta’s oilsands in the ground reflects how poorly the issue is understood, say energy experts.

To many, Toronto Centre candidate Linda McQuaig’s recent statement is just the simple fact of the matter.

“The shock is that anyone would be shocked by this,” said Mark Jaccard, an environmental economist at Simon Fraser University.

Jaccard, who recently signed a letter with 100 scientific colleagues calling for a moratorium on new oilsands development, said Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s goals for emission reductions preclude complete development of the massive resource.

Harper has agreed with a G7 goal of up to 70 per cent greenhouse gas cuts by 2050 and a carbon-free economy by the end of the century.

But estimates suggest the oilsands hold about 168 billion barrels. At current production of about two million barrels a day, that’s 230 years worth of emissions.

Jaccard said Harper’s G7 promise automatically shuts in bitumen — unless massive costs are paid by the rest of society.

“Let’s say you kept oilsands frozen at its current output level,” he said. “(That means) you can’t have any coal-fired power generation in Canada. You’ve got to convert about two-thirds of the vehicle stock to plug-in hybrid electrics and any kind of large trucks have to be on biodiesel.”

And the more oilsands production increases, the more carbon has to come out of the rest of the economy.

“You could expand the oilsands a bit if the rest of us went to zero emissions,” he said. “It would be insane, but it would be possible.”

Or the costs of keeping emissions in check could be borne by industry, said Allan Fogwill of the Canadian Energy Research Institute, an independent research group. Greater energy efficiency or techno-fixes such as carbon capture and storage could reduce Canada’s overall carbon footprint and still allow for oilsands expansion.

“We have the technical solutions available to go down any path,” he said. “The limiting factor is how much those solutions cost.”

That limiting factor may be as important as government policy, said Erin Flanagan of the clean energy think-tank Pembina Institute.

She points to research suggesting oil prices are likely to remain below the cost of production for new oilsands projects well into the next decade. By then, markets may have changed permanently.

“Will they come out of the ground or won’t they come out of the ground? That question is being answered already by global oil markets,” she said.

The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers declined to comment during the election. A spokesman pointed to 2012 research that suggested burning the entire economic oilsands resource would increase global temperatures by 0.03 C.

McQuaig’s point has been made before.

In 2008, a report from the National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy — a Harper-appointed body the government later shut down — said “research indicates that the only option to attain deep emission reductions is to reduce industrial output in some sectors, notably oilsands and mining.”

Still, her remarks prompted a political back-and-forth between New Democrats and Conservatives that lasted days.

Time to get real, said Jaccard.

Even Saudi Arabia has begun to acknowledge some of its hydrocarbons will remain undeveloped, he said.

“It’s kind of like we’re in a dialogue in Canada that reminds me of Saudi Arabia 20 years ago.”

Flanagan said governments need to think about mitigating risks in a changing world.

“The level of fanfare around these comments is really troubling. It shows we’re not ready to have that mature conversation.”

— Follow Bob Weber on Twitter at @row1960

The post Oilsands being left in the ground is just a matter of fact, experts say appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

When it comes to nailing a sales presentation, remember to follow this basic rule: Care about what your customer cares about.

Keeping this at the forefront is what’s helped Doug Spencer, a serial entrepreneur and the co-founder and CEO of Bold Xchange, an online gifting software tool, secure roughly $1 million in outside capital. Some of his proudest moments include securing funding after only one conversation.

“With sales, you’ve got to know their language,” says Spencer, “so that you can speak to what they’re looking for.”

Whether it’s with a prospective investor, customer, or partner, understanding the needs and requirements of the person you’re selling to (plus, how you’re uniquely able to serve these needs) is the key to closing a deal.

Table of Contents

• What is a sales presentation?
• Best Practices for Planning a Sales Presentation
• Essential Steps to Help You Practice Your Presentation
• Tips for Delivering Your Sales Presentations

What is a sales presentation?

Think of a sales presentation as the ultimate pitching opportunity. It’s your chance to prove to your potential customer that your service or product is worthy of investment. It should include granular detail around the specific problem you’re aiming to solve, often with the support of visuals, case studies, and other relevant data.

Also, a sales presentation isn’t complete without a value proposition: Make sure you’re clear on what you’re offering, why you’re the right person to offer it, and exactly how you plan to execute.

Best Practices for Planning a Sales Presentation

1. Study your potential client and the industry.

I know internet stalking isn’t typically condoned, but when you’re planning your sales presentation, a deep level of research is crucial.

“The research step is really, really important, because then [the customer] is going to be like, ‘Hey, this person knows me,’” says Spencer. Your prospective client also wants to see that you have an understanding of the respective industry as a whole.

In addition to knowing the ins and outs of their company’s leadership and employees, “get acquainted with educating yourself about current trends, recent news, and your company’s competitors,” adds Erica Franklin, founder of EVF Consulting and global director of sales for Sistas In Sales.

2. Tell a story.

“Storytelling is winning,” says Franklin. While only 5% of people remember statistics during a presentation, 63% remember stories.

One of the best ways to storytell in a presentation is to incorporate case studies and real-world examples — especially ones that involve use of your product.

“I enjoy seeing presentations from companies that use their own products to convince customers to purchase those same products, like Monday.com and Gong.io,” says Franklin. “They are literally able to show you repeatedly why their products are successful.”

Storytelling is also what helped Franklin land a repeat client who was mulling over whether or not to renew the service. “Instead of accepting their hesitation, I crafted a renewal and upsell proposal that (I believe) shifted their perspective — not just on the current products but also on the future possibilities,” says Franklin.

She did this by showcasing the success of partnership via strategic storytelling and hypothetically presenting what growth would look like if they remained a customer. “They ended up not only renewing but also expanding their partnership,” shares Franklin.

3. Do the leg work — if you can.

Especially if your budget is tight, Spencer suggests putting together the presentation yourself rather than paying someone else to do it, and better allocate those funds to serve a business need elsewhere. It’s also how you get closest to the material you’ll be presenting.

Consider free resources from platforms like Canva, Keynote, Google Slides, and PowerPoint, many of which offer customizable templates.

AI, when used responsibly, can also be a help reviewing and formatting aid. Gamma is a new AI-powered platform on the market that I think is worth testing out.

4. Don’t go too text-heavy.

Forty percent of people prefer non-written visual forms of communication, so charts, graphics and other imagery are ideal.

Videos are even better. Plus, the more copy you add to your slides, the more inclined you’re going to be to read directly from the presentation. Text can be a crutch. Visuals are more of a guide. Likewise, “the more people are trying to read, the less they're listening,” says Spencer.

Another benefit of non-wordy slides is that they also make for a more concise presentation. When it comes to ideal length, Franklin says, “Depending on the product, I would say 20-30 minutes, leaving a few minutes for discussion, so 45 minutes max.”

5. Remove the excess.

Another rule of thumb? Each slide should convey exactly one point, says Spencer. That way you’re staying on track and keeping the customer engaged.

He suggests thinking of it like this: “What are the chapters in my story?” Each slide should be a “chapter.” You don’t want to muddle your chapters with excess, so take note of any information that’s not pertinent. If it’s not adding to the story, it probably doesn’t need to be included. If it must stay, include it as an add-on or reference point, like a book’s appendix or bibliography, that you don’t necessarily need to present.

Essential Steps to Help You Practice Your Presentation

1. Repetition is key.

The more you practice, the more nuances you’re able to consider — and that will make your presentation more interesting.

Repeated practice will also prepare you to be unfazed by any curve balls thrown at you the day of. The more you know your stuff, the less you’ll need to rely on a script. You’re able to deliver a more natural presentation, and I think it makes you more confident when you need to improvise as well.

2. Practice with someone foreign to the project

When you’re the closest to the concept, it’s easy to miss what requires more explanation. Try practicing on someone who has zero or very minimal knowledge of what’s being presented. This was, you can ensure your pitch is clear and thorough no matter who’s on the receiving end.

“You always want to assume that the person you‘re presenting to doesn’t have the level of detail that you have,” says Spencer. “And that they’re not an expert, because often they're not.”

Tips for Delivering Your Sales Presentations

1. Approach it like a conversation.

A sales presentation doesn’t have to feel like that boring lecture every student dreaded attending. Your client wants to learn, but they also want to feel included and engaged.

“Sales presentations have become much more conversational and less scripted or tied to a specific selling process,” says Franklin.

“While selling methodologies are great, sometimes just having real conversations about what is going on and what is needed wins. Trust-building is the key to closing deals.”

Building trust also means approaching the presentations like there’s an already-established partnership. Successful sales reps are 10 times more likely to use collaborative words like “us,” “we,” and “our.”

2. Allow the customer to speak.

Part of engaging your customer means allowing them to participate. Encouraging them to weigh in on the conversation positions you to address anything you may have missed, and you can sometimes drive your point home even further.

Franklin suggests asking your potential client open-ended questions like, “What does success look like for you?” or “What other products have you used in the market to address your pain points?”

3. Make sure your potential customer has a copy of the deck.

While the hope is that your presentation is clear — and that your prospective customer is taking notes — it’s important that they have reference points to refer back to later while deliberating.

“Presentations (even shorter versions) are helpful to your contacts after the meeting as they usually need something tangible and concise to help them sell internally,” says Franklin.

Send them an email with your slides before or after the meeting.

4. Wrap up with clarity around numbers and next steps.

Numbers are important. Always be clear on what yours are.

By the end of the presentation, your client should know exactly what you’re asking for and what the next steps are, should they choose to move forward.

Spencer says it’s important to be confident in the number you're presenting. You should have already done your homework, so “don’t negotiate against yourself,” he says, and be sure to give your potential client room to think.

Equally as important, he adds: “Remember that you’re going to hear no.” Sometimes, it’s a firm no (which happens to the best of us); sometimes, that “no” means not right now, or not in this way. After all, 83% of potential clients won’t initiate a sale for 3-12 months.

“If they cannot buy everything right now, make a long-term plan,” says Franklin. Sometimes it’s about playing the relationship game.

Ready To Present

While sales presentations generally aren’t generally a rep’s favorite part of the job, the best sales reps know that, when done right, sales presentations are a high-earning skill.

After I spent time talking with experts for this post and reviewing their tips and techniques, the one that stands out the most for me is: practice. It might not prepare you for every scenario, but it’ll prepare you for most of them. Best of all, you’ll be confident in your talking points — and your product. There’s no better way to go into a sales presentation.

One reason I am differentiated as a marketing consultant and writer is that I’m old … it helps me connect the dots between decades and generations, between trends and fads. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it!

And as one of the more senior members of the blogging world I can say with confidence that this is the most difficult time to be in marketing over the past 30 years, and probably the most difficult time ever. Now, that doesn’t mean that every day isn’t fun and challenging. I think marketing is the best business career you could choose. I’m just saying you need to be expending an extraordinary amount of brain power these days if you want to succeed.

Here’s why.

1) Shifting platforms and rules

If you were in marketing 25 years ago the process was pretty straight-forward and your options were defined. Executing a marketing strategy might involve advertising on a TV network (if you had a big budget), or taking out ads in a local newspaper or radio show. Throw in a little PR and a trade show and you called it a day.

Of course today the media scene has shattered into a million pieces. But the fragmentation and choice is not even the biggest part of the problem. Far more difficult than sorting out the options are that the rules of engagement shift on a daily basis.

What worked for clients last week may not work next week because the “rules” are changing, and perhaps dramatically.

Here’s a dramatic insight into this challenge. Years, ago, you knew the demographics and reach of a media channel with precision. You took out an ad in a magazine and could reliably count on the “reach” of your message.

Compare that to the Hurricane we fondly call Facebook. A few years ago, if you did a great job with content and engagement you could count on predictable reach for your marketing efforts. Today, without boosting or other Facebook financial alchemy, the organic reach for most companies is near zero. We are forced to constantly learn and adjust, learn and adjust. We need to adopt a liquid strategy.

2) Information competition

Every day my news stream is filled with trends, charts and prognostications. But allow me to suggest that there is just one mega-trend that is overwhelming our business right now, and that is the malignant force of information density.

If you think it is hard to get your message through today, fasten your seatbelt. In the next five years, the amount of information on the web is expected to increase by at least 500 percent. In other words,by 2020, we will have the equivalent of five of the Internets we have today.

Do you think it might be just a LITTLE more difficult to be in marketing?

The overwhelming growth of information is like a hammer pounding on the marketing anvil. It is forging our strategies, new platforms, and new content forms to help us cut through.

My new book The Content Code is entirely devoted to strategies to help you overcome the wall of content before us.

3) New skills

Did you get a degree in marketing? In addition to traditional marketing classes in strategy and consumer behavior, you are probably sub-optimized if you haven’t also picked up these skills:

• An immersion in statistics and data analytics
• Basic content creation and community management skills
• An ability to quickly assess new platforms and technologies
• Fundamentals of search, design, eCommerce, user experience, and social media
• Online networking skills

Most marketing graduates I meet are not prepared for the job market. College curriculums are out-dated. College instructors are out of touch and even resistant to change. At least one major state university in my region does not have a single digital marketing class. To a large degree, companies are placing the responsibility for continuing education on the employee.

There has been a cataclysmic shift in the skills needed to compete and succeed in today’s job market. In fact, it might be an unprecedented upheaval. Keeping up with these demands is another reason it is tough to be in marketing today.

And yet, there is not a single day that I’m not grateful to be in this profession, Without customers, there is no business. Marketers are on the frontlines of the enterprise, an engine for growth, innovation, and profits.

With the rate of change, I fully realize that five years from now I will probably be writing that marketing is even more difficult than it is today. I can’t wait for the challenge. How about you?

Note: For further reading on this subject, check out Christopher Penn’s riff on this post.

This post was written as part of the Dell Insight Partners program, which provides news and analysis about the evolving world of tech. For more on these topics, visit Dell’s thought leadership site PowerMore. Dell sponsored this article, but the opinions are my own and don’t necessarily represent Dell’s positions or strategies.

Illustration courtesy Flickr CC and Carmen Kong

The post Why this is the most difficult (and fun!) time to be in marketing appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

        

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A true price objection surfaced by your prospect at the end stages of the sales cycle usually means one of two things:

1. You misplaced your backbone at the moment of truth and didn’t disqualify the prospect when you had the opportunity, or
2. You didn’t fully disclose your price during qualification.

If it is reason #1, then the prospect was never a true prospect for your product or service, and you wasted your valuable sales time on someone who was never going to buy from you. If the answer is reason #2, then you misled the prospect about your value proposition, and it will be difficult to rebuild your credibility and win the order.

Over the course of many years, I have successfully taught clients and salespeople four rules of thumb about price qualification. Here they are.

1) Be direct with the prospect about your pricing.

Salespeople have developed an unhealthy fear of the price question. They want to stuff it away in a closet and forget about it. They fear that any discussion of price will frighten off the customer.

But that is exactly the point. There is no mystery to qualifying on price. Do what you do best. Ask the right questions to fully understand the customer’s requirements and make sure there’s alignment with your value, features, and specs. And then talk price and value based on the customer’s requirements.

2) Price qualification is a preliminary agreement that your price is proportional to the customer’s assessment of your product or service’s value.

Qualification on price and value doesn’t mean that you’ll never have another discussion about price with the customer. But it does mean that conversation will more likely be centered on scope and deliverables as the means to adjust the pricing to align with the customer’s requirements.

3) A price objection is a valid reason to disqualify a prospect.

Disqualification on price must take place early in your sales process. A true price objection from a prospect late in the sales cycle means that you weren’t transparent in providing your pricing and didn’t disqualify the prospect when you had the opportunity. Consequently, the customer was never a true sales opportunity, and you wasted your selling time on someone who was never going to buy from you.

4) Beware of the price-qualified customer who keeps pushing back on price.

If you do a good job of qualifying the prospect on price, but he keeps pushing back on price while ostensibly still moving forward with his buying process, then you should proceed with caution. It’s possible the buyer has a hidden agenda and is using you in order to advance it. In one very large deal early in my career, the price-qualified prospect kept raising price objections. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of responding to these objections because I didn’t have the experience to understand that the prospect was using me as a leverage point to negotiate a better deal with the competition. It was a painful lesson learned.

Price qualification is a simple and practical tool that will help you maintain your focus on those sales opportunities that have a higher probability of providing a great return on your investment of selling time.

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.

How important is content marketing? Maybe you should have asked Bill Gates 20 years ago.

Gates wrote an article titled “Content is King” in 1996. (Maybe this is where the phrase was coined.) He predicted that content would be where most of the money on the internet would be made. Its most intrinsic value was that it could be spread globally at little cost.

Bill Gates is, unquestionably, a hugely successful man. And it’s one reason why we should heed his vision on the value of content marketing.

We’ve seen the surge that Mr. Gates predicted. But are you making full use of your content marketing strategy?

Content marketing isn’t just about blog posts anymore. It also involves folding SEO into your content, as well as getting the most out of social media, automation, and distribution.

Here are a few ways you can jack up your content strategy.

Start With Valuable, High-Quality Content

Don’t ask your web developer or your secretary to create your content—unless they’re phenomenal and have the time! Put together a skilled team that knows what they’re doing in regards to content. If you don’t have the manpower, get people who can do it for you.

Urbanspoon, a leading bar and restaurant guide, knew that they needed to grow their content in order to better engage their audiences. Lacking in resources, they recruited CrowdSource to help them expand beyond reviews and menus. They aimed to get foodies to try new restaurants, as well as add some culinary education.

Together, CrowdSource and Urbanspoon created an online dining dictionary, where food definitions included fun facts, taste attributes, and associated flavors. Some of the new restaurants they were encouraging visitors to try had food items that were unfamiliar, and the dictionary helped immensely. Getting readers more familiar with exotic items engaged their audience and got them excited to try new restaurants.

Smaller businesses can find help with their content at freelancer sites such as Guru and Upwork, formerly Odesk.

Get Really, Really Creative Content

Creative content marketing creates buzz.

FINIS, a line of swimming gear known for its innovation, chose to use their most loyal fans as brand ambassadors and use their social media content in their marketing strategy.

Using ReadyPulse, they identified their top 1% influencers. After running an “Introduce Yourself” campaign, they collected 1,511 pieces of content. This content generated a great deal of buzz, reaching 2.2 million people and engaging 38,458 consumers.

The content was then displayed on their website alongside “Shop Now” buttons.

When analytics revealed that 16% of their website visitors were clicking the social content, FINIS realized that this form of on-demand social proof was just what they needed. The strategy yielded impressive results. They also saw a 50% engagement rate, with their average order value increasing by 73%.

Use Third-Party Content

If you’re still not able to generate an adequate amount of content, there are ways to successfully use and share content that is already published by other sources.

HD Vest is a financial services firm that provides office support and broker/dealer operations for 4,500 independent financial advisors across the country. In order to stand out as thought leaders, they knew that they would need content. However, they lacked the resources and time. Additionally, in a highly-regulated industry such as financial services, they had to be careful not to step into any legal gray areas with their content.

Trapit technology allowed HD Vest to help advisors find content to disperse on social networks and analyze results. In this platform, businesses can share original in-house content. They can also configure the dashboard to automatically find third-party content from over 100,000 sources to share.

With the solution in place, HD Vest was able to partner Trapit’s discovery engine with the dashboard at Hearsay Social, a platform that manages the social, mobile, and web presence of financial services. This content hub allowed advisors to build reputations on social media that attracts and retains clients every day.

The strategy proved to be highly effective. Ruth Papazian, CMO and head of business development at HD Vest, discussed in a webinar how their content sharing strategy landed a $1,000,000 deal for one advisor.

Use Inbound Marketing Automation to Simplify the Process

Inbound marketing brings people to your site through great content. Inbound marketing automation software helps simplify the process of content creation, capturing leads, distribution, and measuring your return on investment.

Distribute Content to the Right Audience

Don’t just keep it all to yourself. Maximize on the potential of your content by distributing it.

Build relationships with other businesses who will share your content. You can also automate this process and get your content to just the right people at just the right time.

NetLine helped Hubspot get their collection of 20 ebooks into the hands of qualified leads. The goal was to reach US businesses that had 10–1,000 employees. Those leads had to be specific—they specifically wanted to reach business owners, managers, and high titles in marketing. They met their goal, and Hubspot was able to meet their lead volume goal objectives each quarter.

Bill Gates is a wise man—he obviously knew a thing or two about content marketing. Today, content really is king. Make sure you’re making it a focal point in your marketing strategy. Create valuable content, get creative, automate the process, and strategically distribute it.

Those who read your content could very well be your next customers.

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There are a lot of metrics in email marketing. That’s one of the best things about it – you can track every action and reaction down to not just the clicks, but down to each individual subscriber’s clicks.

And yet, with all the stats and charts and analysis, one of the most meaningful metrics of all often gets neglected: Email subscriber value. It means how much each email subscriber is worth to you. Sometimes this is also called the “marketing allowable” or “revenue per subscriber (RPS)”. Whatever you call it, it ties down:

• What each email subscriber is worth to you
• What you can afford to spend to get a new email subscriber

Those are two sides of the same coin, but they speak to the different benefits of knowing how much your subscribers, and your list, are worth.

• If you know how much you can afford to spend in order to get a subscriber, plug that value into your list-building or lead generation efforts, and you just drew a line of “profitable” versus “not profitable” for every single list-building tactic you use. This can become particularly useful if you plug the value of each new subscriber into your analytics account, whether that’s Google Analytics or a marketing automation tool.

• Calculating ROI is the Holy Grail for digital marketers. Having an agreed-upon value for each email subscriber gives you a way to better measure ROI. This is especially true if your company has committed to making email marketing central to your business.

• Is your company a startup? Do you have dreams of selling your business one day? Then knowing the value of your email list can be as important as knowing the size of your market. When direct marketing companies (publishers, catalogs, even online tools) are broken up, it’s usually the list that ends up being the most valuable asset. That’s why people say “the money’s in the list.”

Calculating email subscriber value

There are several different ways to calculate the value of an email subscriber. Here’s the simplest one:

Monthly revenue earned from email list / how many subscribers that month = revenue per subscriber

Let’s plug some numbers in there to make it clearer.

$30,000 in revenue earned from email marketing in June / 9,000 email subscribers = $3.33 (the value of each email subscriber per month)

That’s a good start. But you’ve probably already noticed a few holes in this equation. First of all, where are the overhead costs? Without those, you’re looking at gross, not net, value.

Second, there’s the issue of what time frame you want to use when you set the each subscriber’s value. In the formula above, we’re using a month-long view. But what about the lifetime value of each email subscriber? Of course, to know that, we’d need to know how long the average email subscriber stays on our list. Fortunately, most email service providers can tell you how long people tend to stay on your list.

Should you calculate subscriber value by lifetime value, month, or even each week?

If you were about to sell your business, knowing the lifetime value of your existing subscribers would help. But if you plan to stay in this game for a while, calculating the value per subscriber by month may be far more helpful.

Why? Because you’ll probably want to know if your emails are generating more or less income month to month. As you know, things move fast in marketing. During any given month you might be trying out a new PPC ad campaign or promoting a new webinar or event. Maybe you’ve got a product launch, a website redesign, or new products. Maybe you just switched up your social selling strategy.

Geez… with all that going on, maybe you should forget the monthly subscriber value and calculate it week by week. Or maybe not. In practice, any time I’ve seen a company shift to the week-to-week calculation, they immediately get data overload. It all gets a bit too granular, and people start looking like they need aspirin.

The month view appears to be the sweet spot. You get a narrow enough time frame that you can be fairly agile with your ever-evolving marketing tactics. But you don’t have so much data that it’s hard to make decisions.

Refining the email subscriber value formula

If you just stick with the value per month estimate, the next thing to figure out is your overhead costs.

Here are some of typical overhead costs:

COST PER MONTH Email service provider $100 Creative costs, such as design, copywriting, your share of paying for
blog posts and other content. (More on ascribing costs and benefits
from other departments’ assets below.) $600 25% of your annual gross salary and benefits costs, divided by 12 $1,875 10% of two other annual employees’ gross salaries and benefits costs,
divided by 12 $1,400 Email marketing’s business share of office space, computer, electricity
and everything else per your CFO. $500 TOTAL $4,475

This is a good start. But also check with a financial expert at your company to get their input on overhead costs. Their blessing gives credibility to the final value you ascribe to each subscriber. It helps your boss, and your boss’s boss, take your calculations more seriously.

Let’s see how this calculation looks now.

(Monthly revenue from email list – overhead costs) / how many subscribers you had that month = revenue per subscriber

And with the numbers from before:

($30,000 in revenue email marketing in June – $4,475 in overhead costs) / 9,000 email subscribers = value of each email subscriber in June

$25,525 / 9000 = $2.84 value per subscriber

Nice. That means you can still afford to spend $2.84 per subscriber.

How email subscriber value might inform a pay per click campaign

Want to know if your pay-per-click lead gen campaign is profitable? Here’s what that analysis might look like:

Current average cost per click: $0.50

Lead generation landing page conversion rate: 20%

So it takes 5 clicks to generate one email subscriber.

5 clicks x $0.50 = $2.50

$2.84 value per subscriber – $2.50 cost to get the subscriber = $0.34 profit

Note that this assumes you’ve got no changes to your landing pages, no costs to manage the PPC account, and no employee management costs. After those are figured in, you might need to do some optimization if you want to see positive ROI.

Figuring out attribution

You’ve got a more realistic number now that you’ve plugged in overhead costs. But there’s still the huge issue of attribution. This is one of the most complex parts of marketing in the real world (not in idealized formulas). It’s one of the biggest reasons calculating ROI has been such a challenge.

As many of you know, “attribution” refers to how, and to what extent, you attribute both costs and sales to a particular activity. For simplicity’s sake, let’s distill all the issues of attribution down into two things:

1. Should your email marketing get credit for all the sales it makes?
2. Should your email marketing contribute to the overhead of other departments, whose resources you use to get those emails out?

Uh-oh. Did you hear the can of worms just explode?

Here are just a few common scenarios that trigger these questions:

• What if you had a big display ad campaign running last week? What if the email you sent probably got much of its sales because of that display campaign? Doesn’t the display campaign deserve credit for some of those “email sales”?
• What about the contributions of your sales team?
• If you include a blog post in an email update, shouldn’t you credit at least some of the email sales to that blog content? The blog needs to prove revenue, too. Same goes for the people who manage the webinars, the advertising, and the social media.

All this can make our tidy little email subscriber value calculation look extremely short-sighted.

And, unfortunately, it is.

The best people to sort out the can of worms are in the financial department. They know all the costs associated with everything you do. They know the financial pressures and costs of other parts of the company, which you may not be aware of.

You, along with several other members of the marketing department, sales and a few financial people may need to sit down together. You will need several peoples’ insights to effectively sort out what your email marketing should pay for, and what it should get credit for.

Sometimes this ends up being a complex calculation. Other times a company will just ascribe 5% of gross revenue to email marketing. Then they will draw a bright line through the list of costs, deciding what email is or is not responsible for.

Why it’s worth the effort

I hope these subscriber value calculations are helpful. But to make them really useful, you must adjust them for the particular systems and overhead costs of your company. Does all this sound like a hassle? Well, maybe it is. But if you can’t set a value for each subscriber, it’s hard to assess how effective your list-building efforts are.

What do you think?

Are you calculating the value of your email subscribers? How do you sort out attribution for sales and overhead costs across marketing specialties, much less entire departments? Give us some insights in the comments.

Once you’ve calculated the value of each email subscriber on your list, you’ll want to make sure you’re measuring all of the metrics that matter to your business. Read the New Marketing Metrics for B2B to find out how to track the right data at the right time.

• Everyone knows that getting enough sleep is important, but the things you do right before bed can also set you up for success the following day.
• It can be difficult to fall asleep if you're stressed, which is why it may be key to adopt new routines to help reduce anxiety before bed. 
• From taking a hot bath to writing out the next day's to-do list, successful people have a number of nighttime rituals that may lead to their success.
• We rounded up 15 things that highly successful people do right before bed.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

The last thing you do before bed tends to have a significant impact on your mood and energy level the next day, as it often determines how well and how much you sleep.

But it can be difficult to fall asleep if you're stressed. This is especially true now, as many Americans struggle to cope with nationwide unrest. 

There are some strategies you can adopt to help yourself relax before bed. Good bedtime routines are key for successful people, who depend on getting enough sleep to help them through their busy days. 

Business Insider gathered pre-sleep rituals from business leaders like Sheryl Sandberg and Bill Gates. Here are 15 of the most effective. 

SEE ALSO: Science says parents of successful kids have these 9 things in common

They read.

Experts agree that reading is the very last thing most successful people do before going to sleep —President Barack Obama and Bill Gates are known to read for at least a half hour before bed.

Michael Kerr, an international business speaker and author of "You Can't Be Serious! Putting Humor to Work," says he knows numerous business leaders who block off time just before bed for reading, going so far as to schedule it as a "non-negotiable item" on their calendar.

"This isn't necessarily reserved just for business reading or inspirational reading. Many successful people find value in being browsers of information from a variety of sources, believing it helps fuel greater creativity and passion in their lives," he says.

They unplug completely.

The blue light from your phone mimics the brightness of the sun, which tells your brain to stop producing melatonin, an essential hormone that regulates your circadian rhythm and tells your body when it's time to wake and when it's time to sleep. This could lead not only to poor sleep, but also to vision problems, cancer, and depression.

Michael Woodward, Ph.D., organizational psychologist and author of "The YOU Plan," agrees, saying, "The last thing you need is to be lying in bed thinking about an email you just read from that overzealous boss who spends all their waking hours coming up with random requests driven by little more than a momentary impulse."

Give yourself a buffer period of at least a half-hour between the time you read your last email and the time you go to bed. 

They disconnect from work.

Truly successful people do anything but work right before bed, Kerr says. They don't obsessively check their email, and they try not to dwell on work-related issues. 

Studies have found if you associate your bed with work, it'll be much harder to relax there, so it's essential you reserve your bed for sleep and sex only.

Disconnecting from work is important once you get home, and especially right before bed. It's good to let your mind recharge, spend time doing something you enjoy, and feel ready to tackle the next day. 

Work burnout may actually hinder your productivity by causing you to become easily irritated or stressed out. Taking time after work to fully disconnect from your job may actually increase your productivity the next day. You'll be feeling fresh and ready to take on the day's tasks.

They make a to-do list.

"Clearing the mind for a good night sleep is critical for a lot of successful people," Kerr says.

"Often they will take this time to write down a list of any unattended items to address the following day, so these thoughts don't end up invading their headspace during the night."

For example, Kenneth Chenault, former CEO of American Express, writes down three things he wants to accomplish the next day.

They spend time with family.

Woodward says it's important to make some time to chat with your partner, talk to your kids, or play with your dog.

Laura Vanderkam, author of "I Know How She Does It" and "What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast," says this is a common practice among the highly successful. "I realize not everyone can go to bed at the same time as his or her partner, but if you can, it's a great way to connect and talk about your days."

They spend quality time with their partners.

Another great way to connect with your partner: sex.

Apart from the health benefits — sex is exercise, after all, and it can reduce stress and anxiety levels — and the positive effect it has on your relationship with your partner, a study published by The Institute for the Study of Labor in Germany also found a correlation between sexual frequency and wealth.

The study found that people who had sex four or more times a week earned a salary 5% higher than those who didn't, and those who said they weren't having sex at all made 3.2% less than their counterparts who were having sex.

"People need to love and be loved (sexually and non-sexually) by others," study author Nick Drydakis, an economics lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England, told CBS News. "In the absence of these elements, many people become susceptible to loneliness, social anxiety, and depression that could affect their working life."

They go for an evening stroll.

Joel Gascoigne, cofounder and CEO of Buffer, takes a 20-minute walk every evening before bed. "This is a wind-down period, and allows me to evaluate the day's work, think about the greater challenges, gradually stop thinking about work, and reach a state of tiredness," he writes in a blog post. 

While it's a popular belief that exercise before bed can prevent sleep, the National Sleep Foundation found that exercising whenever you can, even at night, helps you sleep better. Numerous studies have also found walking to reduce stress and anxiety.

They reflect on the good things from the day.

Kerr says many successful people take the time just before bed to reflect on, or to write down, three things they are appreciative of that happened that day. 

"Keeping a 'gratitude journal' also reminds people of the progress they made that day in any aspect of their life, which in turn serves as a key way to stay motivated, especially when going through a challenging period."

It's easy to fall into the trap of replaying negative situations from the day that you wish you had handled differently. Regardless of how badly the day went, successful people typically manage to avoid that pessimistic spiral of negative self-talk because they know it will only create more stress.

Benjamin Franklin famously asked himself the same self-improvement question every night: "What good have I done today?"

They picture tomorrow's success.

Many successful people take a few minutes before bed to envision a positive outcome unfolding for the projects they're working on, says Lynn Taylor, a national workplace expert and author of "Tame Your Terrible Office Tyrant: How to Manage Childish Boss Behavior and Thrive in Your Job." "For most, this is not a task or exercise; they're wired with a gift of solid resolution skills that come naturally."

They meditate.

Many successful people use the 10 minutes before bed to meditate. Dale Kurow, a New York-based executive coach, says it's a great way to relax your body and quiet your mind.

They plan out sleep.

"Much has been written around the dangers busy people face running chronic sleep deficits, so one habit I know several highly successful people do is to simply make it a priority to get enough sleep — which can be a challenge for workaholics or entrepreneurs," Kerr says. One way to do that is to go to bed at a consistent time each evening, which is a key habit all sleep experts recommend to help ensure a healthy night's sleep.

Vanderkam further suggests that you plan out when you're going to wake up, count back however many hours you need to sleep, and then consider setting an alarm to remind yourself to get ready for bed. "The worst thing you can do is stay up late then hit snooze in the morning," she says. "Humans have a limited amount of willpower. Why waste that willpower arguing with yourself over when to get up, and sleeping in miserable nine-minute increments?"

They keep a hygiene ritual.

The National Sleep Foundation recommends you create a hygiene ritual that sends a psychological signal that you are getting ready for bed. This can include brushing your teeth, washing your face, flossing, combing your hair.

Stephen King's nightly routine includes washing his hands and making sure all the pillows face a certain way.

They decompress.

Maybe you like taking a warm bath. Perhaps listening to calming music relaxes you. 

The most successful people find ways to unwind and decompress before heading to bed. It allows them to de-stress, fall asleep quicker, and sleep more soundly so they're ready for the next day.

They skip the wine.

When researching her sleep manifesto, "Thrive," Arianna Huffington consulted a number of sleep specialists for tips. One of her favorites is avoiding alcohol right before bedtime.

While alcohol can certainly help you fall asleep, the National Institute of Health finds that it robs you of quality sleep. Alcohol keeps people in the lighter stages of sleep from which they can be awakened easily and prevents them from falling into deeper, more restorative stages of sleep, the institute finds.

They write down what they accomplished that day.

In a LinkedIn course on how to build resilience, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg shared that she adopted a new bedtime routine to help with grief and anxiety after the death of her husband, former Survey Monkey CEO Dave Goldberg. The routine is simple: Write three things down that you accomplished that day. The accomplishments don't have to be big, Sandberg explained. 

She continues it to this very day, and recommends others do it too. It helps you keep a positive outlook on life, she said. 

Rachel Gillett and Jacquelyn Smith contributed to an earlier version of this post. 

By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca 

Ask a group of sales people what they want to know about their prospect, and the majority respond “I want to know about their pain or needs”. In theory a good concept, in practice highly over rated and ineffective. As discussed before, at any given time, only a small percentage of your total potential market is in play. The various estimates range from as low as 3% to 15%; so if we go with 10% for the sake of this piece, we are likely very generous. Of that 10%, almost all will recognise or admit to a need, and for some that need is in fact driven by or rooted in pain. So even when you perfect uncovering the pain and need, you are playing with a very narrow slice of opportunity. Not to mention a very visible and highly sought after slice, one that every sales person is pursuing, much like a lazy wild cat targets the weak of the herd.

A further 20% or so, don’t have an immediate pain or need, but they recognise that they will need to make a purchase decision 12 – 18 months out. Extremely good sales people, may be able to get a few of these folks to accelerate the need or heighten the pain, and thereby accelerate the purchase decision. But in the vast majority of instances, these people are future business, i.e. not this quota cycle. Having said that they are a good group to work with, as you have lots of runway to build a “relationship” and set yourself up as the obvious favourite when they going into buying mode.

This leaves the 70% plus, of the target market, the status quo, the complacent ones, the ones with no pain, no need, and no desire for a solution. Probing for pains or needs here gets the familiar “all set, we’re good, no need now, not interested” response; sometimes they’ll make you feel good and ask you to send them something. When was the last time you got paid for that?

For many of these buyers, the only immediate pain is the sales person sitting across from them, and the way that many of those sales people sell. While many pride themselves on having “evolved” from asking silly questions like “what keeps you up at night?” From the buyer’s stand point many of the techniques used by many are no better even though they changed the wrapping.

Some fall pray to pundits who will have them go in and try to “create” pain or make the buyer feel inadequate by asking things like “wouldn’t you agree that ….?” or “What would it be like if you could….? But buyers are hip, they see when you snap on the rubber gloves and “probe”.

One pain many buyers complain to me about is the complete unpreparedness they experience when meeting with reps. Rather than truly understanding the buyer, doing a bit of work in advance. Actually research the industry and current and future trends, how those impact the buyer’s company and the buyer, exploring more than just their social stream and LinkedIn profile. Absent pain, you need to look forward, the “value” you bring as a seller is helping the buyer face and win in that future, kicking them in the shin or higher brings a pain that does not lead to sales.

So if you want to use pain to win sales, it needs to be the “pain” of the effort you put into properly engaging a buyer who left to their own devices feels no pain, and is more like in search of something that will help them achieve their objectives, while avoiding the pain that is bad selling.

Tibor Shanto    

Overwhelming to some and essential to others, Twitter has become a valuable sales tool on which to engage prospects, research industries, and keep up with relevant news. In fact, a recent study showed that more salespeople use Twitter in their daily processes than do LinkedIn. 

But that's not to say that all of these reps are using the platform correctly, or to its maximum benefit. To keep afloat in the ocean that is Twitter, steer clear of the following 15 blunders.

1) Not Following Prospects

The number of Twitter followers a person has is a measure of his or her social media popularity. Sending totally random connection requests might creep buyers out on LinkedIn, but most everyone likes to be followed on Twitter.

Follow your customers, your prospects, and even people you'd like to meet but haven't introduced yourself to quite yet. A follow helps the prospect associate you with positive feelings, and can help warm up an otherwise cold call or email.

2) Not Engaging with Prospects

Okay, so you've got the following bit down. Now what? 

It's time to engage. In order to keep the positive feelings flowing, continuously interact with prospects by favoriting, retweeting, and replying to their tweets. You might even add them to a strategically named list, such as "Smart Businesspeople" or "Ones to Watch."

If they write content, share it. If they curate content, comment on it and add to the conversation. Any way you can boost your familiarity and prove your value is a good thing. Following and then disappearing is not.

3) Not Following Target Companies

Just like target prospects, you should also follow the companies you're interested in selling to. Keep an eye out for announcements, competitive moves, relevant news, and other trigger events that can provide a sales opening. And if you're already in touch with the decision maker through Twitter or another channel, even better.

4) Not Searching Industry Hashtags

Periodically searching for the industries you sell to on Twitter can keep you in the loop and bolster your business expertise. For example, type "#manufacturing" or "#HR" into the search bar, and check out the article everyone's buzzing about (that you can then send to prospects), what thought leaders are saying about the space, and conference attendees' reactions to a major keynote. 

5) Sending Direct Messages Too Soon

Direct messages are the creepiest of all Twitter interactions according to the HubSpot survey report "Is Social Selling Creepy?" That said, sending someone a direct message immediately after you follow them or vice versa is a bit like sending a LinkedIn message before the prospect's finger has even left the "accept invitation" button. It's too much, too soon. 

Warm your prospect up before you start direct contact by engaging with them in other ways, such as favoriting, retweeting, and sharing.

6) Sending Automated Direct Messages ...

... that are just a sales pitch. If you want to set up your Twitter account so that every time you gain a follower, they receive a "Thanks for following" direct message, that's okay. Not the most valuable thing in the world, but acceptable. But automated DMs that simply push your product on new followers are bad news. You wouldn't say "Buy my product!" immediately after shaking someone's hand, would you? Well, this is the social media equivalent. 

In general, salespeople should stay away from automated DMs. Why? Modern sales is about personalized and customized messaging. And an automated message that gets sent to each and every new follower -- regardless of what they do, who they are, and why they followed you -- screams generic, spammy, and unhelpful.

7) Not Using Lists

The more people you follow, the more content you have to keep up with. Simply logging into Twitter when you're following more than 100 people can be enough to provoke a panic attack. How can you possibly keep tabs on the important stuff when there's just so much of it?

Enter Twitter lists. Lists can help you group people according to industry, position, buyer lifecycle stage, and pretty much any other criteria you can think of. Then you can easily filter your feed by what you need to check right now, and what can wait a while. The Twitter world is your oyster.

8) Nonexistent or Incomplete Bio

Granted, you don't have a ton of real estate on Twitter for your bio. But you can do more with 160 characters than you might think. 

To optimize your Twitter bio for social selling success, make sure to include: 

• A mini insight
• Your value proposition
• Your company's Twitter handle
• Relevant industry hashtags

For a handy Twitter bio template, check out this post.

9) Not Live Tweeting Conferences or Events

One of the best things about Twitter is that it enables event attendees to tweet their reactions and strike up conversations in real time. With this in mind, salespeople should get involved on Twitter while they're at a conference. You'll certainly gain followers, and maybe even a new lead or two.

But maybe you had a conflict and couldn't make it to the conference. No problem -- search the hashtag on Twitter to virtually attend. This way you don't have to miss the insights (or the lead generation opportunity).

10) Using Favorites Sparingly

A favorite is kind of like a social media high five. They make the recipient feel great, they validate good behavior, and they don't take very much effort.

So why wouldn't you share the love? Reserve retweets and replies for truly exceptional content, but feel free to favorite away. 

11) Ignoring Twitter Sales Openings 

"Wondering about Product A vs. B. What's the difference?"

If you're a rep who sells either of these offerings and you let this tweet pass by without responding, you're making a huge mistake. More and more, buyers are turning to social media outlets to do product research and find answers to questions. And if you offer help precisely when they need it? You just increased your chances of closing a deal. Significantly.

12) Bad Picture

If you're using Twitter for work, you need to get a picture to match. A suit, tie, and totally serious expression isn't necessary. But leave the duck lips pics, bathroom selfies, and frat party snapshots on Facebook where they belong. 

Not sure if your picture is making people cringe? This post can help.

13) No LinkedIn Profile Link

Buyers shouldn't have to struggle to get in touch with you. That said, you should always link to your LinkedIn profile from your Twitter bio and vice versa. This makes it easy for prospects to engage with you further, and contact you on their preferred channel.

14) Not Checking Out Who Your Target Prospects Follow

Want to get to know your buyers? Take a look at the people they follow on Twitter, as well as any public lists they've created. This will help you get a grip on what and who is important to them, so you can model yourself and your sales messaging after their "heroes." 

15) Not Keeping up With Notifications

Twitter makes it simple to track the amount of retweets, favorites, and follows you're getting though the "Notifications" tab. In other words, you have no excuse for bad manners.

When someone engages with you on Twitter, thank them! They didn't have to support you, and a little common courtesy goes a lot way. Not to mention that interactions from potential buyers provide a great sales opening. They've signaled their interest in you -- now follow up to get the conversation flowing.

What Twitter blunders would you add to this list? Share in the comments.

There are many reasons why a professional services firm might consider rebranding. Most of them are firmly rooted in a need to reposition the firm in the marketplace.

It could be as simple as the merger of two firms or as complex as a major shift in target clients or business strategy. But whatever the reason, a firm eventually faces the question of how to rebrand in a way that yields the desired business result.

That is what we are going to cover. What is the right strategy to rebrand your professional services firm?

1. Start With the Business Reason

Any rebranding strategy should start with a thorough understanding of the business reason behind the rebranding. Is it driven by a need to accelerate growth? Does your firm need to compete with larger, more established competitors?

Some of these business cases are very easy to make, such as a merger of two firms. Others are more subtle, such as outgrowing your image. If you are not clear about the business reason driving the effort, you run the risk of wasting a tremendous amount of resources. Some of the other top reasons to rebrand your professional services firm includes:

• You need to compete at a higher level or in a new market.
• Your brand no longer reflects who you are.
• Your firm is spun off from an existing brand.
• You have a legal reason compelling you to change.
• You need to simplify and focus your message.
• You have a new marketing team.
• You are launching a new service line.

2. Research Your Firm and Your Target Clients

When you are clear on the business case for a rebranding, the next step is to conduct independent research on your firm and your clients. If you are attempting to move into a new market, that research should include your new target clients as well. The goal is to have an objective understanding of your current brand perception and competencies.

Without this research, you will be operating from an internal perspective only. Our own research on professional services buyers and sellers shows that virtually all firms have blind spots and distort how the marketplace sees them. After all, we are all human. Without objective research, you will build a brand on false assumptions.

3. Use Positioning and Messaging to Capture Your Brand Strategy

As you develop your firm’s market positioning and messaging architecture, you will uncover the essence of your brand strategy. Your market positioning is a brief description of where you fit into the market space. Are you an innovative leader or a low-cost provider?

This positioning will drive many of your subsequent decisions. But you can’t just make something up. It needs to balance who you are as a firm and who you want to become. You must be able to support your positioning or your brand will be hollow.

Your messaging architecture articulates your messages to each of your main audiences. These messages must be consistent with your overall brand and supportable. This is not marketing copy. It is the skeleton upon which marketing copy is built.

4. Build Your Brand Identity

This is the part of the rebranding strategy where you develop the visual elements that will communicate your brand. Think firm name, logo, tagline, colors, business card design, stationery, and the like. These elements are often described in a brand style guidelines document, which provides a set of parameters to ensure your brand is implemented consistently across all of your marketing materials.

Many folks confuse these elements with your brand. Your brand is your reputation and your visibility, not your firm’s name or its logo. Your brand identity is a sort of visual shorthand for your brand.

5. Build Your Website and Online Presence

Your website is your single most important communication and business development tool. It is the place where you can tell a compelling story to each of your audiences. It is the first place a prospective client or employee will turn to learn more about your firm.

It is no exaggeration to say that a website and your online presence are the heart of a modern professional services firm. All rebranding strategies eventually involve your website. In a very real way, a website is built on the framework of your messaging architecture. Together with your remaining online presence (think social media, for example), it is the full expression of your positioning.

6. Marketing Collateral

At this point in your rebranding strategy, you will develop all of the marketing materials that you need to communicate your brand and services messages. Think pitch decks, proposal templates, brochures, one-sheet flyers and trade show booths.

These are the tools that you will use to communicate your message. They should be firmly anchored in your brand strategy.

7. Brand Building Plan

The final element of your rebranding strategy is to develop a plan to promote and strengthen your new brand. How will you launch it internally? In professional services, it is essential that your employees embrace the new brand. After all, they are your product.

It’s also important that you build the brand in a way that communicates your firm’s reputation and expertise, as well as its name. It must communicate your market positioning. Brand building is different for professional services.

Some rebranding strategies fail because they try to shortcut the process. Others fail because they picked the wrong partners to work with. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Start with a sound rebranding strategy. Find an experienced partner. Give rebranding the attention it deserves and the rewards will follow. A well-positioned firm that clearly communicates its brand is a formidable competitor indeed.

7 Quick Sales Tips for a Strong 2015 Close

The year has once again flown by and, for calendar-year companies, the fourth quarter looms ahead. For sales professionals, this means pedal to the metal to close out the year on a strong note. For sales managers, it means coaching and guiding teams to reach the finish line in good shape.

Here are some quick sales tips that may prove helpful in bringing 2015 to a strong close.

1. Personalize your dialogues — Too many sales professionals send impersonal e-mails and leave “canned” voice mails- I know, because I’m on the receiving end. There’s a tool called the Internet, with the World Wide Web and social media sites, offering a wealth of information regarding the contacts you’re trying to reach. Prior to any dialogue, phone or e-mail, take the time to check LinkedIn and Twitter to find out who they are, their interests, and what they’re tweeting about. Then, use this personal information in your dialogues. I know how great marketing automation systems can be, but they tend to generate generic responses. When you make dialogues personal, you can expect to see a change in response rates.
2. Read, read, read, and read — In our great age of content-based marketing, organizations are producing an abundance of relevant articles, white papers, research studies, briefs, and blogs on key subjects. Search for topics related to your industry, and sign up for alerts and blog subscriptions from people and organizations that can help build your knowledge base. These sources can give you the information to develop and provide insights to prospects.
3. Provide real insights — The more you read, the better the insights you can provide. Don’t just automatically share content with “read this article, it’s a great piece.” Take the time to aggregate data and provide meaning. Offer real insights and value to your connections. Develop an opinion and communicate your points of view. It’s a great way to become an expert and build both credibility and your personal brand.
4. Don’t get complacent — If you are close to making goal with a few months of the year left, it’s easy to get complacent. I say keep the pedal down and make it to the finish line as quickly as possible. Remember, the calendar resets itself each year. Don’t just think about completing the current year; push for continued, sustainable success to lay the foundation for 2016.
5. Fill out your CRM — Data capturing and sharing is critical in today’s business world. I understand that sales professionals typically don’t get up in the morning eager to fill out their CRM, but make a commitment to do so. Tracking won and lost deals is critical for companies, with analysis helping to improve products, positioning, and messaging.
6. Get social — If you are not leveraging social selling tools, do so before it’s too late. You don’t have to become an expert in Twitter or make hundreds of connections on LinkedIn. At the very least, set up accounts on these two social platforms and follow your clients and prospects so you can learn more about how they think and what is important to them. Follow the posts of investor relations departments to get a better understanding of your target companies’ business performance. Finally, follow your competitors, too, so you can stay current on what they are doing.
7. Nurture leads — Prospecting can be difficult. That’s why if someone downloads content from your website, you should make the commitment to follow up and nurture that lead. They may not have an immediate need, but they are searching for elements of your solution. Basically, they’re kicking the tires. If they fit your lead criteria, make sure to touch base and nurture those leads. Don’t just give up after two e-mails; make sure the prospect knows who you are for when the need arises.

Whether you are working effortlessly to make up ground to reach quota or, let’s hope, having a stellar sales year that’s closing in on making President’s Club, it’s wise to plan ahead to create momentum into the next year. That’s how you provide ongoing value for your clients and differentiate yourself from the rest of the pack. What else would you add to this list?

Learn more about Richardson’s Consultative Selling Sales Training Solutions.

The post 7 Quick Sales Tips for a Strong 2015 Close appeared first on Richardson Sales Enablement Blog.

The marketing automation industry has snowballed over the past few years, and yet it’s only just getting started.

According to Marketing Automation Insider, in the past five years alone, we’ve seen over $5.5B worth of acquisitions made, and an aggregate vendor revenues increase from $225M to $1.65B!

At the current rate of adoption and innovation, you may be wondering where marketing automation is headed, which trends are emerging, and how it will all benefit your business. Well, my friend, you’ve come to the right place! Here, we’ll explore three major shifts in the marketing automation industry and how they’ll impact your businesses on both a macro and micro-level. Let’s get started…

1. Predictive analytics is making guessing a game of the past

One of the major trends emerging in the marketing automation industry is the use of predictive analytics and machine learning to power sales and marketing decisions.

Predictive analytics uses clever statistical models to identify what your customers will likely do next and then automatically uses those insights to trigger certain actions.

In 2012, Amazon filed a patent for a predictive analytics system that would allow them to begin shipping products before a customer even ordered them. (Crazy thought, right?!) But by predicting the probability of someone buying a product based on their behavior on the website and previous history, Amazon could reduce its shipping times and move product faster.

There are countless uses for this type of technology, but in the context of marketing automation, it provides the opportunity to eliminate guess work.

How long should you wait between sending two emails in a lead nurturing sequence? Which content (blogs, ebooks, etc) should you send to a certain type of lead? How should you score a lead from a particular marketing channel?

While experience tends to provide good answers to these questions, predictive analytics can provide dynamic answers that, like a good bottle of wine, become better over time, ultimately surpassing that of an experienced marketer’s hunch.

As a result of this, marketing and sales will become less of a guessing game. The most important consequence of this is that companies using predictive analytics will have the competitive advantage.

Predictive analytics adoption is still in its infancy, providing the innovative early birds with a great opportunity to get a head start. The question is, will it be you or your competitors that gain this competitive advantage?

2. Intelligent multi-channel marketing is becoming the norm

Tests have shown that when you target a customer both in their inbox with an email and on Facebook with a matching ad, the customer is 22% more likely to purchase, as opposed to if you had only sent the email.

In multi-channel marketing, the whole is usually greater than the sum of its parts. This is especially true when you add a layer of personalization into the mix, which is of course possible with marketing automation.

Let’s look at time for an example. Let’s imagine that you’re the marketing director of a company that sells kitchen appliances online.

A prospect named Molly visits your website and adds a fridge to her shopping cart (obviously a very large shopping cart.) Molly enters her details to check out but never completes the transaction.

In this situation your multi-channel strategy could look something like this:

• After 30 minutes, an automated email is triggered encouraging Molly to complete her order (in case she got distracted by a phone call…or Game of Thrones).
• Using retargeting through a sync with your marketing automation platform and Facebook, Molly sees an ad saying “Molly, are you refurbishing your kitchen?” and linking to a separate landing page. If this landing page is engaged with, Molly would be entered into a whole new sequence with upsells and offers incentivizing her to buy more items.
• If after one day Molly still hasn’t bought the fridge, a text message could be sent asking if there’s anything your support team could answer or help her with.
• If after several days later there’s still no purchase, a separate email and Facebook ad campaign could be triggered targeting Molly with different fridges and freezers relating to her original search criteria.

This type of multi-channel nurturing is immensely effective for a number of reasons:

• It’s underused. Despite being very effective, few companies are running such hyper-personalized campaigns. This will likely change over the next few years, as more and more companies realize its effectiveness.
• With more channels, you can capture more data from your customers, leading to more relevant targeting. The more relevant your targeting, the more likely a conversion will be.
• It makes it virtually impossible to lose a customer due to distraction, as you’re able to communicate with the buyer across devices and platforms and at different times.

We’re likely to see a lot more multi-channel marketing over the next year or two. As marketing automation tools improve their offerings and features, and as more case studies emerge, more and more businesses will begin to use this powerful tactic.

Could this sort of multi-channel marketing help your business convert more leads into customers?

3. Marketing automation is becoming widely adopted

There are two colliding waves in the marketing automation industry that are converging to form a tsunami-like surge of businesses interested in marketing automation. These waves are 1) the increased awareness of the value of marketing automation and 2) the increasing impact and capabilities of marketing automation software.

Since 2012, the amount of case studies, articles, webinars, and events covering marketing automation has exploded, resulting in a heightened awareness of the impact of adopting a marketing automation solution.

Simultaneously, marketing automation software is becoming more and more powerful. With new features and functionality, such as real-time personalization and adtech-geared tools, as well as an increasing pool of experts readily sharing best practices, the scope of what marketing automation software can achieve is continuing to expand. Word—and excitement—is spreading like wildfire.

These two converging waves have an obvious result: more and more businesses (your competitors included) are implementing a marketing automation solution. As such, it pays to get ahead of the game and start building your marketing automation campaigns early. That way, by the time your competitors are building out their first campaigns, your business could have hundreds of active, fine-tuned campaigns already working on leads. Get to it!

Conclusion

As far as we can tell from the data, marketing automation is becoming smarter, more tailored, and more accessible. The combination of these trends explains why the industry has grown so rapidly over the past five years and why it does not appear to be slowing down anytime soon.

For business owners, the lesson here is simple and Darwinian: evolve now (aka get automating), or risk losing your market share to your competitors.

SPONSORED:

This sponsored post is produced by IBM Silverpop. 

Do you know what your customers’ path to purchase looks like? If your marketing department is like most others, you may have it set up like a city street where your customers move from Point A to Point B in an orderly procession.

It’s not that simple in the real world, especially for complex or high-consideration purchases like appliances, luxury travel, or sports gear. The path is more like a cross-country road trip instead of a bus ride across town, fraught with rest stops, potholes, missed exits — and maybe even a breakdown along the way.

What’s on the Journey?

The “journey” includes not just every place your customer comes into contact with your company, employees, and brands but also retailers, partners, review sites, and more. Mapping this journey means understanding all of those stages — such as researching, buying, and loyalty — as well as the obstacles on that path.

Once you map out this journey, you can determine the kinds of content that can get customers past the roadblocks so they continue traveling with your company.

This can be a complex process, especially for companies with multiple brands and product lines, each with its own marketing program.

But mapping your customer’s journey can revolutionize your digital marketing program and deliver a better experience for your customers, as well as your own bottom line.

4 Elements of ‘Customer Journey’ Marketing

It’s become one of the hottest buzzwords in the industry, but “customer journey” marketing is really the next step up the evolutionary ladder from lifecycle and 1-to-1 marketing. Below are the key elements of this approach:

1. It’s customer-centric, not “customer-focused.” What’s the difference? Customer-focused marketing centers on what you want to say to your customer in each marketing message. Customer-centric marketing views every piece of your marketing plan and programs from your customers’ perspective instead.You understand how your customers research, buy, and maintain post-purchase relations. Your messages reflect what you’ve learned as well as the obstacles that prevent them from moving on to the next step.
2. Email leads an omnichannel approach. Different stages might require different messaging strategies, including both content and channels.Even though you might run your company’s email marketing program, you may find it’s best to communicate with customers at one specific stage via a strategically timed push notification from a mobile app.”Call centers, SMS, direct mail, in-store experiences or direct contact can also factor in at different points on your customer’s journey.
3. Blend broadcast messages with behavior- or preference-driven automated messaging. You’re well on your way if your marketing programs include onboarding for new subscribers, browse- or cart-abandonment emails, post-purchase messages, and continuous re-engagement programs. All of these map to key points on the customer journey.Broadcast messages continue to play an important role, but if you rely solely on promotional marketing messages, you’re missing out on the finer points that can move a customer close to the purchase point or help that customer return time and time again. Communications that incorporate your company or brand personality and vary the message from “Buy this” to “Here’s some insider information that can help you make the right purchase” are also useful. Reflecting the omnichannel approach, these messages could be emails, strategically timed SMS texts, or app or Web push notifications.
4. The customer journey includes auditing all of the messages customers receive from every department or division in your company. Ideally, you’ll map the customer journey across all your company’s brands and departments to reveal how often and in which channels customers are receiving messages.This key insight could lead to a company-wide messaging overhaul, especially if your organization includes many different brands, each with its own messaging strategy. Even if you have just one brand, you’re likely doing a mix of calendar-driven broadcast messages and automated messaging like reminders and updates. See how your communication strategies overlap. What is the customer experience like if you send an irrelevant broadcast message on the same day as one of your welcome or onboarding series emails? It might be OK, or it could provide a less-than-stellar experience out of the gate.

Matching the Journey to Messages

Mapping the customer journey uncovers the trigger points along the way, using the data and signals customers are sending you to respond with helpful messaging.

Your goal is to know which messages you’ll deploy at each stage of the journey — and from which channel. With this information you can build a campaign brief that maps out whether a single message, a series of messages in multiple channels, a specific program or track would work best, as well as the implicit and explicit data you need to determine the specific appropriate content required.

For more information on designing the customer journey, check out IBM Journey Designer, part of the IBM Marketing Cloud.

Loren McDonald’s role at IBM Silverpop is to educate clients and prospects on best practices and emerging trends in email, mobile, and social marketing and marketing automation. He has 30 years of experience in marketing, consulting and strategic planning. McDonald has held executive marketing positions at companies including Lyris, Inc., EmailLabs, USWeb/CKS, and Arthur Andersen. He has written more than 500 articles and blogs, is a frequent speaker, and is author of the ebook “Almost Everything You Wanted to Know About Email Marketing.” He has won several awards, including the eec 2011 Marketer of the Year and the 2005 American Business Award’s (The Stevie’s) Marketing Executive of the Year.

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