The following is an excerpt from The Predictable Revenue Guide To Tripling Your Sales:
The apps you buy should help you and your team see more clearly through clutter, not add to it. eMail add-ons help salespeople do two critical things:
Read more on email marketing tips to increase open rates…
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If you’re a developer, agency, or online video platform that lets users upload video content to share with their friends, one of the things you may worry about is how to make sure that it’ll render in high quality and also encode at a rapid pace. Should you be encountering this problem, Bitcodin wants to let you know that it’s here to help.
Backed by Y Combinator, Bitcodin says it enables fast playback of videos, optimizes the streaming quality, and supports buffering. It claims that it’s going to be able to provide video encoding at speeds a hundred times faster than similar services, while also providing Netflix-grade quality streaming.
Developers interested in tapping into this platform can go to Bitcodin’s website to sign up. All they need to do is upload a video file and select the output format, such as MPEG-DASH at 1080p. From there, the service does all the work and will spit out a new video file that can play on every device.
Perhaps the best news is that when the resulting videos play, they do so without any additional technology or software. That’s right, you won’t need Flash or Silverlight installed. It’s compliant with the same streaming standards that Netflix and YouTube follow. Interestingly, these standards, both with MPEG and MPEG-DASH online video streaming, were formed thanks to contributions from Bitcodin’s founders Stefan Lederer, Christopher Mueller, and Christian Timmerer.
Bitcodin started as a result of Lederer, Mueller, and Timmerer’s standardization work, when they realized what they were doing could help people produce videos of higher quality. Lederer told VentureBeat that his company is able to provide such speed and quality because Bitcodin’s infrastructure is stored in the cloud, which he said lets it move at much faster speeds.
Customers can elect to use one of Bitcodin’s monthly plans. There is a free option that supports up to 2.5 gigabits of data and 10 encodings, as well as paid ones that range from $29 to $149 per month. All the paid plans provide unlimited encodings but differ when it comes to the amount of gigabits it can handle.
To date, Bitcodin has raised a little more than a million from Y Combinator and two investors in Austria.
When Gen. Stanley McChrystal took charge of the U.S. Joint Special Operations Task Force in 2003, he recognized that traditional tactics of warfare were failing in Iraq. Leading this inter-service team — which included Army Rangers, Navy SEALs, and Delta Force — he needed to find new ways to disrupt Al-Qaeda and get these disparate branches of elite U.S. soldiers to work cohesively. In the new book Team of Teams, McChrystal describes the lessons he learned (and applied) in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as research and examples from other fields (including sports, aviation, and emergency medicine) on how teams have learned to work more effectively. (The book is co-authored by his colleagues Tantum Collins, David Silverman, and Chris Fussell.)
Since his retirement in 2010 — brought about by intemperate remarks about Obama officials made by McChrystal and his aides in a Rolling Stone article — the former general has taught leadership at Yale University. He’s also founded a consulting firm called CrossLead. I talked to him about what businesses can learn from the military model. Here’s an edited version of our conversation:
HBR: How did the way the military builds teams change between the time you joined the U.S. Army, in the late 1970s, and the early 2000s when you were leading forces in Afghanistan?
McChrystal: When I joined Special Operations as a Green Beret, we were already pretty good at operating as small teams — say, up to about 20 guys. Inside those teams, you had a chain of command, but you also had a more informal set of linkages. You had constant interaction — the ability to not just hear what people say, but see their actions up close. You get a level of familiarity with teammates, and they get in-depth knowledge of you, too. This informal set of interactions is really the magic. The more powerful those informal interactions are, where all it takes is one glance between one person and another, that’s how you go from command and control to organic movements.
You talk about “trust” as the key element in high functioning teams. How can you accelerate the establishment of trust?
Trust does take time, but it doesn’t have to take time between you and me personally. This is the idea of scaling teams. You trust certain things. If you’re driving on a highway and you’re hungry, and you see a McDonald’s sign, you might decide to go there because you’ve developed a level of trust in McDonald’s, even if you’ve never been to that specific location. In the same way, as you try to build trust inside a team, you try to make trust transferrable.
Let’s say you’re a Navy SEAL and I’m in the Army’s Delta Force. I may not know you personally, but I know some SEALS, and I know how they operate. I know your expectation of me, and you know my expectation of you. We have this understanding that I trust in the values of your organization, and the track record of your organization, and I transfer that trust to you if you’re wearing the right patch and have the right pedigree … [But] it does take a certain amount of personal interaction with people from the organization.
When you take on a new leadership role, what do you do the first day to try to jump-start trust and team-building?
You come with a reputation, but the reputation doesn’t necessarily include trust. It includes an assumption of competence. Sometimes it includes negative things. People might be afraid because they hear you’re a hard-ass. Regardless, the number one thing I try to do is develop personal relationships with key people in the organization. I try to exhibit trust in small ways. In a briefing, if somebody asks me for a decision, I might turn to a subordinate and ask them to handle it. I don’t ask for specifics, and I’m very overt — almost theatrical — about it. Everybody else sees it. The message is: “I trust you guys to handle this stuff,” and that can grow virally throughout an organization.
As a general in Iraq, you went on risky nighttime raids with troops. Why?
Three reasons. First, if you’re putting people in harm’s way, it’s helpful to regularly put yourself in harm’s way. They don’t need me on a mission — I’m not adding value — but accepting some level of common risk with them earns respect. Second, you have to see up close what’s actually happening. You can get descriptions, or watch it from a drone on an HDTV, but you don’t see the faces of the Iraqis. You don’t hear things. You don’t smell things. The last part is there’s a certain theater to commanding. People have an expectation of commanders. You can define your expectations any way you want them to be. A lot of people hear about you more than they directly see you. In a big organization, soldiers may only see the commander on a videoconference, or very occasionally in person. And some of the things you do — like going on missions — help to define you as a person and make clear what set of values you think are important.
Special Forces spend a lot of time rehearsing missions, but as you point out in the book, war has become so unpredictable that the value of rehearsal seems to be diminishing. How should training evolve in that situation?
I still believe in rehearsals, but I’ve learned they have a different value. When I joined the Army Rangers in 1985 we’d rehearse airfield seizure operations — we’d parachute in wearing night vision goggles, and take the field. It’s a pretty complex thing, and we’d do it over and over. We’d have contingencies in case things went wrong, but we were always trying to make things as foolproof as we could. The longer we did it, the more I realized the value of rehearsal was not in trying to get this perfectly choreographed kabuki that would unfold as planned. The value of rehearsal was to familiarize everybody with all the things that could happen, what the relationships are, and how you communicate. What you’re really doing is building up the flexibility to adapt. I’ve never been on an operation that went as planned.
Many companies lack an overarching mission that can really bring people together the way the military’s mission does. So are the lessons of military team-building really transferrable to the private sector?
The lessons are hugely transferrable. I’ve spent the last five years on the commercial side, and it’s much less different from the military than I’d expected. The perception of the military is that we’re always on a razor’s edge, operating in dramatic environments, and making extraordinary decisions. Yes, there is a fair amount of that, but that’s more TV and movies than day-to-day. The things that make the military so good and able are very basic things, such as building levels of relationships and understanding capabilities.
I find leadership in the commercial world is extraordinarily similar. There are differences. Military leadership is easier. Money is not a factor — Congress decides what people get paid, and you can’t [decide on your own to] promote your own people, so no one asks for raises. And even if you work for a great company, it’s hard to [make the mission statement] as simple and compelling as the military’s is. So in some ways, the military has it easier. In other ways, civilian companies can be more adaptable and nimble. They’re aren’t burdened by the level of law and regulation and bureaucracy that the military is.
When you look to external partners for acquiring resources and capabilities, your organization needs a practical roadmap to answer some critical questions: What kind of partners and business combinations do we need? How will we manage them over time? What profits will we earn, and will they justify our investment? The following excerpt from Remix Strategy: The Three Laws of Business Combinations offers a simple, but powerful, framework to help you make those decisions.
Business is being turned outside-in. Acquisitions, mergers, joint ventures, alliances, partnerships, and other business combinations are no longer exceptions for most firms — they have become central to gaining competitive advantage. This combining of assets, capabilities, markets, and talent pools to create new value is what I call remix strategy — and it is critical today to do this remix right.
Most likely, you have considered one or several remixes for your business. The key strategic questions you face are not whether combinations such as these are necessary but, rather, how will they create value, and how are you going to capture that value? How are these ventures going to enhance your competitive position? Whether you are at the top of the company driving the remix, in the middle managing an acquisition or a partnership, or among the operating ranks keeping the pieces humming, you need to know the answers to such questions.
In my work with executives, I’ve noticed a distinct gap in their toolkits. Managers already have a great deal of information and best practices for implementing alliances and acquisitions. The strength of these playbooks is their concrete detail about the legal, managerial, and financial ins and outs of every deal type and the tips on how to manage people and cultures in these combinations on a day-to-day basis. But managers lack a set of guiding principles for actually making the deal create value for the company. Based on my 30 years of consulting, teaching, and academic research on partnership strategy, I have created a simple but powerful framework to help executives see clearly the key decisions that drive value creation and capture, and then to navigate those decisions successfully. I call these guiding principles the three laws of business combinations.
Successful business combinations — those that turn out to be a profitable use of resources — all follow the three laws. These laws are not formulated as commandments or orders, but are necessary conditions for success. All business combinations must have the potential to create joint value, must be governed to realize this value, and must share value in a way that provides a reward to each party’s investment. Each law points to a set of practical implications:
Taken together, the laws provide a powerful, systematic approach for creating and capturing value from your partnerships—from when to form a combination, to how to manage collaboration, to how to ensure that you get a return on your efforts.
These three laws determine the success of any business combination, and at first glance, they’re easy to grasp. But each is deeper than it looks. And living by them is tricky in practice. Often, one or the other gets short shrift in the rush to strike a deal or gets lost in the glare of a promising future. Another practical problem is that because each law revolves around a different school of thought in strategy and management science, experts in one area can easily miss cues in another and, in doing so, inadvertently plant the seeds for a costly retreat later on. To avoid these pitfalls, we will need to dig deeper into each one of the laws:.
In casual conversation, the idea of creating value in combinations is often expressed as 1 + 1 = 3, or some such mathematical metaphor. In fact, that isn’t a crazy way to think about the three laws.
As explained, the first law for a business combination is that the remix must have the potential to create more value than the resources can generate when governed separately, that is, without being combined. In common business language, the combination has to produce synergy. I hesitate to use that term because of its reputation as a business buzzword. But the bad rep comes from ignoring the complex processes involved in creating value in combinations. To actually produce synergy and achieve real results, you need to pay attention to all three laws.
For example, how much more value is created by the combination? In our metaphorical formula, the extra value is 50% (3 is 50% greater than 2). But in a real situation, what is the actual amount of extra value created? That variable is clearly worth pinning down before you launch any new combination. If the increased value is great, then the risk of outright failure is probably lower and there will be more extra value to share in the third law. If the increased value is small, then everything must go right for the combination to pay off— governance must be optimal and setbacks must be minimal. Furthermore, with such a narrow margin of error in the combination, a lopsided division of gains could well leave one party earning less from the combination than it would if the party kept its assets separate. Consequently, this party would be less likely to want to commit to the combination.
And there is an even more fundamental question: How do you even measure value in this context? The numerical metaphor makes it looks easy to add and compare values. But in fact, the benefits of a combination may come in various forms — from added cash profits or lowered costs to added learning or sustainability of an advantage. And not-for-profit partners will usually value outcomes differently still. Similarly, the inputs, or contributions, are also valued differently — these could be cash, technology, know-how, and so forth.
In the abstract, you might think that all the benefits sought and the contributions made affect shareholder value or the market capitalization of a firm. But the steps from strategic benefits to market valuation are, in themselves, usually rough estimates at best. Furthermore, each partner may perceive the benefits from any given combination differently. One partner may estimate an outcome of 3 when the other sees only 2.5. Such differences may get resolved in the negotiation over the distribution of gains, but they make the initial evaluation of joint value murky.
To address these kinds of ambiguities, you need to focus concretely on the economic and competitive mechanisms that will drive the creation of joint value. This calls for fundamental strategic analysis. Why would combining resources yield an added benefit? What new competitive advantages are generated by the combination? Does it matter how the resources are combined? Which key levers affect the amount of value created by the combination?
The second law of business combinations is that they must be implemented in a way that creates joint value in reality, not just on paper. In other words, the combination has to act as an integrated operation in those areas that count for value creation. We might summarize this law as 1 + 1 = 1, referring now to unity in the management of the combination, not to its economic rationale.
Effective governance means more than ensuring that the parties get along at the personal level or that their cultures mesh. Business combinations, of course, involve people, and “soft” factors related to culture need to be addressed with care. Important as these factors are, however, they do not predict success. Excellent combinations have been struck across wide cultural differences, and harmonious personal relationships have often failed to support poorly designed business combinations. I have observed that when “cultural differences” are cited to explain the failure of a deal, the phrase more often than not hides conflicting interests and incompatible strategies.
Alternatively, the effective-governance law might seem to depend mostly on the legal structure of a combination. After all, that structure will reflect some high-level decisions, such as whether to acquire part or all of a firm, how to share investments, and so on. But this too is only a partial condition of success. Joint value does not appear automatically when assets are combined; value creation and distribution also depend on how the combination is shaped and managed after the initial deal is concluded.
When the deal is an acquisition, for example, the acquired resources can be merged into existing units or not, and the management personnel and processes may be left in place or replaced by that of the acquiring firm. Alliances, by definition, leave the partners to be managed as separate firms, but there may be varying degrees of cross-holdings or shared ownership. Simpler transactions usually include little joint management, just an agreement to exchange value on prearranged terms.
Across all these various forms, the elements that are critical to creating joint value must be managed effectively in a coordinated fashion. If the main source of joint value is economies of scale in production, for example, then the combination—whatever its form—must successfully integrate investment and management of the production facilities. If the joint value comes from sales, then that aspect of the deal, similarly, needs coordinated management. Often, the elements critical to a combination do not reside in every part of the value chain. Thus, many combinations can have successful outcomes even if they fall short of full integration and focus only on collaboration in selective areas. But in such combinations, too, excessive rivalry, conflict, or differences in management approach can doom the effort.
Even when joint value is created by a well-governed combination, your company might not receive enough of the value. That’s why the last law is certainly not the least: ultimately, the joint gains need to be divided in a way that leaves each party better off than it would have been without the combination. The share of profits is the reward, or incentive, that encourages each party to contribute its resources to the combination.
To continue the metaphor, the 3 in the 1 + 1 = 3 of the first law needs to be divvied up. The shares are not always predetermined and don’t need to be equal. So, perhaps the summary formula will look like 1 + 1 = 1.4 + 1.6. The split can also be 50-50 or 80-20 or anything else. What matters is that each party earns a fraction high enough to convince it to redirect its assets and efforts from another use into the combination.
Determining this split of profits is often just as hard as estimating the joint value itself. Just as the joint value depends on future trends in the competitive environment, so too does the division of profits. The balance of power between the parties in the combination usually evolves, and with it, so do the profit shares. For example, a partner may go into an alliance with weakness at the bargaining table, but may gain strength over time—perhaps because its own business options are growing and its contributions to the alliance have become more valuable. As a result, whatever division of gains was agreed upon at the start may come under strain over time, with one party pushing for a renegotiation or angling for new ways to capture additional value. The survival of the alliance may then be at risk if the new conditions are not accommodated.
Changes in the division of gains over time are also common in acquisitions, though in these deals the changes express themselves differently. In a cash acquisition (or divestment), one party is paid its share and the other gets the remaining returns, including both upside and downside potentials. If the former owners of the acquired resources retain some ownership in the new combination, perhaps because the acquisition is financed by stock, then they share somewhat in the subsequent risk of the combination. In that case, over time, each party may realize more (or less) value than what was initially anticipated.
The three laws apply to all industries and types of combinations — from mergers in industrial sectors to software partnerships in the emerging Internet of Things. To see how the laws work in practice — and what happens when combinations fail to fulfill them — consider the combination strategies of Daimler and of Renault in the early 2000s. It’s a well-known story, but we will use a new lens to compare and dissect these deals.
Leaders at Daimler and at Renault faced similar strategic issues. Each company’s leadership team decided that it needed to expand its footprint globally and increase its volume of production. Organic growth seemed a slow and difficult way to achieve these goals. Both Daimler and Renault therefore sought combinations with existing companies that could help them expand production and sales globally. In other words, both companies saw a potential to create joint value through a business combination—the first law of every business combination. From there, however, they took different steps, which have led to widely different results.
Daimler proceeded by acquiring Chrysler in the United States and then buying a one-third stake in Mitsubishi in Japan. Later, it also took a minority stake in Hyundai Motors in Korea, formed a three-way auto-engine joint venture with Hyundai and Mitsubishi, and added joint ventures in China. Overall, Daimler created a complex network of alliances worldwide at the same time that it worked to integrate the whole of Chrysler’s business.
Renault chose a different route for the governance of its combinations. It focused mostly on its relationship with Nissan, which was a substantially bigger player in Japan and worldwide than Mitsubishi. Renault acquired a one-third stake in Nissan. Later, the two companies created a 50-50 joint venture to run joint operations, and they invested directly in each other. The result was a more coordinated and balanced approach than Daimler’s multiple, but relatively separate alliances.
The differing governance choices made by each leadership team were heavily influenced by the conditions of its combination partners. Daimler was a more powerful player than any of its partners. Renault was almost equally balanced with Nissan in terms of production volumes. Nissan was financially in distress, but it had a proud and successful history, good technology, and good brands.
With these governance choices, collaboration between Renault and its partner was much more successful than that between Daimler and its partners. Daimler’s relationship with Mitsubishi unraveled after a few years; the German company later divested its ownership of Chrysler after pouring money into the American carmaker, at a deep loss on the investment. Renault, by contrast, successfully turned Nissan around and created an integrated global operation rooted in Europe and Japan. The second law of business combinations helps explain Daimler’s failure and Renault’s success.
The third law came into play too. Because the structures of the deals were different, value was shared differently in the two cases. To acquire Chrysler, Daimler paid off Chrysler shareholders with a one-third premium over market value; in other words, the returns to those former owners of the resource were fixed at this point. The residual returns to whatever joint value DaimlerChrysler might create would accrue to the shareholders of the combined company. Unfortunately, because the actual joint value created was negative, these shareholders were left with negative returns.
The Renault-Nissan partnership, by contrast, set out to create new value for all parties and to pay out benefits as the new value occurred. As a result, the structure of the alliance enabled both parties to gain (or lose, if that were the case) proportionally over time. Their mutual and partial shareholdings were the primary way in which they shared the returns of their cooperation.
Renault was clearly more successful with its combination strategy than Daimler. And the benefits of its alliance with Nissan still resonate today, as the partners continue to manage their global businesses together. Even Daimler has since invested in that combination, buying minority shares in Renault and Nissan.
Remix strategy is more relevant today than ever. Not only is the pace of mergers and acquisitions at an all-time high, but alliances, partnerships, and multiparty consortia are increasingly popular, even if sometimes below the radar. Many big pharma companies rely on partnerships for half or more of their drug pipeline. Business models using sharing and technology platforms depend on remixes too. And incumbent firms in traditional industries have to learn to evolve and adapt — often by bringing in assets from outside their boundaries. Increasingly, competition is a battle among groups of allied firms, not between stand-alone companies. Understanding and applying the three laws are keys to success in this new world.
This was adapted from Remix Strategy: The Three Laws of Business Combinations.
Italian architect Renzo Piano is known for ambitious projects like the new Whitney Museum, the New York Times building, and the striking California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco.
So it comes as a bit of surprise, to say the least, that the Renzo Piano Building Workshop is focusing its efforts on a suburban shopping mall in the Bay Area, dubbed the City Center Bishop Ranch. According to Antonio Belvedere, a partner at the workshop, it's part of a plan to reimagine the mall as a new kind of gathering place for the community.
A plan, in other words, to make suburbia feel a little more like urban centers, where gathering places are plentiful. It's an idea that lines up with New Urbanism, a popular urban design movement that espouses the value of mixed-use and walkable neighborhoods.
In agreeing to do this project, Renzo Piano is taking on a place (the exurbs) and a type of structure (a mall) that most prominent architects would never deign to touch.
But the suburbs deserve quality architecture too. Suburbia isn't going anywhere, despite plenty of claims to the contrary, and neither are malls. During the 2000s, suburbs actually grew more quickly than urban areas. And in wealthy enclaves like Sarasota, Florida, malls are as popular as ever.
Still, the suburban shopping mall hasn't had an easy decade. As online shopping has become more popular, the number of mall visitors has declined. Shopping malls across the U.S. are shuttering. Analytics firm Green Street Advisors predicts that 15% of malls will either fail or morph into non-retail space in the next decade.
As a place for shopping, malls are starting to outlive their usefulness. But malls — especially outdoor ones — are ideal gathering places in the outskirts of suburbia, where more organic communal spaces are either hard to find or non-existent.
The City Center project, currently in development in the non-descript suburb of San Ramon, "is a place that’s meant to be where people are gathering," says Belvedere.
In turn, that means it's a place for San Ramon residents to have chance meetings and even strike up new friendships — a place for the kind of serendipity that communities lose when you have to drive everywhere.
In practice, here's what that looks like: a somewhat typical-looking shopping mall, featuring a pair of minimalist two-story buildings covered in glare-deflecting aluminum. Between the buildings, there is a one-acre enclosed space — a piazza of sorts.
"The piazza is the most important element. Everything is designed around the piazza," says Belvedere.
It's possible that City Center will be a model for future shopping malls, especially as developers search for ways to keep dying malls on life support. But the emphasis on outdoor space poses a problem in in all parts of the country that don't have sunny weather for most of the year.
Think about New Jersey, which has one of the highest concentrations of malls in the country. The amount of rain and snow that the state gets would make a City Center-like experience impossible. Belvedere admits as much.
"California has the perfect weather for it," he says.
It's hard to imagine the City Center as a communal gathering place as long as it remains cut off from its surroundings. Renzo Piano Building Workshop is designing the mall with the expectation that a larger district will pop up around it, with a hotel, housing, and potentially other shops nearby.
"The building becomes a seed in a sense that you put this seed in this place and around this place, things can happen. This place can grow a lot because on the edges you create the right conditions," says Belvedere.
Whether the dream of building an exurban community around a shopping mall can come to fruition remains to be seen — but Renzo Piano has as good a shot as anyone at making it work.
What happens in China doesn't necessarily stay in China. Britain's fortunes have been linked to the global economy for centuries and 2015 is no different.
The picture is not rosy out there. Commodities are in the midst of one of most severe price crashes outside of a global economic crisis, while China is balancing a stock market collapse against a shift in policy away from production to consumption and may miss its 7% growth target.
The two are linked in a loop.
As Chinese growth weakens, the country's manufacturing sector slows down and needs fewer raw materials. As demand for commodities falls, so does the price, hurting economies such as Australia that depend on exporting them. This leads back to less demand for China-made goods.
The UK economy, being outward looking for a lot of its goods, isn't out of this loop.
In case you missed it, this is what a 12 month bloodbath in commodities looks like:
Britain's economy is actually doing relatively well at the moment.
It's going through the third-longest spurt of economic growth since 1955, with UK GDP up by 0.7% between April and June, compared to the three months before. And although the quick uptick in employment recorded has faded a little, it's being replaced by growth in wages.
But this recovery is still fragile.
UK industrial production declined 0.4% in June, surprising analysts who predicted a 0.1% increase. It was led lower by mining and quarrying, which fell a huge 3.8% month-on-month, according to the Office of National Statistics, as the commodities price rout worsened.
Banks that have big links to China have suffered. Profit at Asia-focused lender Standard Chartered fell 44% in the first half of the year, while Douglas Flint, chairman of HSBC said that "falls in commodity prices led to a lower value of commodity related trade finance" in the bank's interim results statement.
The toxic mix is also one of the reasons why the Bank of England is struggling to raise interest rates.
The BoE can't get inflation going with loose monetary policy when prices are falling with commodities. Meanwhile a rise in rates would also strengthen the pound, hurting exports where demand is already weakening.
Here's the pound vs the euro from Bloomberg:
The Bank of England saw a lot of this coming back in February when it announced its nightmare scenario to test UK banks' capital strength in this year's stress tests. The BoE does annual health checks on banks to make sure they can weather extreme but hypothetical economic crises without collapsing. If they fail, they have to raise capital and take fewer risks.
The round of tests this year focuses on the China/commodities death loop, and helps explain how it might hit the UK economy.
The adverse scenario the BoE put in place for the bank exam has China in total decline, growing only 1.7% in Q4 2015.
This pushes down China's trading partners and commodities, at which point "the global downturn impacts the United Kingdom. Output growth turns negative as export demand falls sharply. There are additional spillovers, through financial linkages and confidence effects."
It's good news the BoE is prepared for the worst, but it's perhaps a bit too close to reality for comfort.
Join the conversation about this story »
NOW WATCH: You've been rolling your shirtsleeves wrong your entire life
Effective sales copy on a website shouldn’t suggest that the reader take some specific action, but demand the customer take a specific action immediately.
This is known as the call to action (CTA) and it is the most important part of any type of sales copy.
Everything preceding the CTA should be pushing the customer into taking the definitive action you want them to take: Namely, to purchase your product, subscribe to your service, click on a link, etc.
So let’s see what what the mechanics are to creating responsive ‘call to action’ links, so your advertising converts and sells over and over again…
Rule 1: The CTA must be very clear and very direct.
There can be no ambiguity as to how you want your prospective customers to act. It is a critical point in the flow of your sales letter. If there is anything confusing or not crystal clear in your CTA, you risk losing your customer forever.
Don’t Ask, Just Tell
In your CTA, you don’t want to ask your customers to buy your product. You want to demand that they buy your product by presenting it as the only possible solution to whatever product they are experiencing.
What comes before in your sales copy simply sets up the problem. Then, introduce your product as the solution and explain the benefits they will receive if they purchase your product.
You should also offer social proof that explains how your product has already improved the lives of others or received the endorsement of authoritative people. You also can offer bonuses to add value to your offer and provide an unconditional guarantee.
When you follow this structure, there should be no other course of action for them but to buy your product. That’s when you want to insert your CTA.
Often, the phrase “So what are you waiting for?!” is used right before the CTA. This is often the final push your prospective customers need to act on your clearly-defined CTA: To click on the link to buy your product NOW!
Formatting
People prefer things that are familiar to them, so your sales copy should be immediately identifiable as sales copy. Avoid using strange or unusual formatting that your readers may find off-putting. To get an idea of what your web copy should look like, visit the sales pages of your competitors and see what they are doing.
You can often get formatting ideas from these pages. Another option is to run a Google search on high-converting sales pages and then “borrow” the formatting of those pages for your own. If they are already working for somebody else, those formats probably will work for you as well.
Colors And Fonts
Use standard, neutral colors and familiar fonts on your web pages so that you don’t alienate your visitors. Remember, when they arrive on your page, they are not yet familiar with your product. Do whatever you can to set them at ease.
Video Power
Video sales letters are another option for you to consider. You don’t need a lot of expensive equipment to create high-converting videos. Your laptop or PC probably already has a built-in camera. It may even be high definition.
If you choose to use a video sales letter – or include a short video on your sales page – write a script that includes all the key elements of your sales letter because the sales techniques are the same for video as they are for text.
Using The CTA To Close The Deal
If your CTA is clear and forceful, your pricing provides a lot of perceived value and is neither excessively higher or lower than your competitors, and you have engaged your reader on an emotional level to prove that your produce is something they can’t live without, then your sales letter will convert well.
Tesla is unlike any other car company on Earth. It's much closer to being a technology company, and not just because it's based in Silicon Valley and has a member of the PayPal mafia in Elon Musk as its CEO.
Tesla-as-a-tech-company has always been a big part of the company's story, but there's one way that Tesla doesn't want to be like a tech company. This came to head when the electric car maker reported second-quarter earnings on Wednesday.
Tesla doesn't want to raise money by selling shares.
There's a mounting sense among analysts that Tesla will have to do an equity raise, given the rate at which it's burning through cash. This from the company's Q2 investor letter:
Cash and cash equivalents were $1.15 billion at the end of the quarter, down $359 million sequentially, as capital expenditures were $405 million in the quarter. Capital expenditures were primarily for the capacity expansion and tooling associated with Model X and all-wheel drive vehicles, as well as for the construction of the Gigafactory. We have historically been frugal with our capital spending, and our most recent capital spend per unit of incremental capacity is significantly more efficient than even our prior performance. In Q2, we closed a $500 million asset based credit line that can be expanded to $750 million. This line is collateralized by selected inventory, equipment and accounts receivable, and is specifically designed to provide us both increased liquidity as we ramp Model X deliveries and operating flexibility to expand all aspects of our business. We drew $50 million under this line in Q2.
Tesla executives expressed a lot of confidence that the cash position won't be a problem in 2015, but it's important to remember that this is a company that's aiming to build close to twice as may cars as it did in 2014, and that will be launching a new vehicle, the Model X SUV, in the next two months.
A lot of people think that Tesla should do an equity raise now, while the stock is still trading at stratospheric levels (even though it's getting crushed in trading on Thursday, due to lower guidance on 2015 vehicle deliveries, it's still up monumentally over the past two years).
The idea is that with shares near historic highs — and with some analysts arguing that Tesla's future growth is baked into the current price levels — the stock is poised for a slide as the business gets tougher to manage over the next 18 months and executing on the master plan runs into speedbumps.
Many tech companies obviously love to raise money. But Tesla is both a maturing operation and one that already staged its major "equity event" — its 2010 IPO. Anyone who bought in back then has seen a return of over 1,000% on their initial appetite for risk (assuming they hung onto the stock). But this isn't an early stage tech company anymore.
Tesla did a secondary offering in 2013, when the company was just beginning to roll out the Model S sedan and was still paying off a $465-million loan from the Department of Energy. But that was a period when cash flowing into the company was uncertain.
Selling a $100,000 luxury sedan has enabled Tesla to improve revenues substantially, but the company has upped the ante on its ambitions at the same time. For example, back in 2013, there wasn't a $5-billion Gigafactory under construction in Nevada. Tesla is now constructing that facility to provide enough lithium-ion battery cells to power 500,000 cars by 2020.
Over the past year, Tesla has repeatedly declared that it doesn't see the need to sell shares to raise money. However, on Thursday's earnings call, Musk softened that position a bit in an exchange with Bank of America Merrill Lynch auto analyst John Murphy (thanks to Seeking Alpha for the transcript).
"[W]hen you look at the cash burn and how the capital market sometimes shift very quickly, it just seems like an opportune time to take advantage of what you might need in the future, so that's why we're asking," Murphy said.
"[W]e're in the same sort of mind frame as you are," Musk responded.
But Musk only wants to raise capital as a "risk reduction measure," as he put it. Both he and outgoing CFO Deepak Ahuja stressed that they expect Tesla to end 2015 with $1 billion in the bank. That said, no one is more aware of Tesla's stock value than Musk, who owns a huge amount of it.
Not everyone thinks a capital raise is warranted. Jefferies analyst Dan Dolev published a research note after Tesla earnings in which he observed that "[c]ash flow from operations was once again sharply negative in 2Q for the fifth consecutive quarter" and pointed out that this "once again raised concerns that Tesla may need to raise equity." But he added that Tesla hasn't yet cut into its credit line very much and anticipated that the company's cash position would improve meaningfully in 2016 as it picks up the pace of Model X deliveries.
Dolev's expectations align with Musk and his management team's. The Tesla story is changing and has been changing since last year. Musk wants to run the company less like a fast-growth tech company and more like a game-changing automaker that happens to be very, very good at integrating state-of-the-art technology into its vehicles.
In that sense, it's symbolically and practically essential that Tesla manages its cash and debt without relying on high-flying equity lifelines. The need to be government-supported is in Tesla's past. The early investors have collected their reward. Now Tesla needs to build cars, sell cars, and become a company that's funded by its satisfied customers.
SEE ALSO: Elon Musk says Tesla's new SUV is the 'hardest car to build in the world'
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NOW WATCH: People were baffled by 50 sharks circling in shallow waters off the English coast
Keurig's home brew coffee is getting cold fast.
Keurig's stock sank to its lowest level in years on Thursday after the company delivered a disastrous earnings report the day before that pointed to dismal sales and impending layoffs.
The company's stock continued to plunge about 30% on Thursday, shaving off a $3 billion chunk of its market value in just the last two days
The company's most recent woes seem to trace back to missteps it made with the latest version of its single-serve brewer and fading interest among customers. The company irked its core audience by making only pricier licensed "K-cups" compatible with its Keurig 2.0 machine, which already put people off with a $200 price tag Read more...
More about Business and Keurig
There’s really no reason to beat around the bush, so I’ll just come out and say it. More than 95% of new products launched by established companies each year fail, according to an AcuPoll study.
Ouch, right?
This troublesome stat is due to a variety of factors: poor launch timing, inadequate testing, limited market size, lack of process and coordination, and inaccurate messaging. The good news is that there are some recent statistics that give us B2B marketers insight into how we can turn around this shaky track record. Here are three stats that will change the way you think about and plan your product marketing strategy.
This stat demonstrates how imperative it is that your website follow the three C’s of messaging: clear, consistent, and concise.
Your competitors are all fighting for the attention of your potential customers, so when a visitor comes to your website, they must immediately see value in your product as a potential solution for the challenge you propose to solve. To get to this razor sharp messaging, you’ll want to know exactly WHO you are talking to, and WHAT value you offer.
The concept is basic in theory, but so challenging to put into practice as you juggle competing priorities and myriad feedback from other departments like your sales and customer support teams.
Regardless, it’s critical that you stay clear, consistent, and concise across all your content. Here’s a list of questions to ask your team before distributing any piece of content in your product marketing strategy:
If you can answer YES to these four key questions, your content is on the right track to being engaging enough for your target audience and get you heard above the noise of your competitors.
Content has become the cornerstone of modern product marketing—the days of simply creating a pitch deck and sales sheet to support a product launch are a thing of the past. In fact, 60% of people are inspired to seek out a product after reading content about it, and 70% of consumers would rather learn about a brand via articles than ads. The takeaway here is that quality content is now key to your product marketing strategy.
Try your best not to be reactive and avoid building new content ad hoc and in the middle of your product launch. Reactive marketing practices can lead to disjointed messaging and disruptive funnel activity. Instead, plan and finalize content at each stage of the buyer journey in advance of a product launch. If you must add content later, make sure that it folds seamlessly into your existing plan.
Schedule easy-to-consume, top-of-funnel content at the engage stage, such as an infographic or SlideShare. Use this content to drive readers to gated, information-rich content at the lead generation stage. Then drop product-centric content at the marketing/sales qualified stages. By planning this process early rather than mid-launch, this sets up your team for success from day one, and will allow for more bandwidth when ad hoc projects do pop up during your launch campaign.
Yeah—just let that sink in for a minute.
In my opinion, this statistic from a 2013 Microsoft study deserves a national PSA. Attention world, we now have shorter attention spans than Nemo! It’s a sad, sad day for human kind…but I digress.
Despite this rather embarrassing news, this statistic does have huge ramifications for us B2B marketers. If our messaging doesn’t do the following in eight seconds or less, we’ve lost our opportunity to engage a potential customer.
The takeaway here is twofold:
1. This new reality pushes us B2B marketers to write clearer, more consistent messages when it comes to our product(s).
2. We MUST do our research and measure success (over and over again) to ensure that our messaging and product positioning are resonating with our target market.
The average Twitter account has 208 followers. That number might sound impossibly huge to you, or it might be laughably small compared to your many thousands of followers. But numbers don’t really matter on Twitter – at least not in the way many marketers think.
If you’re busy counting up your Twitter followers and wearing that number as a badge of honor, stop. Think about the last time you took a step back from your carefully composed 140-character messages and asked yourself why you’re so concerned with building a Twitter following.
Growing a Twitter account is not an end goal unto itself. Instead, it is a means to achieve any number of other valuable marketing goals.
Here are three ways your Twitter followers can provide you with value right now, regardless of how many (or how few) you may have:
Your Twitter audience does not tweet in a vacuum. They might send a tweet while watching Top Chef after a long day of work, and quickly flip over to check out some sports scores on ESPN.com.
Knowing who you’re connected to on Twitter can help you plan media buys across multiple channels. Scooping up ad space on sports websites or participating in hashtag conversations while a reality TV show is being broadcast can be effective ways to reach your audience on more than one platform, and when they will be most receptive.
Did your last tweet flop? Not to worry – everything you do on Twitter can be a learning opportunity if you know what lessons to look out for.
Content that falls flat can be used as a “do not repeat” warning to your marketing team. On the other side, content that is eagerly shared and engaged with by your Twitter followers can offer up valuable insights into what they want to see.
And if you are able to dig deep into your audience’s demographics, interests and behavior, you can refine your content even further. Consider cross-promoting your brand with another, compatible brand that your audience loves, or aligning your messaging to the social issues that they value.
How up-to-date are you on your competitor’s marketing strategy? If you don’t know, try turning to Twitter.
Instead of focusing on your Twitter followers to get at this valuable information, explore your competitor’s. Since Twitter users are constantly tweeting about brands they like or dislike, their experiences with customer service, product reviews and more, you can uncover a good deal about how well your competition is doing from their followers’ tweets.
Did you enjoy these tips? You can learn more about unlocking the value of your Twitter followers in this free ebook.
Is a buyer persona a customer profile or an indicator of buying behavior? Savvy marketers know content must be mapped to the right stage of the buying cycle and answer the right concerns.
The better-rounded you can make your buyer persona “template,” the more you’ll understand about buying signals and true pain points. That way, you can map content to those pain points and have appropriate follow up signals.
1—Talking to the right people
2—On the right channels
3—With the right content
So simple in theory.
Copyright: ginasanders / 123RF Stock Photo
Each of these elements play a role in crafting effective buyer personas.
There’s the initial awareness phase – blog posts for example.
That’s followed by the research or consideration phase – case studies or webinars and finally the decision making stage – demonstrations/trials.
Each of these potential buyers are at very different stages in their awareness and needs and how your product or service solves their problem. So it makes sense you’ll need multiple personas and they’ll evolve over time.
Tonya Vinas, Senior Content Strategist at Content4Demand.com, a content marketing agency based in Ohio says:
“Buyer personas are like windows on a house, they give you a view inside. It doesn’t matter how many you have or what they look like. The most important thing is they give insight into your buyers.”
If you’re just starting out, she recommends using an existing framework to help you create yours. There are many models available via companies like Hubspot or Sirius Decisions. You can “try on” two or three and see what works best for you. You may find one of your categories is more important than you realize.
She also recommends getting outside validation on your target buyer. Either through independent research or through a company like Content 4 Demand. That outside perspective offers additional insight that you may not have considered.
Krista Souto, Marketing Consultant and President of BMAPhilly, gives this advice on crafting buyer personas.
“Know. Thy. Audience. Words to live by for a marketer. Take the meaning of those words to a deeper level with the creation of buyer personas. Without personas, you are “spraying and praying” – i.e. wasting the time of your resources, flagrantly spending advertising dollars that could be easily more targeted, and essentially, herding cats.”
1. What do you think is the chief element most companies overlook as they put together buyer personas?
You need groupthink for a successful persona set. Don’t leave the work to the marketing team – they cannot create buyer personas in a vacuum. Take the time to do it the RIGHT way – through evaluation of your lead score data, face-to-face meetings with your sales teams, and a collection of data on your past and current clients. Getting to know your buyer is a collaborative effort across functional boundaries within an organization.
2. What do you think is the most important element in a buyer persona?
The most important element is to use of the persona in your digital marketing. When putting the personas in action – do not forget to incorporate your findings into your SEO on your website.
You’ll have invaluable information to write content that will resonate and attract the buyer – so use it! If you’re executing on social, be sure to use the right one – B2B buyers generally don’t look to Facebook for answers for instance. So get to know your buyers – then lure them in with the right content in the right place with the right message — all wrapped up in your buyer persona sets.
If you follow these guidelines to crafting your personas, you’ll be on the right track. Over time you’ll learn more about your buyers and use your new found knowledge to refine your messaging.
However, if you’re like Samantha Bammes, Programmatic and Behavioral Marketing Specialist for Multiview.com, you realize that with the right tools come real-time marketing. That brings a whole new perspective to the idea of personas.
New to her role at Multiview, which is the world’s largest B2B digital publisher, she said she came in looking for the buyer personas and found they don’t use them — at least not in the traditional sense.
“We use unstructured data for our campaigns so we have unlimited data points to qualify that prospect or lead. That determines how aggressively we pursue that person. If someone visits a site 15 times, downloads a White Paper and views two competitors then we know that person is showing buying signals and we target them accordingly.”
Typically, you might start with a general idea of your buyer personas. For example, you know the CFO, the beginner marketer and the IT professional have different pain points so you target content for each of those. That’s where most companies end it. In reality, that’s only the beginning.
The fun starts when you start adapting the “what happens next” based on the person’s search and actions taken. Done well, your content adapts to the prospect and their needs at the moment. That sounds suspiciously like solving real needs in real time and would have a major impact on the closing the sales cycle.
It’s All About Refining
The good news is that a well-planned buyer persona helps you map your content strategically which will result in more demand. The other good news is, if you treat your buyer personas as living document, you can add to it and make adjustments along the way.
After all, if you know what makes your prospect tick, you know exactly what to say and how to say it.
As marketers, we’re used to reviewing the data and making adjustments. When you review your open and click through rates, you learn what your current readership finds valuable. When you review your analytics, you can see where they linger the most. Use that data to craft a survey to discover more, talk to your sales team, talk to your prospects at an event.
This is an arena where more data — and putting it into context — can help you connect the dots. With good input from multiple sources, your buyer personas will leave no doubt as to what piece of content comes next.
While there may be debate about whether LinkedIn or Twitter is more popular with salespeople, there’s no question that sales executives are becoming more active on Twitter. Why? They understand the power of the micro-blogging platform as a way to monitor, reach, and engage target buyers while also building their personal brand. But how are these sales leaders engaging on Twitter? And in what ways can you use this information to become more effective on social media?
My firm, Leadtail, decided to delve into these very questions by looking at the Twitter activity of 595 sales executives during the first six months of this year. Specifically, we analyzed 160,928 tweets and 91,471 shared links to better understand the topics sales execs are interested in, what they’re reading and sharing, and which people most influence them on social media. Here’s what we discovered.
We compiled the top hashtags used by sales leaders to identify the topics grabbing their attention. Why hashtags? Like search keywords, popular hashtags are a good indicator of what people are paying attention to, talking about, searching for, and sharing on social media.
No surprise that #Sales, #Leadership, #SaaS, and #CRM are hot topics with sales executives, but there are many conversations happening that reflect their growing interest in social media, social selling, marketing, technology, and startups. As the graphic below illustrates, sales leaders engage in a breadth of topics that reflect both business and personal (sports!) interests.
In an age of information overload, which publications are senior sales professionals prioritizing? It may be surprising to discover that they focus much of their social media reading and sharing on top business, entrepreneurial, and technology-related publications such as Forbes, Inc., Harvard Business Review, and TechCrunch. Clearly, sales executives are making it a priority to become better business leaders and entrepreneurs, while also staying current on technology news.
Here are the top 25 content sources shared by sales leaders on Twitter:
Social media has given each of us the ability to create a personal brand, grow an audience, and influence others. The list below shows the top 25 people retweeted by the sales leaders in our study. Whether their tweets are helpful, inspirational, informative, or entertaining, each of the people on this list has created a unique social voice that resonates with top sales professionals.
How can you use these social insights to engage sales executives or other target buyers?
The good news is that you have plenty of opportunity to build a name for yourself using social media. Start by sharing and engaging those publications, brands and people that influence your target audience. This will put you on the path to becoming influential, too!
Interested in what the rest of the C-Suite is up to on social media? Visit our reports page to download any of our free social insights reports.
Today’s Guest Author:
Carter Hostelley is the Founder and CEO of Leadtail, a social strategy and insights firm. For the past six years, he has championed the importance of social media to CMOs and senior marketers at leading business brands and venture-backed companies. Specifically, how social media can reach, engage, and influence buyers. He also writes about B2B social marketing and customer experience for CMSWire. You can follow him on Twitter or LinkedIn.
You’ve heard the stat before: up to 60 percent of the sales cycle is already complete before your prospect ever picks up the phone and speaks to a rep. That means that the vast majority of selling happens online: on your website and through your content. It also means that your inbound marketing efforts have the potential to either be your organization’s most successful salesperson, or the biggest roadblock in your sales process. It’s your role as an inbound marketer to make sure your website and content efforts are on the winning side of that equation.
How can you maximize your marketing to help not only close more customers, but also attract more traffic and convert more visitors into contacts? By taking the time to research, understand, and optimize all your activities around your buyers’ journey (or journeys). In order to accomplish such a feat, it’s important to be sure you understand precisely what that journey is – as well as who it’s for, where it takes place, when, and why.
Before we dive into the five W’s of the buyer’s journey, let’s take a look at what a buyer’s journey is at a high level, and how it relates to our activities as inbound marketers. If you’re looking for in-depth information, check out this blog post. Want the “in a nutshell” version?
The buyer’s journey is the research process your prospective customers, clients, donors, or users go through leading up to their decision to sign on for your product or service. It’s divided into three stages: awareness, consideration, and decision – each of which refer to the specific thought and learning processes people are going through leading up to a purchase.
The buyer’s journey is a bit like the marketing funnel but from the prospective customers’ perspective. Whereas there are specific “top-,” “middle-,” or “bottom-of-the-funnel” (i.e. TOFU, MOFU, or BOFU) activities marketers do to attract more traffic to their site, the buyer’s journey stages (awareness, consideration, and decision) are the actual thought processes and needs of those visitors whom marketers are hoping to attract at the top of the funnel, convert in the middle of the funnel, and close at the bottom of the funnel.
Now that we’re all on the same page with what a buyer’s journey is in the first place, let’s dive deeper into the 5 W’s of the buyer’s journey:
More often than not, each of your buyer personas will have different needs, concerns, goals, questions, and thought processes leading up to making a purchase – meaning, each of your personas will likely have a different buyer’s journey.
The “who” portion of a buyer’s journey can refer to either which of your personas the journey is being created for, or which personas will be involved in the buyer’s journey leading up to making a purchase. For instance, perhaps the primary buyer (i.e. the person who will make the decision in the “decision” stage of the buyer’s journey) needs input from several personas before signing the check, or perhaps the actual end users of the product will not be involved in the buying process whatsoever. Either way, it’s important to know for whom you’re creating a buyer’s journey – even if that person(a)’s decision is ultimately influenced by others.
What are the different types and topics of information your prospective buyers will want or need in each stage of the buyer’s journey? What’s the initial problem they face and the questions they’re asking? The “what” element of the buyer’s journey encompasses precisely the topics that content should cover, but it also touches on the particular format of content that will perform best.
For instance, if your persona is a CTO at a midsize company, suitable “consideration” stage content might be a technical PowerPoint presentation. On the other hand, an organization whose personas are middle school teachers might find more luck with a graphical comparison chart or checklist.
When thinking about the “what” of your buyer’s journey, explore both what persona- and stage-appropriate content should be about, as well as the format it’s best suited to.
If you’ve ever read about or conducted buyer persona research, you know that one of the key criteria to identify is how your persona learns about new things. The same concept extends to buyer’s journey research: it’s important to identify where the content you create should be posted, published, or promoted in order to reach the right people at the right time. For instance, does your persona look for problem-solving guidance by talking to their friends, peers, or co-workers about their experiences? Do they frequent groups or networks, like on LinkedIn, or do they use Google or Bing to search for answers to questions? What about review sites like Yelp or others?
In terms of a buyer’s journey, the “where” element refers to where your persona is looking for answers to their questions or solve their problems, so you can be sure to post your content in those locations or distribute it to those key influencers.
The buyer’s journey has three stages characterized by the different questions, needs, and states of mind prospective customers have leading up to making a purchase.
In the “awareness” stage of the journey, prospective customers have identified a problem or opportunity but may not yet know its cause, implications, or if it can even be solved or addressed. They’re aware of a problem, but are still learning about it and aren’t yet ready to hear about solutions.
Content that performs well in the awareness stage is highly educational and not at all solution-based – very different from content that’s useful in the “consideration” stage, when someone has identified that they have a problem and are exploring potential ways to solve it.
The same is true for content in the “decision” stage, when a particular solution strategy has been decided upon and a solution provider (i.e. product or service) is being decided upon: content that performs well in the “consideration” stage is likely completely irrelevant to individuals who have entered the decision stage – and vice versa. For example, it’s only in the decision stage when product- or brand-focused content is truly relevant: promoting ones’ product offerings to someone before this stage not only may fall flat as a strategy, it could actually drive potential customers away as it’s perceived as too self-promotional.
Identifying what stage of the buyer’s journey your personas are in is essential to ensure you’re presenting the right person with the right content at the right time.
Related to “what” and “when” is “why.” Why is this persona looking for a solution to this particular problem or opportunity to seize? What’s at stake if they don’t take advantage of the opportunity or address the issue?
Identifying the “why” of your buyer’s journey involves not only knowing what the problem is that needs to be solved, but also knowing whom you’re solving a problem for (i.e. your persona).
Taking the time to map out the specific buyers’ journey your persona(s) take leading up to purchasing your product or serve is what separates ho-hum inbound strategies from those that produce truly remarkable content and deliver out-of-this world ROI. Knowing the five W’s of what defines buyers’ journeys is the first step to creating these maps.
Growing up, I spent the majority of my teenage summers working at a local restaurant. My parents believed that everybody should work in the restaurant business at least once in their life to help build a servant attitude and learn that with hard work comes reward.
Sales development is no different.
On the journey to becoming a successful leader, the first step is building a solid foundation of diligence and service of others. In sales development, you learn to prioritize that foundation over everything else, and that’s when sales development reps turn into leaders.
The true foundation of leadership is not power, but authority, which is built upon relationships, love, service, and sacrifice. -James C. Hunter, The Servant
This series kicked off last week with Jon Parisi of Guidespark, and now we’re getting a chance to hear from Jordan Rackie of QASymphony. We asked him how his experience in sales development and how that foundation has shaped his career today. Here’s what he had to say:
Hannon Hill. My job was to set up one hour appointments and demos for the closing reps.
I was their first sales development rep. I worked with the COO, David Klanac, and the Director of Sales, Blaine Herman, to formulate a outbound prospecting plan of attack.
I had a couple of targets including total meetings set and revenue booked. We created a Salesforce dashboard that had a dial that helped me track my progress.
I’m currently the Vice President of Sales at QASymphony. We have four SDRs, and the team is growing. We had our first SDR join in November of last year. The SDR team is tracked and incentivized on multiple fronts, from SQL acceptance to getting kickers for closed won deals they source.
Take ownership of gathering quality leads. Start every morning with a daily plan of attack, and make sure you leverage both your assigned coach (manager), as well as mentor who is in a role you aspire to be in one day.
—
Jordan is just another example of how sales development is proving to be the springboard to many a career. From SDR to VP of Sales, the growth potential of a seasoned sales development rep is exponential.
Don’t believe us? Stay tuned for more sales development leaders who began their careers as SDRs.
The post Started From The Bottom, Now We’re Sales Development Leaders: Jordan Rackie of QASymphony appeared first on SalesLoft.
Is your B2B lead generation content hit and miss? With properly researched buyer personas you can make sure your content is always on target.
When it comes to actively generating leads there are two ends of the lead generation continuum. You can:
Of course, those are the two ends of the leadgen stick and many companies use a combination of both approaches.
However, the problem with relying on an interruptive, outbound lead generation method is that it’s becoming less effective. Things like DVRs, caller ID, email spam blockers and do-not-call lists are reinforcing the invisible castle walls that people have erected to avoid marketing marauders.
Thanks to the Internet, your customers can do research to educate themselves about their business problems, possible solutions and providers. In fact, studies show that in B2B sales, buyers are 60% to 90% through their purchase research before they first contact a vendor.
Plus, people hate being marketed to. They always have and now they can do something about it. We’re now in the post-war era of the Marketer-Consumer War, from which the consumer has emerged victorious.
To get found online and generate leads, you need to produce the right content for the right people in the right context.
There is no silver bullet for creating content that attracts the right kind of traffic to your site and generates leads. But buyer personas come pretty darned close.
In Adele Revella’s book Buyer Personas: How to Gain Insight into your Customer’s Expectations, Align your Marketing Strategies, and Win More Business
, she describes buyer personas this way:
“In the simplest terms, buyer personas are examples or archetypes of real buyers that allow marketers to craft strategies to promote products and services to the people who might buy them.”
Buyer personas are not the traditional marketing demographics.
“Too often, Buyer Profiles are nothing more than an attractive way to display obvious or demographic data . Defining markets based on demographics— data such as a person’s age, income, marital status, and education— is the legacy of 60 years of selling to the mass market.”
To research and build an effective buyer persona, you must talk to buyers…
“… the most effective way to build buyer personas is to interview buyers who have previously weighed their options, considered or rejected solutions, and made a decision similar to the one you want to influence.”
When researching your buyers it’s easy to get lost in all the information buyers will share with you. That’s why it’s important to focus on just a few crucial areas that Revella describes as “The Five Rings of Insight™.”
These are the five things that will determine if you have buyer personas that will positively impact your content creation, lead generation and sales.
Armed with these five insights, Revella explains that your buyer personas will “reveal the buying decision you need to influence – telling how when and why the buyer engages to choose you or a competitor, or to stick with the status quo.”
Having served in the U.S. Army Field Artillery for three years AND worked in marketing ever since, I’m struck by how similar buyer personas are to aiming stakes. Granted, I’m probably the only person who has noticed this, but stay with me.
Artillerymen who fire the guns rarely see their target. This form of indirect fire is why a forward observer is needed who can see the target and call the shots.
Before the howitzer fires, the artillerymen use survey equipment to make sure the gun is pointing in exactly the right direction. But once the cannon starts firing it can knock itself off the correct aim.
That’s where aiming stakes come in. The stakes are put in the ground a good distance from the gun (the farther the better) and surveyed in. Then, before each subsequent round is fired, the gunner looks through a scope to make sure the gun is aligned with the stakes. When the stakes are aligned, the gun is pointing in the right direction.
Similarly, buyer personas serve as an aiming stake to make sure that the content you are sending down range is properly aligned for maximum lead generation impact.
With properly researched buyer personas, you can eliminate guesswork about if your content is going to be on time and on target. If your content is not properly aligned with your buyer persona, it’s going to miss the target and fail to generate leads.
As Scott Vaughan stated in his blog post last week, “Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is all the rage as organizations increasingly deploy strategies to focus on individual companies that are the best fit for their solutions and services.”
With this and next week’s #FlipMyFunnel Conference is mind, I thought it would be helpful to briefly review three eBooks published by technology vendors leading the account-based marketing space.
Published by DemandBase; written by Mathew Sweezey, Marketing Evangelist for Salesforce.com:
https://www.demandbase.com/ebook/account-based-marketing-the-key-to-b2b-success/
What I liked:
What I would’ve liked:
Best insight:
Measure your baseline before getting started with ABM.
“That way, you’ll get a sense of how your current marketing efforts are working to engage your target accounts. This [is] different than simply measuring how individuals engage on your site. Namely, it truly provides insight into the ways that marketing efforts directly link to conversions and sales.”
This is true with any new marketing initiative, but particularly useful when it comes to an effort with impact as wide-ranging as ABM, which can affect all marketing channels.
Published by LeanData:
What I liked:
What I would’ve liked:
Best insight:
Evaluating whether ABM is the right strategy for your company.
“Take a hard look at your business model. Are you a high-volume SaaS solution company? If so, you probably would benefit more from targeted lead marketing strategy. But if that same business is seeking to chart a different course by having top-tier sales reps focus solely on large enterprise accounts, ABM absolutely will have value.”
Just because account-based marketing is hot right now, it doesn’t mean it’s going to work for you.
Published by Lattice Engines:
http://pages.lattice-engines.com/account-based-marketing.html
What I liked:
What I would’ve liked:
Best insight:
Unlike the other two eBooks, Lattice Engines devotes a section to common ABM challenges. Here’s one challenge for example:
“GOING AFTER A ‘DREAM’ LIST
The sales team creates a list of target accounts, largely based on company names reps would love to call “big wins”. Without basing this list on meaningful attributes – such as whether the accounts are faced with a challenge your organization can solve – sales is unable to focus on the accounts most likely to buy your products or services.”
Of course, the eBook’s solution to this problem is predictive analytics.
Another great feature of Lattice’s eBook is a slide titled, “How to Measure Success.” Neither of the other two eBooks focuses much on common metrics that help identify what’s working and what’s failing in an ABM strategy.
Each of these works has great value. If you’re new to ABM (and B2B marketing in general), you’ll want to read the DemandBase eBook first – it’s a great intro. If you’ve been in B2B marketing game a while but want to learn about ABM at a more specific level, go right to the other two eBooks (LeanData and Lattice Engines), which are actually pretty complementary of one another.
A study by CSO Insights reports that, in 2013, the average size of B2B deals dropped 25% over the previous year.
The report summises that this was probably due to more demanding buyers and higher levels of discounting. Even so, this is a significant drop when you consider the supposed increase in economic confidence during the second half of 2013.
As our sales velocity calculator shows, average deal size is one of the four ‘levers’ that impact on sales velocity. So any drop in average deal size will have a corresponding negative impact on your sales performance.
To illustrate the problem, picture this
Let’s say your quarter target is $250,000. With 3 weeks to go, you’ve booked in 6 deals totalling $150,000. How do you go about creating this extra $100,000 of business in such a short timeframe?
Your first reaction is probably to do everything you can to win more deals.
So you go out there and start prospecting, calling, chasing leads, making contacts and, in desperation, discounting your prices to get deals over the line. And finally, after increasing your work load massively, working longer hours, taking shorter lunch breaks, reducing the perceived value of your products, you make it. You manage to win 6 more deals to reach your target.
You now have 12 deals generating $250,000 in revenue. But was this an efficient use of your time and resources? And what impact will discounting have on your customer’s perception of the value your provide and your ability to sell more to them in future?
Is there a better way?
The above example is how most salespeople think. This comes from a mindset of competing on price alone, and not value.
If this is you, it’s time to stop!
Instead of always thinking ‘more deals’ start thinking ‘more from my deals’.
Anthony Iannarino hammers home the same point in this great post. And Jim Keenan does the same here.
When you think and strategize the right way, you’ll find it requires far less effort and resources to increase your average deal size than to try to find, chase and win new deals. All you need is a change in focus.
The secret – greater customer focus, insight and added value
One possible reason why reps are becoming less effective at maximizing deal value is because they are not doing enough to understand the buyer’s real business problems and then crafting a value-added solution around them.
This highlights the importance of having a robust sales process in place, so prospective deals can be qualified and assessed to measure their strategic and revenue potential. The TAS methodology does this better than any other.
A few statistics to consider:
How to become a ‘customer first’ sales team
Become a ‘customer first’ sales team by gaining insight into the customer’s business before you do anything else. Gain insight into their goals, business pressures and obstacles to progression.
Then figure out what insight you can bring to help them learn what you want them to know. When you can demonstrate an understanding of their problem, of its impact and the cost of inaction, you get the opportunity to sell to the customer’s priorities to maintain value. Not price.
Sometimes, you will need to change your approach to the account by adopting a flanking or fragment strategy to focus the customer on the value that you can deliver.
A few questions to ask yourself:
Let us know what you think!
Contrary to popular belief, email marketing is not dead.
In fact, according to a post published by Outboundengine.com, “marketers consistently ranked email as the single most effective tactic for awareness, acquisition, conversion, and retention.”
Over the years, I’ll admit… that I didn’t fully understand the importance of email marketing. But now, I totally get it.
With email marketing, you will have the ability to do some of the following:
Still not convinced yet? Consider these additional mind blowing statistics about email marketing:
1. Aweber
AWeber – (the email marketing service provider that I am currently using) was first started in 1998 and is considered a leader in the email marketing arena.
Their email marketing service plan starts at just 19.99 per month and allows you to send unlimited emails (anywhere and anytime) to up to 500 subscribers.
AWeber’s Features include:
Cons:
AWebers Email Marketing Service Plans are as follows:
Mailchimp – I’ve used Mailchimp in the past and they are an awesome email marketing service provider as well. Mailchimp has a very easy to use interface that allows you to create, send and track emails in a jiffy.
Mailchimp currently has a free plan that allows you to send up to 12,000 emails to 2,000 subscribers.
Mailchimp’s Features include:
Cons:
Some of the features will take a little time to understand and could be a tad more user friendly;
Aside from that, Mailchimp is an awesome email marketing solution.
Mailchimp’s Current Pricing Structure:
Get Response – Is actually voted #1 in Email Marketing service providers by Reviews.com.
Like AWeber and Mailchimp, Get Response has an interface that is super easy to use to create email newsletters and send them to your email list.
Features of Get Response include:
Cons:
As far as pricing is concerned, their offerings are below:
iContact – a super duper popular email marketing service provider that has scored some seriously high marks online (specifically from TopTenReviews.com) iContact scored high praises online with users stating that the software makes it easy to send effective email marketing campaigns.
Features of iContact include:
Cons:
Constant Contact – Last (but definitely not least) is Constant Contact. My good friend over at Diversity Solutions Marketing (Steph) who is a small business marketing & business consultant currently uses this email marketing service provider and has nothing but great things to say about them.
Constant contact (according to online reports) has a very large selection (400 to be exact) of email marketing templates that you can use to make your email campaigns stand out.
Features of Constant Contact:
Cons:
Constant Contact’s Current Pricing Structure:
1. High email deliverability rates – there’s no since in spending money to use an email marketing service that doesn’t do a good job of making sure that your emails get delivered to your subscribers.
2. Autoresponder and automation capabilities – to set some of your email marketing activities on autopilot. This is a very critical component especially if you want to be able to do things like: send freebies to new subscribers when they opt in to your newsletter, automate your blog posts, and etc. This is one of the main features that I love about using AWeber.
3. Support – This is super important. It’s nice to be able to have someone available when you run into an issue. From the looks of it, most of the email marketing service providers mentioned in this post have a substantial amount of information available on their websites (such as end user guides and training videos) to get users up to speed on how to use their services.
All right..now over to you. What email marketing service providers are you using and why? I’d love to hear back from you. Thanks!
Building a demand generation program is like building a house, build a strong foundation and hire the most expensive general contractor. That second part isn’t true. But what is true is that demand generation is about building a strong foundation and being able to plan ahead.
Good B2B marketing metrics allow you to do just that.
In our previous post, we reported a few ways to build successful B2B demand generation programs if you’re starting from scratch.
In this post, we show you the metrics that allow demand generation marketers to measure their impact and identify opportunities to generate revenue.
Month-over-month (MoM) revenue by channel allows marketers to track short-term performance and can clue them in on performance during months when conversions are expected.
As marketers scale up or experiment with new channels, this metric describes the percentage change of revenue compared to the previous month.
For example, events and conferences are a big area for us. We’ve been tracking the performance of the events we’ve sponsored over the last year for one reason. We want to know whether the events draw qualified prospects and whether the rate at which leads convert to opportunities and customers is high.
While sales cycles are longer than a month, building out an events marketing program relies heavily on being able to predict when deals from an event will close. We can use MoM Revenue By Channel to track when deals close from events.
Lastly, marketers can use year-over-year (YoY) and quarter-over-quarter (QoQ) revenue by channel to see trends. Once we scale our events marketing program, you can be sure we’ll use these marketing metrics to forecast and track the performance of our events and conferences.
Similar to the previous marketing metric, MoM Opportunities by Channel helps marketers understand how well they are generating qualified leads.
The days of generating leads, tossing them over to sales, and never looking back are over. Getting lead to opportunity conversion rate is a metric that marketers collect after the hard work of lead generation is over.
As my colleague in Pipeline Marketing @DrewHarris puts it:
While revenue is still king, opportunities generated is an important metric. For example, opportunities by channel can help you project new revenue and new customers.
And because there is generally more data for sales opportunities compared to revenue, you can do a granular analysis and see the touchpoints and channels associated with the contact.
As a marketer you’re experimenting with different online campaigns, from paid search to content syndication. Budgets aren’t limitless and at some point the unavoidable question surfaces, Which of these damn online campaigns worked?
Quarterly Revenue by Websource helps marketers identify which sites or platforms were involved in closing a deal. The attribution model you use will determine how revenue is distributed to these websources.
This metric is especially helpful if you do content syndication and want to track whether your content that appears on other websites eventually translates into revenue.
This metric is also helpful if you’re listed in directories or review sites. You can see how much value these sites generate. It’s also valuable if you’re doing PR. So basically, this is a metric you shouldn’t leave home without… thinking about on the way to work.
Depending on your average sales cycle length, you may choose to look at Weekly or Monthly Revenue by Websource.
Here’s a portion of our revenue by websource data (listing all of them created a messy chart):
If you’re building up a demand generation program then this metric can help you discover websource referral traffic that generates revenue. For example, we discovered that Quora.com was contributing to our business via referral traffic. Answering questions on the Quora platform was doing more than helping users!
The attribution model you choose has big implications for your reporting, so be sure to check out this post on mastering attribution modeling.
For the above chart, we used the W-Shaped Attribution model. The W-Shaped Model gives revenue credit to the three major stages of the B2B marketing funnel. These are the first touch (anonymous touch), the middle touch (lead created), and the last touch (hand off to sales).
Next, we’ll talk about a more granular metric for the data junkies out there.
Revenue by keyword is a very granular metric. It’s nerding out on paid search data and having Eureka moments that no one understands — because you’re the only one in charge of paid search.
Revenue by keyword is important for finding optimization opportunities, tracking keyword performance, testing new keywords and scaling up a paid search program.
Marketers access these metrics by connecting their paid search to their CRM.
No one likes surprises. No one likes uncertainty, at least in the work environment. And no one likes being the person who doesn’t have an answer. Projected ROI estimates when campaigns will make money.
Investments aren’t made based on revenue alone and ROI projected can help you understand the long term returns for your marketing campaigns and channels.
Content is king, and promotion is God. Or maybe the saying goes, Content is king, and distribution is queen and she wears the pants.
Whichever way it’s said, content makes up a big investment so it’s important to make sure it resonates with your audience.
Starting with the top-level metrics on the distribution or promotion side, click-through rates on your paid social ads are a good indicator of whether your content is performing well. It tells you whether headlines, images and CTAs appeal to a wider audience. It can measure whether you’re getting better at creating click-worthy content, which is the first step in getting strangers to discover your brand.
Can you capture broad appeal and then nurture qualified buyers so they connect with the sales team? Content engagement metrics answer the first part.
A good set of content engagement metrics include click-throughs on social platforms, time on page and number of social shares.
If you’re using LinkedIn Ads check out what we learned after spending $50K on LinkedIn.
There is a lot of conversation on the value of a social share and it’s a great metric for your content team to keep in the back of their minds. They should strive to create content that people bookmark and want to associate themselves with.
A social share is a vote of confidence. People share articles that will make them look smart, up to date, and knowledgeable. It’s not easy to continuously create engaging content, but content engagement metrics will clue marketing leaders in on the kinds of content that succeed.
There are many more marketing metrics that demand generation marketers use but the ones covered here are the ones that are relevant, interesting, and useable. Stay tuned as we cover offline metrics for measuring event and conference performance, and top-of-funnel metrics around lead generation.
We’re ready to host Maclean’s National Leaders Debate, August 6 at 8 p.m. ET. And we know that we’re ready because of our years of comprehensive coverage from Parliament Hill since the last election, full of smart, incisive reads from our Ottawa bureau and our newsroom at large. We have long interviews with our parties’ leaders; we have deep dives on national issues; we have insight into the thinking that goes behind the decisions that affect all Canadians.
Here’s a curated selection of some of Maclean’s big reads from the last few years that will help get you up to speed on some of tonight’s debate’s biggest issues.
PROFILE: THOMAS MULCAIR
The definitive profile of the NDP leader, by John Geddes.
PROFILE: JUSTIN TRUDEAU
Paul Wells presses the Liberal leader on what a Justin Trudeau government would look like.
ECONOMY: WHAT HAPPENED TO CANADA’S ECONOMIC MIRACLE?
Stalled growth, rising debt — Canada’s stuck.
ECONOMY: HOW SAFE IS YOUR JOB?
The recession is over, but factories are still closing, companies are downsizing and people are getting laid off.
ECONOMY: STEPHEN HARPER’S SURPRISINGLY LIBERAL ECONOMIC RECORD
An exhaustive audit of Stephen Harper’s nine years in power reveals an economic record that’s (gasp) not so conservative.
DEMOCRACY: MICHAEL CHONG, UNLIKELY REVOLUTIONARY
How a private member’s bill may change the face of Parliament.
DEMOCRACY: TIME TO SCRAP THE SENATE?
After months of scandals, could it finally be time to scrap the Senate? John Geddes reports.
DEMOCRACY: THE HOUSE OF COMMONS IS A SHAM
No one shows up. Nothing gets done. The sad decline of our most important institution.
DEMOCRACY: IGNORE THE SENATE
Stephen Harper’s go-it-alone approach to Senate reform was doomed from the start. And now he’s free to focus on his real interests.
ENERGY: PUMPED TO FIND ANOTHER WAY
Time for Plan B as Keystone XL and Northern Gateway pipelines stall.
ENERGY: THE UNTOLD STORY OF KEYSTONE XL
How one Nebraska farmer tried to kill the pipeline.
ENERGY: STEPHEN HARPER, OIL’S WORST ENEMY?
By trying to protect and promote the oil sector, the Harper government effectively shackled Canada’s pipelines in purgatory.
ENERGY: CRUDE AWAKENING
Paul Wells on why unlocking Alberta’s vast petroleum riches will be anything but easy.
COALITIONS: INSIDE A CRISIS THAT SHOOK THE NATION
Secret meetings, shocking alliances, faulty strategies—and one wonky video camera.
FOREIGN POLICY: STEPHEN HARPER GOES TO CHINA
The prime minister’s trip wasn’t about trade, goodwill or pandas. It was about crushing his opposition at home.
FOREIGN POLICY: WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE…
Why Barack Obama shelved the Keystone pipeline, and insulted Canada (yet again) in the process.
TERROR: BREAKING DOWN BOTH SIDES OF BILL C-51
An expert panel with Ray Boisvert, a security analyst who spent nearly 30 years with CSIS, and Craig Forcese, a law professor at the University of Ottawa.
TERROR: JUSTIN TRUDEAU DEFENDS VOTING FOR C-51
The Liberal leader says he’s surprised anyone would ‘make it seem like the Liberal party doesn’t care about the Charter.’
Read our in-depth primers on the 12 issues that will dominate the election
The post Reading List: Companion reading to the Maclean’s debate appeared first on Macleans.ca.
The art of questions is the next phase in the Negotiator Job Search.
This is the 5th post in the Negotiator Job Search series.
In Jim Camp’s book, Start with NO…The Negotiating Tools that the Pros Don’t Want You to Know, he writes:
Your ability to nurture will be the key to bringing the negotiation back to the table after a breakdown. Your ability to nurture your adversary, to put him or her at ease, is the key to assuring her that you are listening and that you value what she has to say. Nurturing is also just another way to allow your adversary to feel okay.
Nurturing should be part of your body language. When you’re seated, refrain from a sudden forward movement. Lean back. Relax your neck, face, and hands. If you’re standing, lean against the wall, lower your posture. No one is going to deal effectively with you if you’re towering over them. This is common sense, and even an average negotiator would pretty much adhere to this principle.
When in doubt, slow your cadence of speech, lower your voice. As the old saying goes, laughter often is the best medicine, especially laughter directed at ourselves. Laughter is a way to nurture everyone in the room— including ourselves.
Your goal is to put the interviewer and yourself at ease. How you use your tone of voice is key. No need to get touchy-feely, but if you see an opportunity, ask your interviewer, “What is your budget for this position?” If you use a non-confrontational tone and fairly casual manner, you’ll be surprised how the interviewer will respond.
How you say things matters! It is an important part in the art of questions.
Camp writes:
This is a behavior that you must hone to perfection for successful negotiations. The reverse is the behavioral tactic that answers a question with a question, the answer to which will do you some good. When your adversary asks you a question, you do have to say something, but not in the way in which you were trained in school.
“How are you?”
“Great. How are you?”
It is highly likely that you will be asked a couple of questions that you will not want to answer.
This is where the art of questions is really needed. Let’s look at how to answer the following question:
What is your current salary?
I have written about this topic before in my post What is Your Current Salary? How to Answer!
You will need to use your nurturing voice and answer with a question. Here is an example:
I presume you are asking about my current salary because you want to know if I am a good fit for your budget. What is your budget for this position?
You need to practice this ahead of time. You will want to use a low key, nurturing tone of voice. It is important that you are casual in your delivery of the question.
Another question you will not want to directly answer is the following:
Why do you want to leave your current job?
You absolutely do not want to go negative. They will think “next” if you respond about how your current boss is a jerk.
You should phrase your response as follows:
My current position is okay, but what I am looking for is a position that can give me…
You will find multiple examples of how to reverse this question in the post Why Do You Want to Leave Your Current Position.
There is an art to this. It will take practice to use your nurturing voice and reverse the question. You can do this!!
Have you ever reversed one of these questions?
It is all part of the art of questions!
The next post in the series is called Quiet Your Mind, Create a Blank Slate.
Mathematics is all around us, and it has shaped our understanding of the world in countless ways.
In 2013, mathematician and science author Ian Stewart published a book on 17 Equations That Changed The World. We recently came across this convenient table on Dr. Paul Coxon's twitter account by mathematics tutor and blogger Larry Phillips that summarizes the equations. (Our explanation of each is below):
Here is a little bit more about these wonderful equations that have shaped mathematics and human history:
1) The Pythagorean Theorem: This theorem is foundational to our understanding of geometry. It describes the relationship between the sides of a right triangle on a flat plane: square the lengths of the short sides, a and b, add those together, and you get the square of the length of the long side, c.
This relationship, in some ways, actually distinguishes our normal, flat, Euclidean geometry from curved, non-Euclidean geometry. For example, a right triangle drawn on the surface of a sphere need not follow the Pythagorean theorem.
2) Logarithms: Logarithms are the inverses, or opposites, of exponential functions. A logarithm for a particular base tells you what power you need to raise that base to to get a number. For example, the base 10 logarithm of 1 is log(1) = 0, since 1 = 100; log(10) = 1, since 10 = 101; and log(100) = 2, since 100 = 102.
The equation in the graphic, log(ab) = log(a) + log(b), shows one of the most useful applications of logarithms: they turn multiplication into addition.
Until the development of the digital computer, this was the most common way to quickly multiply together large numbers, greatly speeding up calculations in physics, astronomy, and engineering.
3) Calculus: The formula given here is the definition of the derivative in calculus. The derivative measures the rate at which a quantity is changing. For example, we can think of velocity, or speed, as being the derivative of position — if you are walking at 3 miles per hour, then every hour, you have changed your position by 3 miles.
Naturally, much of science is interested in understanding how things change, and the derivative and the integral — the other foundation of calculus — sit at the heart of how mathematicians and scientists understand change.
4) Law of Gravity: Newton's law of gravitation describes the force of gravity between two objects, F, in terms of a universal constant, G, the masses of the two objects, m1 and m2, and the distance between the objects, r. Newton's law is a remarkable piece of scientific history — it explains, almost perfectly, why the planets move in the way they do. Also remarkable is its universal nature — this is not just how gravity works on Earth, or in our solar system, but anywhere in the universe.
Newton's gravity held up very well for two hundred years, and it was not until Einstein's theory of general relativity that it would be replaced.
5) The square root of -1: Mathematicians have always been expanding the idea of what numbers actually are, going from natural numbers, to negative numbers, to fractions, to the real numbers. The square root of -1, usually written i, completes this process, giving rise to the complex numbers.
Mathematically, the complex numbers are supremely elegant. Algebra works perfectly the way we want it to — any equation has a complex number solution, a situation that is not true for the real numbers : x2 + 4 = 0 has no real number solution, but it does have a complex solution: the square root of -4, or 2i. Calculus can be extended to the complex numbers, and by doing so, we find some amazing symmetries and properties of these numbers. Those properties make the complex numbers essential in electronics and signal processing.
6) Euler's Polyhedra Formula: Polyhedra are the three-dimensional versions of polygons, like the cube to the right. The corners of a polyhedron are called its vertices, the lines connecting the vertices are its edges, and the polygons covering it are its faces.
A cube has 8 vertices, 12 edges, and 6 faces. If I add the vertices and faces together, and subtract the edges, I get 8 + 6 - 12 = 2.
Euler's formula states that, as long as your polyhedron is somewhat well behaved, if you add the vertices and faces together, and subtract the edges, you will always get 2. This will be true whether your polyhedron has 4, 8, 12, 20, or any number of faces.
Euler's observation was one of the first examples of what is now called a topological invariant — some number or property shared by a class of shapes that are similar to each other. The entire class of "well-behaved" polyhedra will have V + F - E = 2. This observation, along with with Euler's solution to the Bridges of Konigsburg problem, paved the way to the development of topology, a branch of math essential to modern physics.
7) Normal distribution: The normal probability distribution, which has the familiar bell curve graph to the left, is ubiquitous in statistics.
The normal curve is used in physics, biology, and the social sciences to model various properties. One of the reasons the normal curve shows up so often is that it describes the behavior of large groups of independent processes.
8) Wave Equation: This is a differential equation, or an equation that describes how a property is changing through time in terms of that property's derivative, as above. The wave equation describes the behavior of waves — a vibrating guitar string, ripples in a pond after a stone is thrown, or light coming out of an incandescent bulb. The wave equation was an early differential equation, and the techniques developed to solve the equation opened the door to understanding other differential equations as well.
9) Fourier Transform: The Fourier transform is essential to understanding more complex wave structures, like human speech. Given a complicated, messy wave function like a recording of a person talking, the Fourier transform allows us to break the messy function into a combination of a number of simple waves, greatly simplifying analysis.
The Fourier transform is at the heart of modern signal processing and analysis, and data compression.
10) Navier-Stokes Equations: Like the wave equation, this is a differential equation. The Navier-Stokes equations describes the behavior of flowing fluids — water moving through a pipe, air flow over an airplane wing, or smoke rising from a cigarette. While we have approximate solutions of the Navier-Stokes equations that allow computers to simulate fluid motion fairly well, it is still an open question (with a million dollar prize) whether it is possible to construct mathematically exact solutions to the equations.
11) Maxwell's Equations: This set of four differential equations describes the behavior of and relationship between electricity (E) and magnetism (H).
Maxwell's equations are to classical electromagnetism as Newton's laws of motion and law of universal gravitation are to classical mechanics — they are the foundation of our explanation of how electromagnetism works on a day to day scale. As we will see, however, modern physics relies on a quantum mechanical explanation of electromagnetism, and it is now clear that these elegant equations are just an approximation that works well on human scales.
12) Second Law of Thermodynamics: This states that, in a closed system, entropy (S) is always steady or increasing. Thermodynamic entropy is, roughly speaking, a measure of how disordered a system is. A system that starts out in an ordered, uneven state — say, a hot region next to a cold region — will always tend to even out, with heat flowing from the hot area to the cold area until evenly distributed.
The second law of thermodynamics is one of the few cases in physics where time matters in this way. Most physical processes are reversible — we can run the equations backwards without messing things up. The second law, however, only runs in this direction. If we put an ice cube in a cup of hot coffee, we always see the ice cube melt, and never see the coffee freeze.
13) Relativity: Einstein radically altered the course of physics with his theories of special and general relativity. The classic equation E = mc2 states that matter and energy are equivalent to each other. Special relativity brought in ideas like the speed of light being a universal speed limit and the passage of time being different for people moving at different speeds.
General relativity describes gravity as a curving and folding of space and time themselves, and was the first major change to our understanding of gravity since Newton's law. General relativity is essential to our understanding of the origins, structure, and ultimate fate of the universe.
14) Schrodinger's Equation: This is the main equation in quantum mechanics. As general relativity explains our universe at its largest scales, this equation governs the behavior of atoms and subatomic particles.
Modern quantum mechanics and general relativity are the two most successful scientific theories in history — all of the experimental observations we have made to date are entirely consistent with their predictions. Quantum mechanics is also necessary for most modern technology — nuclear power, semiconductor-based computers, and lasers are all built around quantum phenomena.
15) Information Theory: The equation given here is for Shannon information entropy. As with the thermodynamic entropy given above, this is a measure of disorder. In this case, it measures the information content of a message — a book, a JPEG picture sent on the internet, or anything that can be represented symbolically. The Shannon entropy of a message represents a lower bound on how much that message can be compressed without losing some of its content.
Shannon's entropy measure launched the mathematical study of information, and his results are central to how we communicate over networks today.
16) Chaos Theory: This equation is May's logistic map. It describes a process evolving through time — xt+1, the level of some quantity x in the next time period — is given by the formula on the right, and it depends on xt, the level of x right now. k is a chosen constant. For certain values of k, the map shows chaotic behavior: if we start at some particular initial value of x, the process will evolve one way, but if we start at another initial value, even one very very close to the first value, the process will evolve a completely different way.
We see chaotic behavior — behavior sensitive to initial conditions — like this in many areas. Weather is a classic example — a small change in atmospheric conditions on one day can lead to completely different weather systems a few days later, most commonly captured in the idea of a butterfly flapping its wings on one continent causing a hurricane on another continent.
17) Black-Scholes Equation: Another differential equation, Black-Scholes describes how finance experts and traders find prices for derivatives. Derivatives — financial products based on some underlying asset, like a stock — are a major part of the modern financial system.
The Black-Scholes equation allows financial professionals to calculate the value of these financial products, based on the properties of the derivative and the underlying asset.
SEE ALSO: Computer Genius Builds Language That Lets Anyone Calculate Anything
Despite all the media attention venture capital gets, it’s far from the most common source of startup funding. As Diane Mulcahy explained in a 2013 Harvard Business Review article: ”Angel investors — affluent individuals who invest smaller amounts of capital at an earlier stage than VCs do — fund more than 16 times as many companies as VCs do,” she wrote, “and their share is growing.”
Last year total U.S. angel investments ran to $24.1 billion, according to the Center for Venture Research at the University of New Hampshire. More than 73,000 ventures received angel funding, and there were 316,000 active investors. Yet for how substantial the market is, there’s relatively little data on the decision making process of those who invest in early stage startups.
As a result, we’re stuck with the question of how investors choose which startups to fund. It’s hard to predict whether a novel idea will succeed, and these fledgling firms typically have no financial track record or tangible assets. So Shai Bernstein, an assistant professor of finance at Stanford’s GSB, and Arthur Korteweg of USC’s Marshall School of Business devised an experiment to identify what characteristics do distinguish startups. They partnered with Kevin Laws, the founder of AngelList, and used his platform to measure investors’ initial screening process. In a recent working paper, “Attracting Early Stage Investors: Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment,” they report their findings: the average investor responds strongly to the founding team, but not so much to the startup’s traction (its sales or user base) or existing investors.
This probably isn’t much of a surprise. In fact, the importance of founders has been emphasized in these pages before. Nearly 20 years ago, William A. Sahlman argued that most business plans wasted too much ink on numbers, not paying sufficient attention to the information that really matters to investors: people. “When I receive a business plan, I always read the resume section first,” he wrote. “Not because the people part of the new venture is the most important, but because without the right team, none of the other parts really matters.”
Now, Bernstein, Korteweg, and Laws have the evidence to back this up. AngelList regularly sends emails (shown below) highlighting “featured” startups to investors on the platform. These are firms that AngelList’s algorithm matches to investors who have already noted interest in the firms’ industry or location. The email describes the startup’s idea and funding goal, as well as its founding team, traction, and current investors — but the latter three categories only appear if they pass a certain threshold defined by AngelList’s algorithm. To investors, this signals high quality; seeing one of these in the email means that it’s worth paying attention to. So for example, the founders would only be listed if they went to a top university like Harvard or Stanford or previously worked at a Google or PayPal. Investors respond by clicking “View,” which brings them to the company’s full AngelList profile, or “Get an Intro,” which sends the company an introduction request — or they withhold their click and pass on the company.
The researchers randomly choose which categories would appear in the email to alter the perceived quality of the startup’s team, traction, and current investors. So say one company’s team and traction passed AngelList’s threshold; they would create three emails: one that only listed the team, one that only described the traction, and one that showed both. (The idea and funding goal were always visible, and they never excluded all categories from an email.) If AngelList was planning to send that company to a community of 1,500 investors interested in biotech, the researchers would randomly send 500 of them the email showing the team, while another 500 would see traction, and the other 500 got the control email displaying both.
The experiment ran for eight weeks in the summer of 2013, and spanned 21 startups, 4,494 investors, and nearly 17,000 emails. They found that information about the founding team raised investors’ click rate by 2.2% (average investors’ probability to click is 16%, so in relative terms, founding team information increased the click rates by almost 14%, which is economically important), whereas knowing that the startup had material traction or notable investors did not significantly make investors more likely to click. And these clicks are meaningful — they capture the investors’ level of interest in the startup, which affects funding decisions.
This suggests that a startup’s human capital is uniquely important to potential investors. However, Berstein said they’re not arguing that the team is more important than the idea, since their setting didn’t allow that comparison. Rather, they found that conditional on the idea, the team is quite important — more so than the product’s initial traction and ability to attract earlier investors.
The authors have two hypotheses for why the founding team is so highly valued. The first, they wrote, is that “operational capabilities of the founding team may be important at the earliest stages of a start-up, when most experimentation takes place.” The second, and this is where it gets more speculative, is best explained with an example: “Say we have a team that graduated from HBS. They have many opportunities they could pursue, but the fact that they decided to pursue the startup, and not go work for another venture, signals that this is a really good idea and a very promising venture,” Bernstein told me. He said that they found supportive evidence of the first hypothesis, but they do not rule out the existence of the second.
But does investing based on the founding team work? The researchers couldn’t answer this directly, since these were still very early-stage companies and they didn’t have information about long-term performance. However, when they distinguished between investors’ experience levels, they found that the more experienced and successful investors (measured by their number of prior investments) only responded to information about the team, while the least experienced responded to all three categories. Because the former is more likely to invest in successful startups, the authors said, this offers indirect evidence that selecting based on the founding team is a viable investment strategy.
Angel investors sort through thousands of startups vying for funding, each promising the next big breakthrough. This experiment illustrates how they use various cues to filter their pipeline — and how founders significantly influence their decisions to invest. The formula for long-term success may be different, though, when you consider how founders are often replaced, for various reasons, before the startup’s IPO. “What we find suggests that at the very early stages, at which the startup is still experimenting and trying to find the right business model, the founders are very important. Maybe later on, when the company is on track and growing to a larger scale, the founder becomes less important,” Bernstein said. “But our evidence suggests that at least at the very early stages, investors seem to think tremendously about the team and the founders.”
More people use storytelling to demonstrate to customers their value and credibility. That means you need to be more strategic with your stories so you don’t sound like everyone else. Here are three strategic stories to include in your conversations with buyers.
In today’s world of marketing we have new things bombarding us on a daily basis. The newest trend, the newest buzz word, the newest technology. As I think back on my own career, it’s hard to believe that once upon a time I thought variable printing on direct mail was revolutionary. (And yes, I just aged myself.) If someone had told me back then that within the next twenty years we’d be focusing on things like how to make email communications render properly across mobile devices I would have thought they were crazy.
*photo credit: Thinkstock
The reality is we must keep up with the latest trends, buzz words, technology….all of it. Otherwise we’ll be left behind. Our prospects and customers are no longer passive targets. They are armed with all the tools and means to proactively access information and conduct product research all by themselves. They aren’t sitting around waiting on us to tell them what to buy or how to buy it. They’re figuring it all out on their own.
What that means for marketers is we need to be agile. Change is inevitable, and in fact, it seems to be happening faster and faster as time goes on. We as marketers need to be able to change to meet the needs of our prospects and customers. And we must be able to do it quickly in order to stay relevant and competitive.
Ask yourself these questions:
If you’re unable to track what channels, content offers and messages are generating inbound engagement and outbound response you’ll be at a loss for knowing what is resonating with your audience. In order to change, you need to first know whether you need to make a change or not. That requires benchmarking yourself both internally against past efforts and externally against industry peers. Take a look at last year’s B2B Enterprise Demand Generation Study by ANNUITAS to get a general idea about what KPIs and areas to focus on. Don’t be afraid to test new things and embrace change.
As I’ve stated, a big part of being an agile marketer is the ability to adapt to your customers’ needs. If you don’t have a means for finding out what your customers want, you’re probably already falling behind your competition.
If you can’t answer these questions, you need to figure out a way to do so. Whether it’s customer surveys, going out on the road with your sales force on a regular basis, or interviewing customers and prospects yourself…this needs to be done, and done regularly. It’s not good enough to do this once a year. As we know, change is happening all around us. We must keep ourselves on the pulse of the change so that we can adapt to our customers ever-changing needs.
I’m proud to say that at ANNUITAS we have a culture of constant learning. The collaboration across teams to share new best practices and the constant encouragement and support for technology certifications keeps us all in a spirit of continuous improvement and adaptation. This type of culture comes from the top down. An organization’s leaders must encourage collaboration and sharing rather than silos and hierarchy by doing the following:
And the hardest question…
I hear it all the time from clients, albeit in various ways. It may be fear that the quantity of “leads” will decrease. It may be fear that they don’t have the right resources to conduct the change. Or it may be fear that the ROI of their efforts won’t meet expectations. In most cases, what marketing is doing today isn’t working optimally. And even if it is, there’s no guarantee that it will continue to work as customers’ needs change, new technologies are introduced, and new competitors enter the market. So in reality, what do we have to lose by trying new things as long as we track results and learn from them?
The truth is that change will always happen, and if we as marketers aren’t agile enough to adapt to that change we will fail. Focusing on building an organization that knows where it needs to change, how it needs to change, and rewards change is a step in the right direction. To learn more about what it means to use agile practices today in business read the book, Growing Up Fast by Jascha Kaykas-Wolff and Kevin Fann. It’s a great resource to help you see the value in developing an agile mindset.
Author: Jennifer Harmel @JenniferHarmel2 EVP, Demand Process Strategy Practice and Principal, ANNUITAS
The advent of “marketing automation” seems to have really revved up the marketing communications/sales enablement teams in many companies. Unfortunately, as often happens with shiny new tools, people get carried away. This can be further compounded by the marketer’s (or at least marketing communications) dilemma of trying to appear relevant.
In the “what have you done for me lately,” marketing accountability, marketing ROI driven world today, marketers are often desperate to “prove their worth.” Sales enablement activities are often the shortest link to that prize. And with new automation tools, it is even easier to think less and do more. And as long as you have a lead scoring system, what could possibly go wrong?
We see many examples, but our office manager noted this one. Our office is located near the San Francisco 49ers stadium. As such, the landlord appears not 100% sure what may happen to the space. Will it be re-zoned and then we have to move, or…? This leads to lack of upgraded infrastructure, notably communications. The only provider to our office park is AT&T and I am pretty sure the line in was an original limited speed data line as the service is mediocre in terms of data speed. And AT&T appears to have no plans to upgrade, but more on that a bit later in this post.
Meanwhile Comcast Business Services mumbled they were coming to our office park. However, further discussions with them determined they were coming, if they were, at some unknown time in the far future, once rezoning is accomplished … if it is.
Meanwhile at least 2-3 times per week we get an offer from Comcast Business for 25Mbps and voice for an amazing price. Heck at this point 25Mbps at a fair price would be good. Unfortunately, when we contact Comcast to buy, they tell us it’s not available at our complex. Ok, so why are we getting 2-3 mailings a week? Perhaps the metrics are mailings and calls, because no sale is going to happen. And I may be generous suggesting there are any metrics.
Then of course, not to be totally outdone, but either without a full-blown sales enablement function or a budget, AT&T periodically mails us offers to upgrade our service to higher speed data. Silly us, we call them. Well we call the actual sales person who sends us the letter. He usually doesn’t call back. Perhaps because that is standard AT&T service, or because he knows enough to know the answer is “no” about if they can help us. They just like to tease us apparently.
Anyway, as has been said about automated systems for decades: garbage in just gets you lots more garbage out. And in this case it just reminds your customers and potential customers how non-customer focused your company really is.
Lesson for today: First be effective, then work to be efficient.
Mitch
Content creation is essential in any marketing strategy. It takes time and effort to create good content. If you invest in creating content you want to maximise the return on your investment. You want to see a boost in: traffic to your website, shares on social media, subscriptions to your mailing list and enquires to your sales team. Great content can do all of these and ultimately drive more sales.
Some content will only attract traffic for a brief spurt. For example: an article about a new development in your industry. Such an article can drive a spike in traffic that might diminish in a matter of days.
source: moz.com
However some content can continue to attract traffic over time. For example: an article about fundamental concepts in your industry. Such an article can draw in new traffic for years to come.
source: moz.com
This type of content is called evergreen content.
In your content marketing strategy you need both types of content: news type stories to keep abreast of current developments, and evergreen content to grow your brand over the long term.
Evergreen content can help you in the following ways:
Evergreen content which is relevant and informative will enhance the credibility of your brand. It will demonstrate to your audience that you understand their needs, you have expertise and you can offer them a solution. Through reading your content, your audience will grow to trust you and will feel comfortable with doing business with you.
If you can create authoritative evergreen content which addresses key issues in your industry, you can position your brand as a thought leader. Over time, this will raise awareness of your brand’s expertise. This will attract links from bloggers and writers, driving online traffic. In the offline world this can lead to invitations to speak at industry conferences and seminars.
Evergreen content will give you love not just from humans, but search engines too. Google is committed to rewarding exceptional content while penalising thin, low-value pages. As reported by Search Engine Watch, Google’s algorithms have been carefully designed to reward in-depth evergreen content that is really useful to visitors. To maximise the SEO potential of your evergreen content, make sure you do proper keyword research and optimise your content for your target keywords.
Unlike a time-sensitive news article, evergreen content can continue to drive shares on social media for years after it was first published. Evergreen content will never lose its relevance so it can be promoted as part of your long-term social media strategy.
Evergreen content has the following characteristics:
It goes without saying that your evergreen content must be of the highest quality. In this way you will impress not just your readers but also the search engines. In my article on quality content I reveal how search engines measure the quality of your content. If you're going to create outstanding evergreen content, you should:
If you know your audience’s needs, this can help you find ideal topics for your evergreen content. You can learn more about what your audience wants by reading relevant forums in your industry, searching for questions about your industry on Q&A sites like Quora, reading blog comments, and sending out surveys. Hell, you could even try talking to them.
You can mine data from your own website for ideas. On-site analytics tools like Google Analytics can tell you what posts are the most trafficked, the most shared, or attracted the most comments. Once you’ve identified topics which are really engaging your audience, you can base your evergreen content strategy around them.
You can use analytics tools you can find what topics have historically been popular in your niche. With Buzzsumo you can enter either a keyword for your industry or the domain of one of your competitors in the search bar. Press the “go” button and Buzzsumo will give you a list of the best performing topics in the past for the keyword or domain as measured by the number of shares.
You want your evergreen post to be the ultimate resource for that particular topic on the internet. Have a look at what’s already been written online. You're going to create something that’s going to blow it out of the water.
Your ultimate resource should:
You might be an expert in your industry but many of your visitors will not. To attract the widest possible audience you need to write for beginners. After all, beginners are the ones most likely to be searching for help. You want to be the one who's providing the answers.
Writing for beginners means that you avoid technical language and confusing terminology. Use short sentences and simple words. Demonstrate your expertise without alienating your readers.
Here are some tried and tested evergreen content ideas:
After spending your time and energy creating epic evergreen content, you don’t want it to get buried under an outflow of new blog posts over time. You need a strategy that will continually put your evergreen content before new eyes:
The power of evergreen content lies in its timelessness. With evergreen content you’re not chasing the latest trends. You’re building a solid foundation for your marketing that will grow your brand over time.
Can you afford to be without it?
Thanks to Clement Lim for sharing his advice and opinions in this post. Clement is a freelance writer and content marketer. His website is at limwriter.com. You can also follow him on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn.It happens time and time again: you create awesome content, it gets shared once, and then disappears forever into the content vacuum of death. Ok, maybe that’s a little dramatic, but the reality is you work hard to create great content, and if your internal teams aren’t using it, that hurts.
And, to add insult to injury, we’ve got the stats to prove it. 91% of B2B marketers use marketing content, but 65% of the content created goes unused.
Double burn.
Whether it be an eBook, a SlideShare presentation, a webinar, or an infographic, the content you create is a valuable business asset that should work to support your internal stakeholders. Too much time and effort is put into creating compelling content to let it fall by the wayside and go unused.
Think about the content you share externally. When you publish a blog post, it goes onto your blog—every single time. Ideally, you are also distributing that content via other channels that your audience is already engaging in, but your blog is the repository that houses every post you’ve ever published. If a customer is looking for a topic that was covered a few months ago, they know exactly how to look for it, and likely have a search function to get them there quicker.
You’ve invested time and money to make this search process simple and intuitive for your leads. You would never scatter content across the web like a trail of bread crumbs for your customer—so why is it happening to your internal teams?
Just like your external audiences, your internal teams need an intuitive system to find the content they need to do their jobs. If you don’t have a system in place that makes your content accessible, relevant, and trackable, chances are your content isn’t being used—simply because no one can find it.
So how do you know if your content is being shared and used effectively by your sales and support teams? To find out, ask yourself these three questions:
If you answered email, take a deep breath. You’re not alone.
Not knowing where to store all of your content is a common problem that a lot of marketers face. You know the content exists, but you don’t remember where—and neither does anyone else. Whether it’s lost in a thread of emails, buried in folders, or stored on the cloud, there often is no central, intuitive place to search.
Now think about your sales enablement, social, and demand gen teams. If it’s difficult for you to find content, how is your digital asset management system (or lack thereof) working for all of your stakeholders?
Successfully sharing content within your organization means having one central location that houses all of your digital assets. Using a content repository not only makes digital asset management easier, but it enables your sales and other customer-facing teams to easily access the content you create.
Unlike a blog post that gets pushed to a broader audience, sales and customer success teams use content to serve the needs of very specific people that they are communicating with one-on-one, at highly specific stages within the sales funnel. Often, sales uses content to show explicit value and overcome particular objections a potential customer may have. As such, your content is only a true asset to your internal teams when it’s relevant to the exact person it’s being delivered to, and targeted within a specific sales stage.
If your content isn’t searchable by category, sales stage, or persona, then it’s likely not easy for the people in your organization to find the right content they need. Often, this bottleneck translates into new content being created ad hoc and thus, duplicated efforts.
To create an internal content repository that is functional, stakeholders need to be able to search and filter according to who they are communicating with, the sales stage they are in, and any other parameter that makes sense for your business.
One of the biggest hurdles marketers face is tracking the performance of their content. While most marketers are tracking top-of-funnel metrics like clicks, shares, and downloads, few are tracking how their content is being utilized internally.
Simply put, content marketers need to know if their internal teams are using their content or not. Just like you need to know if your external assets are generating leads, it’s critical that marketers know if the content they are creating is supporting their internal teams. Otherwise, you’re living in a dark hole of content generation and run the risk of ignoring the needs of prospects that are further down the sales funnel.
Without metrics to track internal use, it’s nearly impossible to know if what you’re creating is actually relevant to your key stakeholders, let alone optimizing existing content for future use. And, if you’re not optimizing your content for re-purposing future assets, you’re likely wasting valuable time and money.
It’s time to get out of email hell, clean up the bread crumbs, and create an internal content repository that is easy for all of your internal stakeholders to find the content they need. With a central location to house all of your assets, you and your teams will be able to better align your goals and strategies, and ultimately be able to serve your customers better.
The demand for subject matter experts is at an all-time high as more companies invest in digital content and live events to engage their audience.
Considering that LinkedIn has just celebrated its 1 millionth writer, it might seem like there are more than enough influencers available to fill the demand. However, while there are a lot of people who have a lot to say, true thought leaders are hard to come by.
As discussed in the blog post “How to Identify Your Brand’s Thought Leaders,” you likely have a number of individuals within your own organization whose unique expertise and voice can help you in your brand marketing efforts.
There are times, though, when it benefits you to work with an expert outside of your brand whose personal successes and failures can be used to educate others and evolve your industry.
Micah Liebowitz, PR Newswire’s Director of Digital and Events, has firsthand experience with the trials and tribulations of identifying the right experts to collaborate with, some of which include:
Here are Micah’s top tips on how to weed out the noisemakers and find third-party thought leaders who can help boost your brand’s reputation and business goals.
1. Reach out to experts you’ve worked with in the past. Make sure their expertise fits the topic and that they haven’t spoken on that topic too recently. You can also enlist the help of your sales teams or agency partners to reach out to clients who might fit the bill.
2. Try to secure more than one expert. With regards to live events and webinars, in particular, some experts might be well-versed in niche subject areas while others cover a broader audience base. A combination of both can help drive registration numbers.
3. Research the expert’s online footprint. YouTube videos of live presentations, for example, can help you gauge a speaker’s ability to articulate their knowledge. As Micah explains, if you want people to take time out of their day to attend a presentation or a webinar, the featured guest has to have cachet or the company that they work for should be considered a thought leader.
“An interesting topic has to have an interesting speaker,” he says. “They have to be a luminary in their field and they have to have a message that’s important.”
4. Discover up-and-coming experts outside of your known network. The volume of content being produced continues to grow exponentially each year. And while it’s helpful to have a speaker who is on point with your brand’s message, your audience wants diversity and will grow tired if you use the same event speakers over and over.
Because of this, Micah cautions, the well of qualified experts available within your personal network can dry up quickly. The subsequent challenge is finding emerging thought leaders who are sharing new and interesting ideas within your industry’s speaker circuit.
Submitting an expert query through a service like ProfNet can also help you uncover new talent for digital content and speaking engagements.
5. Interview every speaker before signing an agreement. Never engage with someone who is not going to carry out your message. Before moving ahead on a project, discuss the most important topics you want to cover and listen to their reactions to determine how well they understand and will contribute to it.
6. Follow up with a thank-you note. Be sure to keep your relationship intact with the experts who successfully complement your brand. The relationship could lead to additional opportunities such as guest blogging, sharing leads and more.
You need to carefully select the thought leaders your company works with, explains Micah, because a successful collaboration between brands and external thought leaders is mutually beneficial.
“People trust brands less than they used to,” he says. “Having an outside person vouch for your message rings much louder and is beneficial from an engagement standpoint, moving existing business through the funnel and getting your own thought leaders recognized.”
For the experts, speaking on behalf of other organizations gives them an opportunity to boost their public profile, qualify for awards and validate investments in their own brands.
To keep up with ever-evolving business demands, today’s public relations and marketing professionals need to reconsider how they plan their campaigns. Read more PR strategy tips in our white paper High-Impact PR Planning that Drives ROI & Supports Demand Generation.
