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Whole Foods' new chain of stores will be almost as cheap as Trader Joe's.

The chain, called 365 by Whole Foods Market, will primarily feature the company's store brand products — which are only about 2% more expensive than Trader Joe's, according to a new price comparison study by Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Jennifer Bartashus.

Bartashus purchased 35 identical private-label items at each store for the study.

The Whole Foods items cost $88.86, while the Trader Joe's basket cost $86.75.

Whole Foods has a reputation for being expensive, while Trader Joe's is best known for its low prices. Trader Joe's also sells twice as much per square foot as Whole Foods.

The study proves that Whole Foods will now be able to compete with Trader Joe's and other specialty grocers on price, Bartashus writes.

But the cheaper prices could end up hurting Whole Foods' existing stores, according to Deutsche Bank analysts.

"It could backfire if price points are materially different, because an obvious price spread between the two formats could create doubts with their existing loyal customer base, and this could lead to erosion of their very strong brand equity," analysts write in a recent research note.

Whole Foods could also face a challenge keeping rent and labor costs low enough to make the "mini-me millennial" stores profitable, according to the note.

"Real estate and labor are both becoming scarcer, which could complicate this endeavor," the analysts write.

The new chain, which will start opening stores in 2016, will be led by 20-year Whole Foods veteran Jeff Turnas Turnas was previously president of the company’s North Atlantic region. 

"We are excited to introduce 365 by Whole Foods Market to bring healthy foods to even more communities with a fresh, quality-meets-value shopping experience that’s fun and convenient," Turnas said in a statement. "A modern, streamlined design with innovative technology and a carefully curated product mix will offer an efficient and rewarding way to grocery shop."

SEE ALSO: Whole Foods just offended its most important customers

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On today's Facebook earnings call, investors asked several questions about two fledgling businesses: Instagram and Messenger. 

We know the plan for Instagram. Earlier this quarter, Facebook rolled out a major app update for Instagram and announced plans to open up all of Facebook's ad targeting tools to the photo sharing service. It also now lets brands use a new format where they can create slideshows of multiple photos, with links.

Messenger's road to dollar signs hasn't been quite as clear, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg laid out Facebook's plans much more clearly during the earnings call. 

He's said in the past that the company believes in waiting until its products hit 1 billion users before focusing on turning them into meaningful businesses (read: revenue drivers), and Messenger, with 700 million monthly active users, nearly hits that landmark. 

"The playbook that we're gonna run with Messenger and WhatsApp is kinda similar to how we thought about building a business in Facebook and Newsfeed," Zuckerberg said.

In early 2006, investors and analysts pushed Facebook to monetize faster by plastering more banner ads on its site. Instead, though, Facebook decided that ads and monetization would work better "if there was an organic interaction between the people using the product and businesses."

So, it encouraged businesses to join Facebook by creating Pages for free. It pushed them to try to get other users to "Like" those pages, and gave them Insights to see how their Pages were driving business.

From there, Facebook started letting businesses pay to promote posts. Today, Facebook can charge much more for Promoted Posts than it can for banner ads it serves on the side of its site. 

"Messaging I think is going to be pretty similar," Zuckerberg said. 

Building on "organic interactions with businesses"

Right now, some people in WhatsApp — and to a lesser extent Messenger — use the service to communicate with businesses.

At its developers conference this spring, Facebook said it was going to start letting brands and businesses use Messenger to send customers receipts or shipping updates for products they bought or handle any other customer-service issues.

Instead of forcing monetization right now, it wants to get more people using those tools, and then find a natural way to squeeze some money from brands. 

"The long-term bet is that by enabling people to have good organic interactions with businesses, that will end up being a massive multiplier on the value of the monetization down the road, when we really work on that, and really focus on that in a bigger way," Zuckerberg said. "So we ask for some patience on this to do this correctly." 

Although this explanation makes sense for Facebook, it might spark some caution for brands. 

Businesses have argued that the way that Facebook emphasized the importance of "Pages" and "Likes," then decreased the organic reach of those things felt deceptive, since they had put significant time and effort into something that was no longer as effective.  

SEE ALSO: Facebook beats earnings expectations, but the stock sinks

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As a marketer, I’m a big believer in the value that marketing can provide sales teams. With messaging and content for multiple buyer personas, marketing delivers a strong foundation for the purchasing process. But, as someone who has worked in and with sales for a number of years, I also know sales must be able to take that messaging and tailor it based on a customer’s particular needs in order to close the deal.

Research just released from Aberdeen Group shows how the top performing organizations are gaining these insights to personalize a transformed customer journey. (See infographic below.) One of the keys to success has been identified as sales enablement. According to Aberdeen, by arming their sales reps with sales enablement tools, these organizations are:

Forging a stronger alignment between marketing and sales teams

These companies recognize that both marketing and sales teams have a stake when it comes to content development, management, and distribution. And by giving sales reps enablement tools to easily access and personalize buyer-facing content – from email messaging to collateral to case studies – they are getting big pay-offs with:

• 21% stronger lead acceptance rates
• 36% higher lead conversion averages

And that’s not the only way these organizations are getting ahead. Other approaches they pursue include:

• Personalizing the business story for every single customer (77% versus 45% laggard)
• Delivering insight into what content to use when and with whom (57% versus 9% laggard)
• Seeing what sales activity levels drive the most deals (33% versus 25% laggard)

To get the above insights, companies are using automated engagement tracking software (AETS) to look at past sales activities, and see how many dials, emails, conversations or appointments it takes for sales reps to meet their goals – to help them build successful, repeatable processes to close other deals.

Sales organizations are seeing key performance indicators (KPIs) such as a 50% better lead conversion rate (22% vs. 14) and a 14% stronger customer retention rate. Who doesn’t like those numbers?

I’m personally excited to see this research from Aberdeen as it definitely aligns with some of our findings with LiveHive’s own customers.

If you want to find out how personalized content and engagement can make a difference for your business, check out the full Aberdeen report .

Original post

Unicorns are supposed to be rare beasts. But in tech — where a "unicorn" is defined as a private startup company valued at more than $1 billion — at least 100 of them have been spotted so far.

At Business Insider we have been discussing whether the unicorn glut is an indicator that the tech sector is in some sort of bubble.

Some people think there is no tech bubble because private equity has simply replaced the role of public stock IPOs, making it look like there is a bubble when in fact there is not.

But others — including at least one unicorn CEO — think there is a bubble.

Those folks believe that central banks — the US Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank and the Bank of England — have caused this bubble by keeping interest rates very low for a long time.

Those low rates — effectively zero percent across much of the West since 2009 — have made money incredibly cheap to borrow. That has allowed investors to pump money into projects that wouldn't get funding in any other environment.

Startups without revenue models — like Secret and Ello — are prime examples of this. But it has also affected companies that do have revenue, like Uber and Airbnb. At $40 billion, Uber is now valued privately at a sum greater than publicly traded companies like Kraft, Kellogg, CBS, Marks & Spencer or ITV. No one outside the company even knows whether it is profitable.

This cheap money has flooded into the tech venture capital and private equity markets. And it is sending valuations through the roof, insiders argue. (Moody's, for comparison, thinks a similar thing is happening in European housing — because the ECB is pumping money into the bond market that is ending up in property investment.)

Business Insider recently talked to Kevin Kinsella, the founder of Avalon Ventures, a venture capital company that has made investments in Zynga, Backupify, Good (acquired by Motorola), Nanigans, Neurocrine and Tapad. We wanted to know, what's going to happen when, inevitably, the central banks reverse course and start raising interest rates again?

There are signs that is about to happen because both the Fed and the BofE have said that the markets they regulate in the US and Europe are now so healthy that they expect to see some inflation, increasing the likelihood that they'll raise rates as a way of beating back that inflation.

If interest rates were to go up, then the environment for tech venture funding would change. Investors would not be able to get zero interest, or low interest money. The tide would go out, in other words.

We wanted to know how that might affect tech venture investing and valuations.

Kinsella told us that he believes higher interest rates will pop any bubble that has formed in tech. Investors will pull money from the public stock markets and rush to put it into the bond markets, where the new action will be.

"If you have money draining out of the public equity markets, that inevitably affects the private equity market. They cannot exist going in different directions because somehow that will rent the fabric of the universe. It’s just not permitted that that happens. Obviously there can be anomalies for brief periods of time but it just can’t happen forever," he says.

"In other words, you wouldn’t see this unicorn phenomenon in the stock market if NASDAQ was in the tank and going lower, it just wouldn’t happen. For a lot of reasons, not the least of which is if one of the avenues of liquidity is going public and your vehicle or your market for going public, NASDAQ for example, is going in the tank, well that’s the problem."

The problem then, he says, is that private equity investors — the large, institutional investors who poured money in after the regular tech venture capital funds — will be stuck with big investments in tech startups that they cannot sell, or exit from via public IPOs, Kinsella says: "They’re screwed, they’re completely screwed."

"That’s what I refer to as the liquidity crisis. Your private valuation has gotten way ahead of any potential notion of what a public valuation could be where you could exit."

Kinsella thinks the banks are now signalling that the tech bubble has peaked: "I think the interest rate, this is probably what’s going to tip this over. It’s like an early warning sign with a rumble in the distance, and pretty soon, the freight train is bearing down on you, or the earthquake is, buildings are shaking or whatever."

"We’re in one of the biggest tech bubbles we’ve ever had."

Here's an edited transcript of our entire conversation with Kinsella. If you're interested in a how an interest rate bubble might shake out, it's crucial reading. We also discuss whether big tech unicorns like Uber and Airbnb are over-valued in the long run.

BI: What do you think of unicorns?

Kevin Kinsella: Basically my point of view on unicorns is that private companies which have sky high valuations, it doesn’t really mean anything in the real world until it’s marked to market. And there’s only two ways things get marked to market in venture capital: Either a company is acquired by another company for cash or marketable security, or it goes public, and then it has reporting requirements and then the market will determine the value.

The problem in my view, at the present time, is with the continued flood of money, now. Venture capital has peaked in terms of its appetite, in terms of how much money it wants to put in. So now private equity funds are piling in. Primarily because interest rates are virtually zero so there’s no fixed income play and they’re not moving around. A good trader loves an active market, you don’t make money when the market is static.

The stock market has gone up and if you are stock picking, that’s fine, you may do a bit better than the market. But if you want to play in another game where you can get rapid increases of value and so on and so forth, this apparently has become the new parlour game, to invest in these companies and many their cases, the private equity that has been piling in onto of the venture capital is creating the unicorn, in other words the company with the $1 billion valuation. 

My metaphor for that is it’s like a rich man’s game of saying ‘okay i’ll trade my two, half-a-million-dollar, Siamese cats, who have beautiful blue eyes, for your beautiful, gorgeous, $1-million golden retriever and we’ll call it square.’ And you can play that game all day long but if you really want to know what a Siamese cat is worth or a golden retriever is worth, you go on eBay or you go down the pet store, and it’s certainly not those values, that I cited by way of example.

BI: I was interested in what you said about the interest rates being zero, so there’s no fixed income opportunity, so private equity is looking elsewhere. Clearly it sees value in tech, so that’s where to go if you want to see values rising. Is the link that direct?

KK: I mean we live in a global market and money’s fungible and hedge fund private equity is looking for momentum plays, and there ain’t no momentum plays in bonds, right? When the interest rates were spiking up or down, well they never really spike down they do spike up though. Something’s got to happen, there’s got to be motion, the dice has to be rolling on the board, and if it’s not then they’re not going to play because they’re not going to get the adrenaline rush from looking at… you know, money markets fund interest rates or bond interests or whatever. It’s got to be sexy. It’s got to be things like either going long or short on Greek bonds.

BI: So when interest rates start to go up again, what happens to the flow of private equity money then?

KK: This is what I think one of the tipping points is for the unicorn phenomenon. As soon as there becomes action in another sector, people will try to bail out of the action that has stalled. A couple of things will happen: One is once interest rates start to move. As you know they don’t go up for a month and down for another month, and up for two months down for three. Once they start to go up they just keep going and they may not go through an inflection point, it may be organic or line growth or something, but they don’t go jumping all over the place. That’s just not the way the world works.

So when that starts to happen … it’s like everyone running over to the other side of the ship — so when futures on interest rates become attractive, a lot of money is going to slosh from equities, where they’ve had a great run for quite a few years, over to that ‘cause they’re looking for the next play and they want to anticipate it.

So if you have money draining out of the public equity markets, that inevitably affects the private equity market. They cannot exist going in different directions because somehow that will rent the fabric of the universe. It’s just not permitted that that happens. Obviously there can be anomalies for brief periods of time but it just can’t happen forever. In other words, you wouldn’t see this unicorn phenomenon in the stock market if NASDAQ was in the tank and going lower, it just wouldn’t happen. For a lot of reasons, not the least of which is if one of the avenues of liquidity is going public and your vehicle or your market for going public, NASDAQ for example, is going in the tank, well that’s the problem.

I think the interest rate this is probably what’s going to tip this over. It’s like an early warning sign with a rumble in the distance, and pretty soon, the freight train is bearing down on you or the earthquake is, buildings are shaking or whatever.

BI: So currently, right now you’ve got more than 100 unicorns and my understanding that one of the reasons these unicorns exist is because they have not gone public. Instead they’ve stayed private with new, bigger private equity valuations. The original early VCs, instead of staging IPOs, have resold the equity privately. So you have this situation: interest rates go up, the money starts sloshing to the other side of the boat, what happens to all the private holders who are holding equity at what used to be valued at a unicorn level? How do they cash out?

KK: They can’t. That’s the problem. You’re clever in perceiving that venture capitalists who are investing at high valuations but not necessarily astronomical valuations have been able [to so far]. And we participated in one of these, one of our unicorns was Zynga, we were selling when the private price got to be 8, 10, 14 billion dollars. We sort of said, that’s a pretty healthy return for a games company that’s based on hits that have to persevere over a period of time and then they have to be replaced by other hits. That’s pretty risky. So that’s a pretty robust valuation when we got in it. So we started selling to investors coming in to the company, like Andreessen Horowitz and so forth. So we had sold all of this privately rather than half it and then waited until it went public and sold the rest.

You have to look at the fundamental raison d’être of the business — what is it doing? What’s the nature of the business and what are its prospects for success? What are its prospects to break even and then return the sustained profit? Because a lot of the philosophies of the businesses are just ‘we’re interested in getting customers now and if we’re losing money with each customer now that’s okay because we have this huge hoard of venture capital that we can subsidise the operation with and once we have the required number of tens of millions of customers and we drive our competitors out of business, then we can start to raise prices and become a proper business.’

Well there’s several problems with that. The first one is that, if you notice, is that how many of the unicorn companies are really prosaic businesses — like limousine services or renting rooms in your house? The original VC firms from the ’70’s made their money and established the reputation of their respective brands by leveraging big cleverness with small capital, not small cleverness with big capital, and that’s what’s going on with these unicorns. That has never worked and it won’t work this time. It doesn’t produce venture quality returns, and it never will.

BI: If I look at things like Airbnb and Uber, they are prosaic, old fashioned businesses, renting rooms and renting cars. But they don’t own any of the inventory, they don’t have any of the asset risk, no operational expenses. All they do is take a percentage of transactions, and there are millions of transactions, and that is a great business to be in. All you have to do is maintain the app and that’s pretty much it. The consumers and employees take the risks and spend the money.

KK: Okay so it’s not that simple. First thing is — and this gets back to the whole unicorn thing — these companies have to return money to their investors and they’re not going to do that per transaction, they’re not going to do that by the revenue that they’re getting because they’re losing money. Therefore at the end of the day, the investor who piles onto the completely ridiculous multi-billion dollar valuation, finally someone’s going to say ‘you know what, stock markets in the tank, you’ve got this valuation, we’ve been really grinding your numbers and we just don’t see how A, you’re going to break even, and B, how you’re ultimately going to make money on a sustained basis doing this.

BI: You really think Uber can’t break even?

KK: Not if they’re subsidising drivers. The rumour is they’re subsidising drivers in San Francisco to the tune of $10 million a week.

So obviously they raised a boatload of venture capital at huge market caps, and they’re just subsidising this and my view is that if there’s not path to profitability, just trying to dominate a market and then hope that they can raise prices later, they could be woefully disappointed because I think the price inelasticity for demand for delivery services is pretty significant.

BI: So let’s say the recession comes along but the underlying business is actually viable. The business is profitable. It may not meet the valuation they hoped, but it’s a real business. My worry is, if I’m the last set of investors in and we’ve now ploughed in some astronomical sum of money, like $1 billion dollars, at a valuation of $10 billion, and it’s all still private equity, then when the market goes down, I can’t sell this. The market is completely  illiquid. At least if it had IPO’d, I could bail out of my shares and get some cents on the dollar. But what if you’re Fidelity or Calpers, one of these large institutional investors that comes in at a late stage — how are they going to cash that out? 

KK: They’re screwed, they’re completely screwed. 

BI: So you have a highly valued asset stuck in an illiquid non-transparent market?

KK: Yeah and that’s what I refer to as the liquidity crisis. Your private valuation has gotten way ahead of any potential notion of what a public valuation could be where you could exit. And therefore the problem is that you’re stuck with the investment.

BI: Let me play devil’s advocate — Airbnb, Uber … they have one good thing going for them: they don’t really have employees and all they do is take a cut from transactions and the market for these transactions is massive. If Uber can get 50% of all taxi rides and take whatever the cut is, just for making an app, at the end of the day, that’s like printing money. Why is that not a good idea?

KK: I’m not saying it’s not a good idea. I’m saying it has to be within limits and there has to be some adult supervision of the expansion and the marketing plans and the world dominance visions of some of these people. I think mobile web enabled services can be great business but A): it doesn’t apply to everything, I think the markets will ultimately get a bit fragmented when the crunch stars to happen. And the other thing is, B): it doesn’t necessarily work with everything. 

I heard a pitch from some Stanford Business School grads in a café in Palo Alto. So they were smart guys — late 20’s, early 30’s. They had great academic credentials, Stanford Business School, knew a lot about entrepreneurship and all that sort of stuff, but what they were proposing to do was, taking the metaphor you’re talking about which is ‘you don’t have any inventory, you don’t have any employees, you just take a cut of these transactions.’ So they had this great idea that they were going to solve the on-time, on-demand delivery for pharmaceuticals. 

So I said let’s analyse that a minute. First of all, for venture capital, one of the original principles is people you want to invest in are people who’ve done it before with someone else’s money. Not people who’ve just came out of business school.

So I said, "do any of you know anything about the pharmaceutical business or drugs or drug pricing? Or do you know anything about actually delivering bottles of pills to people? Either of you come out of a business related to that?"

“No, we just think that mobile enabled web service is so great that it will conquer the world.”

So I said, I don’t think so. We like domain expertise. We like to find people who say "I've been working for this company and they deliver pills and I had this great idea and I went to my boss and he said ‘we’re not going to do it your way we’re going to do it my way. But I want to leave and do it my way because X, Y, Z, this is how we’re going to kick ass.”

And then I’d say “yeah that sounds great, let’s go. Let’s see you kick some ass. But you know something about that business — it’s not just another mobile web enabled delivery of something.”

There are things that have done well. If you get out of Uber and Airbnb or WeWork at the right time, Oh man! I mean high-five! You have made a ton of money, and don’t look back! Head to the Bahamas and don’t look back! Because the company you exited may not be as robust and healthy in three years from now.

BI: Okay, are we in a bubble?

KK: We’re in one of the biggest tech bubbles we’ve ever had.

BI: You’re not even going to qualify that?

KK: Everyone who is inside of an expanding bubble can’t imagine another world where the bubble collapses on them. It’s unimaginable because they haven’t lived through it. And one of the problems of course is with millennials.

Let’s say you’re 30, right? Fifteen years ago in 2000 when that market blew up, you were only a sophomore in high school, you were 15. So you have no institutional memory of what went on there. Of course you’ve read about it and talked about it and then you have a rationale that’s been pre-digested for you by someone else. This time it’s not a bubble, this time, these tulip bulbs, they’re really worth $200. Think of all the beautiful colours! More people are planting gardens every year in Holland and all over the world. It’s 200 now but it’ll be 300 soon!

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Today’s empowered customer

Every business out there knows (or pretends to) that customers are their bread and butter, yet customer experience gets either swept under the rug or remains a non-issue. The prevalence of headline-grabbing customer service disasters show us that our trade still hasn’t learned to:

• understand customer expectations
• inspire confidence around their product
• provide value beyond the purchased product

We’re constantly reminded that support agents should be the face of the brand — yet — can they play the part? Can we deliver memorable customer experiences — and just as importantly, salvage toxic ones? The key to the answer may lie with your customers. Here are five secrets your customers don’t want you to know (which can help you in better understanding them):

“I can make or break your brand”

Whether you’d like to admit it or not, your customer service reps are the face of your company, projecting a certain image and brand value across. They are a first point of contact and, far too often, also the last one.

Today’s customers are powerful, demanding and worst of all, connected. Being on multiple social networks, they can easily unleash damaging vendettas against your brand.

The solution? Teach your support agents that every single interaction they have with customers amounts to branding. The way you greet, communicate (in person, by phone, email, or even voicemail), follow-up, ask for repeat business, and promote your products is an opportunity for a renewed brand.

“I can be your evil ex (or worse)”

Customers are human, each with their own feelings, desires and a certain level of expectation from your brand. When you cross them, your customers can take matters personally — and actively work at discouraging your business.

Let’s take a simple analogy: You went on a date and had a great time, but started traveling around immediately and forgot to give your date a call. The first day you don’t call, she will tell her friends you’re a jerk. The second day, she tells her mother. By the third day she’ll tell everyone in her circle, and maybe even some strangers for good measure.

Your customers are much the same. They feel let down and deceived when a company doesn’t do the necessary legwork to make them feel valued. You don’t want to go that path.

“I am smarter than you think”

We are more time-strapped than ever before. We have more choices as to where to buy and have an ability to share our brand experiences at the click of a button. What’s more, we now have the ability to voice our frustrations and invite outsiders to support our crusades.

Your customers are no different.

If a customer feels as if they know more than the sales rep (and these days they often do — especially with resources available at their fingertips) they will lose confidence in your team and the brand faster than you think.

“I don’t care!!!”

Most customers could care less about your offers and promotions unless it’s exactly what he or she seeks. While this may seem obvious, consider that businesses have a tendency of focusing their resources on attracting new customers instead of truly listening to their existing ones.

This includes everything from running sophisticated promotion campaigns to cutting prices for a sales boost. When the price point becomes a main differentiator, businesses are cornered into cutting costs in critical areas in order to stay competitive. Staff training and customer service ends up on the chopping block, too, and — soon enough — customers start feeling abandoned.

“I don’t want to hear excuses”

This is where companies hit a roadblock. It may seem simply impossible to attend to your customer’s every need, all the time. Yet in order to succeed, companies should do just that.

More often than not, businesses cite a lack of resources such as funding and staffing, citing mantras about their inability to “please everyone at once”. However, this is proverbial slippery slope as far as the customer experience goes. Perhaps Adolf Loos, a renowned Austrian architect said it best:

The house has to please everyone, contrary to the work of art which does not. The work is a private matter for the artist. The house is not.

Just like an architect must provide a solution to a set of problems in the form of a building that works for everyone, a customer service agent use the tools of the trade to do the same for their customers. A support agent’s most important tool (aside from the phone) is their customer service software.

When it comes to a stellar customer experience, it turns out that pleasing everyone is exactly what you should be doing!

There’s data that helps you make day-to-day execution decisions, and then there’s the data that represents important trends and showcases real traction to your board. Gathering the right metrics to shed light on your successes or failures becomes especially important in terms of calculating ROI and understanding where and how to grow your startup.

But there’s a fundamental difference between mobile and web metrics and reporting – so sticking with the norm isn’t going to get you far. Instead, you need to hone in on the app-specific metrics that actually showcase progress, and accurately reflect how your users are behaving in-app. In this post, we outline the four reporting categories you need to cover, as well as some sample metrics to include.

1. Acquisition Costs

Your app users come to you from a host of different channels – paid and organic. This means doubling down on App Store optimization and advertising channels, for both the pull and push (respectively) of awareness and new user acquisition. In order to create a long-term plan that helps you attain and retain the right customers, you need a system with appropriately low ROI and high engagement rates.

When you’re a startup, you also get a bit of a “two-fer” out of running paid campaigns – they help you learn, quickly, where your audience is and where your traction is. So yes, you’re spending to acquire users, but you’re also acquiring knowledge about your market much faster than you would if you did purely organic – which is why reporting on the right paid metrics is a must for your board.

Some metrics to include: Total spend, spend per campaign, cost per user

2. Growth Numbers

In a startup, you can show growth in a number of ways: number of new employees, increases in revenue, and other major milestones. Your app is no different – it’s an essential platform for growth, especially when you consider the sheer number of consumers who use apps regularly to interact with brands.

The most important thing to showcase here is app stickiness. Meaning, does your app continue to engage users over time, and are you seeing a constant increase in retention and user LTV? Proving and improving retention is the key to growing your app and creating brand positivity.

Some metrics to include: Number of new users, user retention over time, change in LTV

3. Engagement Numbers

Retention is a function of engagement, which is to say when your users are engaged, they’re more likely to return again and again. Engaging users should be the ultimate goal of your app, because it means they’re gaining value from its usage. Tracking how your app is used, for how long and how users are converting in-app on key actions will signal engagement.

Some metrics to include: Time in app, session interval, feature usage, conversion rate

4. Revenue Results

Your board is going to want to know how and why your users find your app valuable – but really, they want to know what that means for the bottom line. Reporting on revenue numbers relative to your app can be the ultimate proof of concept. Not only is that where your audience is actively spending
their time, but it’s also a huge channel for setting up your brand.

Some metrics to include: Total app revenue, in-app purchases, total user LTV

We outline all of the 27 metrics to include in your report in our latest eBook, The Startup Guide to App Analytics & Marketing. Grab your free copy today, and learn how to pull together the reports that matter most to your investors, plus how to track app user behavior and ways to improve initial retention.

Value is the buzzword of the 21st century. You can’t go anywhere and not see some marketing maven, some company, some blog post, some industry guru whipping out the word value and how important it is to “create value.”

Yeah, no shit. Ya think?!

Value is being bantered about with such ubiquity it hardly has any meaning left.  Really? What the fuck does “value” mean?

We’re overusing the word value, and it’s confusing people.

I imagine sales people, marketers, and everyone break away from a webinar, conference, a blog post all hyped up to go offer value only to realize they have NO clue exactly what it is they’re supposed to offer, if it’s even valuable or even how to measure value.  I see confused, frustrated, clumsy, people scratching their heads saying; “Hey, how the hell do I create value, how do I define value.”

I say it’s time we spend less effort talking about value and more talking about what value is and how to provide it.

Value as a word doesn’t mean anything. It’s a placeholder, a catchphrase for something that is dynamic, contextual and requires acknowledgement from others. So when we whip around the word value, we’re not offering much insight. Value for one person is different for another. Value changes from product to product, service to service, idea to idea, and offer to offer. Value isn’t a thing; it’s an agreement.

val·ue

noun

1. the regard that something is held to deserve; the importance, worth, or usefulness of something

Identifying value starts with looking outward. It begins with a comprehensive understanding of the other person, group, or company you’re looking to demonstrate value to. Creating value requires empathy and knowledge of others. Creating value means considering another’s goals, objectives, issues, problems, pain, and more. Providing value is being able to solve, minimize, eradicate the problems or pain of those you’re working with. It’s helping others achieve their goals and objectives. When you can position yourself as an asset, as a tool in someone’s efforts to improve their world, that’s creating value.

Creating value isn’t easy when the value isn’t intrinsic. Money, gold, stocks and bonds, houses, etc. they have intrinsic value, and the market sets the value. But when it comes to creating value in the world of sales, that’s not so easy. What is the value of 30 minutes of someone’s time? How do you measure the value of a piece of content, a tweet, a blog post, a demo, an in-person meeting, an all-day off-site, a training course, etc. Determining the value of these things becomes more difficult. The magic is being able to identify the value in these things and convey the value to your prospects and buyers.

Simply put value is being seen as worth something; time, money, commitment, support, etc. When what you’re offering demands something in return, you’re headed in the right direct. The more someone will give you for what your offering, the more value you are providing

Let’s stop talking about adding value or delivering value. Instead,  let’s spend our precious, valuable time talking about what value is and how to create it.

Value is an overused buzzword today. Spend less time worrying about value and more time knowing what it is and how to create it. That’s where the win is!

It just may be the dirtiest little secret in professional sales: that subject matter expertise is the key to sales success. Yes, you have to have it, but whether a buyer hires you depends on much more. In this article Charles H. Green explores what goes through buyers' minds during the decision process.

Proper sales and marketing alignment has continuously proven to positively impact a business’ success. Despite this, businesses still significantly continue to struggle to achieve this interdepartmental alignment. It’s incredibly effective for a company to create a functional environment where both teams can share information to reach common goals. Marketing and sales teams should communicate and coach each other to address their main challenges and effectively resolve them.

To further encourage you to kick-start this alignment process within your organization, let’s address the benefits of how, through proper alignment, marketing can learn from sales to become more effective and experience growth within an organization.

Creating Buyer Personas

Customer-centric knowledge is the most important and impactful information that can be used by any business. Marketing professionals often struggle to understand buyer personas in today’s complex buying environment. Buyer personas are defined as fictional generalized representations of a company’s ideal customers. According to ITSMA, only 44% of B2B companies use buyer personas. In other words, more than half of the B2B companies are unsure whether or not the content they create is relevant to their actual customers.

Out of an entire organization’s operation, the sales team spends the vast amount of their time in direct customer contact. Because of this, it is crucial that they have a concrete understanding of specific buyers and their needs. This contact and understanding implies that the sales team can inform the marketing team about these buyers and their needs. The marketing team can then create both thought leadership content and sales collateral, which target these buyer personas.

The Importance of Educating the Buyer

In the past, a B2B customer would talk to a salesperson during the early solution development phase. The salesperson gained the greatest advantage by being the first person to assist the buyer in developing requirements and building trust through information sharing. Today, according to a study conducted by CEB, B2B consumers are approximately 57% on their way to making a buying decision when they contact a sales rep. With this statistic in mind, being the first to provide insight regarding solutions and building trust still creates a substantial advantage for any company. Now, creating that advantage is up to marketers.

Marketers can strike first by developing effective programs that help educate buyers as they develop their solution requirements. Marketing content is the gateway to success when prospective buyers decide which solution to select for their company.

Tracking the Competition

Sales teams constantly work to update their market knowledge to use while negotiating and selling to customers. Frequently, prospect’s main concern to be addressed is why their product should be chosen over that of a competitor’s. A great sales rep clearly understands their competition’s strengths and weaknesses as well as their products, pricing, target audiences, mission statements, and marketing strategies.

Although marketers aren’t questioned as frequently as to why their product is superior to the product of their competitors, it is still crucial that they too have a strong grasp on the competitive information. To help in this process, sales and marketing should engage in a continuous feedback loop with one another about interactions with customers. By gaining this information, marketers can evaluate their go-to-market strategy and ensure that all opportunities are captured. They can focus on clearly differentiating their brand from their competition and formulating content around these main points.

Context-Driven Content

Once a prospect is ready to finally contact a sales rep, it is marketing’s responsibility to provide the content that drives the sales conversation and generates revenue. If the content is not customized to the situation that a salesperson meets a prospect in, then it is useless. With the customer diversity being at its peak, context marketing becomes an essential tool in developing customized content for the sales team. Context marketing is defined as the process of delivering the right content, to the right people, at the right time.

Because the sales team is active in the field and makes direct client contact, they understand and can communicate to marketing the context of the selling situation. Based on the specifics, marketing can then create relevant collateral that supports the sales reps’ conversations and close more deals. This feedback loop can be achieved with a sales enablement solution, allowing the marketing team to get feedback on the content they have created for the sales team and understand what collateral is most powerful or preferred by the sales force for use in sales conversations.

By applying their knowledge acquired from their sales team and understanding their competitors in the market, marketers will become the effective support that the sales team needs to ensure business growth.

To learn more about effective marketing and content creation, check out the e-book.

Social selling. It seems to be the subject of at least half of the blog articles I come across these days, and even the focus of a few conferences I’ve seen.

And it makes sense, doesn’t it? Using your social network to connect with potential buyers is kind of a no-brainer. And learning a bit about those buyers can only help you gain access or start a conversation.

So why isn’t every sales rep in the world embracing social selling with a vengeance?

No matter who you are, changing the way you’ve always done something can be challenging, if not completely overwhelming. A veteran rep might say, “I’ve always done it this way, and I’ve been very successful, so I don’t want to take the time to learn something new.” But we in Sales Enablement know that sometimes you have to give a gentle nudge and provide a process and tools around new concepts, and social selling is certainly no exception.

In fact, I’ve been going through this exact challenge for the last few months at Brainshark. Here is what I’ve learned (so far) are critical components for launching a social selling program that will actually change your rep’s behavior. Hopefully, it will save you from some of the mistakes I’ve made. (rFactr also has some great tips for implementing a social sales program.)

Include training

As a veteran learning and development professional, I often assume that this goes without saying, but you know what they say about those who assume… so I’m calling it out here. If you want to change behavior, you MUST train, reinforce, and train some more. It cannot be a quick “OK, here is a tool. This is how you use it. GO!” type of situation.

A workshop-style approach to training just doesn’t work for social selling. We’ve all been there. You sit in on a webinar or in a room with an instructor and think, “Yep, got it!” Then you go back to your desk and somehow that transition causes partial or total amnesia. You have no idea where to start.

I found this to be the case when we were trying to get our reps started with the LinkedIn Sales Navigator. LinkedIn ran a training sessions for us: they demonstrated the value, they showed it in action, and gave us additional resources, but then our reps were on their own. A few used it, but most just went back to what they had always been doing. We realized that we needed a different approach.

Leverage technology to make it easy

Reps are always looking for the most efficient way to do anything. They feel the pressure of their quotas bearing down on them every quarter, so wasted time is the enemy.

Although there are experts that would disagree with me, to get adoption quickly, you need to include technology and train reps on how to effectively use it as part of a larger social selling strategy. Start by getting reps to use what you already have in place. Then make a list of the barriers your reps face with social selling and use that as a starting point for researching any new technology.

Track success

Probably the most important factor in the success of any social selling initiative is to be able to tie it to pipeline and revenue. While most of the social selling technologies have some type of analytics, ultimately, you’ll need to track success using your CRM.

There are two ways to accomplish this: automate it, or rely on reps to enter the information. You will probably use a combination of the two, with the former being more reliable. At a minimum, you want to capture whether social activity led to the lead conversion and the contract, but a better approach is to see where social had an impact throughout the sales cycle. You can then start to understand best practices for using social in your organization.

What else can you do?

Here are some additional things to consider:

Recruit an expert – While I used all the top social media sites fairly regularly, I am by no means an expert in social selling. Fortunately, one of our reps was already skilled at using social selling concepts himself. We’ve been able to join forces to show other reps how they can be successful, which made it easier to introduce new concepts and increase adoption.

Get executive buy-in – Changing behavior needs to start from the top down. If you don’t have buy-in from your executive team and your sales leaders, how do you expect to change sales reps’ behavior?

Think holistically – It may seem like a good idea to start small and roll out the program incrementally, but you have to consider how all of the pieces of social selling fit together. If you don’t, you risk incorporating “random acts” of social selling into your sales process instead of transforming how your reps sell.

Start with a pilot team – Rather than rolling everything out at once, we found working with a small team first gave us the opportunity to get feedback about what worked, what didn’t, and make adjustments. (If you go with this approach, be very selective about your team members.)

Creating a programmatic approach to social selling at your organization is the best way to gain adoption from your reps. If you don’t provide guidance, you rely on them to find and implement the best practices that work successfully for others. And if you don’t track success, your reps won’t see that social selling can really pay off.

When you’ve got a qualified prospect on the phone, there’s one thing you always want to do before you end the call: Initiate the next step!

Do it right then and there while you still have them on the phone, not by telling them how much you enjoyed speaking with them, not by agreeing to talk again soon (someday), not by sending them a follow up email.

Use the power of right fucking now to get the thing done.

Let’s say you had a quick introductory call and established they’d be a good customer, and now the conversation comes to an end and you want to schedule a follow up.

Too many times sales people say: “I’ll send you an email to schedule our next call later today, suggesting different times. Please have a look and let me know what works best for you, or if none of them work, just suggest a time that’s convenient for you.”

That’s the wrong way to go about it. You’re just starting a game of scheduling ping pong, and a lot of those games end with one side dropping the ball.

If you really want to schedule the next call, do it right then and there with them on the phone. Have them open up their calendar and find a time when you two can talk again and then make sure they put it on their calendar.

At Close.io, we get inquiries from people all the time who have some question about our sales CRM but haven’t yet tried the software themselves. We always qualify these people and if their answers indicate that Close.io is a good fit for them, we get them to start their trial right then and there:

“Hey, I think this is a perfect fit. Let’s get you going with a free 14-day trial right now.” We get them to start their trial while still on the phone with our sales rep or SDR.

Helping prospects to get more out of their trial

Let’s say someone is already on a trial, and we’re on the phone with them and see that they haven’t yet imported their contacts into the system.

We know that’s a crucial step - you can’t get value from Close.io if you don’t have any contacts in there. So that’s what we’ll have them do next.

Our sales reps don’t just say: “Hey, I’ll send you an email with a link that tells you how to get your contacts into Close.io.”

They say: “Let’s get your contacts into the system right now so you can actually experience how much our sales tool can help boost your sales productivity.”

And then our reps help the customer import their contacts into the system while they’re still on the phone.

Because we want them to experience a wow moment.

One of our sales interns guided a prospect through the setup process on the phone. All the way from signing up for our trial to getting their contacts in and starting to use the system.

Once they had imported their contacts, he showed them how easy it is to use Close.io’s search feature to create a list of leads that need to be followed up with.

The prospect saw that and immediately realized how valuable this would be for them and how much time it would save them. They bought right then and there.

Scheduling demos or webinars

The same principle applies to scheduling demos or a webinar. All too often, I hear sales reps say: “I’ll email you a link to the webinar later.”

No, tomorrow the prospect’s inbox is flooded, their to-do list is overflowing, they’ve got a thousand things going on in their life, and they just might forget that they actually wanted to attend your webinar.

So do it right then and there while you’ve still got them on the phone and have their commitment and attention.

Getting referrals & introductions

The same is true for referrals. I’m on the call with founders all the time, and they often ask me: “Steli, do you know any investors who might be interested in what we’re doing?”

“Yes, I might know a few.”

“Great! I’ll email you some info later and would appreciate if you could forward that intro email to them.”

That’s not the way to go about it. You’ve got my attention right now. I just gave you a yes, so now is the time to capitalize on that momentum. Send me the email right now and have me do the intro for you before we hang up.

How I got Paul Graham from Y Combinator to introduce me…right then and there!

Years ago we had a meeting with Paul and I asked him if he’d email an investor. “Sure”, said Paul.

When you ask for something, always be prepared for a yes!

I already had my laptop open, with an incognito browser window on the gmail login screen. I turned my laptop towards him and said: “Can you do it right now?”

PG laughed, logged in and sent the email right then and there.

Could I have emailed him about it later? Yup. Would he still have done it? Probably. But this was important for us and “probably” wasn’t good enough.

“Probably” shouldn’t be good enough for you either, otherwise whatever it is probably isn't worth doing in the first place.

Whenever you have someone on the phone, take an action together before you end the call.

Not only will you get more things done and have fewer things slip through the cracks, but you’ll also end every call with a sense of accomplishment and spend less time following up on silly little things and more time doing things that really create results.

When you scan some of the big job search sites, you will see ads for thousands of salespeople.

Unfortunately, neither the ad, nor probably the detailed requirements or expectations for the position are nuanced enough to draw the right people to apply, or to, ultimately, set the salesperson up to succeed over the long term after he/she is hired.

When a net is cast that broadly, all sorts of mismatches can occur, because the terms “salesperson” and “sales” are much too broad for the real need an employer may be trying to meet.

Here is an analogy to consider for this discussion.

I Need a “Doctor”

Let’s say that you injured your leg . . . bad enough that you knew it was going to require serious medical attention to give you the best chance for a successful recovery and outcome.

Now let’s imagine for a minute that the way doctors were selected by patients was by the patient putting an ad in the leading medical journals or LinkedIn, and doctors would then apply for the job.

But let’s say that rather than being more specific, you merely advertised that you needed a doctor. That, of course “might” capture the attention of a good leg doctor, but it would also probably draw interest from all sorts of doctors with different specialties and skill sets.

Yes, they are all “doctors,” just like salespeople are all “salespeople,” but the difference between, say a heart specialist, knee specialist, dentist, or even a psychologist has remarkable breadth and depth within the broad description of doctor.

But what if you set your expectations a little differently? What if you did not just want a doctor, but you wanted a knee specialist?

And what if you wanted a knee specialist that has direct experience and success with a particular procedure? And perhaps you are a professional athlete, so you want someone who has treated and rehabbed athletes. And so on.

Now you should begin to draw the interest of people whose specific aptitude, training and skill sets more exquisitely match your specific medical needs and expectations.

We Need a “Salesperson”

This concept also applies to sales.

When you post an ad for a “sales position,” you are setting yourself up to draw in candidates with different sales interests and different levels of experience and aptitude.

There is a big difference between the aptitude and skills needed for someone you expect to identify and pursue business on his own and a person for whom your marketing may be providing warm leads.

If you are looking for a sales hunter, someone who will hit the ground running from day one and will relentlessly close new business for you, you may want to be very specific in your job description.

This type of position will require someone with some level of experience and knowledge about your specific industry and of course, a high level of Drive.

If you are looking for a sales farmer, who will take, close and follow up on inbound leads your job description will look slightly different. This type of position does not require as much experience or even a high level of Drive necessarily. If you are able to provide training to the candidate, an inexperienced candidate may be a good option for your company.

Both types of candidates can be classified as “salespeople” in the broadest sense, but a true “hunter” would go crazy sitting at his desk taking calls, while a great, inbound call closer might not have the innate characteristics necessary to succeed in an account acquisition position.

If you are not writing very detailed and specific job descriptions, you are going to pull in a wide array of candidates.

By including your specific business needs and expectations for the open role, you will filter out many inapplicable candidates right away.

This will allow you to spend more of your time in high-level interviews and less time culling out salespeople who did not fit your specific criteria.

Take Your Recruiting Process One Step Further: Incorporate a Sales Assessment

Identifying “Drive” in sales candidates through sales aptitude testing prior to the behavioral interview will allow you to maximize your time and chances of hiring the best possible candidate for your open position.

Drive is based upon three, innate personality traits that cannot be taught, Need for Achievement, Competitiveness and Optimism.

We do not recommend that hiring managers spend time vetting low-Drive candidates for classic hunter positions. Our research and client feedback suggests that they will not sustain performance over time. But that criterion can change with the nuance of the sales position.

For example, if the salesperson is not asked to “hunt,” that is, go out and source his own leads, but instead is given warm leads sourced by an “opt-in” offer, it is possible for him to score lower on Drive and still be successful.

This occurs because this specific sales position requires a farmer with a different set of important skills, like empathy, great communication skills and listening skills. Elements of Drive are still important to a certain degree such as self-motivation and optimism as rejection goes with any sales position, but other teachable skills may rise in importance.

It might be that when you analyze your candidates’ sales assessment results, you will accept some lower scores on the “hunter skills” in exchange for some nuanced skill sets which you know match well with the more subtle needs of the position or vice versa.

Final Thought

So next time you post a new job opening be sure to start out with a more-detailed description about what will be needed to succeed in this specific position – really describing the type of salesperson you need – is the first step toward a better recruiting outcome.

Next, administer a sales assessment to all of your applicants to determine their levels of Drive before bringing them in for the interview.

This combination will allow you to zero in on the aptitude and skill sets that you require, providing you with the best possible candidates for your specific sales position.

The post “Sales” is Too Broad for Job Postings. More Nuances are Needed for a Successful Recruiting Outcome appeared first on SalesDrive LLC.

Sales and Marketing. The two should go together like peas and carrots, but sometimes it tastes more like pickles and ice cream. This article outlines some of the common mishaps that can occur between even the best of sales and marketing teams, and what to do about them once they’re identified.

A brief word of caution – don’t assume these mistakes don’t occur in your own organization. Even the most finely tuned sales and marketing machine needs regular maintenance, and keeping these pitfalls top of mind may prevent it from going unchecked and falling into disrepair.

Over-Reliance on Inbound

We’ve all heard that “cold calling is dead,” and that customers are already 57% of the way through the buying process before engaging with vendors (this number varies significantly depending on the source, by the way). I totally understand that most salespeople would rather wait for a potential client to raise their hand than pound the pavement or work their way through the phone book, but there needs to be a balance. I’ve known far too many salespeople – not at my company, of course – who have used these statistics to justify the avoidance of good old fashioned WORK. You know, that thing that built America back in the day before all of these Millennials showed up and ruined it? The statistic I prefer to rely on is that the first vendor to the table usually wins, and as much as some reps may not like it, the best way to get invited to the party is to throw it yourself.

The solution: prioritize outbound activity – email campaigns, phone calls, and cultivating partner relationships are all great ways to supplement your inbound leads.

Spending too much Time on Social Media

#Social Selling is all the rage these days. I myself have an impressive 96 Twitter followers at the time of writing this article, and 5 people “liked” or shared my last LinkedIn update. I still don’t have Facebook, but my wife does, so I have about 1,100 friends by proxy. As you can tell, I’m kind of a popular guy. The problem I have with social selling though, is that it’s not actually selling. It’s marketing. Marketing is absolutely critical to creating and sustaining growth, and any business person who tells you otherwise needs to re-evaluate their career aspirations, however marketing is not sales. If you don’t know what I mean by that, go pick out a member of your marketing team and ask them to close one of the leads they’ve assigned to you, or to manage the relationship with your most valuable client. It’s not going to happen, but if it does, move that person into sales. Their W2 will thank you for it.

The solution: be “social” for real. Conduct regular phone or face-to-face meetings, attend networking events, and get out there!

Not Coordinating Sales and Marketing Campaigns

It always amazes me how much time and effort goes into ensuring that Marketing’s message is crisp, concise, and thought provoking, and in contrast how little is spent ensuring that Sales can understand and articulate the keys points of that very same message. I personally believe that companies should strive for consistent messaging and execution throughout the buyer’s experience – from the moment they read that first piece of content to the time the sale is closed, and continuing on through client development. This is obviously much easier said than done, but when considering the benefits, I think it’s worth the added effort.

The solution: Marketing should regularly communicate upcoming campaigns, webinars, and industry events to Sales, and work collaboratively to create complimentary messaging around those activities.

Prevent Marketing Automation Gone Wrong

Shortly before writing this, I received a clearly automated email from a sales rep attempting to sell me access to a widely used contact database. The email began “Hi Dan Thompson! As Sales Director – U.S. East at Smarsh, you probably…” and after several paragraphs (which I admittedly did not read) concluded with the classic call to action “what does your schedule look like for a quick introductory call, tomorrow?” I simply replied “I’m wide open. You do realize that tomorrow is Saturday, right, Account Executive at [company I won’t name here]?” I never heard back from the sales rep. Perhaps they were embarrassed and decided to walk away rather than admit they just mail merged the details from my LinkedIn profile (no one talks or writes like that in the real world), but I think they just forgot to include my email address in their next .xls dump. The point being, people buy from people, not machines, so if you’re going to use automation, please do it wisely and add a human element.

The solution: get Sales involved to customize and create ownership on any communication that has their name on it. No one like to feel embarrassed.

Not Having a Feedback Loop

Knowledge is one of the most powerful competitive advantages to any business, but an alarming number of organizations and teams are still reluctant to share it. When you think about the number of customer interactions that occur every day between Sales, Marketing, and Sales Development (SDR) teams, there are just too many valuable data points to keep them all bottled up. This is even more important when considering that each of these teams play a different role in the sales process, and touch the customer at different points in the buyer’s journey. Sharing these data points and learning how to tailor your message accordingly is critical to ensuring alignment, breaking down silos, and staying ahead of the competition.

The solution: schedule regular meetings between Sales, Marketing, and your SDR teams, and encourage constant communication to break down silos.

And there you have it. A few simple ways to keep your peas from tasting like pickles. Unless, of course, you like pickles.

The post 5 Ways To Prevent Sales and Marketing Mishaps appeared first on Sales Hacker.

It’s the era of engagement. B2B Marketing is no longer about marketing and selling on a business-to-business mind-set; we’re marketing and selling to humans.

On the flipside of this though, B2B prospects themselves are becoming faster and more independent in their research. Up to 90% of the buying journey is complete before you even know who these prospects are…

If your B2B prospects want interaction and engagement, but at the same time, are independently researching through over 90% of the buying process, how are you supposed to build a relationship with them and guide them to purchase?

To break into their research phase and begin building that valued human-to-human relationship, you need a lead nurturing campaign that unites your sales and marketing team.

In part one of this series, we talked about demand generating and lead generation activity to fill up your pipeline. Turbo-charging your lead generation at this stage is all about nurturing your leads with the right information and working collaboratively, both sales and marketing, to ensure you’re driving your prospects in the right direction.

Here’s our pick of the top do’s and don’ts to turbo-charge your middle-of-the-funnel lead nurturing activity:

DO

Match your content strategy with the B2B buyer journey

61% of B2B Buyers agree that to win a sale, you need to deliver a better mix of appropriate content at each decision-making stage – and we don’t just mean that for the marketing team! Your Sales team need to understand the content / buyer journey too.

Understanding when to send your prospects a technical specification vs. a customer testimonial could be the difference between winning and losing that deal. This is especially true when you know that 95% of B2B buyers are seeking relevant content and information to help them make a buying decision.

Map out the modern B2B buyer journey from brand awareness to sale, and their information needs at each stage. By doing this, you’ll understand what content is going to have the most impact. Plan your sales and marketing contact strategy around this research and you’re guaranteed to inform, educate, and delight your prospects throughout the whole funnel.

Enable your sales team to deal with prospects from different sources, which may or may not be ready to buy yet

Up to 65% of sales reps say they can’t find content to send to prospects…

But hang on a sec, sources like the Content Marketing Institute say that over 90% of businesses are creating MORE content than ever before – so what’s going on?

Obviously, there’s a connect-the-dots issue between sales and marketing going on here. If you want to turbo-charge your middle-of-the-funnel activity, it can’t just be left to marketing. The whole team needs to be on board with lead nurturing, and your sales team are a vital part at this stage of the sales funnel.

Enable your sales team by regularly briefing them on marketing and content activity so they can fully support the value proposition, and make use of strong supporting content when nurturing leads through the funnel.

Don’t

Leave lead follow-up to the last minute

A recent study from Velocify found that in many cases, companies had a 391% better chance of conversion if they called a lead within 60 seconds, but that most companies will leave their lead follow-ups for up to 48 hours.

It’s not just up to marketing to nurture those leads through the funnel. Adding a human-touch to your lead nurturing campaign could help generate 50% more sales-ready leads. Giving your sales team real-time insight like Lead Forensics means they can see when nurtured prospects are visiting your website, and can follow-up with a call in real-time.

Seeing a nurtured prospect visiting your website repeatedly is a clear indicator their business is seriously researching your company as a potential solution, and could be ready to open up the conversation about their needs and research to your sales team.

Expect your leads to skip along a straight stepping stone path

Lead nurturing is essentially building a relationship with your prospects that should help them make right purchasing decision. Your prospects don’t skip along a straight path to purchase, so neither should your lead nurturing activity.

According to Baseone, B2B buyers will use an average of 2.4 information sources when undertaking middle-of-the-funnel research. Some of the top information sources include ‘direct to supplier website’, ‘search engines’, ‘advice from colleagues’ and ‘industry-specific online communities’.

The result of using many different sources is an erratic buyer behaviour in which leads enter, ‘hang around’ and leave the funnel at different touch points. By tracking your prospects buying journey end-to-end, you’ll be able to follow and optimise your lead nurturing activity according to what sources your prospects are actively using the most.

Good lead-nurturing campaigns can generate 50% more sales-ready leads, with the same budget. Leaving your leads in a stagnant email nurture list is a quick way to lose your prospects to competitors (and a bit lazy too, we’re looking at you – Marketers!).

Lead nurturing activity is most effective when you combine different technologies with a human element (that’s your sales team); to make sure it doesn’t end up feeling too automated. By actively measuring and mapping your B2B buyer journeys, you can create an innovative lead nurturing campaign that unites sales and marketing for the greater good – more leads!

Ready to boost your lead nurturing?

Download your Free B2B Guide to Turbo-Charged Lead Generation

This blog was originally posted on the Lead Forensics website. Read the original article here.

If you’ve been keeping up with our account-based marketing (ABM) 101 series, then you’ve learned all about the basics of ABM, how it works, and how it can help align your sales and marketing teams.

But understanding the underlying principles of ABM is only half of the battle. What situations are best suited for an account-based marketing strategy? How are companies employing ABM to find success?

We’ve compiled some of the most effective account-based marketing strategies below. Learn how ABM can be used to acquire new customers, revive inactive leads in your database, follow up with event-sourced leads, nurture leads to sales-readiness, and more.

1. Acquiring New Customers

One of the most common uses for ABM is to acquire new customers. By working with your sales team to create a targeted list of companies you would like to present your marketing messaging to, you can drive greater engagement among your target accounts — and not just with a single lead, but with all key decision makers in an account.

If your goal is to acquire new customers, consider developing personalized messaging and creative for each potential new customer to increase the effectiveness of your marketing.

2. Nurturing Leads

Because of the nature of today’s B2B sales cycle, many of the leads that you’re marketing to aren’t going to be ready to make a purchasing decision. Don’t make the mistake of letting these leads go to waste just because they’re not going to turn into an immediate sale.

Instead, use account-based nurturing to continue to present your marketing message over time via targeted ads, keeping your company top of mind until your leads are ready to reenter the sales cycle.

3. Following Up After Events

When it comes to events, it can be tricky to make sure you’re following up with all of your hot leads and giving your colder leads the attention they deserve. While your sales team will likely be following up with the most promising leads via phone, less sales-ready leads may get neglected without an appropriate account-based strategy in place.

In order to create awareness and further penetrate the accounts that you spoke to at an event, run account-based advertising campaigns targeted toward these accounts. Not only will this keep your brand in front of your leads after the event, it will also put your messaging in front of decision makers who may not have attended the event at all, but who still have a stake in the final purchasing decision.

If you’re looking for more information about using account-based advertising to boost your event marketing efforts and maximize your investment, check out this blog post.

4. Reviving Inactive Leads

At any given time, your database is full of leads who aren’t actively participating in the sales cycle. In fact, these leads may have been “dead” for six months or more. Despite their inactivity, they aren’t necessarily useless. To bring these inactive leads back to life, you can run campaigns targeted toward these unresponsive accounts.

Not only does this remind your leads about your solution, it also allows you to reach additional contacts within each account — contacts that may be more receptive to your messaging and more likely to engage with your brand.

See how Kevy used account-based advertising to wake the dead in this recent blog post.

5. Expanding Within Enterprise Accounts

Selling into enterprise accounts can be tricky, especially when enterprise companies are divided into smaller divisions that operate independently (and often have different points of contact for sales).

If you’ve sold into an enterprise company before, but are hoping to expand to other divisions, you can use ABM’s IP- and cookie-based targeting to present ads to key decision makers and stakeholders within those other divisions. These ads can be personalized so that they feature the benefits and testimonies that your leads’ coworkers are already seeing from your solution.

Stay tuned for the next post in our account-based marketing 101 series, which will cover how to measure and optimize your ABM campaigns.

By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca 

Sellers often have a distorted view of what is really important to buyers, leaving buyers to repeatedly ask WTF? Get your mind out of the gutter, the question is Why That Feature? Not what you’d be asking when the deal goes sideways, as it will if you are unable to nail the buyer’s WTF.

One thing that many executives and owners tell me regularly is that they are frustrated by some sales people’s inability to relate to the buyer’s perspective of things. As importantly, the incapability of sellers to have a fluid and malleable enough understanding of the products they sell to make it fit the buyer’s requirements, not just those of the selling organizations.

They feel that sellers come in and present features that may seem cool and useful to people in their own marketing group, or features someone in product development thought made sense. While some features may seem cool and useful to a developer, the same may not resonate with real world users. While secondary research may suggest a demand for a feature to the marketing group, it may not be top of mind for all buyers.

At times the disconnect is simply that buyers, especially executives are looking for specific outcomes, and don’t look at the product through functionality. One executive noted “I could care less how it does it, if it’s legal, and gets me what I want, that’s just fine!”

Sellers need to be able to relate aspects of the product to the buyer’s reality, and while there may be similarities in those realities, each buyer is just that different. Mat be it is only in terms of where they are in the buying cycle or as broad as market strategy. While everyone says that they are beyond feature/benefit in their sales approach, buyers tell me different. Sellers are still trying to bend the buyer to their feature, rather than highlighting how that feature gets the buyer to where they want to be.

Of course to do that, sellers need to be aware of what buyers are trying to achieve. And this is not more of something per minute, or faster processing, or social integration. It is more about something that starts with why, and ends with outcomes and impacts. The means are usually secondary.

Presentations where the seller filled with buzzwords still abound, as does communication from marketing. There is almost an expectation that the buyer will paint the same picture in response to single trigger word, as the seller or their marketing group did. Expecting buyers to come around to our view and our definitions just leads to more and harder work, a lot harder than changing the narrative to that of the buyer.

The same is true for unnecessary upgrades or changes in features that were working just fine. Change and new are not always better, especially if it change that was not driven by users/buyers. Users/paying customers don’t always see the same need for change as the developer. If it does not positively impact the buyer’s journey or ability to drive objectives, it is not a great feature or upgrade. These also lead buyer to ask Why That Feature, this not so much why do I need that (why do I wanna pay for that), but what was so bad about it that you had to change it.

Learn to speak with the buyer, not at the buyer, and avoid forcing them to ask WTF?

Tibor Shanto    

Just a few short years ago, the average B2B buyer still responded well to the classic marketing and sales tag-team approach, with marketing providing high-quantity product exposure and sales moving in to close the deal. This had been the model for decades, and everyone (buyers and sellers alike) was trained to it.

And then the buyer broke the mold.

The evolution of the Internet drastically changed the way prospective buyers fulfill their needs and wants. Where once a scarcity of available information drove all buyers to the same mass-media outlets, such as trade magazines and industry conferences, buyers now have a world of information literally at their fingertips: over 1 billion smartphone subscriptions are reported globally. Today’s population is the most connected and self-educated to date.

In the modern world of data overstimulation, buyers seek relevance over all else. They actively seek out products that relate to their own individual interests, valuing the quality of information presented specific to their needs over the quantity of marketing touches.

And they’re taking control of their own buying experience: 78% start the buying process with a web search, and 50% research through peer reviews, blogs, and news sites before engaging directly with companies themselves. In effect, they proactively construct an educational curriculum for themselves that meets their unique needs, rather than passively absorbing marketing messages pushed through mass media.

Buyers have unprecedented, unlimited access to information and choice, giving them full control of their buying process. In fact, according to SiriusDecisions, 70% of the buying process is already complete by the time a prospective buyer is ready to talk to a sales rep.

How do marketing and sales teams respond to the challenges these new buyers present?

To reach these modern buyers, marketing teams need specific, targeted digital programs designed to meet the unique needs of every prospective buyer. But sending marketing messages that are directly relevant to each individual in a diverse group is a tall order.

Enter marketing automation. Originally built to extend marketing and email capabilities for the large enterprise, the technology has evolved to enable meaningful connections to modern buyers that work as well for the small and mid-sized business as for the big ones.

The marketing automation platform has become a hub of marketing intelligence, tracking each individual buyer’s journey from their first touch point to their final sale, providing an in-depth view of the 70% of the buying process that traditionally occurs in the dark, beyond the firewall of traditional marketing and sales programs. Marketing automation overcomes this firewall – it’s the science and technology that enables marketing and sales to streamline, automate, illuminate, and measure the modern buyer’s journey through the purchase process.

Data is marketing’s new power.

Data that was previously unavailable to marketing and sales teams can now be tracked and analyzed, from the age-old staple of traditional demographics, to behavioral data like email clicks, website visits, and content downloads. Marketers are now empowered to measure this digital body language and discern where buyers are on their purchasing journey and what types of content they want to consume.

Marketing automation centralizes this intelligence. It identifies every meaningful interaction that a buyer has with your brand, following the individual’s journey toward making a purchase decision. It tracks, measures, and analyzes the data of every interaction so that marketing and sales teams can sell smarter to a more engaged audience.

So what do you do with this trove of data? It’s already clear that the number of prospects you reach – or “quantity of eyeballs” – is no longer a meaningful goal to pursue. The world of marketing and sales has changed, but not for the worse. What emerges is the ability to wait for likely buyers who will identify themselves as they become sales-ready, and follow up with a proactive, targeted outreach, making the marketing process more efficient.

The availability of behavioral data makes it possible for marketing teams to push content that is directly relevant to the buyer’s interests and stage in the purchasing journey. Instead of taking the control from the buyer, it is now the marketer’s job to help buyers make the purchase decisions they are currently contemplating, giving them the right information to come to a conclusion on their own.

Where do you start with marketing automation tech?

Getting started with marketing automation can be a daunting task – with so much information available, where do you start? Start with your buyer. Create your programs around what you know about your buyers, and build out from there:

1. Map out typical buying stages.
   Take a close look at how your best customers make buying decisions. Are there common trigger events that cause prospects to start investigating new solutions? Common questions or challenges that must be overcome? Tip: talk to your sales team. They’ll have a pretty good idea of common decision stages.
2. Map out programs and activities that will help you get in front of buyers at each stage.
   What do you need to do to get in front of buyers at each stage of the journey? Here you map out tactics, required content, and initiatives necessary to start getting in front of buyers as they begin to make their decision. For example, if most of your buyers start with a web search, creating great web content that’s optimized for search engines should be on the top of your list.
3. Map out the systems and technologies needed to support the initiatives outlined in step 2.
   What technical systems do you need to support your activities? Ensure that your marketing automation platform meets your key requirements and has the flexibility to integrate with other technologies as your business needs expand. For instance: if SEO is one of your key tactics, you’ll need an SEO auditing tool, a feature that’s baked into top marketing automation platforms.

These three steps are the foundation for building a marketing and sales engine that is centered on your customers – not your teams or products. You’ll be well positioned to dive head first into the digital age and attract modern buyers with this customer-centered approach.

Dismantle, destroy, destruct the “sales vs. marketing” approach.

The traditional “versus” setup has been pitting marketing and sales teams against each other for years. Without a clear central focus on the modern buyer’s journey, sales and marketing teams often become adversaries.

The marketing team thinks the sales team is throwing away good leads out of laziness, and the sales team thinks the marketing team isn’t doing enough brand building or providing the quality leads the sales team needs to do its job. However, it’s likely that neither of these assumptions are true. Quite simply, the way buyers operate has changed. Marketing and sales teams need to change, too.

Nearly 80% of leads deemed “bad” by sales go on to make a purchase within 24 months. That’s a lot of missed opportunities. You know that sales rep who keeps complaining that the marketing team is sending him horrible leads? He might be missing out on some great deals. But on the other hand, he might be at least partially right! The leads he is getting probably aren’t ready to talk to a sales rep yet, leading to frustration from sales, marketing, and prospective customers alike.

With a focus on the buyer’s journey, and the new ability to track and measure that journey, marketing teams can prioritize prospects that are most likely to make a purchase now. And prospects that are earlier in the decision-making process can be held back and warmed up in an automated lead nurturing program.

Companies that use marketing automation see big returns.

So what does the adoption of marketing automation mean for the bottom-line? The figures are astounding:

• Marketing automation helps you more efficiently engage prospects with information that’s directly relevant to them – this builds trust and understanding with your prospective buyers. For marketers who deploy lead nurturing, the return is a 2x win rate and a 47% increase in average order value.
• Targeting the right content to the right prospects at the right time accelerates a buyer’s decision-making process. In fact, companies that use marketing automation also see 70% faster sales cycle times.
• 67% of B2B marketers say lead nurturing increases sales opportunities throughout the funnel by at least 10%, with 15% seeing opportunities increase by 30% or more.
  

Want more information on how to use marketing automation to connect with the new breed of buyer? Tune into the Marketing Technology Summit webinar “Marketing Automation for the New Buyer’s Journey” with Linda West, Group Manager of Demand Generation at Act-On, and Jerry Rackley, Chief Analyst at Demand Metric.

Even if you have a steady stream of inbound sales leads surging into the pipeline, odds are, you'll have to supplement your funnel from time to time with outbound prospecting. And that's totally fine ... if you go about it in the right way, that is.

Sales emails, when written well and sent to the right people, can be incredibly effective tools to generate new customers. But when they're written poorly and devoid of value, nothing prompts recipients to flag a message as spam faster.

Sending valuable, customized, personalized sales emails is a legitimate sales tactic. Blasting out spam is not. So how can you tell if a cold sales email actually spam? Use these 14 signs to make the call.

How to Tell if Your Sales Email Is Warm Outreach or Spam

1) The email doesn't use the recipient's first name.

We've all gotten emails addressed to "Hi [prospect]" or "Dear Sir or Madam." Did you read the rest of the message? I didn't either.

Failing to use the recipient's first name is a dead giveaway that this email was not intended solely for them. If you're working from an email template, double and triple check that you've filled in the correct name at the top, or risk getting sent to the spam graveyard.

2) The email offers nothing of value.

"My company is great. Let me tell you all about it. We do W, X, Y, and even Z."

Um ... and this is relevant to me how?

Never send a sales email to a prospect without including something that will be valuable to them, such as a piece of content, an introduction to someone they would benefit from knowing, or a helpful tip.

3) The email is not personalized in the slightest.

You're on LinkedIn, right? Good. (If you're not, stop reading this blog post and join right now. Seriously.)

LinkedIn offers up a wealth of knowledge about your prospects for the taking. You have no excuse to go into a cold email totally cold. Grab a few tidbits from the prospect's social media profiles and call them out in your message to show you've done your homework.

4) The email contains no customization.

Personalization pertains to the person -- their job, their goals, what they share on social, and so on. Customization, on the other hand, revolves around the prospect's company and industry. What's happening at their organization? What trends are shaping their industry? What are the major priorities of their department or business unit?

An email that only addresses the prospect's business in bland generalities won't strike them as particularly relevant. Take time to research the company and tailor your value proposition specifically to the organization's needs.

5) The email is just an ask.

"Hi. Do you have time for a 30-minute meeting?"

Hmm. Let me think about that. Considering what I know about said meeting and the value you promised I would get out of it, I'm gonna go with no.

Don't be lazy. Yes, the ask is your email's punchline, but it can't be the entire message. Make it clear why the prospect should spend their precious time on you, or they won't give your request a second thought as it disappears into Spam Canyon.

6) The email is solely about your company.

Remember your mother's sage advice about not talking about yourself too much? Yeah, that applies here. If your email is just one long advertisement for your company, your recipient has no reason to care. Make it about them, not you.

7) The email is sent to a large list of people at once.

Nothing says "Do business with me because I'll give you a personalized buying experience" like sending a cold sales email to every single lead in your pipeline. Yikes.

And don't think you're being clever by putting everyone on BCC. Buyers know what that means. Mass emails smack of spam, plain and simple.

8) The email is riddled with typos and grammatical errors.

"I can insure you'll get the bset service youve ever experenced plus we have a discount running right now for ............. 50% OFF!!!!!!"

Just typing that sentence made my writerly heart hurt a little. You can imagine how a message positively dripping with poor grammar and misspelled words will come off to your buyers. Spoiler alert: not good.

9) You send the email to a person who doesn't resemble your target buyer in the slightest.

Maybe you've crafted a beautifully customized sales email template specifically targeted to companies in the technology industry.

So ... why are you sending it to a prospect who works in education?

It's a no-brainer -- people don't want irrelevant information. Why would they? Keep this in mind, and only contact prospects who closely match your ideal customer profile.

10) The subject line contains spammy words.

"Earn Extra Cash While You Sleep"

"Dear Friend"

"F R E E Will Not Believe Your Eyes!"

I bet you couldn't wait to open emails with these subject lines. </sarcasm>

Certain words and phrases set off spam triggers. If you're using any or several of them in your subject line, your email might not even reach your recipient's inbox. For a complete list of spammy words to avoid, check out this post.

11) The subject line is misleading.

Remember that even if your message makes it past the spam filter, prospects still have the power to mark it as spam in their inbox. And when do people mark something as spam? When the sender makes them mad.

Inserting a false "Re:" or "Fwd:" in your subject line when you've never contacted the prospect before is deceptive, and can invoke recipients' ire. Other headers that fall into this category are those like "Long time no talk" or "We should catch up."

If you don't know the person, don't act like you do. You might lull them into a false sense of familiarity for a second, but this will quickly turn into anger when they realize your cheap trickery.

12) The email contains words and/or sentences that have been obviously copied and pasted.

Here I'm talking about sentences that all of a sudden switch fonts or color. Here's an example:

You think this is a template that the salesperson customized? Just maybe.

Again, using templated emails is a smart move, but make sure the email looks uniform.

13) You copied and pasted the entire email.

Templates and scripts are not the same thing. Templates provide a starting point for salespeople to build on and contain areas that need to be customized. Scripts are blocks of text that salespeople simply copy and paste over, and over, and over again.

No two buyers are the same, so there's simply no way you're providing value to anyone if your email prospecting consists of sending the same message to everybody.

14) The email is only a link.

Clicking on suspicious links is a surefire way to get a computer virus. That said, a sales message that's just a link looks awfully spammy:

"Hi! www.clickheretoseemycompany.com."

You might be directing the prospect to the most helpful resource in the world, but there's zero chance they're going to check it out if you don't put in the effort to explain what it is and how it will help them. And by the way -- if it won't help them? Don't send it at all. 

If you're ever in doubt as to whether your sales email is spam or not, use this simple rule of thumb. If your email isn't customized enough to be sent to one person and only that person, it's straddling the spam line. Go back and personalize until the email is as unique as your prospect herself.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in July 2015 and has been updated for comprehensiveness and accuracy.

In an upcoming webinar on lead qualification, I’ll discuss the factors that play a big role in lead qualification, and what you can do to qualify your sales leads. For instance, lead qualification and buyer personas can go hand in hand. What value do buyer personas bring to your sales efforts? Understanding the buyer persona is something that has become a lost art with more of the prospecting process being done via the Internet and the pushing out of data. It’s for this very reason I’m a huge believer in not having canned email responses to inquiries. When we have the personal interaction regardless of the medium it takes, it can provide us with a window into the buyer’s persona.

Here are more insights and tips for qualifying sales leads.

1. Understand The Science

While emotion plays a large role in the B2B buying process, lead qualification should be based on science and not emotion. What metrics should a salesperson prioritize? The prospect is looking to buy to deal with:

• A pain
• A gain
• Prevention
• Optimization

When we understand which of these items above is the focus, we can begin to understand the importance of the decision.

2. Tap Into Social Media

Engagement on social media during the buying process is a proven strategy. How important is the salesperson during the education phase? The role of the salesperson is much more than most realize when it comes to social

media. Too many companies and salespeople believe it’s all about pushing content, but in doing so, they forget the first word: Social. Social means real people engaging with real people.

A quote I like to use when it comes to social media:

Make it personal and you will make it profitable.

3. Data Accuracy

How do you constantly fold new data on ideal customers back into the system? How do you profile in or rule out prospects during the pre-qualification phase? The worst thing we can do is to rule out a prospect completely. Data helps to identify the high potential prospects. The most valuable asset any salesperson has is their own time, which means they will be more effective when they are spending maximum time with minimum prospects. Minimum prospects are most likely to buy now. Data accuracy will give you those insights.

Bonus: Questions To Qualify Prospects

When you are qualifying prospects, ask yourself these four questions:

1. What is their timeline for making a decision?
2. What is their value of money?
3. What are 2 critical issues I can assist them with?
4. Am I dealing with the decision maker?

When we have the answers to these questions, we increase our ability to close the prospect significantly.

Join me on a webinar on August 26th with Pipeliner and RingLead to discuss even more on sales qualification.

Thomas Erumgold has done multiple "tours of duty," a euphemism he uses to refer to time behind bars. Prison, he says, is a lonely place to be, and keeping in touch with friends and family on the outside world "can sometimes feel like pulling teeth."

That all changed in 2012 when a company called JPay, known for its electronic money transfer service for inmates, installed a kiosk in his prison's common area where inmates could send emails and browse through a library of over 10,000 songs. Not long after, JPay also began selling prison-safe tablets, which inmates could use to write up their emails, listen to music downloaded from the kiosk, and play games.

With this technology, Erumgold had easy access to his son's mother in Oregon, his good friends in Hawaii and Virginia — all of the people who previously seemed so far out of reach. 

 “The ability to maintain contact with loved ones or people who actually care about you who have some positive things to say to you, it’s kind of priceless," Erumgold told me in 2014, while he was still in North Dakota State Penitentiary.

JPay is often criticized for its business practices — it has been accused of overcharging for services, offering shoddy technical support, and operating in the moral gray area of making money off the backs of prisoners and their loved ones — but the company also does a lot more good than people give it credit for.

For Erumgold, JPay's products were a salve for the loneliness that often pervades prison life. Based on discussions with Tech Insider and on social media, prisoners and their family members seem to agree. 

Shaking up an antiquated industry

JPay founder Ryan Shapiro has never been in prison, but to hear him tell it, he cares deeply about the inadequacies of the justice system.

In 2001, a friend's mother was taken to New York's infamous Riker's Island after being arrested by the FBI for allegedly embezzling funds from her boss. Once there, she found that she needed money on a weekly basis in order to eat well and pay for protection.

Shapiro's friend, also in New York, was forced to drive down to a detention center, waiting in line with at least 100 other people to hand cash to a worker behind a window. The friend would then have to wait for his mother to call to say that she got the money, often up to two weeks later.

"It was obvious to us that the industry needed disruption," says Shapiro, who previously worked in marketing for a tech startup. "We needed more convenient options to make payments."

This was the seed that planted the idea for JPay's electronic money transfer system, which lets people in the outside world send money to inmates via an online system that generally processes payments within a day.

JPay launched in 2002, and in the years since, the Florida company has expanded far beyond money transfers, coming out with a kiosk for email access and Skype-like video visitations, an MP3 player, and multiple versions of an electronic tablet, among other things. 

Before companies like JPay started installing kiosks, inmates only had access to the outside through letters, phone calls, and in-person visits. There are still plenty of prisons that don't offer email or video options at all. 

In early July, Shapiro unveiled JPay's newest product: the JP5Mini, a $70 tablet that's outfitted with wireless capabilities and an app store. No longer do prisoners have to download music and send emails from the JPay kiosk. Now they can do it from a personal device — inside their cells, in the weight room, or wherever else the wireless network works. 

The only hitch: everything comes at a cost, including emails, which require a paid virtual "stamp" to go through to recipients. Stamp pricing varies depending on the prison, but each one goes for about the same cost as a physical stamp. At the Texas Department of Criminal Justice's Byrd Unit, for example, 20 stamps go for $9.80, while 40 can be had for $19.60.

Electronic money deposits also come at a price. The cost of sending between $100 and $199.99 at the Byrd Unit: $10.45.

The Steve Jobs of prison tech

JPay has been called the "Apple of the U.S. prison system." In a sense, that makes Shapiro the Steve Jobs of prison tech.

Like Jobs, he's a controversial figure in his industry. He's also created prison-ready analogues for many of Apple's offerings — albeit items that are designed more for durability than elegance — including a music library with over 10 million songs available for purchase, an MP3 player, tablets, and an app store. 

Shapiro is not the only one to offer these products — other companies also sell tablets and MP3 players to prisoners. But he has used his marketing savvy to get far more attention than his competitors, for better or worse.  

An extensive investigation in 2014 by The Center for Public Integrity accused the company of gouging inmates' families with unreasonable fees for its electronic money transfers. (JPay cut its fees for sending money to inmates after the investigation came out.)

The CPI investigation also condemned JPay for unfair practices in its music download and tablet businesses. Inmates in Ohio told CPI that the state takes away inmate-owned radios when music players and tablets go on sale. At the same time, JPay's songs can cost 30 to 50% more than they would on iTunes.

When I first spoke to Shapiro, not long after the CPI investigation was released, he brushed it off.

"[The reporter] clearly had his agenda before he even interviewed me. He went out and interviewed three or four different customers who were disgruntled, and made it seem as if our customer base was unhappy with our company. I can’t tell you how untrue this was," Shapiro says. "He didn’t go and interview any of our customers who are perfectly happy with us. I can’t tell you how many phone calls, how many people we meet who say we made a difference in their life."

A glance at JPay's Facebook page indicates that people are conflicted about the company.

There are plenty of complaints:

• "To JPay officials: the Machine OH DCI 0001 located at Dayton Correctional Institution has a broken USB port which physically needs to be fixed. Everyone's JP4s are locked because they cannot plug them in."
• "I send my Jpays to the Hughes Unit and they are routinely lost of late. Inmates should have to sign something when receiving a Jpay."
• "Video visits to my daughter in Dayton Ohio has not been completed the last 3 visits. The kiosk is ALWAYS broke.......A total rip off."

But also appreciative messages:

• "This is a great way to stay connected with your loved ones and make sure they are alright."
• "My love got out in March and we got married over the wkend. Thanks to jpay for making communication so much easier while he was incarcerated!"
• "I absolutely love the service jpay provides. From emailing to the video grams and music. It's awesome! It's so important to be able to keep in close contact with our loved ones!"

Donald Zeller, a former Washington state inmate (and longtime JPay customer) who recently spoke to Business Insider, says that the company's products — including the first-generation JP3 media player and the Jp4 tablet — provided an escape from tedium and made the prison experience easier to handle.

But JPay's quality control and customer support are lacking, says Zeller. When the JP3 was released, "you'd get the device and it would work for a couple days, but then it wouldn't connect to a kiosk, or the device locks itself," he says.

"We've always had issues with the devices. We would submit support tickets to the company using the kiosk, and anywhere from three days to two weeks later, we would get a response that we'd have to mail back the property. Anywhere from a month to six months later we would get the devices back. There was no consistency."

The top priority: security

While inmates complain about device quality, JPay's takes security precautions seriously. The company runs its own private, locked-down WiFi network in the prisons that offer the JP5Mini, and inmates don't have access to an Internet browser on its tablets.

Prisoners can't easily the steal devices. Inmate credentials are digitally engraved upon delivery, and can't be deleted. If a prisoner tried to steal one from another inmate, he or she would have no way of using the tablet.

Inmates can't email anyone they want, either; people on the outside have to initiate contact first, ensuring that prisoners don't contact their victims. Prison staffers also have the option of screening emails. 

The clear plastic casing of JPay's tablets makes it difficult to hide contraband, and the device is designed to be tamper-proof. "There were some worries about the JP4 tablet being used as a weapon, but we’ve had no issues at all with those types of things," says Colby Braun, the warden at North Dakota State Penitentiary.   

JPay's presence only continues to grow. The company's various services are now offered at over 1,200 facilities in 34 states, ranging from low-security outfits to supermax prisons. In 2014, inmates sent over 14.2 million emails and 650,000 mobile payments through JPay's systems. Over 40,000 JP4 tablets — the most up-to-date JPay tablet at the time — were purchased.

Shapiro predicts that JPay's offerings will be in every state by 2020. He won't disclose the company's financial information, but says that it "has the largest footprint in corrections in the country" out of any prison tech outfit.  

The JP5mini vs. every other tablet 

The first thing to know about the new WiFi-enabled JP5mini is that it doesn't measure up to an iPad, or any other consumer tablet for that matter. The device, which has 32 gigabytes of storage and a dual-core processor, is incredibly sturdy, so it has that on delicate tablets that crack after a single drop on the ground.

As you can see, the tablet handily survives a big fall. It can also hold up in 250-degree temperatures, and the battery lasts long enough to play 12 hours of video and over 35 hours of music.

But its feature set is limited.

Here's what inmates can do today on the 4.3-inch, Android-based JP5mini: purchase music with an "iTunes-like experience," as Shapiro calls it; send email; and buy games from an app store. 

"We manipulate the games to work in our environment. We license, modify them, or buy them straight out and offer them in the app store in order to work in the prison environment," Shapiro says. 

JPay also plans to make movies, books, and learning apps available for purchase in the near future. In the fall, the company plans to roll out an education platform, but won't give details on what it will look like until then. 

Getting access to JPay's tablets is fairly simple for inmates who have the money. Prisoners can either order a device directly from one of JPay's kiosks and have it shipped to them, or family members on the outside can buy the tablets.

JPay shipped me a JP5mini to test out soon after the tablet launched. My verdict: it seems like a decent way to pass the time. The tablet came preloaded with a calendar, radio, calculator, music player, image gallery, email app (photo and video attachments are allowed), and a handful of games, including Tiltmazes and a version of tic-tac-toe.

If I were in prison and had enough cash, I'd probably buy one of these. 

While JPay's kiosk services remain popular, the company is now devoting most of its resources to developing tablets and apps, with an emphasis on future education apps. 

The future of prison education

Shapiro gets especially excited when he talks about JPay's future in the education space.

"We have to focus our energy on making sure that inmates don’t return to prison. If they’re trained and educated in prison on use of technologies or email, and they're taking coursework, we can reduce [recidivism]," he says. "We're developing course offerings, and we'll deliver college courses."

JPay isn't alone in its vision of providing educational materials to prisoners. Another company, American Prison Data Systems (APDS), provides prison tablets — ruggedized Samsung Android tablets — that are focused on education. These tablets are actually free for prisoners and paid for by correctional facilities. The hope is that the devices can prevent criminals from relapsing into lives of crime once they are released. 

"Our tablet does provide entertainment that could be a pacifier, keeping inmates calm, but our purpose is a higher purpose," APDS CEO Chris Grewe said when we spoke in 2014.  "We think, frankly, that some of our competitors have a practice of being mildly exploitative and having their sights set too low. Some other companies have mixed reputations with pricing and money transfers. They’re not education companies at heart."

APDS's offerings include offline Khan Academy courses, thousands of digital books, and an e-law library. 

The desire to reduce recidivism through education isn't unfounded. According to a 2013 study from the RAND Corporation, inmates participating in prison education programs have a 43% lower chance of returning to prison than those who don't. Participating inmates also have a 13% higher chance of getting employment upon release. 

JPay is still much larger than APDS, so its footprint in the educational space will also be bigger, at least for now. With approximately 2.2 million adults imprisoned in the U.S., the  prison tech industry still has plenty of room to grow.

Shapiro says that he's seen a flood of requests for proposals (RFPs) from state agencies looking for prison tablets.

"They see the advantages, the necessity," he says. "There's no point in fighting it. You’re just fighting being more efficient. It's good for the public, for the security of the prison, and for the inmates."

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Grand solutions to the world's ever-sharpening threat of climate change are usually met with a mix of skepticism and fear.

Geoengineering — the practice of intervening with Earth's natural systems to stop global warming —is especially thought to be messing with fire.

Take a dramatic action like spraying sulfate aerosols (water vapor and sulfur) into the atmosphere, increasing Earth's ability to reflect sunlight back into space, and we might be able to cool down the Earth. But global warming could go into overdrive if we ever stop that cooling process.

Reversing climate change doesn't necessarily need to come with such heavy baggage.

That's why, in 2007, philanthropist and tie-loathing adventurer Richard Branson launched the Virgin Earth Challenge (VEC).

From more than 10,000 entrants, 11 finalists were chosen.

Due to a mix of obstacles, none of the proposed solutions ultimately earned the $25 million prize, awarded to a solution that is scientifically sound, low-impact, viable outside of a lab, scalable, and economically feasible.  But Branson remains hopeful.

"We believe with more research a solution is possible," Branson wrote in 2014. 

Here are some of the more promising (but still failed) entrants to keep an eye on:

Carbon Capture

One of the most popular routes that companies are taking to clean up the atmosphere is a straightforward one: removing carbon dioxide directly. 

Sweden's Climeworks, Canada's Carbon Engineering, and the US's Coaway and Global Thermostat all made the finals of the VEC with their techniques for taking large batches of air and isolating the carbon dioxide inside. The extracted CO2 can then be repurposed into plastic or fuels or compressed for other applications.

Each company uses giant fans or filters to swallow up the surrounding air. Once inside the closed-loop system, CO2 molecules are drawn out and held in separate reservoirs for later use. Meanwhile, the CO2-free air is recycled back into the environment.

Plants do this already, but the costs of land and maintenance make artificial air capture the better option. The main challenge, as many see it, is getting the infrastructure in place and actually getting some use out of the leftover CO2 once the process ends. 

While effective in theory, those steps take considerable amounts of time — possibly on the order of decades.

Enhanced Weathering

Normal weathering happens when the many forces of nature break down rocks on the earth's surface. Certain rocks, such as olivine and serpentine, have the interesting property of essentially reabsorbing CO2 when they weather. 

Smartstones, a VEC finalist from the Netherlands, wants to mill olivine and spread it around in places where it will get weathered naturally. 

"One should follow the KISS principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid), and leave the weathering to nature," Smartstones states on its website. "Instead, many researchers try to develop techniques to speed up the carbonation. This costs extra energy and money, by which mineral carbonation is pricing itself out of the market."

Time, however, is still a point of contention. One 2009 study found olivine grains would need between 700 and 2,100 years to fully sequester CO2 at a steady rate. Meanwhile, other research says that figure is highly flawed and "grossly understates the uptake rate in natural settings."

Biochar

Most people use charcoal in their outdoor grills. Environmental scientists at Full Circle Biochar and Soil Reef Biochar use it to reduce the amount of CO2 in the air. 

To get biochar, wood and feedstock gets burned at nearly 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, with limited oxygen involved. This carbonizes the biomass through a process called pyrolysis. In its new state, the biochar has the distinct property of preventing carbon from reentering the atmosphere when used in soils. It can also provide energy to plants and increase crop yield.

Humans currently produce about 37 gigatons (that's 37 billion tons) of CO2 a year. According to one 2010 study, biochar could help reduce the human-caused emissions by up to 12%. Over a century, the scientists claim, that could yield a 130-gigaton drop "without endangering food security, habitat, or soil conservation."

Like all other proposals to reverse climate change, biochar relies on a concerted effort to succeed. The plan might be the brainchild of a lone few, but to offset the massive effects of industrialization, it must be embraced by all.

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Twitter Inc interim CEO Jack Dorsey's criticism of the company's efforts to woo new users may just be the first step to address its long-standing problems.

But being frank is not enough.

To generate long-term earnings growth and satisfy investors, Twitter needs to broaden its portfolio and create an ecosystem of products similar to that of Google Inc and Facebook Inc 

Wall Street analysts took a dim view of the management's commentary on a post-earnings call on Tuesday. At least 15 brokerages cut their price target on Twitter to as low as $30 - 18 percent lower than Tuesday's close of 36.54.

Investors were harsher. Twitter's shares fell 12 percent to $32.15 in premarket trading, set to erase nearly $3 billion of the company's market value.

Dorsey warned on Tuesday that the company is unlikely to see sustained meaningful growth in monthly active users (MAU) until it can reach the mass market, after it reported its the slowest growth in MAU since it went public in 2013.

RBC analyst Mark Mahaney said improvements in monetization would not be enough to sustain high growth rates.

"That's why MAU growth matters. That's why user and usage metrics matter. And that's why hitting metrics growth walls really matters."

Dorsey said the company would focus on more disciplined product execution, simplify the website and better communicate Twitter's purpose.

Edison Investment Research analyst Richard Windsor disagreed. "I think that these areas are simply dancing around the edge of the real problem."

"In essence it must go from being a one product company to an ecosystem and this will require a radical shift in strategy from where the company is today," Windsor said.

Twitter, which is in the midst of a management change after Chief Executive Dick Costolo stepped down in June, said core MAUs rose only 2 million in the second quarter to 304 million.

That number pales in comparison to social-media rival Facebook Inc's 1.4 billion users.

SEE ALSO: Twitter may change the entire way you read tweets

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Ever felt like the only cure for a slow afternoon is either a salty bag of pretzels or a sweet cookie?

Turns out sweet and salty aren't the only flavors you can crave.

Scientists think we can crave fat as well.

A hundred years ago, scientists thought that the only things we could recognize on our tongues fell under four distinct types: Sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. 

But about a decade ago, they discovered another taste: Umami, a savory or meaty taste. And now, researchers from Purdue University think fat should join the list of these primary flavors because, they write in their study, their participants could consciously distinguish fat as a primary taste.

Researchers have known since 2012 that we have taste receptors that can identify fatty acids from other tastes. But they couldn’t exactly show that we knew just what it tasted like — only that there was something characteristically appealing about fat.

So this month, the scientists set out to discover if people could actually distinguish and, more importantly identify, this fat taste from other tastes like sweet and sour.

They asked about 100 people between the ages of 18 and 54 to try samples of tastes and group the ones that were similar — sweet with sweet, sour with sour, etc. They didn't have a hard time figuring out what was sweet, salty, or sour. But when it came to what they considered to be "unpleasant" tastes like bitter, umami, and fat, most grouped them into a single taste grouping.

When asked to split up those unpleasant tastes into more specific groups, the participants then could separate them out into three groups, which were bitter, umami, and fat.

When we think about fat, we often associate it with the creamy feel of fat in food. But that's not actually what it tastes like.

While the idea of eating bacon-grease popcorn might sound like a great way to taste fat, the actual concentrated taste of fat tastes much worse — picture that gloppy pool of concentrated turkey drippings the day after Thanksgiving. To make sure participants didn't have any influences on the way they perceived taste, the researchers controlled for odor, texture, and appearance.

Identifying this primary taste could help scientists make better foods. Instead of creating foods that mimic the texture of fat, they have the potential to single out just its taste. That way, they could either remove it from dishes that aren't as good because of the taste or add it to dishes that can benefit from just a pinch of the flavor sprinkled on top. Think, for example, about how coffee and wine benefit from just a smidge of bitter taste.

The study was published this month in Chemical Senses. Up next, the team is sorting through the data of the more than 1,000 participants to expand their understanding about fat and learn more about the genetics of fat taste.

READ THIS: The government wants to add daily values of sugar to food labels, and it’s going to make a lot of manufacturers unhappy

CHECK OUT: A massive misconception is wreaking havoc on how we think about food

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NOW WATCH: We found out if the 5-second rule is a real thing

Twitter (NASDAQ: TWTR) released Q2 2015 earnings on 7/28/15. The stock was up approximately 6% after hours until the company’s earnings call when CFO Anthony Noto admitted that Twitter’s user growth was not expected to improve anytime soon. After that comment, Twitter’s stock took a nosedive - losing more than 11% of its value - and is now trading at $32.41, a new 52-week low.

With the help of our friends, we dissected the reasons behind Twitter’s fail-whale performance. Let’s get to it.

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Transportation is one of the world’s largest industries. The five largest automotive companies in the world generate more than 750 billion euro in annual revenue. The names in the industry are global brands – BMW, Ford, Daimler. Yet despite its size and stature, it’s also an industry in the midst of transformation. Today, new transportation vendors like Uber, Lyft, Zipcar, and Grabtaxi are changing our relationship with cars.

Few other industries with such a pervasive and tangible impact on each of our lives have gone through recent periods of similar upheaval. Information technology, however, is one of those industries. We all interact with computers on a near daily basis, and like cars today, the IT industry has been undergoing its own transformation over the past 15 years.

Some of the same factors that have driven the transformation in IT help point the way toward the future of transportation. Namely, four themes from the growth of cloud computing help us understand why a shift to “cloud transportation” is underway.

1.  Renting is almost always cheaper than owning.

Historically, renting infrastructure has been relatively expensive. Any renter needed to both cover the profit offered to rental companies and settle for less customized infrastructure. That changed in the world of computing over the last decade – mostly due to the sheer growth in consumers of IT infrastructure.

Today’s cloud IT vendors have both the buying power and the operational discipline to minimize the cost to the customer of a unit of data storage or computing power. With the addition of self-service infrastructure, powered by scalable web interfaces, the cloud IT vendors are also able to provide incredible variety to their customers without dramatically increasing their costs.

The same shift can be anticipated in transportation. Huge vendors of cloud transportation — just like their counterparts in IT — have every incentive to optimize their fleets against cost per mile driven. Unlike the average consumer, cloud transportation vendors will attempt to ensure they (or their drivers) buy the most efficient cars per mile, service them optimally, and retire them on the best schedules. (Ever wonder why Hertz doesn’t have many cars with more than 30,000 miles?)

It may be a long time before cloud transportation companies offer anywhere near the same variety that ownership can confer. But for many of us, what they offer will be good enough. And when it is, we should expect renting to become cheaper than owning.

2. Network effects will be critical to performance.

In a world of cloud infrastructure (whether in software or transportation), there are a number of advantages to scale. Beyond purchasing power, scale helps companies establish strong network effects. In software, these network effects help draw new developers and consumers to a given platform, simplify application deployment and service, and streamline the act of finding relevant talent.

In transportation, networks create value in a couple of ways. The first is convenience. The more Zipcars in your city, the more compelling it is for people to sign up for Zipcar, and the more Zipcar locations can be supported. Similarly, the more Uber drivers there are in a city, the more likely people are to sign up for Uber, and the more likely drivers are to opt into it.

A dense network also limits transaction costs. Every mile driven by a ride-sharing driver with no customer in the seat is a mile of costs that need to be covered. But once a ride-sharing company has built meaningful network density, a driver might leave you on one corner and pick up his next rider only a block down the road.

In cloud computing, we’ve seen these network effects help solidify the position of massive players – locking new entrants out of the market. In the world of transportation, this is definitely a possibility and one of the primary reasons so many next generation companies are trying to expand so quickly.

3. Most of the old guard will struggle to adapt.

As is the case with most waves of disruption, suppliers trying to make the shift to cloud business models will struggle to adapt.

Why? Mainly because the most valuable customers in their portfolio today aren’t necessarily the most valuable customers in the new world. Today, car companies might treasure the luxury customer willing to pay for a highly customized interior. Tomorrow, the best segment to own might be the B2B buyers who are buying at massive scale. Unfortunately, these new buyers have different needs entirely. They’ll care about extremely minute efficiency gains that even the pickiest individual buyers wouldn’t even notice. They’ll look for cars that cost little to maintain, get great gas mileage, and last forever. And in a world with driverless transportation, they may want cars with very different service models, layouts, and architectures.

The theory of disruption would suggest that, for these reasons, traditional automakers will struggle to make the shift, even armed with the massive scale and brand advantages they have today.

4. Change will be slow, and edge cases will persist for decades.

If the cloud revolution in information technology has taught us anything, it’s that edge cases will persist for decades. Despite the known advantages of cloud computing, we’re far from a world where cloud can do everything. But for the vast majority of companies, cloud is a godsend.

Transportation will follow a similar path. We’re a long way from being able to serve many suburban and rural areas with next-generation infrastructure. Genuine car enthusiasts might never make the shift. And there is nothing in place today to help address the edge needs of those doing things like hauling junk, transporting construction tools, or moving people long distances on a regular basis.

Beyond the purely functional limitations of the technology, regulatory issues will persist for decades. We’re seeing the beginning of these issues arise with the questions surrounding the employment status of Uber and Lyft’s contract employees. We’ll only see more of these issues over time. Regulatory issues haven’t slowed cloud computing all that much — but then, data security seems almost insignificant when compared to the physical safety of our loved ones and children. Background checks and security screening issues will be ever more critical in a world of transportation marketplaces. Adapting rules, testing product, and creating the software to enable driverless cars will take quite some time.

But just like with cloud IT, even if we don’t see everyone move en masse, the change will be noticeable. And it will be noticeable soon. Within years, we’ll have trends that point the way toward a very different future.

A decade ago, it was clear to a lot of thoughtful folks that cloud software was going to be the clear choice of the future. Today, the same theme seems to hold for transportation. We should assume that cost advantages will favor the cloud vendors, that scale will improve performance, that the old guard will have to adapt to flourish in the new world, that the edge cases will slowly fill in, and that the change is coming — eventually.

Lead nurturing programs allow you to move customers along the buyer’s journey by educating, entertaining and anticipating the buyer’s needs.

Event-based lead nurturing creates a real-time approach to connecting with prospects, by sending information and taking action based on a lead’s activity (event) on your website. How do you build a program like this?

What You’ll Need:

• Marketing Automation Platform With Workflows: To ensure that you are able to build workflows based on events or website activity, you will need to have a marketing automation platform that has workflows. It doesn’t matter which one you choose, but whatever you do, just make sure it has the features to create workflows based on actions.

• Website Tracking: Most marketing automation platforms also come with website tracking to allow you to track what happens on your website. Although technically, you don’t need website tracking when creating event workflows, website tracking helps you create a more robust lead nurturing process. With website tracking you can gain insights on other web activities that your leads partake in that do not follow your workflow trajectory. For instance, you could have an event workflow setup that says each time someone visits a page (link) it should set off a series of activities. However, if the prospect strays away and does other things on your website that you didn’t anticipate ahead of time, without website tracking, you may not be privileged to this information.

How To Create Your Event-Based Lead Nurturing Plan

Identify all conversion pages:

Create a list of pages that you think your target audience who are seriously considering your solution, product or service might visit to convert. Examples of web pages that usually show a visitor’s intent to learn more include:

• Pricing pages
• Demo pages
• Adding items to shopping carts (ecommerce websites)
• Contact pages
• Ebook landing pages

Determine the form of action that you want the person to take

The goal of lead nurturing is to guide and move prospects along the buying cycle with the aim of helping them make the decision to purchase from you. Usually, the prospects that are nurtured using an event-based lead nurturing strategy may not have taken the form of action that you wanted them to. For example, someone visits your pricing page but fails to sign up or ask for a price quote.

Create Automated Emails and Tasks

Now that you have determined the pages that you want your event to based on, it’s time to create a list of automated emails and tasks to get your lead to where you want them to be. Before creating if/then scenarios for your workflow, firstly create a list of all your call to actions for each page taking into account that, buyers maybe at different stages of the buying cycle. Even though someone may look at your pricing page, the visitor could still be at the awareness stage of the buying cycle and still require some education.

Create Messages that answer the Prospects questions

There are a plethora of reasons why prospects might decide not to follow the conversion path that you create. Examples or reasons include:

1. Not finding your content compelling enough to take the next action
2. Getting distracted because someone sent them a cat video (ok, maybe not a cat video, but sometimes we intend to do something but don’t)
3. Inability to quantify the ROI for buying your solution

In my previous example about the pricing page, you could send an email with a detailed explanation about the pricing options available as your first email and ask for a follow up phone call to work with the leads budget if you have discounts available. In this case, leads that are the awareness stage may shy away from meeting with you, but you may also get your leads at the decision stages to take the forms of action that you want them to.

What The Workflow looks like

Now that you have your ideas built out, the next stage is to actually build the event-based workflow. When building workflows you have to think about all possible outcomes for a proposed action. For emails, here are your possible outcomes:

• Lead doesn’t get email delivered
• Lead gets email delivered but does not open it
• Lead opens the email but does not click the link
• Lead opens the email clicks the link but does not respond to your call to action
• Lead opens the email, clicks the link and responds to your call to action (best case scenario)

Having all these outcomes laid out is necessary because every prospect has his/her own unique journey.

Here is a sample event based workflow based on the pricing page example used throughout this post.

Notes:

In order for event nurturing to work, you will need to have at least the email address of the prospect already in your database. Newsletter subscriptions can be used to gain this information.

When using an automation platform that doesn’t offer website tracking, you can only track actions based on links to pages that you specify. If your prospect deviates from your chosen path, you may not have access to the intelligence to be able to create real-time tweaks to your event nurturing campaigns.

Finding leads on Twitter is both skill and art–one that involves creating relevant relationships and conversations.

According to a recent study, Twitter was found to be the number one social selling tool for sales representatives looking to take advantage of social selling to exceed sales quotas. This finding makes the idea that LinkedIn is the best tool for social selling and lead generation a bit of gainsay.

FindInG and Connect With Leads on Twitter

Monitor Lists

To get started with finding and connecting with leads on twitter there is the need to create a social monitoring and social listening strategy. Think of social listening just as a normal conversation. Usually, if you want to be better at contributing to a conversation, you also have to be willing to listen and absorb the other person has to say. Start with monitoring targeted lists in the form of keywords to help you know what to say when trying to find the right people.

• How to Set Realistic Social Media Goals

Discovering Industry Trends for Targeted Verticals

Once you have the keywords or industries that you will like to target, you will need to have a social monitoring tool for tracking conversations. Examples of popular social monitoring tools include, TweetDeck (free) and HootSuite (free for a limited number of accounts). The goal with monitoring these lists is to discover industry trends that can serve as an entry point for you to jump into conversations. Interjecting into conversations on Twitter can come in different formats for example, if you find that the industry that you are targeting talks about a problem that your solution solves, you could send a link to an informative post on your blog on how you solve the problem. If you don’t already have a blog post or content material that speaks to that problem, you could create something new.

• How To Social Media Piggy Ride: Leverage Existing Social Media Conversations

Using Hashtags

Hashtags are really great ways to not only connect with your target audience on Twitter but to also get found. When choosing hashtags, try to find existing hashtags that are already used by others at first. This makes it easier for other people to discover your tweets. Once you start getting the right responses and followers, you can create and promote your own hashtags if you wish. For ideas, see post on how to use existing hashtags to your benefit here.

Qualifying Leads from Twitter [FlowChart]

Your work is half done, once you start to identify the audience that you want to talk to and start having meaningful conversations. With Twitter, there is the need to really weed out people who may not be qualified leads in order for you to get your desired results. Use this flowchart from LeadSift to help you with ranking and qualifying leads on Twitter.

• MarketingWorld Skim-Top Story: What Twitter Type Are You? #MWSkims

Sales based organizations typically choose between pursuing an inside sales model or an outside sales model. Inside sales implies that salespeople report daily to the office and make sales inquiries over the phone, via web based virtual demos, or through another remote strategy. Outside sales include field reps who travel for face to face meetings with clients and other services that benefit from a physically present representative. Today, inside sales organizations are more prolific, and are growing more rapidly than outside sales organizations. However the two are inherently different in the kind of sales they bring in. This is something to consider before deciding which model to follow. Should you choose one, or incorporate smaller teams of both styles into your sales organization? It all depends on your business and your product.

Quality vs. quantity is a simple way to sum up the different types of deals that come out of outside and inside selling respectively. Inside reps do most of their selling from their desks over the phone. Not having to travel at all allows them to pitch the product at a mass volume to many people everyday. Inside sales also allows for much easier prospecting. Ken Krogue notes that prospecting has become almost entirely an inside sales process, with most field sales reps choosing to first reach prospective clients over the phone rather than face to face. Inside sales tends to fall on the quantity side of the spectrum, which is not to say the customers are of a lower quality, but they are less likely to be big ticket purchases. In general, items purchased over the phone are ordered in smaller quantities with a shorter sales cycle. Wallace Management Group notes that inside sales tend to be centered around a lower cost product, lower complexity, and small scale orders. This makes sense, as companies who are willing to spend a lot of money on a complex, industry altering product usually want to meet face to face with a rep to work out price and functionality. However, inside sales makes up for lower cost with a larger volume.

While inside reps make seven times as many pitches, field reps convert prospects to clients 40% of the time compared to inside reps who do this only 18% of the time, says Krogue. With their face to face meetings, field reps are able to cultivate strong relationships with clients and continue selling to them over a longer period of time making for a longer, more complex sales cycle, according to SalesLoft. Field sales lends itself to products that demand a lot of service, attention, or set up. For example, field reps who sell their products in retail locations need to be able to visit the store to set up product displays and keep their product in stock. Another advantage of field reps is that they are able to utilize more methods for sales such as presentations, displays, and samples. This keeps prospects engaged and more likely to buy, as visuals are processed 60,000 times faster than written text. Because of the time, travel, and long-term relationships of field sales reps, they subscribe more to the quality over quantity mantra.

Recently, many sales based organizations have been switching to inside sales models. Today, for every one field rep hired, ten inside reps are hired. However, this does not mean field reps are obsolete. A Harvard Business Review study on changing sales dynamics shows that while many organizations are switching to inside sales, they still need and appreciate the relationships built by field reps. As stated here by this study participant, “Field Sales is more strategic, meeting with C-level executives and developing strategic business innovation to help them grow their business versus inside which is more quantity and not as in-depth the majority of the time.” If you are selling to both small and large companies, the answer may be a hybrid solution that uses both kinds of sales. Outside field reps can handle large accounts that require a constant hands on presence, while inside reps are able to sell more to smaller businesses remotely, who will not need as much interaction.

When deciding which sales model to choose, first analyze what it is you’re selling, and to whom you are selling. Despite inside sales recent drive in popularity, if you are selling a pricey product to a large organization, outfitting your business with an entirely inside sales team may not get you far. The converse could result in a small business’ annoyance at having to take time out of their schedule for a face to face meeting. Having both systems in place can be mutually beneficial depending on what you are selling. Know your product, learn your customers, and go from there!

You already know that getting client referrals is fantastic, but did you know that clients who were referred by a loyal client have a 37% higher retention rate?  On top of that, referred leads are more valuable than other leads.  Why is that?  Because referred leads have shorter sales cycles and better client conversion rates.

So how can you generate more referrals?  It all comes down to client satisfaction, creating evangelists for your services and having them talk about you.  And while it’s nice to think this will just happen if you’re awesome (and sometimes it might) there is actually a process for it.  In Inbound we call this the “Delight” phase and it’s built into the program.  Whether you’ve heard that term or not isn’t important – what matters is getting more referrals…so here’s how it works:

Step 1 – Provide Awesome Service

This seems blatantly obvious, but there is more to this than just being fantastic at what you do.  Here’s what I mean:  while courting a prospect you probably had pretty good lines of communication going on.  You didn’t want that possible client to forget why they needed you and how valuable you are, so you made sure to communicate with them whenever you could.  Now that they are a client, and you’re doing amazing work for them (naturally) make sure you have a plan in place to keep those communication lines open and offer information that may be useful to them outside of the services you’re providing.

There are many ways to keep the information flowing, ranging from simply picking up the phone to tell your client about something that they may find beneficial to creating an email workflow to keep them on top of things.  The bottom line here is this – it costs you very little in time/money to touch base, shoot a quick email or leave a voicemail with a client to provide added (i.e. unexpected) value.  And believe this: they will notice.

Step 2 – After the Dust Settles, Don’t Fade Away

When your client has entered a phase of non-activity, or the honeymoon period is over, have a system in place to keep them engaged, informed and continue to add value.  This is where most firms fall flat, or perhaps think they have it covered with a periodic newsletter…and that’s a mis-step.  Here’s why: after the dust has settled a bit, and maybe they aren’t in a critical phase of needing your immediate attention, they’ll be in a place where they can reflect on their experience with you.  They’ll also be in a place where they feel like they can talk about it with others.  You definitely do not want them to forget about you now.

Again, a new flow of information should be in place that provides value for them now.  An easy way to do this is develop a series of emails for challenges or opportunities that clients face after your first phase of service.  This is going to be specific to the type of service you provide, for example if you’re a divorce attorney it could be an email series that ranges from finances to child care.  If you have a practice centered around Mass Tort it could be about finding medical guidance.  If your clients are businesses going through an M&A, it could be a series with resources on how to survive and thrive after a merger.  The ways you can add value are limitless.

Step 3 – Encouraging The Evangelist

An evangelist is someone who touts their experience with you.  They are your unpaid advertisers who sing your praises, and creating customer evangelists should always be a factor in your business strategy.  They are your fans…and they are where referrals come from.

Referrals can come in numerous different ways.   We’re all familiar with the tell-a-friend type of referral – and you absolutely want these.  One way to encourage this is to simply ask (if you know they’re thrilled with your service).  Asking for a referral can go a long ways in increasing the frequency, but let’s look at how the majority of communication is done now – social media.

It’s astounding but true, according to HubSpot research, prospective client are 71% more likely to hire you based on social media referrals.  This is where your clients, including B2B clients are talking…and hopefully talking about you.  Having a social presence is also an ongoing reminder for clients or even former clients, and will undoubtedly increase the odds of your firm coming up in discussions that lead to referrals.

Final Thoughts On Increasing Client Acquisition Through Referrals

Referrals are amazing.  Referrals are valuable.  Referrals make your life easier.  Referrals can be greatly increased with minimal effort.  You definitely do not want to miss these nuggets of gold by not having a simple plan in place to grab them.  Whatever your strategy is, and regardless of who your clientele are, having an ongoing strategy in place to increase referrals can make an enormous impact on your client acquisition and an increased revenue stream.