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Sunglasses are an essential summer item, but there’s still a right time and place for them. This matrix graphic shows the proper etiquette for wearing and stashing your sunglasses in all types of situations.

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The Kayapo tribe, living south of the Amazon basin in Brazil, is a reservoir of culture jeopardized by the reservoir of a dam. The Belo Monte Dam, the third-largest hydroelectric station in the world, will start surging next year, and one of its reservoirs could displace the 8,000 Kayapo people. The tribe’s chief is selling smaller plots to pay for lawyers and to fly himself to court—a $5,000 trip from hut to hearing.

Along with trying to protect the community, the Kayapo people are working to save the ecology of their land. The tribe owns an area nearly three times the size of Vancouver Island, which is where the photographer Cristina Mittermeier, who is originally from Mexico, now lives. “The dam is slaughtering a huge chunk of the rainforest,” she says. “We’re talking about the size of metropolitan Toronto.”

Mittermeier’s photos of the Kayapo are now part of an exhibition, Water’s Edge, on display at Toronto Pearson International Airport and Union Station in Toronto during the Pan American Games. In her work for conservation organizations and NGOs, as well as for National Geographic, she specializes in capturing traditional livelihoods. “It’s the Avatar syndrome,” she says. “I seem to always be photographing people struggling to keep white people out.”

She describes the Kayapo as warm as they are persistent. When she first met them in 1992, she was pregnant, and the women sensed and soothed her morning sickness, communicating in sign language. During each of her following stays, they have lent her a hut. “They’re very friendly people,” she says, “but only if you’re invited.”

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Cristina Mittermeier

The post Photo essay: Brazil’s threatened tribe, damned by a dam appeared first on Macleans.ca.

How do we use Ambition to align sales and marketing KPIs on our own business team? Glad you asked.

The Ambition Business Team has been using Ambition since the latter part of 2014.

We have a range of team members on it, including C-Level Executives, Account Executives, SDRs and Marketing personnel — anyone who engages in daily revenue-generating activities.

Here’s how we use Ambition to drive KPIs within our own team.

How We Score KPIs On Ambition

We track a variety of metrics via Ambition, with each role having a unique set of KPIs factoring into their Ambition Score.

Sales Development Rep

The KPIs we track for our SDRs are as follows:

• Outbound calls
• Emails sent
• Demos scheduled

Our SDRs are charges with cold calling and emailing prospects, then setting up a demo with one of our Account Executives.

The main two activities that generate our apex objective (demo scheduled) are emails and calls. Logging a call or email in Salesforce triggers a small boost to an SDR’s daily Ambition Score.

Logging a new demo scheduled triggers a much bigger Ambition Score boost, as it is the prime objective for an SDR.

Account Executive

The sales KPIs we track for our Account Executives are as follows:

• Outbound calls
• Web Demos completed
• Deals closed

As you can see, they included our top revenue-generating activity (outbound calls), a mid-funnel objective (demos completed) and apex objective (deals closed).

Those KPIs are weighted in ascending order. Logging a new closed deal triggers the most dramatic boost to Ambition Score, while logging an outbound call triggers the smallest boost.

Marketing

The marketing KPIs we track are as follows:

• Content Downloads
• Webinar and Pricing Sign-Ups
• Inbound Demo Requests

As Director of Marketing, lead generation and nurturing is my total focus.

For that reason, my three KPIs that go into my Ambition Score are all objective-based, with Inbound Demo requested weighted highest, since that’s the most preferred action a new inbound could take.

We sync our marketing automation platform, Pardot, with Salesforce, so a new inbound lead automatically triggers an update to my Ambition Score.

How We Recognize Top Performers On Ambition

Every user on Ambition has an Ambition Anthem.

Users select their personal Ambition Anthems from YouTube, which will then play whenever they hit a major milestone (ex. a 100 Ambition Score for the day) on our TV in the Ambition Sales Lab.

We’ve also used the Ambition Scores to determine which sales reps got to attend major conferences such as Dreamforce and the AA-ISP Leadership Summit.

Beyond that, we also get notifications when we’re reaching personal bests and overtaking a peer in a given metric.

Hope 1st place was fun while it lasted, Jay.

Lessons We’ve Learned Using Ambition

As a small team, it’s been difficult and/or unnecessary to utilize some of our product’s core features, like competitions and reporting. (Click here to read the Harvard Business Review’s profile of how Clayton Homes used those features).

With that said, we’ve gotten a ton of mileage out of Ambition. As a Marketing team member, I love being able to go toe-to-toe with Sales and see how I’m stacking up against them, in terms of hitting my benchmarks.

Countless times, members of our sales team have lingered at the office late. When asked why, the answer typically went something like, “I’m just a few calls away from hitting a 100 on my daily Ambition Score.”

With sales and marketing, it can be hard to get excited about the little things — making a cold call, updating prospect info into Salesforce and so forth. Ambition has changed that within our team, and it’s doing so in many others around the world.

As more marketers have focused on the Millennial Generation with efforts focused on capturing this cohort’s attentions, major budgets are being planned in the mistaken belief that Millennials are less brand loyal than other age cohorts, and require additional attention to create brand preference.

A recent assessment of 12,300 Millennial consumers in 63 categories conducted by Brand Keys, Inc., the New York City-based brand loyalty and emotional engagement research consultancy, proves that emotional values and higher expectations not only play a greater part in the Millennial decision-process but that a brand’s ability to deliver on required emotional values trumps rational ones every time. It turns out that the loyalty bonds created by doing so for Millennials are stronger than those of other age groups.

Today Emotions Are More Important to Millennials

In 1985, when the first of what was christened the “Millennial Generation” were about 5 years old the purchase-decision process was more rational than it was emotional, calculated to be a ratio of 70:30. That meant rational values having to do pricing, product quality, numbers of distribution points, and advertising tonnage, were more important, more leveragable, and more differentiating to consumers than emotional values.

In 2000 the ratio shifted to 65:35,emotional to rational.

Five years later the ratio reversed the 1985 numbers, this time 70:30, but with the preponderance of the decision process turning emotional.

This year, 2015 – as the first Millennials turn 35 – the decision process is decidedly more emotional, at a category-generalized ratio of 80:20. Emotional values like customization, meeting personal emotive needs, the ability to meaningfully “talk” to the brand that actually “listened,” and a sense of authenticity, became more important in the brand bonding decision-process as consumers had more and more access to the Internet and lived hot-wired mobile devices and, consequently, more and more empowered empowered. Millennials are demanding real reasons to be loyal.

Ratios of Emotional vs. Rational Values in Millennial Brand Decision-Making

Millennials Have Higher Expectations

Complicating marketing efforts, overall, cross-category expectations (examined by generational cohort and indexed versus a benchmark of 100 to provide comparability) showed Millennials to hold significantly higher expectations regarding categories and brands than any other age group as well.

Overall Customer Expectation levels By Generational Cohort

High Numbers of Millennial Loyalty Leaders

One thing that crosses all generational cohorts as regards brand loyalty and engagement is that brands best able to meet the consumers’ expectations for the values – particularly emotional values – that drive the category are always the brands that show up on the top of consumers’ shopping lists. A review of the Millennial loyalty leaders in the 63 categories included in this analysis revealed that 91% of them were the category’s leaders. These included brands like Apple, Nike, Chipotle, and Old Navy.

Ultimately brands that are able to stand for the right emotional values, maintain relevance, and better meet Millennial’s expectations have shown higher levels of positive consumer behavior in the marketplace and higher loyalty levels than any other generational cohort. The secret, of course, is identifying and measuring what expectations Millennials hold for which emotional values and then planning how to communicate them to consumers in an engaging manner.

And unfortunately, that’s a more complex process than just adding more social networking or more storytelling to the marketing budget.

Investing in technology rather than digital ads is the reason Starbucks dodged the seismic shift in consumer behavior that has knocked traditional retailers, claimed chief executive Howard Schultz.

The coffee seller’s boss made the claim to explain how the business has been able to defy the odds and turn digital payments into a key revenue source. Mobile payments now represent a whopping 20% of all in-store sales in the US, more than double the figure from just two years ago and the coffee house is processing nearly nine million transactions each week.

“Two years ago I reported on the seismic shift in consumer behaviour that would significantly impact traditional bricks and mortar retailers,” Schultz told analysts on a conference call yesterday evening (23 July).

“Since then, many traditional retailers and consumer brands have responded simply by substantially increasing their digital advertising budgets, significantly driving up their cost of customer acquisition and producing little to show for it. We, on the other hand, took a very different approach.”

And this different approach was for all to see in its latest quarter. Like-for-like sales rose 7% in the three months to July, spurred by a three per cent uplift in customer visits, which the business thanked its loyalty program. The number of active users of the digital scheme grew 28 per cent year-on-year n the US alone in the period to 10.4 million.

The program “continues to be our most important business drivers” as new members contribute not only short-term increases in revenue and profit, “but also to long-term loyalty for years to come”, said Schultz.

It’s not just digital channels the business hopes to extract revenues from. It’s also been linking up with other companies to grow its customer base, securing deals with the New York Times, Spotify and Lyft. The idea is to use the partnerships to leverage the usage of its loyalty scheme, turning Starbucks stores into the only places where people can access exclusive services; whether it's music or reading free articles on smartphones.

“…and you're going to see a lot more in the days ahead,” promised Schultz.

“What each of these partnerships affords is the opportunity for consumers to earn Starbucks Stars outside of Starbucks stores and then to redeem them for their favorite food and beverages within Starbucks stores, providing a unique opportunity for [incremental growth], increased profitability and the opportunity for us to serve, connect with and become part of the daily ritual of an even more larger based number of consumers, and adding further momentum to Starbucks unique increasingly global flywheel.”

Total sales in the quarter rose 18% from a year earlier to $4.9bn.

SEE ALSO: Starbucks chooses Lyft over Uber to give coffee perks to passengers

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Starbucks, Dunkin' or McDonald's — which coffee is the best value?

TEHRAN, IRAN — The Iranian video begins low-key, the camera panning silently as dozens of aspiring entrepreneurs click away at their computers, lost in thought.

The video, produced by Avatech, a technology incubator company in Tehran, portrays a world of ideas, of white boards and post-it notes, of coffee cups and creativity.

Then the music starts: the distinctive rock-n-roll anthem, “We will rock you,” by Queen. Tables are pounded to the beat, a singer belts out lyrics in Persian, and the energy release shows how much ambition and hope these young Iranians have in their tech start-up future – and how much greater it can be, now that a landmark nuclear deal is opening up Iran for business.

“There will come a day when everybody knows your name,” cries the singer in the video, giving encouragement to the budding entrepreneurs as a poster shows a drawing of the world. “You will see that day, when there’s no one left who can tell you that you can’t [succeed].”

While critics of the Iran nuclear deal hold forth in Washington and Tehran, at least one group is engaging with renewed aspirations: the business leaders, start-up entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists who want to cash in on Iran’s post-sanctions prospects.

Choked by years of sanctions that cut Iran off from financial markets, trade, and much of its primary source of income – oil exports – businesses are looking forward to eased restrictions that will bring 80 million Iranians back into the global economic fold.

From aircraft builders, automakers, and energy giants to telecoms and tech companies, Western firms and investors are jockeying to be ready for when sanctions ease under the July 14 nuclear deal. On Thursday, top Iranian officials in Vienna outlined plans for $185 billion in new projects by 2020, most in oil and gas, and said already $2 billion in deals have been approved with European companies. 

But even more optimism is found among the sophisticated, Western-world-aware crop of Iranian graduates engaged in start-ups, high-tech, nano- and bio-technology, and other high-end scientific pursuits.

“The [Queen] video came out of the whole vibe here; we wanted to visualize the start-up culture in Iran,” says Mohsen Malayeri, a founder of Avatech, which arranges finance and professional mentoring for start-ups.

“Iran is a very young country. You see they want to take their own destiny, take their dreams in their hands,” Mr. Malayari says at an event to bring angel investors together with start-up teams. The psychological impact of the deal can’t be ignored, he says, because sanctions were “even limiting the amount of vision you have. Now it is: ‘Why can’t I think regionally? Why can’t I think globally?’ ”

The race to invest is on: Germany’s vice chancellor and economic minister, Sigmar Gabriel, led a business delegation to Iran last weekend – the highest ranking German visit in 12 years – just days after the nuclear deal concluded in Vienna.

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius – who has trade ties in his portfolio – is visiting Iran next week, hoping that France’s hard line at the nuclear talks does not prevent a restoration of Franco-Iranian business ties that dropped from 1.66 billion euros in 2011 to just 62 million euros in 2013.

Sanctions promoted self-sufficiency

By one count, more than 100 European business delegations – and some American ones – have arrived in Iran since late 2013, when an interim nuclear deal provided the first crack in the sanctions regime.

“I’ve been waiting really for 12 years for this moment … because the synergies are simply unbelievably big,” says Cyrus Razzaghi, president of Ara Enterprises in Tehran, which does market research and business matchmaking.

“What people don’t know about Iran is this human capital,” says Mr. Razzaghi, noting that Iranian students’ score high globally in subjects like electrical engineering, which means Iran can be a natural hub for research and development.

Another little known factor is a consequence of years of sanctions: Self-sufficiency and a diverse industrial base that forced the creation of entire supply chains at home.

“Now we can produce many things from scratch, from A to Z, not the highest quality with the most modern technology, but the value chain is there, the know-how is there,” says Razzaghi.

Support from Rouhani

Iran could therefore also become a manufacturing hub, he says, and the scene of industrial-scale projects estimated to be worth $500 billion to $1 trillion in sectors ranging from oil, gas and petrochemicals to luxury hotel construction.

“These two things make Iranian potential huge; the unlocked potential is just tremendous,” says Razzaghi. “We are under no illusion. It will take time, and will take big support of the government.”

That support has come since the June 2013 election of centrist President Hassan Rouhani. His economy minister last week created a new working group to speed the influx of foreign capital, and to expand Iran’s $100 billion stock market. 

“Rouhani has quietly caused some revolutionary changes,” says Shahrzad Saderi, a Dubai-based Iranian consultant, noting reduced bureaucracy and more support for start-ups. “What they have done is recognize that if you are going to develop the country, you need investment in these ideas.”

“That’s the change: How we work with companies,” says Ms. Saderi. “We are not corporate America, but now we say: ‘Oh wow, maybe we can do this.’ This is new energy.”

Investing in tech

That impressed an American delegation of CEOs that visited Iran in the spring. Among them was Christopher Schroeder, a venture capitalist on his second trip to the Islamic Republic and author of “Startup Rising: The Entrepreneurial Remaking of the Middle East.”

The budding entrepreneurs he found “aren’t just replicating the tech start-up successes they see elsewhere; they’re improvising on them and making them their very own,” Mr. Schroeder wrote in Politico. “What may have began as workarounds until sanctions were lifted is laying groundwork – tech infrastructure, tolerance for failure, start-ups as a ‘real’ job – for the next generation of companies and entrepreneurs.”

Even while expectations grow, as Iran becomes the biggest economy to rejoin global trade and financial networks since the breakup of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the most enthusiastic pockets of hope are found in places like the Pardis Technology Park, 15 miles east of Tehran through barren desert hills.

A government project first built more than a decade ago, the carefully laid out avenues – “1st Innovation Street” and so on, and even a “Scientists’ Garden” – have surged with new enterprise from dozens of bio-tech, medical, and IT companies.

Bulldozers are now expanding the site. Officials told the American delegation that Iran spent $4 billion on tech infrastructure last year alone, and plans to spend $25 billion more in the next three years.

It is at places like Sarava, a local venture capital firm with a mission to invest in start-ups, where Iran’s young tech elite – some of them returned to Iran after getting their educations despite lucrative prospects in the US or Canada – are applying the Midas touch.

Rapid growth

In well-lit, color-coordinated rooms with leather seats and open floor plans – in just one of scores of corporate headquarters here – they absorb presentations on personal branding; study American how-to guides on their smart phones; and follow on-line courses at US universities – when they are not brainstorming or playing foosball in the basement cafeteria.

One of the most successful companies Sarava works with is Digikala, Iran’s version of Amazon. It has grown from a staff of 25 to more than 800 in three years and become a $300 million company that daily ships thousands of orders across Iran.

Sarava began “start-up weekends” nearly three years ago, and in the last year – with official support – conducted 39 such weekends in 16 cities, engaging thousands of aspiring entrepreneurs.

The nuclear deal “opens up and strengthens the tie between Iran and the rest of the world … and it creates an environment of bigger hopes, where dreams can materialize,” says Said Rahmani, the founder of Sarava.

“What I have difficulty imagining is how it could go even faster.… We are working day and night,” says Mr. Rahmani. “With this rate of change, it is going to be mind-boggling what will happen after sanctions.”

SEE ALSO: The Assad regime used mobile weapons labs to hide its chemical arms program

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NOW WATCH: The secret strategy samurai use to achieve laser-focus

In 2013, Zappos began transitioning to "Holacracy," an alternative management system that replaces a pyramidal hierarchy with a network of circles dedicated to specific functions like marketing or HR, and ditches traditional management.

Job titles are replaced with "roles" that employees can accumulate.

This past March, CEO Tony Hsieh decided the transition was moving too slowly and offered employees a severance package to leave the company if they didn't agree with its direction.

By May, 210 of the roughly 1,500 employees (14%) took the deal, and the Amazon-owned online retailer was all in with Holacracy.

One of the key challenges the company faces during this time of transformation is figuring out how to pay workers who don't have traditional job titles. It's now experimenting with a "badge-based compensation" system developed by Holacracy founder Brian Robertson. 

Employees receive various badges that represent roles and skills they have. Currently the badges don't represent pay, but they may in the near future.

"At this time, compensation is tied to roles, and the badges encompass the work or skills being done in those roles," says Lisa Jewett, who has the role of "@Badge_Librarian" and is leading how compensation works in the Zappos Holacracy. "However, we are currently in the process of building a more robust badging system that will allow people to build their salary based on the avenues they would like to pursue."

Essentially, that means that the pursuit of badges may eventually resemble a "leveling up" process from video games, where the acquiring of a new badge automatically equals a bigger paycheck. As of now, employees looking for a raise submit an application to Zappos' Compensation Circle, a group of employees responsible for approving salaries. 

Jewett says Zappos still hires employees for traditional job roles and determines their base salaries accordingly. Once employees have undergone necessary Holacracy training, they can begin to pursue a more customized path by taking on roles in different parts of the company.

For example, "if we are hiring them for the call center, then it would be the market value call-center pay," Jewett says. "Once the employee is onboarded they will have the opportunity to expand their roles by earning different badges, giving them both the potential of earning more compensation and pursuing their passions."

There are also badges that are not tied to roles that result in a raise, such as the Teal 101 badge, which employees can earn after reading management guru Frederic Laloux's book, "Reinventing Organizations," and writing one to three paragraphs demonstrating their understanding, the Las Vegas Sun reports.

Badges also exist for non-monetary roles like proficiency in talking about Teal companies (what Zappos aspires to be) and teaching yoga. Jewett says these reinforce Hsieh's Core Value No. 3 to "create fun and a little weirdness," and self-expression has always been at the heart of Zappos.

All of these badges are accessible to browse in an internal database open to all employees. And while Zappos would not share designs with us, each badge has a unique design representing its role.

The Teal 101 Badge, according to the Las Vegas Sun, consists of two teal butterflies with a "101," inspired by Laloux's book cover.

There are no restrictions as to which type of roles employees can pursue, beyond meeting certain prerequisites. As Jewett says, "Before you can earn a Merchandising Planning Badge 103, you need to earn 102 first."

Zappos will continue to see how role-based compensation and eventually a full-fledged badge-based compensation system will work, and is also considering options it has yet to reveal.

"It's been moving really fast and people are excited, but until we flush out all the bugs we will be in a testing phase," Jewett explains. "We are also looking at other ways as well to enhance the compensation conversation."

SEE ALSO: Here's how the 'self-management' system that Zappos is using actually works

DON'T MISS: Inside Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh's radical management experiment that prompted 14% of employees to quit

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Turns out 'Shark Tank' investor Robert Herjavec doesn't value advice at all

"Shark Tank" investor Robert Herjavec's cybersecurity firm, the Herjavec Group, brought in $140 million in revenue last year. But he tells Business Insider he was not a born entrepreneur.

"Mark Cuban and I always argue about this," Herjavec says. "He's always, 'Oh, when I was 12 I knew I was going to start my own business.'"

"When I was 12," he says, "I didn't know anything. I just wanted to go outside and play."

Herjavec writes in his 2010 book, "Driven," that after he graduated college he lacked direction. He decided to get two jobs as a waiter, one at an upscale restaurant and one at a casual one, to support himself until inspiration struck. The jobs impacted him more than he ever expected.

He writes that "over the course of 25 years since then, I have often reflected on things I learned about people, about business, and about myself while waiting on tables. I won't say the experiences were totally responsible for my business success, but I draw upon them from time to time when making a business decision or assessing a situation."

Herjavec lists six business lessons he learned from having to deal with people every night as a waiter.

You can't choose all of your customers.

Diners are assigned servers according to what part of the restaurant needs to be filled, not according to how skilled the server is. That means that each server has a variety of customers on any given day.

Herjavec had to learn that some people will be more agreeable and generous than others, but that all will expect their needs to be met.

"Selling to people who share your interests is easy," he writes. "Selling to people with whom you have nothing in common isn't, but it's necessary."

The customer isn't always right.

Herjavec says he'd often deal with customers whose anger or frustration with their order would be directed at him. And while he knew it wasn't his fault, he learned that it was necessary to always have a customer leave happy, through the help of a complimentary drink or dessert.

As in business, a "sincere show of concern on my part" can win over unhappy customers, whether their unhappiness is justified or not.

Empower employees to handle problems on their own.

Most customers, Herjavec says, want to have their server address their problem rather than have to go to a manager. "They want to focus on someone who understands their concern and can solve it on the spot."

In a business setting, this means having the CEO empower employees to handle crises without always seeking the help of a superior.

Take responsibility for both successes and failures.

In a restaurant, a server is often rewarded or penalized for a great meal, regardless of the fact that they had nothing to do with the food. Similarly, business managers need to take responsibility for all of their team members' work, regardless of how involved they were.

"Success as a waiter and as a business operator consists of reaching an ideal goal in an imperfect world," Herjavec writes.

Be polite to rude customers.

Reacting to a rude customer never yielded a good result, Herjavec says.

"Managing to be pleasant and civil in the presence of rudeness, on the other hand, can provide surprising rewards," he writes.

Never appear overwhelmed.

"Diners and customers alike value coolness under pressure," Herjavec writes. He says that if he had to take a breath or throw a tantrum, it would always be in the kitchen, not in the dining area. The same principle applies in an office setting or public appearances representing your company.

SEE ALSO: 20 successful entrepreneurs share the most important lesson they learned in their 20s

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: 'Shark Tank' investor Robert Herjavec reveals the one trait successful entrepreneurs share

We’ve all heard that it’s “not what you know, but who you know.” That has some truth to it, and that’s why it resonates. Who among us has not benefited from an opportunity that could be traced back to someone else?

From internships, to jobs, to new business opportunities, most of us have someone else to thank. Networking is important even if you are not in a role that necessarily requires it, like sales or entrepreneurship. Frankly, we all benefit from each other.

You never know what opportunities may arise in the future that would help you or your company if only you had known the right point of contact, or even someone who could point you in that direction. It’s a lost opportunity to have met someone, exchanged business cards, only to have not bothered to follow up with them. Soon you’ll find their business card, but won’t be able to put the name to a face, and it would be as if you’d have never met. You’ll probably never know what you missed out on.

Here’s 4 tips on nurturing those business relationships, and creating real connections instead of just another LinkedIn connection.

1. Make your intentions clear

First, if you are trying to sell someone something (which frequently happens at conferences and industry events), make that apparent early on. If there is simply not a good product-company match, then there may not be a need for the back and forth that accompanies a sales discussion. In that case, perhaps there’s common ground or interest in a different subject? It can be interesting to learn more about a company or an individual’s background just for the sake of learning.

You can always ask people what brought them to the event. It may be to learn from notable speakers, to pitch their product, to provide their company exposure, to network, or maybe for the delicious free breakfast. There’s usually common ground to be found, especially when you know each other’s goals.

2. Help others

Once you know what someone is looking for, help them if you can. If they’re looking for a job, think about how you can be helpful. If your company is hiring for their prospective role, chat with them about their background, experiences, and what they’re looking for to see if there’s potential of moving forward with a referral. Perhaps you may know someone who knows someone, or even know someone who knows someone who knows someone. That’s what networking is all about.

Maybe during the conversation, you realize that you know somebody who could help them. You can always mention that you’ll introduce them to someone who would be relevant for them to meet, whether they’re involved in the same space or are looking for advice. If they’re not at the event with you, then you can introduce them via email. What goes around comes around.

3. Follow up right away

We meet people, and we forget their names a second later. It happens to the best of us! Thankfully, looking at a business card later with their name, company, and role can jog our memories and we’ll be able to follow up appropriately.

Follow up the next day with a quick email. Keep it short, and simply say that you enjoyed meeting them and reflect on an aspect of the conversion that you had. Something like, “It was great meeting you at DevWeek last night. Best of luck with the new launch!” If you’d like to schedule a meeting, just add “We started to talk about our techniques for growing our press reach and I’d love to continue that conversation. How does your schedule look next Tuesday to grab coffee or lunch?”

4. Keep in Touch

LinkedIn is a easy, low-commitment way to keep your contacts front-of-mind for you. It’s a great way for you and them to remember each other’s names and faces, and provide an easy future opportunity for you to reach out, as well as keep in touch. There’s no harm in having them pop up on your newsfeed or email when it’s their birthday, when they have a work anniversary, get a new job, or share content. All of these occasions are fair game for reaching out, if even with a quick and friendly note.

The key is, that you must actually reach out! This is the usual, common way these things go: you request someone on LinkedIn, they accept, you send them a follow up message and they respond, then you never contact each other again. Let’s break that cycle. You can also keep in touch with a relevant email. If you met through an industry event, then feel free to email them to ask how they are and share an interesting article that pertains to their professional interests and that touches on what you’ve discussed. Use your best judgement here: reaching out, especially out of the blue, can feel awkward, inauthentic, or tricky.

Don’t Stop the Process

If you strive to provide real value in your outreach, and are not just reaching out as a self-serving way of broadening networks that may be valuable to you, then people should look forward to your outreach. You want to aim to establish regular communication so it doesn’t appear that you’re only reaching out when you need something. Focus on what they may need, whether that be an introduction or idea. It’s the thought that counts.

There are very few unique ideas in the world; don’t think you are the first person in the billions of people in the world to think of it. The difference between success and failure relies on a lot of factors, like management and customer service, but every successful product has some distinguishing characteristic, some competitive advantage, that sets it apart from the competitors. These unique characteristics succeed because the customer sees more value in them—and consequently, in your product—than other products.

Not every successful feature translates into a competition-crushing product. Your product may have a price advantage, but that might only appeal to a small part of the market interested in ease of use. Your product may be blue instead of red, and that, for some crazy reason, might appeal to a huge part of the market, making your sales skyrocket. There are tons of examples of products in which a seemingly simple difference made a huge difference.

So, finding that simple difference can lead to success. How do you find it? I’ve been studying sales process for many years and I think I have an idea. In sales, one important thing to ask prospects is how they feel about the competitor’s product. If you can isolate what they like about the product they are currently using, then what they don’t like about it, you can build up your product’s similarities in the good things and your superiority in the bad things.

Translate this for the product development process, the critical customer investigation (See Seven Steps of Customer Investigation, 4/09/15) you have to go through as you develop your feature set and you’ll see it’s really simple process. You ask two questions:

1. What do you like most about the product you are currently using?
2. What would you change about the product you are currently using?

Let’s take a hypothetical case as an example. You are developing a new dog leash. You approach dog owners in a store or on a walk and start the customer interview. At some point, you should look for a compelling advantage.

“What do you like about the leash you’re using now?”

“It’s pretty good. It retracts and keeps my dog under control.”

“What would you change if you could?”

“Well, it’s sort of hard to hold for more than 5 minutes. I keep having to shift hands. Kind of bulky.’

Now, you get the important information in the follow up questions.

“So, you’d like it better if it were a little lighter and more comfortable to hold with just one hand, right?”

“That would be better, yes”

“Our product is specifically designed to retract and control the dog just as well as your current leash, but it is 50% lighter and the handle is shaped to make it more comfortable. Would that be something that you would see value in?”

“Absolutely. I would certainly take that into account when I’m in the market for a new leash.”

If you conduct 100 interviews and you keep hearing that complaint and response, you now know how to design your product to gain a competitive advantage.

At the age of 57, Keith Krach isn’t the prototypical young, brash college dropout CEO so often seen in Silicon Valley.

Still, Krach is leading one of the hottest startups in today’s tech scene, pushing through an epic career that spans over three decades.

Once the youngest VP in General Motors’ history, and the founder of two extremely successful startups, Krach is now the CEO of Docusign, a $3 billion e-signature company that wants to replace paper signing.

“Basically, think of wherever there’s paper, there’s a 9 out of 10 chance that we could get rid of it,” Krach told Business Insider.

If this sounds like hyperbole, just take a look at the list of investors buying into it: Kleiner Perkins, Accel Partners, Bain Capital, SAP, Microsoft, Salesforce, Intel, and Samsung, just to name a few.

Docusign has raised over $500 million to date, including its $280 million Series F round in May.

“I’m having a time of my life, as you can see," he tells us.

GM's 26-year old Vice President

Krach started his career as one of the GM Scholars at the age of 19, when he was a sophomore at Purdue University.

It was a demanding job, requiring midnight shifts at an autoplant in Detroit. “I had about 30 of the biggest guys you’ve ever seen in your life working for me,” Krach recalls. “Two of the biggest issues you had to deal with were drugs and prostitution.”

Krach still managed to leave a good impression and was later offered an engineer position when he graduated. But he was more interested in business, and instead got into the GM Fellowship program, which paid for tuition, books, and half of his salary to go to Harvard Business School.

When he returned to GM, Krach worked under Rick Wagoner, who went on to become the CEO of GM for 10 years.

Krach’s rise to fame came while leading a joint venture between GM and Fanuc, a multi-billion dollar robotics company whose equipment is used to manufacture Tesla and Apple products now. That JV quickly became an industry leader, and helped promote the 26-year old Krach to GM’s youngest VP in company history.

“People thought I was nuts”

By any means, Krach was having a great career at GM. His team was beating big shot competitors like GE and IBM in his space. He had pretty much locked up a promising future at the company.

“I probably had as good a chance as anybody to be the future CEO [of GM],” Krach told us.

But it was right around then that Krach started to feel the entrepreneurial itch. He was working with a lot of Silicon Valley-based companies at the time, and saw how fun and rewarding the startup life appeared to be.

So when GM offered him another promotion, Krach turned it down, simply saying, “I want to build my own company.”

On his 30th birthday, Krach quit his job at GM and moved out to Silicon Valley.

“People thought I was nuts,” he says.

Getting whacked in the face by a '2X4'

But Silicon Valley wasn’t what he imagined it to be. He constantly butted heads with the CEO of the startup he joined, and ended up quitting the job within a year, right when his first son was about to be born.

“It was like getting whacked in the face by a 2X4. It was the most miserable year of my life,” he says.

Still, being in the Valley connected him with a lot of good talent, and eventually he was able to find a group of PhDs who were willing to start a business with him.

They launched a company called Rasna Corporation, which developed mechanical engineering software, and in 1995 sold it to Parametric Technology for $500 million. 

“I’m sitting there, in my mid-30s, with more money than I’d ever thought I’d make, thinking, ‘What am I going to do next?’” he says.

From zero to $4.3 billion

That’s when Krach got a call from Benchmark Capital, and became its first-ever entrepreneur-in-residence, a position given to people who want to incubate startups while working at the VC firm.

Krach was still in touch with a bunch of Rasna guys then, and with six of his best people, he formed another new startup called Ariba.

This was around 1996 when the internet was just getting started. Ariba’s goal was to create an online service that could speed up the entire procurement process for businesses, making things like supply chain management, invoicing, and billings a lot easier.

Ariba was able to raise $6 million in just two days, and turned cash flow positive from the second quarter of its existence. A few years later, in 1999, Ariba went public, becoming one of the first internet software companies to IPO.

Ariba may not be a household name, but it's had some of the most talented people who went on to do big things in the Valley. Its CTO was Craig Federighi, now Apple's SVP of software engineering, while Jim Steele and David Rudnitsky, the two pioneering former Saleforce executives now at Insidesales.com, were also part of its sales team.

Krach eventually left Ariba in 2001, shortly after the dot-com crash. Once a company worth over $30 billion, Ariba was sold for $4.3 billion to SAP in 2012.

Semi-retired 'soccer dad'

For the next 8 years after leaving Ariba, Krach spent most of his time with his kids, enjoying life as a semi-retired, “soccer dad,” he says.

During that time, he took his son out of school for a year to travel around the world, from Mt. Kilimanjaro to the Amazon jungle and the African desert.

Then one day, after he returned to the States, Krach received a call from Pete Solvik, then-CIO of Cisco, who he knew through a previous deal at Ariba.

“I have a company to show you,” Solvik said. “It’s like Ariba on steroids.”

Solvik was referring to Docusign, a software company founded in 2003 that allows users to send signatures and manage documents online. Krach was immediately hooked and soon got on the board.

Replacing paper

The Docusign board was looking for a new CEO to take the company to the next level at the time, and had Krach in mind.

But Krach had some reservations about returning to a CEO position. He knew more than anyone how draining and tough the job could be.

Krach says he made up his mind after a brief conversation with his wife. “I remember going back home, telling my wife, ‘These guys want me to do the CEO thing, but I can tell you don’t want me doing this. There’s no peace of mind,” he told her. “I don’t know if this is a good idea - what do you think?”

Krach’s wife told him: “All I know is when you go to a Docusign board meeting, you’re so excited. And when you come back home from one, you’re even more excited…I’ve seen husband Keith, father Keith, Purdue Keith, but I’ve never seen CEO Keith that’s having this much fun.”

So in 2012, Krach accepted the offer and became Docusign’s CEO.

Krach says his decision to ditch semi-retirement and resume what he calls the "CEO thing" was largely predicated on the opportunity he saw ahead for Docusign. He says its technology that allows people to sign paper electronically in a secure environment — within minutes, as opposed to days when it's on paper — is a game-changer that will completely disrupt the document approval and management process. 

"I came back because I really saw an opportunity to change the way business is done and to build something that's built to last," Krach says.

Docusign has been quickly expanding its presence across the world, reaching 50 million unique users across 188 countries. More than 100,000 companies use it for document approval and transaction, as well as workflow management. Now it's estimated to be worth $3 billion.

Is an IPO the next step?

Krach won't say exactly. 

"Everybody asks that question, but for us we just look at being public as a financing event," he says. "We choose with our equity strategy, not ony the most efficient way, but also to ensure that we get long term investors and strategic partners in terms of investments like Google, SAP, Salesforce, NTT, Mitsui, Samsung."

In any case, he says that a company has really made it when the brand becomes a verb, the way that Google or Uber are used in place of the words for "online search" or "taxi-hailing." Docusign has now become a verb too, he says, as in "just docusign it" when people ask for an electronic signature.

Krach believes this is just the tip of the iceberg, with much more room to grow. “Not only large and small companies can use it, but every department within those companies, and every person are potential users," Krach says. “The value is infinitely quantifiable.” 

SEE ALSO: This former Google exec’s startup lends money based on your school, SAT score, and job history — and a star Wall Street investor’s betting on it

Join the conversation about this story »

Ideas have rights.

• The right to exist. You judge your ideas to soon. You are afraid they aren’t good enough. You worry that people will judge you for having a bad idea or one with which they don’t agree. So you kill the idea while it is still in the womb before it is even born. But the only way to have good ideas is to have a lot of ideas. Your ideas have a right to exist.
• The right to be explored. Some ideas are half-baked. They aren’t fully formed. They’re just the kernel of an idea. Many of them won’t amount to anything. But with further exploration, some ideas turn out to be valuable, revolutionary, earth-shattering humdingers. Unless you explore the idea, you’ll never know whether or not it had value.
• The right to be defended. Your ideas need you to defend them. They need to be protected. There is always someone who is willing to play devil’s advocate, and too few willing to play angel’s advocate. Ideas don’t grow up to create value and come to fruition without someone willing to defend them from those who would rather see them destroyed.

You will never have the right idea if you aren’t willing to generate ideas without fear, explore them without judgement, and defend them from those opposed..

The post Ideas Have Rights appeared first on The Sales Blog.

Let’s be honest: our education system is screwed.

I mean, almost all of the important history I learned between grades 5 and 12 I could probably find on Wikipedia and understand within a few weeks now.

And pretty much any scientific knowledge you could ever want to learn is explained with pretty videos on YouTube.

On top of that, you have the most unstable job market in almost 100 years, technology developing so rapidly that robots will be doing half the work in another decade, college degrees that some argue are now worthless, and new industries and technologies being invented practically every six months.

Yet we’re still pushing kids through the same curriculum their grandparents went through.

It’s cliche at this point to say that the most important things you learn in life you don’t learn in school. I know in my life, the most important things I’ve learned I had to figure out on my own as an adult.

But why couldn’t these things be taught in school? I mean, if I had to spend six months learning about Chaucer and Renaissance painters, why couldn’t I spend six months learning about how to save for retirement and what sexual consent was? Or why didn’t anybody tell me that by the time I became an adult, a large percentage of the job market would either be performed by robots or sent overseas?

Call me bitter. Or maybe just an entitled Millennial. But seriously, where were these classes? You know, the ones with the s--- I actually needed to hear?

Obviously, when I rule the world — which should be any day now, waiting to hear back from some people — we won’t have these problems. I will craft a curriculum of the perfect life knowledge to impart upon the populace. And you will all thank me and give offerings of milk and honey and sexy virgins and maybe even slaughter a goat or two in my name (sorry vegans).

But before I get carried away fantasizing, let’s get real. What are the classes we shouldhave had to take in high school, but didn’t? Here are five off the top of my head.

1. Personal finance

Curriculum would include: Credit cards and interest rates and credit ratings and retirement accounts and why you should start saving like $100 per week when you’re 18 because by the time you’re 50 you’ll be like a quadruple-gajillionaire.

Seriously, compound interest runs the f------ planet. How did I not even hear about this until I was like 24?

Why it’s important: Because the average American household has over $15,000 in credit card debt.2 Because 36% of working Americans have NOTHING saved for retirement.3 Because this video exists:

Note: If you would choose the chocolate bar over the silver, and don’t understand why this is a horrible decision, meet me at this footnote. We need to talk. Now.4

If managing your own money was a school, the majority of the US population would be riding the shortbus. And failing. And dropping out entirely.

This financial illiteracy is actually a really big problem. Because, see, if you have a society full of people buying a bunch of crap they can’t afford, retiring with no savings, getting sick and not being able to afford health care — well, that screws all of us in a major way.

You know, like exactly what is happening right now.

2. Relationships

Curriculum would include: Communicating your feelings without blaming or judging each other; how to spot manipulative behavior and cut it off; personal boundaries and not being a pushover; honest discussions about sexuality and how it relates (or doesn’t relate) to love; “F--- Yes” consent and how the experiences of men and women differ.

Basically everything most of us learn by going through excruciating breakup after excruciating breakup.

Why it’s important: Because when you’re in bed dying of cancer, you’re not thinking about how Napoleon got over-zealous in Russia or how the Meiji Restoration totally changed the face of Asian geopolitics or how organic compounds are conspiring to make your brain rot.

You’re thinking about the ones you’ve loved in your life and the ones you’ve lost.

Many things make for a happy life, but few things have as much influence and impact as our relationships do.5 Learning how to not stumble through them like a drunken a------ and how to exercise some conscious control of how you express your emotions and intimacy is possibly the most life-changing skill set I’ve ever come across.

Because we’re not just talking about how to get wifey’d and have sexy time. We’re talking about capital-R Relationships: how to be a good friend, how to not treat your family like dog s---, how to deal with conflict at work, how to take responsibility for your own emotions and problems and neuroses without dragging the rest of the world down with you.

As humans, we are fundamentally social animals. We don’t exist in a vacuum. We can’t. Our social bonds make up the fabric of our life. The question is: are yours made of smooth silk or cheap polyester?

3. Logic and reasoning

Curriculum would include: This question:

The answer, of course, is “false.” 6

Questions like this always felt annoying on standardized tests. But our ability to think through them actually has major repercussions on our beliefs and how we lead our lives. For instance, following the same logical progression as above, but with real-world examples:

“Cindy creates conflict at the office. Cindy is a woman. Therefore women create conflict at the office.” 7

Or:

“Most criminals are poor. Most poor people receive welfare. Therefore most welfare goes to criminals.”

These things are false, yet you see them reported in the media as fact, debated by leaders as if they’re valid arguments, and become the foundation of many people’s biases and prejudices.

Just the other day, I saw possibly the stupidest article I’ve seen in months. It tried to argue that sexual objectification of women is wrong while sexual objectification of men is fine. Why? Because men aren’t raped as often as women are.

That’s like Swiss-cheese territory of logical holes and fallacies.8

Why it’s important: The point is, we’re making these logical fallacies all the time. And often in subtle ways that go unnoticed by us. And often regarding important decisions and beliefs that have life-or-death consequences. They creep up in political campaigns (X is good at making money; governments need to make money; therefore X will be good at government), civil rights issues, moral and ethical decisions (Bob lies to me, therefore I should be able to lie to Bob), dealing with personal conflicts, and so on.

These logical fallacies then infiltrate our lives by causing us to make dumb decisions. Dumb decisions about our health, our relationships, our career, pretty much everything.

The problem is in school we’re rarely taught how to actually think or problem solve. Instead, we’re taught how to copy and memorize things — and then promptly forget them.9 This poorly suits us for sorting through the complexities of adult life. And especially because in the 21st century, life is getting really f------ complex. I feel like maybe the intellectual retreat we’re seeing recently into religious fundamentalism and other simple-minded cultures comes from this complete lack of preparation for a complicated postmodern world.

4. Self-awareness

Curriculum would include: I know what you’re saying right now. “How the f--- do you teach self-awareness?” But seriously, it can be taught and practiced like anything else.10

Self-awareness is the ability to think about how you think. It’s the ability to have feelings about your feelings. To have opinions about your opinions.

For example, I might think something like, “I hate every person named ‘Steve.’ People named Steve are bad people.”

This is a classic example of bigotry, a simple channeling of hatred through some superficial stereotype. And if you lack all self-awareness, you will take this prejudice at face value.

But if one is self-aware, they’ll catch this thought and question it. “Why do I hate people named Steve? Is it maybe because my ex-boyfriend is named Steve? Is it because my father’s named Steve? Am I perhaps channeling my anger for the Steves in my life onto all of the Steves of the world? I feel embarrassed at how hateful I am. I should visit a shrink.”

This is me thinking about my thoughts. It’s me having feelings about my feelings. It’s me having opinions on my opinions. It’s self-awareness. And the majority of people go through most of their life having very little of it.

But it can be learned, like anything else, through practice. Basically anything that requires you to think about what you’re thinking, to have feelings about your feelings, is developing your ability to be self-aware. That could be meditation, talk therapy, journaling, or just having a person really close to you point out your biases and prejudices with some consistency.

Why it’s important: A high degree of self-awareness has been found in research to benefit, well, just about everything. People who develop meta-cognition skills are better planners, more disciplined, more focused, more attuned to their emotions, better decision-makers, and better able to foresee potential problems ahead.11

I also make the point in this article that self-awareness is possibly the most important traitin making a relationship work.

In everything we do in life, there’s only one tool that stays with us from beginning to end: our mind. It is the great filter. Everything we do and everything that happens to us is filtered through our own mind and thinking. Therefore, we need to invest the time and energy to understand our mind as well as we possibly can, because it affects everything. Maybe you are quick to get angry and judgmental. Maybe you’re laid back and overly detached. Maybe you suffer from anxiety in a number of ways that are subtly holding you back. Maybe you are impulsive and an expert at bulls------- yourself.

Whatever it is, we must all figure out our own tendencies and then learn how to monitor them and then adapt to them.

5. Skepticism

Curriculum would include: Why everything we believe is most likely wrong to some degree; why our memories are completely unreliable; how fields as seemingly sturdy as mathematics and physics are full of unresolvable uncertainty;12 how we’re all terrible judges of both what made us happy/unhappy in the past and what will make us happy/unhappy in the future;13 how the most important events in history are always those that are least predictable;14 how it’s certainty and rigidness of belief that leads to evil and violence, not the opposite;15 that much of what passes for scientific knowledge today is based on research that has repeatedly failed to be replicated or verified;16 and so on.

Why it’s important: Pretty much anything good in life comes from uncertainty or a state of not knowing. Uncertainty is what drives you to become curious, to learn, to test new ideas, to communicate your intentions to others. It’s what keeps you humble. It helps you accept whatever comes along. It allows you to see others without unfair judgments and biases.

Pretty much anything bad in life comes from certainty: complacency, arrogance, bigotry and unfair prejudice. People don’t get together and form religious cults and then drink cyanide-laced Kool-Aid because they’re uncertain about something. They do it because they’re certain. Governments don’t starve and murder millions of their own citizens because of uncertainty. They do it because of certainty. People don’t fall into deep depression, obsessively stalk their ex, or shoot up a school because they’re uncertain about themselves. They do it because they’re certain.

They’re certain in a belief that, like almost every other belief, is probably wrong.

Skepticism cultivates the ability to open yourself to alternatives, to withhold judgment, to question and challenge yourself and make yourself a better person.

You don’t actually know if Susy at work hates you or not. You don’t actually know whether your boss is a d--- or just bad at communicating. Maybe his wife has cancer or something and he stays up crying all night. Maybe you’re the d--- and you don’t know it.

You don’t really know if gay marriage will ruin the fabric of society or whether men and women really are so different or the same. You don’t know if that new job will make you happy, if getting married will fix your relationship problems (I’m betting on “no”), or whether or not your kid really deserves all those participation awards.

Life is lived in the uncertainties. Our certainties are just strategies we use to avoid that life. To avoid adapting and changing and flowing through it. Because education and learning shouldn’t end when the last textbook slams shut or when the diplomas are handed out. It should only end when we do.

Notes

1. Whenever I write articles bashing the US education system, I often get angry emails from teachers. I just want to make it clear that I’m not bashing the teachers themselves or the work they’re doing. There are great teachers and there are shitty teachers. But they’re all stuck within a shitty system. And I’m sure many of them feel just as hamstrung with the antiquated curriculum as the rest of us.
2. As of July 2015. Pulled from the New York Fed’s Report on Household Credit Debt
3. USA Today. A third of people have nothing saved for retirement.
4. Hi there. Let me guess, you’re having some money problems right now? Maybe own a few too many flat screen TVs that you are having trouble paying off? Maybe a car you can’t really afford but don’t want to give up? Maybe student loan debt five times higher than your annual salary? Well, the good news is, things can get better. The bad news is that when you manage money, it’s not pretty. You do know that ten ounces of silver is worth like $160, right? OK, look, I’m not going to rag on you. You need help. The best beginner-level book on personal finance I’ve read is Ramit Sethi’s I Will Teach You To Be Rich. Do yourself a favor and read it.
5. Vaillant, G. E. (2012). Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press.
6. The way to approach these logic questions is to always replace the funny names with something more tangible, like: “All Eskimos are Canadian. All Canadians are North American. Therefore all North Americans are Eskimos.” When phrased this way, it’s obvious that there are tons of North Americans who are not Eskimos. A surprising amount of students get questions like this wrong.
7. I love this example because it can be interpreted in both a misogynistic way and a misandrist way. Chauvinist guys will say, “Yeah, Cindy starts all the fights because she’s a woman.” Raging radical feminists will say, “Yeah, men pick fights with Cindy because she’s a woman.” Both conclusions are logically incorrect (and bigoted).
8. This article was so infuriatingly dumb that I’m not even going to link to it. You’re welcome humanity.
9. For instance, most kids drop two grade levels in math over summer break.
10. In psychological jargon, self-awareness is known as ‘meta-cognition.’
11. Schraw, G. (1998). Promoting general metacognitive awareness. Instructional Science, 26(1-2), 113–125.
12. Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem showed that there are inherent limitations in any axiomatic system of mathematics. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle shows that at a sub-atomic level, nothing can be truly measured with any precision.
13. See: Stumbling On Happiness by Daniel Gilbert for more on this.
14. See: The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb for more on this.
15. See: Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty by Roy Baumeister for more on this.
16. The New Yorker. The Truth Wears Off.

SEE ALSO: The 15 best business schools for your salary

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Why we have to give our business partners the power to destroy us

I recently finished a book called Dirty Little Secrets by Sharon Drew Morgan. Fascinating. Read it.

It emphasizes the need to understand and empathize with the buyer’s crazy internal system that accepts or does not accept any change to their status quo. The premise is: until the buying team can obtain buy-in to changing the status quo…they won’t. It’s that simple.

When you insert a new system—a new way of doing things—resistance is everywhere. You can show them all day long how your solution makes things better. But until you get conformation—or a true confession from all interested parties, you’ll waste lots of time in the selling cycle wondering what’s going on inside the buying decision cycle.

Until you get all interested people to the table and discuss all the options: internal solutions, existing vendors, and workarounds, you really won’t make much progress. The key is to be a problem facilitator, not a solution peddler.

They’ll go through this process anyway—they have to. So don’t fight it. Leverage it.

We have been really successful with buying facilitation. It’s now part of our selling culture. And it’s changed everything. We don’t talk about our solutions—we talk about the buyer’s situation, and the change obstacles they are facing.  We encourage looking at internal solutions, other existing vendor solutions, and possible workarounds.

If they pass that test, and still have a problem, then you have a qualified buyer. It helps you and the buying team quickly get to your solution.

How to use buying facilitation questions to maximum advantage

Ask the right questions early—don’t peddle products.

“So, have you looked at ways to solve the problems without bringing in an external solution?”

“Are there existing solutions in place that could be enhanced to address the issues?”

“Who needs to be involved to get a change like this accepted?”

“What are the main obstacles you see in making this change?”

Become the buying facilitator—the trusted advisor

After helping your buying team understand how to consider the possible alternatives and workarounds, then you can start to show how your solutions can bring greater value. You’ll have inside knowledge and competitive position, making your job much easier. You can demonstrate value with confidence that your buyers are ready to change.

It makes so much sense. And best of all… it works. It dramatically shortens your sales cycles, because you’re expediting the inevitable.

Hope you have your best year ever.

To many contemporary B2B sales professionals, the CRM is a necessary evil rather than an enabling solution that actually helps them do their job more efficiently. This is a symptom of technology deployment for its own sake and of companies taking their eyes off the prize: sales operations processes and tools that truly speed up the sales cycle.

“Boss, do you want me spending my time entering data into the CRM, or closing deals?”

The one-word answer to this question may be considered both evasive and abrasive: “yes.” Almost every modern selling team uses some form of CRM platform, from traditional “glorified Rolodex” on-premise solutions to leading-edge, cloud-based, collaborative streams that look more like Facebook than enterprise applications. The difference between how high-performing sales organizations and lagging teams utilize this business foundation often boils down to one simple premise: whether the system has been deployed for the primary benefit of management ‒ which legitimately needs to monitor activity and build accurate forecasts ‒ or of individual contributors, who represent the source of most raw data. If your company suffers from GIGO fatigue (garbage in, garbage out) in your CRM then no one is benefiting from the time and money invested in it. And chances are your sales forecasts and other metrics are suffering as a result.

A Faster Way To Beating Quota

Aberdeen’s research conducted for From Lead to Close: Best-in-Class Sales Acceleration Techniques that Win shows us that the most successful sales teams – leaders, individual contributors, operations, and even sales engineers – share an identifiable set of best practices as well as technology investments, which set them apart from under-performers. For example, these Best-in-Class organizations are 48% more likely than All Others (80% vs. 54%) to indicate high or very high proficiency at “minimizing the number of people, departments, and other internal steps required to develop and deliver a sales quote or proposal to our prospective buyers.” A similar delta of 43% (73% vs. 51%) applies to “Rapidly and effectively responding to requests for proposals (RFPs) or other formal bidding opportunities from current / prospective customers.”

Figure 1: Top Performers Accelerate Their Sales Workflow Tech Investments

These best practices are supported by a collection of enabling technologies addressed in the Lead to Close data set, all of which are receiving significantly more investments among Best-in-Class firms – Figure 1. While each of these solution sets offers benefit to modern sales leaders on their own – see Aberdeen’s published content on proposal automation, configure-price-quote, sales contract management, sales playbooks, and electronic signature – a fascinating data point within the research tells us that Best-in-Class firms are far more likely than under-performers to plan increased integration between these niche products and their core CRM. The average delta between these Leading companies and All Others, in fact, is a staggering 115%, ranging from merely impressive (59% for CPQ integration) to remarkable (217% for proposal automation solutions).

Turning CRM Into A Mission-Critical, Must-Have Foundation

If so many more successful sales leaders are, literally, doubling down on their investment in integrating sales workflow enablers with their CRM, are they similarly investing in the core platform itself? Let’s look at their deployments in the context of friction-reducing success by reevaluating survey responses to compare the performance and behavior of “CRM Expanders” versus All Other respondents. This label refers to the 67% of companies indicating a planned expansion of their CRM footprint in the coming year, and yields a striking set of performance differentials. Compared with companies planning to reduce or simaintain CRM focus, Expanders report:

• 52% more proposals, quotes, or RFP responses delivered to customers / prospects (14.25 per sales rep, per month, vs. 9.40)
• 32% higher overall team attainment of sales quota (62% vs. 47%)
• 24% more sales reps achieving individual quota (56% vs. 45%)
• 23% higher lead conversion rate (33% vs. 27%)
• 11% more quotes resulting in orders (41% vs. 37%)

In addition to these performance metrics, the same subset of survey respondents report far greater proficiencies – Figure 2 – such as the Best-in-Class competencies reported above:

Figure 2: Sales Efficiencies Accrue To Aggressive CRM Deployers

Read the full report here.

Think you need deep pockets and an outrageously large marketing budget to attract customers? Think again.

Some of the highest growth companies have shockingly low marketing budgets. In fact, companies with the highest growth spend only 4.9% of their revenues on marketing, according to a survey by Hinge. That’s compared to the 5.1% spent by businesses with average growth figures.

The reason high growth businesses can spend so little is because these companies focus on a strategy that has the greatest return on investment – inbound marketing.

Inbound marketing is a strategy that attracts customers to your brand naturally. It doesn’t rely on pushy messages and forcing brands in front of consumers. It instead takes a value-based approach to bring customers the answers needed to make a purchase.

Here’s an example of when this works. SEO leads have a 14.6% close rate, while outbound leads (from print or direct mail) only see a 1.7% close rate, according to Search Engine Journal. Businesses with 401 – 1000 pages of content on their website get six times more leads than businesses with only 51 – 100 pages of content, according to HubSpot’s Lead Generation Lessons from 4,000 Businesses report.

Companies that see the biggest influx in leads, and in turn higher growth patterns, are those that put value first.

Here are some of the core elements of this strategy and why it works.

It All Starts With The Customer

High growth companies have a relentless focus on their customers. Before any marketing campaign is launched, these companies take an intimate look at what their buyers want, need, and are struggling with. They don’t focus on demographics and statistics that tell an inaccurate story. Instead, they focus on the inner thoughts and desires of their client base.

Here are a few ways they do this:

Buyer Personas

To get to know the people behind each purchase, most high growth companies develop buyer personas. These personas put a face to the buyer and tell their story. They outline:

• The buyer’s wants;
• The buyer’s needs;
• The buyer’s goals;
• The buyer’s desires;
• The pain points the buyer experiences;
• The goals the buyer has for his/her life.

With this in mind, companies are better able to understand the motivations of their customers, making it easier to build a product or service that’s needed by the market.

Vision Statement

These companies don’t just stop at getting to know the customers. They infuse their customers into everything they do. To build a customer-centric culture, high growth companies create a vision statement that’s centered on serving their customer.

This vision statement is crucial. It focuses product development teams on creating products that will attract the market. It focuses the marketing campaigns on developing messaging is clear and compelling.

Instead of just solving problems, high growth companies win over their buyers and develop customer evangelists.

Flexibility Is Key

Getting to know your buyer is just the first step. You must also anticipate their future needs, wants, and desires based on the information you already know. Then, to answer those needs (sometimes, even before the customer knows she needs it) you must develop your product accordingly.

This requires flexibility.

The more nimble your processes are, the faster you can adapt your products and marketing campaigns to your target market’s needs. Reevaluating these needs every six months to a year is important so that you’re always on the leading edge.

Adding Value Through Content

Ultimately, your customer needs to know you’re listening to her needs. She wants to work with a company that “gets it.” Inbound marketing enables your brand to talk to your customer and show the value you offer. Creating content that answers their pain points and solves problems accomplishes this task.

In tailoring a campaign to prospects, it is helpful to answer the questions: What is important for them to know about your company, and what is important for them to know about the products or services your company offers? It is important to understand how the product or service can benefit your audience and to accurately identify a point of pain (or multiple points) that they are experiencing. Once that information is determined it is easier to develop relevant content to answer these questions and help your messaging resonate with prospects. – Launch Marketing

There are several forms of content you can produce:

• Written content, such as blogs or e-books
• Videos
• Audio, such as snippets on your website with SoundCloud or podcasts

When you have content that is easily accessible and available in a variety of formats, it’s easier to be heard by the people who want to learn more from your company. The best part? It doesn’t cost you a fortune to produce, making this one of the most affordable and effective marketing strategies.

Your Marketing Budget Is All About “Show Me The Money”

These low-cost approaches – customer focus, flexibility, and value-based approaches – attract more business and retain loyal customers. It’s a one-two punch that makes it easy for high growth companies to spend less on marketing and still see the high returns they’re after.

Want to learn more about how high growth companies market their business? Check out “The Ultimate Marketing Guide for High Growth Companies” to get more insight into why it works and the details of how it’s done.

There is a new world order coming to Wall Street. 

Startups are taking on the financial sector. Some of the companies look to usurp traditional players, and others step into the gaps they've left behind. 

Business Insider spoke to venture capitalists and banking veterans to put together a list of lesser-known start ups, some of which are just a couple of month old.   

The list includes companies offering online payments, loan origination, wealth management software, cryptocurrency trading and behavioral analysis for financial clients.

Some are worth hundreds of millions, while others are bootstrapped.

Every one is trying to find their place alongside the biggest names on Wall Street. 

Estimize keeps traders ahead of the tape

Wall Street traders and banks are always on the lookout for top tools to sharpen their game. That’s where Estimize comes in. Leigh Drogen’s startup crunches data for hundreds of companies to get estimates to traders that might be ahead of the tape. One example is luxury brand Coach, according to Drogen, who told Business Insider: "Our consensus is well below Wall Street and the stock has been correspondingly getting crushed on the lower real expectations.” Estimize closed a new funding round earlier this month, taking the total for money raised to more than $6 million to date. The firm is up against established players like Thomson Reuters’ First Call, among others.  

Exitround looks to simplify the M&A process

The M&A process is one of the most secretive parts of the business of Wall Street. Slipping up and leaking details might disrupt a deal or publicly embarrass executives. Exitround’s software allows companies to shop themselves anonymously to potential buyers. Its network includes 30,000 client companies and private equity firms and other investors, and uses more than one billion data points to help pair off companies up for sale with those looking to make an acquisition. 

WealthFront is taking on money managers

WealthFront CEO Adam Nash says that method of money management is outdated and inefficient. Wealth management units at the big banks are often bloated as there is a limit to the number of account money managers can control, which can be as few as six. “It’s a ratio that doesn’t need to exist,” he says of the banks’ personnel-heavy business model. “There’s only a few solutions to that problem.” Customers can sign up to WealthFront with as little as $500, and the start-up doesn't charge them for the first $10,000 it manages. As millenials save and inherit more, digital finance management tools could displace a huge revenue driver at banks.

NOW WATCH: People were baffled by 50 sharks circling in shallow waters off the English coast

I don’t think it’s an accident that there’s so much buzz around account-based marketing right now. As a matter of fact, right around the corner in the sales world, there’s a new phenomenon happening called social selling.

What’s the link between the two? And why now?

Great questions — and of course, I have an opinion.

I have to share that I first heard about social selling from the queen herself, Jill Rowley, during an interview we did. At the time, my main excitement was centered on account-based marketing. After spending some time with Jill, we found that we were both talking about the same thing: the customer experience.

Here’s the reality: the reason these two trends are happening right now and rocking the sales and marketing world is because customer behaviors have fundamentally changed.

Here are two amazing stats that show why account-based marketing and social selling are driving the next generation of tech, strategy, sales, and marketing:

92% of #B2B marketers say #ABM is extremely important to marketing. – @SiriusDecisions

90% of B2B buyers say when they are ready to buy, they will find you.- @DG_Report

Let’s now examine both strategies in turn, and take a look at a few of the reasons that they appeal to the marketing and sales audiences, respectively.

Account-based Marketing

This goal here is to identify the right companies, expand your reach to all of the relevant influencers/decision makers within those companies by exposing them to your messaging across any channel possible, and turn them into advocates. This is what I call the #FlipMyFunnel movement.

Historically, B2B marketing has been all about lead generation, which is all wrong since no one really closes a lead. Every business in B2B closes an account.

Lead metrics are extremely archaic and almost worthless if the lead is not from the right company, doesn’t fit your customer criteria, and doesn’t have the exact job description and purchasing power that you need to close the deal. That combination is almost impossible to find in one lead unless you are selling to a one-person company.

Why are B2B marketers excited about account-based marketing?

B2B Marketers never had a chance to earn a seat at the decision-making table — until now. Marketers are still the ones who write e-books, design eye-catching event booths, respond to sales for support with collateral, and create tons of internal messaging that no one uses (okay, that’s a bit dramatic — but it’s the ugly truth of marketing that most CMOs hate to admit).

Now, imagine that — all of a sudden — marketers can impact the bottom line and see the results of their efforts in the same way that the sales team does.

As the sales leader talks in a boardroom meeting about the top ten accounts they are trying to close, the marketer in the room can chime in and tell the story of how the account — not just one lead — has been engaging with the content and brand as a whole.

That is incredibly powerful (like wearing an Iron Man suit, as my 5 year old would say). It’s no wonder that marketers are excited to try account-based marketing for themselves.

Social Selling

Jill put it best when she said:

Social selling is all about relationship-building and engaging with customers on their terms.

It requires understanding your various personas and needs of your prospective customers. Also, it involves doing the Gary Vaynerchuck-style jab, jab, jab before you throw the right hook.

This means that you should provide so much value to your prospects up front that you practically guilt them into doing something for you without really asking for it. As a sales person myself, this is really hard to do, but when done right, it’s magical.

Why are sales professionals excited about Social Selling?

Sales has been doing the same old phone and email catch-up game since the late 90s. No matter how many stats prove that this strategy is depleting sales resources and annoying the heck out of others — just like climate change — some need to disagree.

But the fact remains, no one likes cold calls or emails! And if that’s the reality, then why would you do that to others?

With social selling, sales finally has a better way to engage with their buyers on their terms by talking about things their prospects care about — not on the phone — but on Twitter or LinkedIn. They can view their prospect’s interests and send them content that they will appreciate without having to rely on cold calls.

Finally, sales can talk to someone. It’s ironic, but true!

To put it candidly, making hundreds of cold calls each day with little response has to suck. On the other hand, having a Tweet reply that goes directly to a buyer and having insight into whether the buyer favorites it — now that’s refreshing. No wonder all sales wants to do is be social! It takes them back to how they were before technology took over.

The Bottom Line

The reality remains that both B2B sales and marketing are going through some incredible changes. I’d venture to say that it’s because of one big reason: our customers have evolved and they expect different — and more — engagement than usual.

However, it’s not about emailing or calling them, it’s about engaging them on their terms. It’s not about making a great sales pitch, but about telling a story that drives results.

Both account-based marketing and social selling are here to stay. That should not only make sales reps and marketers happy, it should make customers happy too.

Leads, leads, leads.

That’s all sales reps on your team should care about, right? Well, not exactly.

Leads are obviously vital, but many sales leaders are shifting the focus from individual leads to a system of named accounts. A named account is a specific company or organization assigned to a rep, including multiple contacts within the company. When one lead at a company raises their hand and indicates interest in buying your product, reps chase that lead, but also go after the lead’s co-workers, supervisor, and the CEO.

Many companies shy away from named accounts because it’s more difficult to set up in a CRM. However, it’s worth the effort. Instead of working a long list of unrelated leads, named accounts push reps to take responsibility for engaging multiple prospects within one company. It’s a much more effective way to sell to prospects, and gets results. Here’s why your sales team should stop chasing leads and start working named accounts.

B2B Buying Decisions Involve an Average of 5.4 People

Focusing on leads alone simply doesn’t work for salespeople anymore. In today’s complex B2B sales world, no one ever makes decisions alone. In fact, the typical B2B buying decision now involves an average of 5.4 people, according to research from CEB. This means that sales reps must sell to multiple people at every prospective company. Reps have to get a group consensus that it’s a good decision to buy the product, or the deal will never close. This is incredibly difficult to do if you only have one contact at a company.

Sales reps have to get buy in from multiple people within the organization, including tough-to-convince CFOs and VPs. For example, if a rep relies too heavily on one sales champion to sell the product internally, the sale is at risk. What if that champion goes on vacation for a few weeks, or takes a new job? With just one contact to rely on, the deal could easily push to next month, or completely die. But if reps are working the entire account and can engage with another person at the company, it’s much harder for the opportunity to suddenly go cold.

A Duplication of Efforts Can Kill Your Deal

Reps should have specific accounts assigned to them to work personally. Instead of just chasing a single lead, reps should contact an initial lead at a company, and then dig deeper and work the entire account. This means they should prospect into the account, searching LinkedIn and other sources for relevant contacts and reaching out to multiple people. Reps can also get introduced to other people within the organization through that first contact. Working the account makes it much easier for reps to reach the decision-maker, instead of wasting time with powerless tire-kickers.

This will also minimize the risk of your team accidentally duplicating their sales efforts. For example, without the structure of named accounts, one rep might not realize that a co-worker is already working with a lead at the same company. The second rep will call and try to re-introduce the product, when the prospect’s company is already fully engaged and looking into buying. This isn’t just an annoyance either — it could kill the deal. Prospects will think your company is disorganized and untrustworthy. Working the account prevents this nightmare scenario.

Sell the Right Features to the Right Role

While named accounts reduce the risk of doubling up efforts and improve your ability to sell, this method doesn’t come without challenges. Sales reps cannot approach every contact at the account in the same way. Each person within the company has different needs that sales reps must focus on when selling. As you go through and work the account — starting with a lower-level employee and working your way through management and across departments — make sure you keep your buyer in mind and customize your pitch.

For example, a line-of-business prospect does not have the same wants or needs at the CEO. As you sell, you have to change your value proposition to suit your audience as you work the account. Makes sure that the admin knows how your product will save you time, the manager knows you your product will improve results, and the CEO knows the ROI. Named accounts are often more work, but they give sales reps more control over the messages being communicated to all of the stakeholders involved.

Named accounts aren’t just another option for approaching a sales or categorizing a lead. It’s a systematic change that fundamentally alters the way your reps engage with prospects. Named accounts will push your team to dive deeper, work the entire account, and close more deals.

Fourteen years ago my business partner and I identified a big problem with many sales/marketing teams. A gap existed between the two that was dramatically affecting the productivity of both teams and as a result, the growth of the organizations whose teams had this dysfunction.

Over the years the problem has been identified by the sales and marketing community as a whole so many organizations have attempted to address this issue with limited or little success.

The gap to which I refer is the Sales Development function. The function which qualifies MQL’s generated from marketing as well as making proactive outbound calls into the company’s “sweet spot” of target prospects.

Amazingly, this function either does not exist within many organizations or if it does, it is not nearly as effective as it should be. SiriusDecisions added this function to their waterfall much to our delight a few years back. This has helped bring light to the function, but there is still much work to do.

Over the years we have seen the advent of CRM, the marketing automation, and most recently a wide variety of “sales acceleration” tools. While all of these tools can be helpful, in my experience most fall short in that the user is unable to maximize them, given they just do not have the appropriate level of specific expertise. To make matters worse very few of the companies that provide these tools have the will or ability to provide the necessary support to ensure customer success. Most, if not all are technology companies and have very little focus or understanding of Services. As a result, an entire business category of consultants has been created to address this need. A quick Google search will yield dozens of, CRM, marketing automation and general marketing and sales consultants. I know and work with many great people in this category, all of which provide tremendous value to their customers. Trish, Cindy, Janet, Matt and the entire team at The Bridge Group, Kevin at Daggerfoil, Matt at Heinz Marketing, and John Barrows are some of the best and brightest in the industry, helping their customers gain a significant market advantage over their competitors largely by helping them implement Sales Development Strategies.

No tool is a silver bullet. Smart, motivated sales professionals are, and will always be necessary to complete the equation for success. Buyers still want to interact with salespeople. The idea that an organization can rely solely on inbound leads generated through SEO, email marketing, Google Adwords and such is simply a pipedream. In a Webinar I recently attended, Craig Elias, presented data from a Demand Gen report revealing that a whopping 80% of purchases are unbudgeted and unplanned. Put another way, if you stick to inbound alone, you might be losing out on up to 80% of your potential revenue.

I have been in sales my entire career if there was a silver bullet I would have found it. The only tool that has helped me or my team, has been the one that we developed internally to help sales development reps which pulls together the right combination of data, process, technology, combined with coaching, management and reporting. In my experience there is no substitute for hard work. Working hard with the right tools, process and support however can and will yield amazing results. Our mission at QuotaFactory is to ensure every sales rep exceeds quota.

Oh yeah, the three signs your sales team needs sales development:

1. You don’t have one!

   If you are sending your MQL’s directly to your sales team, you are wasting your marketing dollars. A SiriusDecisions study shows that up to 97% of MQL’s will not be adequately followed up upon.

2. You do not have an targeted outbound strategy.

   Remember the 80%? The fact is the 20% of people that are coming to you have already identified their pain or need, and have reached out to several of your competitors. These folks who are reaching out to you may likely view you as a vendor versus a value add partner which never starts a relationship off on a good note.

3. Conversions.

   If you are not seeing at least 20% of your MQL’s convert to SQL’s you have a problem. If you do not know what % of your MQL’s are converting you have a bigger problem.

The good news – you can do this! If you do, your sales development process will drive incremental revenue to your top line.

Happy Friday Sales Hackers!

Cheers- You’ve made it through another week! I’ve put together some of the highlights from our LinkedIn Community this week. We round up the best content that we can for the blog, but we’ve realized there are so many good discussions going on in our community that we don’t want overlooked!

Please let me know if you have any feedback, or have something to contribute to next weeks Community Round Up. I look forward to hearing from you! Enjoy the weekend… you earned it!

Best,

Jessie Barnes

This Week’s Question:

Clark Kasheta: I am a firm believer in professional persistence. However, at what point must we draw the line and say “that’s too many voicemails,” or “maybe I shouldn’t call his personal cell.” How do we maintain that persistent and professional balance?

Best Responses from our Sales Hacker LinkedIn Community:

Ryan Leech: It’s a good question for sure. This is kind of a cop out, but it really depends on the situation.

If I’ve identified a company that I know 100% can use our product, then I am not going to give up easily. To get around having to ask yourself this question too often, I would always try and cultivate multiple points of contact at the company using LinkedIn. For instance, I’ll routinely call Director of Sales, Director of Sales Ops, VP’s of Sales and Marketing, Lead Gen, Inside Sales Managers, and on the list goes. If you feel confident they would benefit from your service then hit them all until somebody that sounds informed either tells you they’re already working with a similar product, they have no need, or there’s no budget.

If you’re confident they’re a fit for what you’re selling, then there should be no hesitation to try their personal cell a few times, especially if they give it out in their direct dial voicemail message. I recently cold called one of the SVP’s at a large recruiting firm this way. He asked if I know what he does, as if nobody should have the audacity to call such a person. But at the end of the day he still told me who I should reach out and I was able to quickly get in touch with the guy and set something up.

Richard Harris: A good SDR / AE will have a break up email to help prevent wasting their own time and their prospects. Will not always get a response but sometimes you have to ask for the “no”.

Sean H. Heyboer: It depends. Did they coming knocking on your door or are your outbound cold prospecting? If they’re inbound a good cadence would be 6 calls and 5 emails, properly timed and spaced out. Outbound is a different animal. Some experts suggest up to 22 touch points, whether it be email, calls, social interactions etc. I often times space those out over a longer period of time knowing that it’s more of a marathon rather than a sprint.

Michael A Brown: The prospect’s perception becomes their reality. If, to them, persistence becomes harassment or stalking, then any opportunity goes away. There is no known “magic number” of attempts, which is why “how often” and “in which combination of media” are more important than “how many.”

Do not try to fit prospects’ time frames to your company’s reporting periods. Doing so leads to frustration at best, inappropriate selling pressure and lost business at worst. Instead, augment your “persistent professional balance” with healthy respect for time.

Where to “draw the line?” Two main ways to know: first, when you learn that circumstances at the prospect organization make doing any business unlikely or unprofitable. For example, they are entering Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Second, when the prospect organization no longer does what your product/service enables. For example, a company selling jet engine noise-suppression kits learns that their target airline has sold all its airplanes that could use such kits.

Greg Pietruszynski: A lot of great tips here, especially on contacting multiple decision makers and break up email. When someone is even slightly interested and I qualified her as a sales opportunity, I will basically never give up. I think that the most important thing is carrying about the number of follow ups, but focusing on the content instead. If you’re trying to be helpful, write emails based on the events at customers’ company or even your own events – you have a new feature that would be helpful, you have a similar customer success story to share, etc. I also experiment with sharing some content I consider helpful, or even create “imaginary events” such as: “I talked with a customer and they told me [what they told must be relevant to the customer]. From my experience it’s good to be persistent, but you should avoid being pushy.

It’s a marathon as Sean just said! Here’s an example of my follow-up campaign:

* Email
* Call
* LinkedIn invitation
* Second email
* Second call
* LinkedIn message
* Third email
* Third call

I also try to look at their tweets and Linkedin updates, as there always a chance for interaction. Sounds like a lot of work, but it’s worth it :)

What are your thoughts? When does persistence turn into harassment? Comment below!

The post Persistence vs. Harrassment: Community Roundup July 24th appeared first on Sales Hacker.

With 67% of the buyer’s journey occurring digitally, your audience’s online interaction with your company will make or break sales numbers. Yes, there’s an overwhelming amount of information on the web about optimizing B2B consumer experience — but with that many voices, where you do you start?

You begin with the buyer’s journey. Understanding your audience’s road to commitment and any potential pitfalls along the way gives you a bird’s eye view of your best practices as a marketer. We dug around for the most insightful wisdom on the B2B buyer’s journey to help anchor your strategy.

Here are some golden nuggets from marketing experts:

1. Pardot: Recognize the Role of Search Engines

Once your buyers begin to realize that they have a particular pain point, the research begins. For 72% of buyers, they’ll turn to Google. The first stage of research begins with general search terms as buyers explore the options at their disposal. Buyers are usually looking for educational material, customer reviews, and testimonials at this stage. – Pardot

Takeaway: SEO matters. Optimize your site by identifying and utilizing common keywords that are related to your customers’ pain points and your offerings. Always focus on educating potential clients with tools like interactive content.

2. Kerry Bodine: Map Out the Journey

I like using stickers for this. You can get red and green stickers at your office supply store. You can use markers. The idea is that you’re going to note where the different steps in that process are going well and then maybe where those steps start to go south. This will give you a really good depiction of where the problem points are in your customer journey and where you need to focus on improving interactions to better meet your customer’s needs. – Kerry Bodine

Takeaway: Figure out what exactly your prospects look at every day when they jump onto your website. Are their any detours or roadblocks that keep them from moving forward? Get visual — don’t be afraid to dive into your office supplies and map it out on a whiteboard or your conference room table.

3. Lori Wizdo: Consider Group Personas

For the B2B buying process, there is typically no single buyer . . . it’s a team; therefore, individual personas aren’t as important. There is no “average” buyer. In fact, individual personas are almost irrelevant for B2B marketing. What you need to do is profile the buying team as a whole based upon your own assessment of the buying team’s journey. – Lori Wizdo

Takeaway: Who do you need to woo to make a sale happen? It’s probably not your individual lead but their boss! Include the entire purchasing team when developing B2B personas, delving into the process with the same detail that you would with an individual buyer persona. Together, your group persona and buyer’s journey map will give you a complete picture.

4. Seth Godin: Honor the Hierarchy of Needs

If you’re selling a product or service to a business — to a non-owner — consider this hierarchy, from primary needs on down:

• Avoiding risk
• Avoiding hassle
• Gaining praise
• Gaining power
• Having fun
• Making a profit

In most large organizations, nothing happens unless at least one of these needs are met, and in just about every organization big enough and profitable enough to buy from you, the order of needs starts with the first one and works its way down the list. – Seth Godin

Takeaway: Print out Seth Godin’s hierarchy of needs and stick it next to your computer. When you develop copy, speak to your lead’s primary needs first: avoiding risk and avoiding hassle. Despite the instinct to delve into ROI, leave that for your end game. It should be the icing on the cake – not the foundation for your conversation.

5. Joseph Thibeault: Roll with the Ch, Ch, Ch, Changes

Up until digital really changed the way people interact with organizations, the buyer’s journey largely looked like this (1):

It was a straight shot with one step following the next, a linear color-by-numbers approach. But because of digital, the buyer’s journey has taken on a shape more like this (2):

Image Source: econsultancy

How did digital transform the linear buyer’s journey into this spaghetti mess? Most likely because consumers are inundated with information 24/7/365. From social media or the web, new information comes online every second that can impact a purchase decision (i.e., a new review).

As such, consumers are bouncing around the different aspects of the buyer’s journey —discovery, consideration, and decision — as new information is discovered. – Joseph Thibeault

Takeaway: Recognize that your content is not the only influencing factor in a buyer’s decision. Your work may be offset by a bad review or a Twitter comment that went viral. As a marketer, keep your eye on the big picture, making sure to tune into social channels, especially when negative feedback requires a thoughtful response. Also expect leads to wander before they commit.

6. Fred Studer: Optimize in Every Form

Quick question: How many devices do you have on your person right now? The average is three and I have six! We need to offer the same marketing outreach and overall customer experience across all devices and engagement platforms. Our end goal must always be consistency, while connecting with the customer in the way they want to and at the time of their choosing. Our ultimate aim is to lay the foundations to build lifelong relationships with our customers based on trust via our marketing. – Fred Studer

Takeaway: Is your content equally compelling on a smartphone, tablet or laptop? Even for B2B buyers, your buyer’s journey needs to be engaging on every possible device. When a site is mobile-optimized, 67% of buyers are more likely to buy products or services.

7. Meagen Eisenberg: Capture & Act On Data

We all know the story around how buyers have more information when they come to us, and they are doing a lot more research. But on the other side, we as marketers also have a lot more information if we are embracing newer technologies. If we’re capturing the data and we know which data to capture, then we are learning from it and getting insights. The amount of time that it would typically take to go through the funnel should be shrinking, because not only do they know more about us — but we know more about them if we’ve done our job and have embraced the new technologies. – Meagen Eisenberg

Takeaway: The most effective marketers give buyers the data they need to make a decision quickly. Utilize emerging technologies and interactive formats to harness powerful data that can serve you (and the consumer) in the long run.

8. Kristi Hines: Keep It Up Post-Purchase

Closing the deal and getting the purchase is not everything. You will want your customers coming back for more. The best way to do this is through email content. Get your customers on your mailing list and keep providing them with the same valuable content that attracted them to your business in the first place. Also make it easy for customers to help themselves on your website through comprehensive support content. If you have a support team, let them be in charge of creating content to solve the most commonly asked questions they receive. – Kristi Hines

Takeaway: Keep your content fresh and relevant to current customers as well as prospects. Your sale is not the end of the conversation but an opportunity to further cement your relationship. Utilize email marketing that addresses common issues.

Conclusion

The buyer’s journey is an ongoing adventure for you and your clients. Even if you have a solid inbound marketing strategy, continual evaluation allows you to hone your company’s approach. Tweaking your efforts will only further fortify your growth as a company. After all, demand generation marketing is an ever-changing field — keeping up requires a posture of exploration and a willingness to adapt.

Learn how interactive content works at any stage in the buyer’s journey!

There is a popular term being used by marketers lately online called “tripwire marketing”. It is actually a concept that has been around for a long time (even before the internet). It involves segmenting your leads into interest groups, selling them into a low priced item and then up-selling those who buy into one of your main products or services.

What is Tripwire Marketing?

Ok, the term may sound a little sinister, but what it commonly means is turning a lead into a customer by making them a low-cost, relatively painless offer, then having the opportunity to upsell them once they are in your sales funnel.

This means that instead of asking someone to invest in your more expensive products or services first up you are able to repurpose or repackage parts of your more expensive items based on a certain more detailed solution in a way that delivers value and also “teases” what else is in store if someone chooses to buy more from you.

The idea is that once people have bought even an inexpensive item from you, they are more likely to purchase something else. Why? Veteran online marketer Frank Kern explains it well when he says that with a free offer, people will often be suspicious and wonder “what is the catch?”, whereas with a low-cost offer it tends to convert better because it helps to alleviate that suspicion.

Plus once someone goes from lead to buyer they now justify their purchase with you and are more emotionally connected to what you offer next. It also allows you to sell many of these inexpensive items across different topics to test what your market wants and then customise follow-up communications that are more targeted.

Whatever your preferred terminology…tripwire, splinter product, loss leader, front-end offer, or introductory offer… this idea has been around in one form or another for years and is still a very effective marketing technique. (Does anyone remember Columbia House’s old 11 “albums for a penny” mail order music club deal?)

Here are 5 Ways to Master Tripwire Marketing:

1. Start with a lead magnet (or as we like to say, party starter)

Before you can even offer the initial tripwire you need people to sign up for your email list. In order to do this you need to offer them something for free that leaves them thirsting for more and eager to take the next step with you. We give a list of ideas in our podcast about opt-in ideas that convert. (find out why the free eBook is pretty much dead for most markets!).

The important thing here is to offer something that your entire market will find valuable. It is the tripwires that will help you segment your list by using different topics and solutions of your larger products or services.

2. Create your tripwire

This is a low-ticket item that solves a very specific problem in your buyer’s life. This means that in order to create a successful tripwire, you need to get very specific about what kinds of problems your ideal customer may have.

Ideas include webinars, something physical that you mail out (such as a book – Brendon Burchard used this technique for The Charge), or even a personal consultation. Companies who offer a great deal (such as 5 children’s books for $3.95) to entice you into signing up with their subscription program are a great example of tripwires at work. Note that the idea is not necessarily to make any profit, in fact many tripwires are sold at a loss in order to bring in the customers.

Don’t just stop at one. Outline all of the different topics your list may be interested in and then start creating tripwires for each of these.

On our blog, for example, we ask how we can help…business automation, online marketing, social media strategy or website traffic tips. Why? We have found these are our most popular article types. Our main solutions are around building automated funnels and content marketing, but we generally help people first by addressing issues with their website or social media traffic.

A couple of our tripwires are a website checklist to help people see what they are leaving out on their website to grow their business and a Facebook ads training and cheatsheet to help people do better market research and quickly place an ad to the right people. Every business owner has issues online when it comes to growing their business. For some right now it will be traffic, for others it will be their website, and then there are people who aren’t good at follow up with their email list. We could have hundreds of online marketing stress points we could develop products for… all ultimately leading to either our DIY online marketing training or our done for you services.

Let’s use a personal trainer as an example next. If they were to only focus on weight loss they are potentially leaving 2/3 of their market from finding them…those that want to lose fat or gain muscle.

A great lead magnet for them would be a 5 minute ab exercise that melts fat and builds definition. This would be something all 3 groups would be interested in. Once someone gets that, then 3 tripwires could be a smoothie recipe booklet for weight loss, 10 cardio moves to melt fat and a 3-step formula to double your mass in 3 months. All three would then upsell into the trainer’s signature 6 month program. This way he or she will know how to sell their program better by providing the benefits that only matter to the person who wants it. So suddenly instead of having one sales page they would have 3, and each tripwire purchase then sends the buyer to the sales page that is best for them.

Are you starting to see how powerful this can be, both by mastering your customer avatar but also only promoting things to your email list based on what they want.

3. Introduce your tripwire to prospects on your list

One way to do this is by sending out 2-3 emails offering your product for a limited amount of time. You can do this in a couple of ways: send your list straight to a sales page to get your tripwire or send them to a free piece of content that then sells the tripwire at the end.

The important thing to remember here is that not everyone on your list will click. This is what you want. You want to segment your list at this point into interest groups. This means your emails should be written in a way that clearly outlines the problem and the benefit of your tripwire or piece of content and how it can help. Get specific at this point.

Eventually you could have several different segments (or lists) based on the preferences shown by people on your list so that you can start sending certain types of emails to a certain segment.

Many email systems will allow you to segment your list. Some require using landing pages to get people to opt-in again to a new list and some allow you to create rules based on the links clicked in your emails to move people to different lists based on their preferences. No matter what email marketing program you use, you can still offer tripwires.

4. Introduce buyers to your core product

The intention of every tripwire is to introduce customers to a bigger offer and entice them to seek more from you. To that end, they should logically lead to a core product of yours that you wish to upsell to the customer. Many successful marketers offer a deal on the upsell while the customer is purchasing the tripwire – a “striking while the wallet is open” technique. Or, of course you could email out an offer on your core product separately, or use a combination of the two.

Trial periods are an example of a tripwire that is also a core product. For example, many different software or membership programs will allow you to have a 30 day trial period at very low cost. They tend to have a condition that you will start to be billed for full membership after the trial period unless you contact them and cancel. It gives customers the chance to check that the product is really for them and removes any doubt that the customer will opt in to the full subscription as they must opt out rather than opt in.

5. Rinse and Repeat

The chances are that there are many possible tripwire ideas that can lead to marketing your core product. You can run different tripwires concurrently or sequentially.

As you continue to set them up you are basically building a multi-faceted funnel or “web” of info highly targeted to solve a very specific problem that ultimately leads into what you really want to sell.

Make sure you test your tripwire ideas, including tweaking headlines and copy so that you get a definitive idea of what works and what your customers are looking for. You will find that there will be some more popular than others and that is OK. It all leads you one step closer to knowing what your leads want and helps you fine-tune what problems you should be solving instead of what you think your customers want.

Here’s a little tip: An easy way of developing a tripwire is to take your main offer and break off a piece of it and package it as an individual product. A website designer could sell a logo, a stylist could offer a wardrobe review, a massage therapist could offer an organic stress release lotion, a pool cleaning company could offer a DIY chlorine check, an accountant could offer a tax time checklist, a business lawyer could offer a contract template pack… these are all items they would use with you anyway should you “upgrade” to their main product or service.

For those interested in DIY learning in Autopilot Your Business we sometimes use some of our individual trainings from inside Digital Traffic Institute as a tripwire. It allows people to get a sneak peak into the type of training we do, and of course the upsell would be into the Institute.

Now it’s your turn to get creative. All you need is your email list, a product to sell and a few techy things set up behind the scenes to link and automate this and you could be promoting your first tripwire!

Social media has been established as a powerful way to get more traffic and build an authority on the web. Many people have used social media to become the leaders of their niches and ultimately dominate their industries. Social media brings over 10,000 people to this blog every month.

Although social media is powerful, it is not something that we should rely on for blog traffic. There are several people who get all of their traffic from social media, or worse, one social network in particular.

The risk with relying on social media, or even worse, a single social network to bring in the bulk of your blog’s traffic is that you are putting all of your eggs in one basket. Although the basket may look nice and stable now, the basket can suddenly break, and then all of your eggs are splattered on the floor. Do you want that to happen to you? Chances are you don’t, and just in case that was not convincing enough, here are the seven reasons why you should depend on social media for blog traffic.

#1: Social networks change

One of the main reasons why I wrote this blog post was because I recently read an article about Twitter experimenting with an algorithm similar to Facebook. These algorithms enforce a pay to play system where growing a presence is no longer enough.

Facebook posts now only get seen by about 3% of your audience which means to have a big impact on Facebook, you need to have a ginormous audience. There was a time when Facebook did not have these algorithms and everyone was happy. With Facebook’s change, many people say a noticeable decline in Facebook engagement and traffic. Would you be happy if you had a Facebook Page with 300 fans, but only nine of those fans could see the posts on their home feed?

Does Twitter follow this exact path and create a pay to play system? Only time will tell, but Twitter talking about an algorithm suggests how little power we have in the decisions that popular social networks make. If Twitter decides to enforce the same policy as Facebook, then too bad. We will complain, but every social network has the final say in what happens.

#2: There are other options available

With the thought of a Twitter algorithm causing dissent amongst many users and a pay to play system being enforced, blogging has become more important than ever. Just because social media is powerful does not mean it is the only option.

With a blog, you still have the power to publish content and share it with the world. Blogging also gives you numerous advantages such as growing an email list and bringing in more sales. These advantages allow you to control the communication that you have with the people who stop by. On the other hand, social media has direct control over all of the interactions you have on it. If a social network decides to suspend your account, all conversations come to an end whether you want them to or not.

#3: All social networks get hacked

Many people look at Burger King’s success on the day it got hacked and aspire to be hacked themselves. Some accounts have even faked being hacked just to gain popularity. However, the latest hacks have not gone as well for the hacked accounts.

An example of this was when Uber Facts lost over 10,000 followers on the day it was hacked. Ouch! The worst part about hackings is that in most cases, they are not under your control. Some information leaks out of social networks. Remember Heartbleed?

Changing your password reduces the chances of your account getting hacked. However, anything on the web to get hacked nowadays, but if your social network gets hacked, and you have no other way of communicating with your audience, that spells trouble. Not only are you barred from your audience, but the hacker may use your account to insult your audience or post inappropriate content–all under your name.

#4: All social networks have bugs

There are some social networks that encounter strange bugs that make them perform differently. There are some Twitter users who get their accounts compromised every single day for no reason whatsoever. When these accounts get compromised, no tweets can be sent out. That means all of those tweets that got scheduled on HootSuite cannot be sent out because of a flaw out of your control.

No one is hacking into the account, and many of these Twitter users have resorted to 30 character passwords which still does not solve the compromise problem. If a bug affects your ability to post content on your social network, then you are losing blog traffic, interactions, and possibly sales.

#5: Not everyone will see your posts

No matter how much hard work you put into growing your social media audience, most of that audience will not see the social media posts that you publish. If every single one of my Twitter followers saw one of my tweets and clicked on the link, I would be getting hundreds of thousands of visitors every day (at that point, move over Huffington Post).

Too bad that is not the case. Unfortunately, no matter which platform you choose, not everyone will see your posts. However, social media happens to be a place where few people click on your posts and engage with you. I get over 10,000 visitors every month from Twitter alone. Assuming there are no repeat visitors (which is not the case), that would mean less than 10% of my followers see at least one of my tweets every month. The typical email list leads to more engagement than the typical social media account.

#6: Social media is addictive

Although social media is a great way to bring in more blog traffic, it is also extremely addictive. Some people spend hours on social media every week, and the amount of time people spend on social media takes time away from the big projects. Social media eats up more time than most people realize. Many people are spending three hours every day on social media while others are on social media for a longer amount of time.

When someone finally logs out after spending three hours on social media, that person may remember the blog post that needed to get published or the video that should have been uploaded to YouTube. If you are unproductively using social media for three hours every day, think about how much time you are spending unproductively on social media within a given week, month, or year. It adds up.

#7: Social media is not a direct way to make money on the web

When people think of making money online, they want to make money as directly as possible. Many people have tried turning social media into a direct revenue stream, but that’s not how social media works.

The function of social media is to build an awareness for your blog, get more traffic, and then have your blog optimized so it is able to bring in revenue. Since social media is addictive, it is entirely possible that the time you invest in social media does not necessarily result in more revenue.

In Conclusion

Just like the millions of other people who use them, I love social media. I am able to interact with my followers, build connections, and get more blog traffic. However, with the popularity of social networks, many people have become dependent on social media traffic for their blogs.

Regardless of how many visitors a social network is bringing in, you need to avoid having all of your eggs in one basket. If that basket gets dropped (whether it’s your fault or not), your blog traffic will suffer.

Utilizing social media while utilizing other avenues of traffic will allow you to become a successful blogger who is not dependent on one thing. Be sure to branch out by getting more traffic with different methods whenever you can.

GUEST:

A few weeks ago, I caught a serendipitous Lyft with a particularly chatty driver. Normally, I keep to myself when Lyfting around town, but somehow we started talking, and I mentioned that I was headed to a conference to present my biggest marketing screw-ups. He chuckled and told me, “Smart men learn from their mistakes; wise men learn from other people’s mistakes.” A few minutes later, I got out at my stop and thanked him for giving me a great opener for my speech.

While most of the news about Zenefits focuses on our incredible growth, we — like any company — have made our share of mistakes; mistakes you’d be wise to learn from. Just take it from Mr. Lyft Driver.

Here are the top five marketing mistakes we made early on at Zenefits.

Mistake 1: We stopped doing things that didn’t scale.

Most incubators — Y Combinator in our case — encourage startups to get to market faster by building products that don’t scale (at first). No one really encourages you to do the same from a marketing perspective, but it actually holds true.

In our early days, I developed a marketing campaign that was an amalgamation of dynamic content and data. It ended up being hugely successful and contributed to a decent chunk of our first year revenue. Then, one day, Parker Conrad (Zenefits’ cofounder and CEO) came to me and said, “Great! We’re going to go from three salespeople to 10. Now, we need to scale this campaign. Let’s do every industry. Every vertical.”

I immediately told him there was no way we could scale the campaign because it would require too much data and customization. So instead, I took the easy way out and created a “scaleable” campaign by using pre-baked, non-dynamic content that would work across every industry.

Weeks later, we found out the “scaled” campaign was performing terribly. Why? Because it now had nothing that made the initial campaign awesome. Parker wasn’t too jazzed when he found out and asked me to stay as long as I needed that night to scale one industry correctly. I did as he asked, and it worked extremely well.

Two and a half years later, we have more than 100 people pulling industry data and feeding it into a custom app we built in-house, all to make this campaign work at scale.

Lesson 1: Get it to work first. Worry about scaling it later.

Do the most creative thing possible to get business. If it’s sending cupcakes with handwritten letters, then send cupcakes with handwritten letters. Then figure out how to scale it. After my experience, I firmly believe you can scale anything with enough time, money, and creativity.

The goal should always be to find something that works well and leave the worry for later; otherwise you may pass on an idea that could have completely changed your business — like I almost did.

Mistake 2: We listened to each other.

Never listen to your coworkers. It’s a terrible mistake. Let me explain.

One day, we decided to convert a few of our inbound Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) into outbound SDRs, to see if outbound sales development was a viable channel for us.

Everybody involved — the SDRs, their managers, and even my directors — were all cheering the success of the test and touting how many leads they were generating. So, naturally, we all high-fived and began hiring based on this success.

However, many months later, we dug into the data and discovered that 30 percent of the leads they were creating were actually coming from a segment of companies we didn’t really want. This messed up our hiring model in a big way.  We had planned out two years of hiring on an attainment number that was completely wrong, all because I trusted what my team was telling me. Now I only trust one thing: data.

Lesson 2: D.R.E.A.M. (Data Rules Everything Around Me)

Every conversation you have with your team should begin and end with data. Qualitative data is always helpful, but quantitative rules all. If you don’t operate in a D.R.E.A.M state of mind, you run the risk of making decisions based on how something feels — which can at times be incredibly convincing — instead of how something actually is.   

Mistake 3: We set “realistic goals.”

At the beginning of 2013, Zenefits’ first year of operation, Parker set a goal of $2 million annual recurring revenue (ARR), and we ended up falling short by a little bit. On the first workday of 2014, Parker came into the office and said, “Great! This year we’re going for $10 million in ARR” — to which I agreed because I thought we could do it. Maybe. We’re talking a very weak maybe.

The next day, Parker sat down with me and Sam Blond, our incredible VP of Sales, and said, “Okay, I changed my mind. We’re going to 20 million.” I immediately threw a fit. I went full on toddler-in-a-grocery-store. I cried. I yelled. I stamped my feet. I threw things. I couldn’t think of a single company that had done that, and I looked around at our 20-person rag tag crew wondering how we could possibly reach that goal.

Then, something interesting happened. Parker calmed me down, and asked me, “What if it was possible to hit $20 million, what would you need to do? Theoretically?” I (very grumpily) listed off all the things I would need to do, and he asked me, “Well, why don’t you do that?” Within 15 minutes, I had gone from vehemently rejecting the goal to figuring out how to hit it.

In 2014, we did $20 million. Not only did we meet our goal, but we exceeded it.

Lesson 3: Stretch Goal = The Real Goal (Ask yourself: What if?)

Whatever goal you set, people tend to come in just a little short or a little above the goal line – no matter what it is. When you create a stretch goal and get rid of the word stretch, the odds are better that you’ll achieve a greater outcome than if you set a lower, more “realistic” goal. I would have much rather fallen slightly short of $20 million than slightly beat $10 million.

When you’re put in a pressure cooker — and your back is against the wall — you do things that you didn’t think possible. If the goal feels impossible, just remember to ask yourself: “What if?” You’ll do things you can’t and won’t do when you’re comfortable and enjoying the ride.

Mistake 4: We hired people when we needed them.

Once, we were working on a giant, targeted marketing campaign. I knew there were a handful of people we would need eventually. At the time, I was hacking along on my own just fine, so I kept making it work and figured we could hire when we “really” needed help.

By the time we really needed these people, it was too late. It took 2-3 months to find the right candidates, 2-3 weeks for them to start their job, and 2-3 months to ramp. To say we were behind the 8-ball by the time they got going would be an understatement. The campaign was delayed by an entire quarter, along with all of the revenue behind it.

Lesson 4: Hire people you’re going to need 3-6 months from today.

It will take you roughly two to three months to find the right candidates, plus time to negotiate, and two weeks’ notice at their old company. And once they are finally in the seat, they still need time to set up and get up to speed.

If you’re a startup and you’re trying to show traction, your early hires will make or break your company. If you don’t have the person you need in that seat when the time comes, you’re basically toast.

Mistake 5: We focused on what worked.

At one point, we developed a marketing campaign that the whole team was enamored with it. All the SaaS metrics were perfect — we did X, and we got X demos in return. The math was simple. Do more of it, and get demos with more potential customers.

I started to put my energy — and all my team’s energy — into this one campaign. Eventually, it became so big and so successful, that it literally ate up 90 percent of my time. I didn’t care though, I was hitting goal!

Things went south really fast, however, when Parker gave me another 10x-type goal. I couldn’t 10x this specific campaign, and I had no other campaigns that could reach that goal. Four months after Parker asked me to 10x, I finally found a way to do it. Three months past the deadline.

I had become so focused on the lever that was working that I had completely stopped trying to find new levers to pull.

Lesson 5: Marketing is a rolling stone.

Our job as demand gen marketers is to find levers that work. Not one, or two, or three — dozens.  As soon as you find a lever that shows signs of being scalable, you need to put someone in charge of that lever and move on to finding the next lever. There always needs to be a rolling stone testing new levers, whether that’s the CMO, VP of Marketing, or VP of Growth.

Today, we’re growing the Zenefits marketing team so that we’ll be able to pull 20 levers at a time. Good marketing is always having 20 balls in the air, not keeping one giant ball afloat.

Matt Epstein is the first employee at Zenefits, and he currently serves as VP of Marketing. Prior to Zenefits, he was a Sr. Account Manager at Definition 6, a digital marketing agency, where he helped develop and execute online marketing strategies for Fortune 1,000 clients. He was also a D-list YouTube celebrity in his previous life — www.googlepleasehire.me.