Rnordman

In September 2004, R. Martin Chavez, then 40, sold his tech startup and retired to a beach house on New York's Fire Island. Things didn't go as planned. 

Not long into the retirement, Chavez, aka "Marty," got a call from Gary Cohn, now president and COO of Goldman Sachs, where he'd worked for a few years until 1997.

Cohn congratulated Chavez on the sale of his company. Then he said, "I was just calling to share with you that you're coming back."

Chavez got his start on Wall Street in 1993. Goldman's commodities and energy brokerage unit—then known as J. Aron—was hiring, and a headhunter put Chavez on a list of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and Stanford Ph.D.'s.

When Chavez received the letter from the recruiter, he initially looked at the opportunity as a free trip to New York. He got the gig, joining the same division where now-CEO Lloyd Blankfein, now-CFO Harvey Schwartz, and Cohn all got their start at the firm.

During his early years at the bank, Chavez worked as a senior energy "strat." A strat — similar to a quant — works on the trading floor creating models for pricing and risk management.

Four years later, Chavez quit Goldman to join Credit Suisse as the head of its energy-derivatives business. He told Fortune that he had made the move because he had just quit drinking and needed a change.

Cohn had told Chavez that if he ever changed his mind and wanted to come back to give him a call. Chavez admitted in an interview with GlobalCapital he regretted leaving, but that his pride prevented him from calling Cohn first.

Chavez spent three years at Credit Suisse, leaving the Swiss bank in 2000. He then founded Kiodex, a commodities risk-management software company. SunGard acquired Kiodex in 2004 for an undisclosed sum. Chavez headed for his house on Fire Island.

Then came the call from Cohn. After three months of retirement, Chavez returned to Goldman in January 2005 for his second stint. This time, he was a managing director in the equities business.

A year later he was made partner — one of the most coveted titles on Wall Street. After that, he became the co-chief operating officer of equities trading. 

From strat to CIO

His move into the big leagues didn't come until September 2013, however, when Chavez was tapped to become the bank's chief information officer.

The promotion came at a critical time for the bank, which had experienced a technical glitch on August 20, 2013 that roiled the options markets. The SEC recently said the bank could have lost as much as $500 million, but that the losses ultimately ended about $38 million.

The promotion made Chavez one of the most important executives at Goldman. He's the guy tasked with leading the firm's technology efforts.

At its core, Goldman is a financial-services company, helping clients buy and sell assets and advising on company acquisitions and fundraisings. Many of those functions are becoming increasingly reliant on technology, especially the trading of shares and bonds and the compliance systems that check these tasks are being performed correctly.

As CIO, Chavez leads the firm's strats team as well as a team of 9,000 engineers. To put it in perspective, Goldman employs 35,000 people globally, meaning Chavez is responsible for a team that makes up about a quarter of the firm.

What's more telling is that Goldman's team of engineers is bigger than the entire payrolls at Silicon Valley companies such as LinkedIn and Twitter. Goldman also has a multi-billion dollar budget dedicated to engineering.

It is no surprise company chief executive Lloyd Blankfein has referred to Goldman as "a technology company."

Under Chavez' s leadership, the firm has developed its own programming language for risk calculations. They've also written over a billion lines of code. A lot of that code is open source — anyone who wants to use it can. In Silicon Valley, that's considered a legit move. It shows just how much Chavez and Goldman get the tech world.

Goldman and Chavez were unable to speak for this profile.

A mother's dream come true

The oldest of five children, Chavez grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His mother, Rose, was the daughter of Spanish and Mexican immigrants, and his father, Ray, came from an old New Mexico family.

The legend in the Chavez family is that his mother made a promise when she was a teenager — either she would enter a convent or she would have 10 children and they would all go to Harvard.

Rose Chavez got halfway there. She had five children and all of them graduated from Harvard.

Growing up, Chavez's parents placed a great deal of emphasis on their kids' education. They could all read and write by the time they entered kindergarten.

The family made sacrifices to send all of their kids to private school and to piano lessons. Sometimes that meant not eating out or buying new clothes or going on family vacations.

Chavez excelled in school. By seventh grade, he started taking college courses at the University of New Mexico. He graduated from Albuquerque Academy in 1981. He started at Harvard with sophomore status.

He went on to graduate magna cum laude from Harvard with a bachelor's degree in biochemistry. He earned a master's degree in computer science before pursuing his Ph.D. in medical information sciences at Stanford.

"I didn't know what I had been doing all that time was preparing for a career in finance," Chavez, a computer scientist at heart, said on a recent podcast.

Breaking the mold

Chavez describes himself as a "math and computer geek," but he doesn't look the stereotypical part with his tattoo sleeves.

He's not just smart— people say he's "impossible to dislike."

People say that he's someone who can interact with everybody. For example, he'll come straight from a management committee meeting to have breakfast or coffee with an intern at the firm.

Chavez has been an integral part of Goldman's culture.

When he joined Goldman in 1993, he was one of the first openly gay employees. Being out was "the smartest and best decision" for him.

With his help, Goldman now has a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Network. Chavez mentors and sponsors many in the LGBT community.

As a corporation, Goldman advocated for marriage equality. Blankfein was the first American CEO to publicly speak out about it as a business issue.

Blankfein, who worked as a lawyer, also filed a brief with the Supreme Court asking them to strike down the Defense of Marriage Act.

"For me, it was transformational. It means that my husband, who's a British subject, can live together with our newborn baby boy,'" Chavez said in a YouTube video.

Chavez later added: "When I thanked Lloyd, in characteristic fashion, he said, 'Marty, don't thank me. It was the right thing to do. But it was also the smart thing to do.'"

Being authentic

For Chavez, he believes it's smart for everyone "to bring all of themselves to work." 

In an internal "best advice" memo from 2011, he explained how being authentic is crucial for peace of mind. 

"For me, being out is really about being who I am and being authentic. Pretending to be something that I'm not is inconsistent with my peace of mind. It's not necessarily a lie, but it's a type of pretending. It's a lack of being straightforward and authentic with colleagues or with friends."

He continued: "When that lack of authenticity happens, there are always reasons for it. It can be hard to be out – or one can imagine that it might be hard, which is more often the case. In truth, it's often worse in the imagination than in the actuality.

"But if that imagination leads to holding back, manufacturing alternative stories of how you spent your weekend or where you spent your time off, that not only impacts your peace of mind, it also has negative consequences for your career. There are connections that you can build with colleagues and clients based on being candid and authentic."

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Health insurers are going deal crazy, and it is at least in part because of Obamacare. That's great news for investment banks that could reap as much as $345 million in fees as a result.

Industry giant Anthem this morning announced a $54.2 billion deal to take over Cigna. The combined company will have $115 billion in revenues and 53 million medical members, according to the deal announcement. 

The deal comes hot on the heels of another multi-billion dollar takeover in the health insurance industry. Earlier this month, Aetna agreed a $37 billion takeover of Humana. The two deals, if they go ahead, would take the list of the top five health insurers down to three. 

The companies involved could pay out between $285 million and $345 million in fees to Wall Street investment banks so far this year, if the deals close, according to estimates from Freeman & Co. Investors do expect regulators to scrutinize the deals, and their impact on insurance consumers. Cigna's shares fell to about $147 a share this morning -- well below the per share value of Anthem's offer -- suggesting that traders are wary of the risk.

A key factor behind the dealmaking is Obamacare, otherwise known as The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which was signed into law in 2010. 

Ana Gupte, an analyst with Leerink Partners, told Bloomberg last month: "The industry is far more regulated under Obamacare and so companies need to do a better job at negotiating better unit costs and contracts.” 

“Market share helps. The larger you are, the stronger standing you have.”

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: James Altucher defends his outrageous claim that you shouldn't invest in your 401(k)

It seems everywhere you look these days there is a marketer proclaiming the death of demographics. From experts at Mindshare to JD Power and from publications as diverse as CMO.com and Brand Quarterly, it would appear that the era of demographic targeting has come to a close.

Unsurprisingly, much of the criticism has come from the US. In a year in which Caitlyn Jenner (pictured) has highlighted the transgender issue and Rachel Dolezal has done the same for the transracial discussion, the continued use of demographics to portray and predict a consumer’s references was always going to be contentious.

On a superficial level these critics have a point. Targeting the 28- to 40-year-old moms is clearly not the optimum way to market any product or service. But that was always the case. There have always been weak marketers who don’t do any research or segmentation and just conjure up a broad, stereotypical ‘target segment’ to make their marketing plan look more professional. In that sense, demographics have always been dead. A point I would encourage those obsessed with so-called ‘millennials’ to thoroughly contemplate.

To be fair, most decent marketers never used demographics this way. They recruited a representative sample of the market and asked for demographic questions along with a bunch of attitudinal and behavioral questions. Then they did behavioral segmentation in which the market was sorted into distinct sub-groups based on how they thought and what they bought. Only then, with a small distinct segment of consumers identified, did we apply the demographics and examine if a segment was demonstratively more likely to be older, female, urban etc. There’s a huge difference between assuming girls like pink and boys prefer blue and a representative survey of the population showing a statistically significant skew in color choice between male and female respondents. The difference between stereotypes and segments is data.

My defense of demographics may be outdated, however. The entire approach to marketing in which you commission research and segment the market may be going the way of the dodo if experts are to be believed. In the era of digital marketing, the premise of needing to segment and target in the traditional manner is transformed. Once you have a mountain of big data attached to a specific consumer derived from past search activity or from Facebook interactions, the relevance of a consumer’s gender or age becomes relegated to an afterthought. Despite what the financial services industry might warn, past performance of consumer behavior really does predict future performance. Marketers can buy eyeballs based on what they have previously looked at, rather than the age or gender of the skull that they happen to reside within.

But hold on again. This idealistic vision of purely behavioral segmentation devoid of any and all demographic identification depends on a couple of assumptions about the market. First, that you have this data for close to 100% of the target audience and that you can reach them all using media that allows you to identify each consumer individually. That may appear to be possible for the addled social media obsessives who now seem to dominate marketing and assume every campaign is a blend of Pinterest, Twitter and Facebook.

For British marketers it’s important to note that in the UK only half of the marketing budget is spent on digital communication, the other 50% is invested in ancient media monoliths such as TV, radio and print. For those methods –  and therefore half the marketing being done in the UK – some form of demographic data is needed. Even in the brave new world of programmatic marketing don’t forget that much of the data being modeled inside the black box is good old-fashioned demographics.​

Brute demographics without other data were always stupid. But using demographics as part of a broader approach to behavioral segmentation and targeting remains a valuable activity for many marketers and brands. If you have complete behavioral data and the ability to buy targets based on past purchase and current interests, go for it. But don’t throw the baby (or any other age-based segment of the market) out with bathwater just yet.

This thought piece is featured courtesy of Marketing Week, the United Kingdom’s leading marketing publication.

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GENGHIS KHAN: THE MAN WHO CONQUERED THE WORLD

Frank McLynn

Would-be world conquerors can learn a lot from Genghis Khan. No one in history has ruled over as large a territory as Genghis and his heirs: from eastern Europe to China. Yet there was more to the Mongol horde than its well-deserved reputation for murder, rape and mayhem.

Its leader began life as Temujin, son of a minor clan chieftain within the complex and volatile Mongol tribal system. After temporarily seizing control of the nation in 1206, Temujin quickly engineered a wholesale reorganization of Mongol life—introducing compulsory military service and making leadership appointments based on merit rather than birthright. In this way he weakened unstable tribal loyalties and ensured all Mongols owed their allegiance to him, Genghis Khan—the great or fierce ruler.

With his homeland unified, Genghis set to work keeping it that way. Nomadic Mongols were motivated by one thing: plunder. Satisfying his public thus required a constant series of invasions and conquests. “Like a shark,” observes McLynn, “the Mongol empire had to be in continuous forward motion.”

Genghis Khan’s famous ultimatum of “Surrender or Die” was meant to provide maximum booty with minimum effort. If necessary, he backed it up with his warriors’ great skill as mounted archers. Anyone who resisted was slaughtered in very public ways, as a caution to others. Parallels with the Islamic State’s broadcast of horrific executions in Iraq and Syria will quickly come to mind for modern-day readers. Yet despite his horde’s bloody repute, Genghis was a pragmatist, not a fanatic. He was surprisingly tolerant of religious differences (Islamic State take note) and his armies were rainbows of diversity. He eagerly adopted technological advances from his opponents, including gunpowder and siege engines from China. And he was extremely protective of diplomats and international trade routes as sources of intelligence.

This unique combination of strategic vision, political smarts and battlefield cruelty gave Genghis unparalleled success. He took on two massive and disparate foes, in China and Persia, simultaneously. He operated far beyond his supply lines and was generally outnumbered. The Mongols even successfully invaded Russia in the dead of winter. Time was the only obstacle to defy him. His deathbed advice, at age 65, to his sons: “Life is short. I could not conquer all the world. You will have to do it.”

The post The secrets of Genghis Khan’s success appeared first on Macleans.ca.

This post appears courtesy of the Ferenstein Wire, a syndicated news service. Publishing partners may edit posts. For inquiries, please email author and publisher Gregory Ferenstein.  

I didn't expect to spend 5 minutes watching a commercial for an e-commerce startup, let alone enjoy it enough to share it with friends. But Jet.com, a hot new competitor to Amazon, produced a delightfully entertaining commercial that proves the financial underpinning of ad-based businesses don't have to be annoying. 

The company hired HBO "Silicon Valley" comedian Kumail Nanjiani to perform a 5 minute semi-interactive standup routine explaining the e-commerce service's best features. 

See also: How Small Changes To Google Search Can Punch Your Web Traffic In The Face

"Five pounds of mayonnaise is a fundamentally ridiculous thing to buy," says Nanjiani, explaining how pricing algorithms allow for the warehouse-style pricing on groceries. "When you're done with it, you can live inside the jar—7 years from now." 

I watched the entire ad. Voluntarily. Even more important, at the end, when Nanjiani pointed to embedded hyperlinks, I clicked to learn more about the company. The clip was basically a pitch deck disguised as a video, and it worked. Due to sheer entertainment value, I sat through the whole spiel and wanted to learn more. 

Creativity Rules 

Engaging videos are important not just for startups, but for the free Web as a whole. The media industry, social networks like Facebook, and countless others depend on ads for their livelihoods. The business they bring in pays for the tools users enjoy for free.  

But click-through-rates for many types of advertisements are declining, forcing online businesses to become increasingly aggressive about their tactics. The online world is riddled with annoying popup ads, auto-play videos, and complicated tracking software that slow webpage load times to a crawl. 

The rationalization: If people don't voluntarily consume ads, then companies must get attention by any means necessary. 

That approach, to put it simply, is wrong-headed. There's a difference between videos that bully their way into your view, and ones that draw people in and inspire them to click or share. The latter is not only less annoying, but, as Jet.com's effort shows, can be highly effective. The video was so popular, it landed on the front page of Digg.com. 

This is, apparently, the year of video marketing. Larger companies have some advantages, like more resources and bigger budgets. But young companies looking to grab attention don't have the layers of bureaucracy and approvals that all too-often bog down video production. They just need to use the same type of creative thinking that went into building their apps or developing their products, and let it loose for the cameras. 

Here's to hoping that ads get less annoying and become more a welcome part of the Web.

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Maybe we shouldn’t take our daily corporate samples too seriously. Maybe they don’t adequately represent the global economy. So IBM’s revenues last quarter plunged 13% from a year ago. It blamed China and the dollar, among other culprits. But IBM’s revenues have dropped for 13 quarters in a row. It’s a normal IBM condition and not a reflection of the global economy.

A whole slew of other tech companies chimed in with either disappointing revenues or disappointing outlooks, or both, each blaming a variety of issues, among them China and the dollar. Chip maker Qualcomm just reported a 14% plunge in its quarterly revenues. It’s having trouble in the smartphone market and will lay off a bunch of people. But maybe they’re just running into tougher competitors, rather than a lousy global economy. And the PC business, which is cratering, is dragging down all those involved. That’s structural and has little to do with the state of the global economy.

Then there’s industrial giant United Technology which reported that its revenues last quarter dropped 5%. Today Caterpillar reported that global machine sales plunged 15% in June compared to a year ago, after having dropped 12% in May and 11% in April, In Asia, machine sales plunged 19%, in Latin America 50%. And in booming North America? Down 5%, after having been up for the prior two months.

So CAT is facing Japanese, Chinese, and German competitors. It’s having to slug it out with them in China precisely when China is slowing. So it may be just CAT that’s having a hard time.

But don’t look at energy. Energy is getting clobbered….

So maybe we’re cherry-picking negative data. There are companies with actual revenue increases and positive outlooks, like Equifax, the credit bureau, which just reported a 10% jump in revenues (14% “in local currency,” as it says). Consumer borrowing is king, and Equifax expedites the process.

So what the heck is going on?

Turns out, global trade during the quarter and during the first five months of the year experienced the sharpest drop-off since the Financial Crisis.

The CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis, a division of the Ministry of Economic Affairs, just released its latest Merchandise World Trade Monitor, which covers global import and export volumes. It was dreary.

World trade shrank 1.2% in May from the previous month. The index fell to 135.1, the lowest level since July 2014, having dropped nearly every month so far this year. It’s down 4.7 points from its peak in December, the sharpest and longest decline since the Financial Crisis.

This chart, going back to January 2012, shows the very crummy state of the global economy, expressed in global trade:

To smoothen out the volatility of these sorts of monthly numbers – though there hasn’t been much volatility this year, it’s been just down – the CPB offers a measure of trade volume “momentum,” which it defines as “the change in the three months average up to the report month relative to the average of the preceding three months.”

That trade momentum measure slumped 1.3% in May, after having dropped 1.2% in April. It now amounts to the most negative “momentum” since the Financial Crisis.

The report explains: “Import and export momentum were close to zero in advanced economies, while both numbers were below 2% in emerging economies.” The chart from CBP, going back to 2010:

This isn’t stagnation or sluggish growth. This is the steepest and longest decline in world trade since the Financial Crisis. Unless a miracle happened in June, and miracles are becoming exceedingly scarce in this sector, world trade will have experienced its first back-to-back quarterly contraction since 2009.

Both of the measures above track import and export volumes. As volumes have been skidding, new shipping capacity has been bursting on the scene in what has become a brutal fight for market share [read… Container Carriers Wage Price War to Form Global Shipping Oligopoly].

Hence pricing per unit, in US dollars, has plunged 14% since May 2014, and nearly 20% since the peak in March 2011. For the months of March, April, and May, the unit price index has hit levels not seen since mid-2009.

World trade isn’t down for just one month, or just one region. It wasn’t bad weather or an election somewhere or whatever. The swoon has now lasted five months. In addition, the CPB decorated its report with sharp downward revisions of the prior months. And it isn’t limited to just one region. The report explains:

The decline was widespread, import and export volumes decreasing in most regions and countries, both advanced and emerging. Import and export growth turned heavily negative in Japan. Among emerging economies, Central and Eastern Europe was one of the worst performers.

Given these trends, the crummy performance of our heavily internationalized revenue-challenged corporate heroes is starting to make sense: it’s tough out there.

But not just in the rest of the world. At first we thought it might have been a blip, a short-term thing. Read… Americans’ Economic Confidence Gets Whacked

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B2B marketers have a huge and exciting challenge every moment of every day: a long buying cycle. The B2B buying cycle can take 30, 60, or even 90 days, and there are many stages that the customer experiences before signing on the dotted line.

In addition, B2B marketing puts a lot of money and resources at stake. You need to nurture your prospects all the way through the process. It’s about driving them through to the sale by creating great content at each stage of their journey.

Here are three secrets to providing great content at every stage in the customer journey.

1. Own Each Phase of the Funnel

There’s a level of accountability in each phase of the funnel, so it’s important to outline it and come up with your strategy for the entire funnel, and then work with sales for buy-in.

Top of the Funnel

Include content related to the topic of your industry and offering. For example, for RingLead, we often create top-of-funnel content around data quality, CRM implementation, marketing automation best practices, and even broader content, such as marketing and sales productivity tips. This stage of the funnel is all about helping, not selling. There is no product mention; instead, you’re establishing your brand as a leader—and expert—in the topics your audience cares about.

Check out these examples of excellent top-of-funnel content.

Middle of the Funnel

Often thought of as the “black hole” of your sales funnel, since the top of the funnel is clearly owned by the marketing department and the bottom of the funnel is clearly owned by sales. This is the middle ground where organizations tend to get lost and prospects tend to slow down. Prospects often want to take action at this stage, but if there’s no compelling event, messaging, or content, you lose them. Middle-of-funnel content is where the product starts to get woven in. Whether it’s product-related webinars or case studies, you’re still high-level and helpful, but you’re more actionable when it comes to your offering.

Here are examples of brands creating effective middle-of-funnel content.

Bottom of the Funnel

Sales-driven. This is the point where sales decks, presentations, proposals, and pricing come into play. If the entire funnel is a road and the marketer is driving a car down Funnel Street, the marketer moves to the backseat and the salesperson takes the wheel at this point in the cycle.

Here’s what good bottom-of-funnel content looks like.

No matter where you are in the funnel, it’s a marriage between sales and marketing—they must work together to help the prospect become a customer.

One study showed a 209% increase in revenue and closure rates based on strong alignment between sales and marketing.

2. Remember That a Funnel Is Not a Perfectly Shaped, Organized, Upside-Down Triangle

It’s actually more like a bucket with holes in it.

Prospects fall out of the bucket left and right, and come in at different angles and stages. A prospect could come in at the middle or the bottom. Someone might come in at the top and move directly to the bottom, and vice versa.

Therefore, make sure your content tells a cohesive story all the way through the funnel, whether it’s bottom-up, top-down, or somewhere in between.

3. Remain Transparent throughout the Funnel

Marketers know the importance of being honest and transparent when working with customers, engaging on social media, etc., and the same holds true for the sales cycle. Be open and clear about the different stages of the funnel and where the prospect is going next.

Transparency starts with the prospect’s first experience with you.

Oftentimes the prospect doesn’t know what the buyer journey looks like—especially yours. Map out the journey for your prospects so they understand what they’re likely going to need at each of the different stages.

For instance, be clear about when your prospect may need to involve an executive for budget sign-off, or at what point they’ll get a quick hello from your CEO.

Transparency starts with the prospect’s first experience with you, and usually that’s your website.

If someone is about to download one of your eBooks, let them know that they’re going to receive an email with the eBook, and then in the email, let them know that BDR Joe is going to reach out, and include Joe’s photo. Even better, that email should come from Joe.

The B2B sales funnel is not cut and dry, and neither is the content associated with it. However, if you put your audience’s best interests first and think about the information they need to address their challenges and pain points, you’ll be appreciated, loved, and shared. Most importantly, you’ll also gain customers for life.

Facebook, always known to be a giant, is appearing increasingly friendly as of late.

To publishers (and advertisers), that is.

Whether the discussion is about social media, media in general, new avenues for publishing content, or anything else vaguely media-related – Facebook is likely to come up at some point. With a fifth of the world’s population logged on as active users, this is inevitable. These truths represent both great challenges and great opportunities for publishers and marketers.

To wit, Facebook has tinkered with the way they approach their relationships with large publishers of digital content. Seeking to improve their own user experience (we all prefer experiencing a platform when the content we’re scrolling through is high quality and interesting, after all) while deepening their lucrative ties with publishers, they have announced one of the most important of these changes: Instant Articles.

Facebook Met Publishers on Their Terms

Basically, Instant Articles are News Feed-based spaces where publishers can post highly interactive multimedia “articles.” I use quotations because the tools Facebook is offering for building this type of content are indicative of far more stimulating experiences than merely reading a traditional newspaper article. Some of these features include colorful cinemagraph covers, autoplay videos, intensely colorful and easily zoomable photographs, and even interactive maps to give stories a geographic context. Clearly, these are meant to be engaged with on a deep level, something that both publishers and advertisers can get behind.

Facebook sees these as a momentous new development in the field of online publishing:

“Powerful new creative tools bring your stories to life. Instantly zoom into high-resolution photos and tilt to explore in detail. Watch autoplay video come alive as you scroll through the article. See where it all happened with interactive maps. Hear the author’s voice with embedded audio captions.”

The language is both bold and provocative, as are the digital tools they are describing. With Instant Articles, publishers can create a user experience that is equal parts evocative, informative, and unique to their brand. While some publishing giants were wary of going full bore into the new publishing platform, Facebook was able to entice nine major American and British publishing outlets: The New York Times, National Geographic, and BuzzFeed being the most often discussed of the bunch.

Facebook knew from the start that publishers would have concerns about the new strategy, largely stemming from directing their user experience away from their own websites and on to the Facebook News Feed. According to The New York Times (who, coincidentally are one of the publishers now on board), employees from The Guardian were the most hesitant, suggesting to peers at other outlets that “publishers should band together to negotiate deals that work for the whole industry, and should retain control of their own advertising.” It’s unclear whether such collusion was necessary, but one thing is clear: Facebook understood the concerns and went all out in alleviating them. In order to create a program that was too good for the publishers to pass up, Facebook took a number of measures.

1. Ad Revenue: Facebook is allowing publishers to keep 100% of the ad revenue if they sell their own ad space, and 70% of the ad revenues if they leave it up to Facebook to sell the ad space through their own network.
2. Final Cut: Facebook is also allowing publishers to have total control over what content is created and how it is displayed. As Contently puts it, “In essence, publishers can use Facebook Instant Articles as an alternative platform to deliver a superior experience for their readers coming from Facebook – all without sacrificing ad revenue.”
3. Front and Center: Facebook is still running the show, of course, and thus will be in control of how visible these ads remain. Once again, though, the motivating factor for them is an improved user experience. Therefore, they’ll likely be doing everything in their power to make the content publishers create appear early and often in users’ News Feeds, so as to satisfy the promises made in those agreements and also give users easy access to quality, visually stimulating content.

BuzzFeed is the publishing outlet widely deemed to be the most primed to succeed with the new format. Because their brand is built around engaging with content in shorter intervals with unique formats (quizzes, lists, etc.), the Instant Article platform will suit them well. Facebook has already assured them that Instant Articles will be a suitable platform for their varied approach to displaying and sharing content.

Publishers shouldn’t be the only group excited about this development, though. Advertisers should be making very careful note of how ad space will function with these tools. Whether buying ad space from the publishers directly or from Facebook (which, once again, would mean Facebook would get to keep 30% of those ad revenues), marketers and ad agencies should be salivating at the thought of these highly engaging and visible plots of digital real estate.

As Marketing Land points out, it’s becoming less and less common for publishers (no matter how large) to have large sales teams. Because of this, we may see publishers opt for the indirect advertising method, in which Facebook would be in control of the ad inventory. The 30% decrease in revenue collection could be potentially made up for by the ability to take advantage of Facebook’s advanced targeting methods. Also, marketers will be able to benefit from a new, “no-nonsense means of serving more trackable, targeted ads across high-value media properties.” In other words, marketers will benefit immensely from yet another innovative and highly specific method of targeting audiences through Facebook.

Formatting

In terms of formatting, the ads will have certain restrictions. Facebook has posted the following specifications for Instant Article ad units:

• 1 large banner ad, sized 320×250 or 300×250 pixels – or – 2 small banners sized 320×50 or 300×50 pixels for every 500 words of content
• A maximum of 4 total ads per article, and a maximum of 2 small banners per article.
• All articles are allowed to have at least one ad, regardless of the length.
• Publishers may include no more than one house ad per article.
• No ads may be placed “above the fold” on the first view of the article.
• Publishers may not include ads in autoplay videos embedded in their articles, although ads in third-party video players are allowed

It’s interesting to see these specifications as a window into the way Facebook sees themselves benefiting from these instant articles. It all comes down to user experience. So, when users are scrolling down their News Feeds and are confronted with an Instant Article, Facebook ensures that the ads included won’t be the first visible element. Also, they ensure that the ads will be useful, not merely a way for publishers to shill their content, at least not more than once per article. As consistency is part of the foundation on which UX is built, Facebook is making sure that videos aren’t preceded by ads. Since it’s asking more of a user to sit through a video than it is to simply see a written blurb, Facebook knows that this last specification will make the user more willing to engage with the high-quality video content.

Recap

Because it’s still such a new advertising platform, it will take some time to develop useful results metrics and best practices guidelines. Already though, ad space on Instant Articles is signaling a dramatic change in the way publishers and advertisers digitally interact. Ultimately, if Facebook doesn’t go back on the concessions made to publishers so far, (this is possible, of course, as Facebook can essentially do whatever it wants) the ability to advertise on Instant Articles represents huge brand building opportunities. Users will be met with Instant Articles in a highly visible (the format is exclusively mobile) and high quality (the examples so far are visually rich, easy to engage with, and varied in subject matter) content. How this changes in the future remains to be seen, but marketers, advertisers, and business alike should all be taking careful note of how it all shakes out.

Manufacturing as the most vital sector across the global contributes over US$10 trillion to global economy every year. Despite the global manufacturing production has had low growth for the last few years (2.3% in 2014), the annual growth of manufacturing value added has still remained around 1% for three consecutive years, and the currently global manufacturing sector are mainly driven by developing and emerging economies, particularly Asia is dominating the global manufacturing market, according the Manufacturing Index 2014 from investment consulting company Cushman & Wakefield.

The index analyses countries worldwide by assessing coasts, risks and operating conditions and relevant factors including logistics; the likelihood of natural disaster; economic risk; and energy and labour costs for manufacturing. The result indicates that Malaysia is the world’s top manufacturing market, and Taiwan places second with South Korea in third and Thailand in fourth.

The largest manufacturing country in the world, China, is well positioned in fifth overall, performing strongly in terms of costs, but the nation falls short of the top spot due to its weak score in the risk category.

Malaysia has become a new investors’ favourite, thanks to its central location in Southeast Asia, high annual GDP growth rate of 4.68% from 2000 to 2014, its pro-business policies, comparatively stable economic and political environment, sophisticated financial facilities, and well-developed infrastructure. Today, Malaysia’s manufacturing industry constitutes over 25% of GDP, with leading manufacturing sector by some margin is electrical and electronic products, which constitute 32.9% of Malaysia’s exports, and as such is a significant driver of the economy.

Singapore, as the world’s best country for doing business, is also becoming one of the leading markets for manufacturing sector. Singapore’s manufacturing output contributes over 21% of its total GDP, with major industries such as include chemicals, electronics, precision engineering, transport engineering, biomedical manufacturing, and general manufacturing.

As Asia continues to be at the leading position of the global manufacturing sector, Manufacturing Solutions Expo (MSE) 2015 will presents one-stop exhibition platform for products and solutions providers in both Asia and the World to showcase innovative solutions, cost effective technologies and products to improve productivity and efficiency within and beyond manufacturing industries.

Facebook Insights is their analytics platform for page managers. Anyone that manages a page on Facebook has access to this tool, which is easy to use and can provide exactly what you’d want it to, insights.

Where can you find Facebook Insights?

Log in to Facebook and go directly to your page. There should be a number of options at the top of the page, “Page”, “Messages”, etc. One of them is “Insights”. Click it.

What does Facebook Insights tell you?

Facebook Insights currently breaks itself into 6 categories: Likes, Reach, Visits, Posts, Videos, and People.

• Likes – here you can see how many people liked your page over a given time period, and how and where the like happened.
• Reach – this page shows you how many people your page reached, or how many people saw something coming from your page. It breaks it down into organic and paid, assuming you pay to show ads or boost posts. And it shows you how many people you pissed off, with total numbers of users who unliked the page, reported your posts as spam, or hide your posts altogether.
• Visits – quite simply, this page shows you how many people visited your page, how they got there, and what they looked at once they got there.
• Posts – here you can analyze each post you made to your page to see how many people they reached, number of shares, clicks, likes, and comments. You can also see which types of posts do better than others, and what days of the week or time of the day is most effective.
• Videos – if you post videos to Facebook, this is where you can see all the viewer stats for those videos.
• People – this page breaks down all the people who like your page by a variety of different geographical and demographic attributes, including gender, location, language, etc.

How can Facebook Insights help you?

Facebook Insights is a great tool for marketers who want to get more value out of their Facebook account. There are almost an endless number of ways to use the data provided by Facebook Insights, but here are a few suggestions.

1. Use the posts and reach tabs to learn when and what to post. Find the posts that get the most engagement and start to develop more of them, leaving behind the kinds of posts that don’t do all that well with your fans.
2. Use the likes and visits tabs to figure out how you’re currently getting people to your Facebook page and double down on those efforts that are bringing them in to grow your total audience.
3. Use the people tab to track who your fans are and use that information to better target a Facebook ads campaign in an effort to reach more people like them.

When you pick up that phone to make a sales call, you are in control right?

You’ve made the decision on when to call, and you’ve decided who it is you’re going to be calling.

But are you going to control the conversation?

Whatever time you have spent learning about your products, identifying and refining your target marketing, strategizing personas and researching the competition, it all comes down to the moment you pick up the phone and engage with your potential buyer.

In sales, it’s never been enough to just show up.

64% of all sales calls are unsuccessful. Here’s why:

When it comes to the conversation itself, nothing has been planned. Without a detailed plan of what the call is supposed to achieve and the kinds of outcomes that are desired, the salesperson is likely to squander that opportunity in front of them.

You can’t reach that end goal if you don’t know where you’re going.  You need to know those desired outcomes, identify any hurdles and spot those potential pitfalls before you begin a call, otherwise you’ll have no chance of crossing the finishing line.

Without a plan, how will you show the business executive you’re speaking with that you have insight to bring to the conversation and value to add to the interaction?

Having a plan for your sales calls is vital

Of course, there are those salespeople who’ll tell you “I think on my feet.” Some of them do have a natural ability to process and respond to scenarios more quickly than others, but they still don’t have a clear end goal or a plan to get them there.

Then there are those veterans who think they’ve handled every possible variation of the sales call, and they can anticipate exactly how each one will go. They’ve done the same thing over and over again, so they don’t need a plan. So why aren’t they achieving better success rates?

The figures speak for themselves, and the fact remains that a lack of preparation turns off two thirds of business executives before the call has barely progressed.

Without a plan, the salesperson will not create value on the call. Without adequate preparation, your value as a potential relationship and the value of your products will be questioned at best, or more likely damaged beyond repair.

When you’ve wasted the time of an executive, one of their most precious commodities, the chances of getting them to commit to the next step is greatly diminished. You’ll find it an uphill battle to get hold of that contact again, your calls will be screened and if you do win any business, there’s a good chance you will have done so by competing on price. Congratulations on winning the race to the bottom!

Any customer loyalty you were hoping for has been rejected because of the purchase experience.

Make your sales calls matter

Every call will vary depending on the client and the situation.  Having a good plan can improve the odds and make all the difference.

When you have an effective plan for your sales calls you can:

• Nurture those relationships
• Overcome any stumbling blocks
• Advance the sale
• Add value and satisfaction

Good plans are impressive; a potential client will appreciate them. A good plan shows you’ve taken the time to develop a thoughtful, logical and mutually beneficial approach, and invested time into the relationship before it has begun.

That makes a difference.

You’ve ensured that your customer has gotten more from the call than they expected. That’s satisfying, and means they won’t feel like their time has been wasted. In fact, the call has been valuable, that all-important magic word.

Know what your customer expects, make a plan, and exceed those expectations; then you’ll be on the right track to closing the sale.

Make your call plans as effective as possible with Dealmaker Smart Call Planner and start improving results today. 

In recent months, China has stepped up a longstanding campaign for its currency (officially called the renminbi [RMB] but also referred to as the yuan), to be included as a part of the composition of the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF’s) Special Drawing Rights (SDR).

While the media is abuzz with the potential market implications of China’s currency achieving status as an international reserve currency—one which can be held by central banks and other major financial institutions to pay off international debt obligations—at one level, the issue is somewhat arcane.

SDRs are a synthetic quasi-currency made up of a basket of widely traded currencies. They are used by the IMF for accounting purposes and as a medium for allocating assets among member countries. They play almost no role in private trade and finance.

They do, however, provide the IMF’s approval that a currency has the qualities necessary to be an international reserve currency. Indeed, SDR currencies are automatically regarded as acceptable reserve currencies, whereas other currencies have to meet criteria for full convertibility to have the same status.

Until recently, the Chinese government placed major restrictions on the use of the RMB. The authorities appeared to consider the control that an insulated currency conferred on domestic monetary and fiscal policy to be more important than the potential benefits from full participation in global financial markets.

In recent years, however, the government attitude has changed, with market-oriented economic reforms and a more outward-looking foreign policy including measures to encourage wide RMB usage.

The four currencies with SDR status—the US dollar, the euro, the UK pound sterling and the Japanese yen—currently make up the overwhelming majority of global international currency reserves. As a knock-on effect, they dominate international bond markets and global financial transactions.

In recent years, the rising share of global trade accounted for by emerging markets, and by China in particular, has left this state of affairs looking somewhat anachronistic.

The Chinese government had campaigned for RMB inclusion in SDRs in 2010, at the most recent of the IMF’s reviews of the SDR structure, but at that time, the bid was rejected. In our view, prospects for success at the meeting scheduled for October 2015 appear high.

The Potential Benefits for China

Reserve currency status and RMB internationalization could confer a number of significant benefits on China, including potentially lowering borrowing costs and facilitating overseas expansion by Chinese companies, allowing cross-border contracts in major commodities such as iron ore to be priced in RMB, thereby easing foreign exchange risks arising from pricing in US dollars, and above all, opening the way for a portion of China’s enormous foreign exchange reserves to be redeployed in more economically productive directions.

The latter measure could conceivably stimulate economic growth at the margin both in China and on a global scale.

Other reserve currency countries have much lower reserves relative to their gross domestic product than China does—the United States is able effectively to operate without reserves at present— while overseas investment projects such as China’s ambitious “one belt, one road” and “New Silk Road” initiatives to build trading infrastructure with neighboring states, as well as private initiatives, would represent potentially attractive new uses for resources that are at present tied up in currency deposits and Treasury bills.

For a currency to be included in SDRs, the IMF primarily requires that it be important in terms of its share in global trade, but also that it is “freely used,” a term further broken down into “widely used” and “widely traded.” In 2010, the RMB already featured widely in global trade, but the IMF decided that the currency did not meet the “freely used” criterion.

At that time, the RMB was not an internationally convertible currency. Its exchange rate against other currencies was tightly controlled by the Chinese government at a level believed by many commentators to represent a significant undervaluation, while an unsophisticated local banking system lacked the ability to provide many of the instruments required by international companies to manage their currency exposures.

A form of the RMB, called “offshore RMB” was available through a few Hong Kong-based banks, but it was cumbersome to trade in compared with other currencies, and its value differed from that of the onshore RMB on foreign exchange markets.

A good deal has changed since 2010, and the process of change has been accelerating. The number of offshore centers where RMB is traded has proliferated, while in the Shanghai Free Trade Zone (FTZ), currency transactions can be executed between mainland and associated offshore companies with few restrictions.

Meanwhile, the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) has been moving toward reforms in the country’s banking system by freeing interest rates and by introducing a deposit insurance system, two important milestones on the road to creating a system fully able to participate in international financial flows. Importantly, many authorities, including the IMF, believe that the RMB is fairly valued. Reserve currency status would imply abandoning the current RMB-dollar peg.

A New Currency Connection

The opening of the Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connect in the latter part of 2014, allowing foreign investors to freely invest in eligible Chinese A shares previously restricted to only Chinese citizens or foreigners with special permits, was seen as a major move in internationalizing the RMB through allowing mainland investors to acquire stocks on the internationally traded Hong Kong markets.

The initial impact was lower than expected, however, with only small percentages of permitted daily trading quotas being utilized. The situation changed in April 2015 with the announcement of measures to permit mainland mutual fund managers to buy into Hong Kong stocks (that were trading at markedly lower valuations).

Restrictions on use of the Stock Connect by individuals were also eased. As details of the move filtered out, use of the Stock Connect rose sharply, such that trading quotas were exceeded on some occasions and remained well above prior levels.

In May, we also saw the announcement of a planned “Mutual Recognition” program that would open the way for mainland and Hong Kong mutual fund managers to offer their funds in each other’s markets. As mutual recognition comes into operation, we believe Chinese mainland investors would be most impacted, given wider investment choices.

These recent developments could also help the Shanghai stock market become much more closely integrated into global financial markets, markedly expanding the effective global use of RMB.

Some remaining areas of uncertainty surrounding direct investment in China—in particular, lingering fears that a “suspended” capital gains tax could be reinstated and the possibility that a “short swing” law could potentially lead to capital gains from larger investor positions in individual companies being expropriated—are tempering our enthusiasm for utilizing the new freedoms at present.

In addition, recent government intervention in the stock market and suspension of stocks during a sharp market downturn could have an impact on the reform process and the progress made toward RMB gaining international reserve currency status. However, we do feel there is political will toward economic reform in China, so such issues may not persist.

Going forward, the PBOC is offering a move to full “managed convertibility” over the remainder of 2015, predicting the opening of a stock connect between Hong Kong and China’s other major stock exchange at Shenzhen and extending the currency trading freedoms introduced in Shanghai to other FTZs and eventually the whole country.

In addition, we think the introduction of the planned China International Payment System (CIPS), setting up a worldwide clearing house for international RMB payments, markedly increases the ease of use of the currency, placing it more on a par with other global currencies.

Some controls would be retained in such fields as the monitoring of money laundering and terrorist financing, the avoidance of excessive foreign debt and currency mismatches, the management of short-term speculative flows, and the improvement of balance of payments statistics and monitoring.

Furthermore, the IMF will likely be aware that the prospect of full membership in the world financial system is a significant factor driving the financial reform program in China, and it might be reluctant to risk providing ammunition for domestic opponents of the changes, thus complicating a process that appears very much in the interests of Western investors as well as the Chinese themselves.

A strong hint of the direction of IMF thinking came in March with IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde’s comment that the RMB’s inclusion in SDRs was a question of “when, not if,” but there could be some caution in light of recent market events.

International businesses appear to be “voting with their feet” on the matter of RMB internationalization. In a survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit for the international lawyers Allen & Overy, some 50% of executives who responded anticipated at least a doubling of RMB use, while 45% had used the currency in a cross-border transaction in the past year, as opposed to only 21% in the previous 12 months. Forty-nine percent were planning to use RMB to fund acquisitions. Fewer than 20% had been using the currency for such purposes for more than 12 months.

In our view, further movement toward full convertibility could see the process accelerate. Thus, the end of 2015 could see a transformed international financial landscape, with the launch of the Asian Infrastructure Bank, the New Development Bank and CIPS, accompanied by the admission of the RMB to the IMF’s SDRs, clearing the way for it to become one of the world’s principal reserve currencies.

At the same time, China’s A share stock market could be well on the way to becoming a component of global indexes, a move likely only delayed rather than blocked by the recent decision by MSCI to exclude Chinese shares at least until 2016. China would thus become far more tied into, and significant in the global financial system than is the case at the moment.

We believe that these developments, and the changes that have made them possible, represent a major long-term opportunity for international investors and will greatly raise the status of emerging-market economies as a whole.

However, recent actions by the Chinese government to prop up the market and influence market participants could weigh heavily on the ability of the market to attain international respectability. 

We believe the index creators will likely be very cautious in regards to putting a heavy weighting on Chinese A shares. So, we can’t expect very much in the short term, but in the longer term we believe that the Chinese market will mature and become an important part of global portfolios.

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Hopes were high last year that India’s new Prime Minister Narendra Modi could revitalize the economy, but expectations were far too optimistic, and a more mixed, pragmatic outlook has since taken hold. This tends to be the pattern in India: Because of its huge potential – with 1.2 billion people and 60% of the population below 30 years of age – investors can become mesmerized by the scale and tend to read too much into cyclical turns.

Nevertheless, even as the post-election euphoria has subsided, there are reasons for optimism on India’s investment potential. While the credit sector is no longer an exceptional value, we see opportunities in duration in local markets and would look to add currency exposure during periods when markets become risk-averse.

Under new management: Untangling the web of bureaucracy and aligning regional and central governments are daunting tasks, but Prime Minister Modi, leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), is known for his anti-corruption and pro-business stance. Already, talk is circulating of a second term, which, while far too early to predict, would allow time for real change.

At the Reserve Bank of India (RBI): Raghuram Rajan, the new governor of the RBI and former IMF chief economist, is leading a regime change, steering the central bank through a new monetary policy framework that includes inflation targeting.

Inflation targeting: The RBI and the Ministry of Finance agreed to an inflation target below 6% by January 2016 and 4% thereafter (within a 2% band). For the historically high-inflation economy, this is a pivotal change, and if global inflationary pressures remain subdued, the target can be achieved.

Evolving bond/rates markets: Access to India’s local markets for foreign investors may increase by up to $10 billion over the next few months, although liquidity will likely remain low. The central bank cut interest rates by 25 basis points on June 2 and further rate cuts are expected before year-end. In addition, the government is working on new guidelines for global bonds, which should increase issuance, and tax reform appears to be a real possibility, a big plus for local markets.

Within India there is much debate: Is India the next China? Certainly the government’s projection for GDP growth this year at 7% or higher is eye-catching. But with a smaller economy, the need for huge structural reform, and less capability to make swift political decisions on the economy, India is not another China. India is its own unique story, and the world’s largest democracy, as the locals say, maneuvers slowly.

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A commentary in the Communist Party's flagship publication yesterday suggests the mainland government is prepared to intervene in the stock market again if turbulence returns.

The article in People's Daily, which says that maintaining financial stability should be a top priority, is the latest piece by state media to reaffirm Beijing's intervention to stabilize the stock market, amid mounting pressure on authorities to prepare an exit strategy.

It said the finance sector was the lifeline of the national economy and warned that instability would jeopardize years of market reform.

"When abnormal volatility and irregularities arise, we must be resolute in taking action and measures when necessary, without hesitation," the commentary said. "Genuine financial stability must be a proactive, long-term and sustainable stability - not a passive, short-lived and unsustainable stability."

On Monday the paper said intervention in the stock market was an "international norm".

"It was obviously a morale-boosting article aimed at soothing investors' concerns about the market outlook," said Haitong Securities analyst Zhang Qi. "But a boom-to-bust cycle is unlikely to happen in the coming three or four months."

The commentary also dismissed calls for the pace of market reforms in the financial sector to slow, arguing more change was needed for stability.

The A-share market has been on a roller-coaster ride since June 15, with stock markets dipping more than 30 per cent in three weeks, wiping out US$3 trillion of market value.

Beijing stepped in to stem the market crash as regulators suspended new share offerings and ordered major shareholders not to sell stock but to increase their holdings.

The central bank also injected liquidity into the China Securities Finance Corporation, which distributed cash to mutual funds to buy shares.

It was estimated that the rescue efforts had cost more than US$161 billion of capital, though it remained unclear how and when the regulators would work out a plan to withdraw the funds.

Lin Zuoming, chairman of the Aviation Industry Corporation of China, said recently that the market crash was the result of a scheme by hostile foreign investors to undermine the country's reforms and overthrow the party.

On Monday, financial news outlet Caijing said regulators were studying how to withdraw the rescue funds, but the China Securities Regulatory Commission denied the report.

The market rout happened after the benchmark indicator surged 120 per cent from October 2014, buoyed by an influx of speculative capital.

State-owned media such as Xinhua were blamed by millions of retail investors for publishing upbeat articles in late April, encouraging them to chase the rally amid the country's deepening economic reforms.

Levin Zhu Yunlai, son of former premier Zhu Rongji and former chief of China International Capital Corporation, this week criticized some of the stabilization measures. He said regulators should come up with a more systemic approach.

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NOW WATCH: Scientists are astonished by these Goby fish that can climb 300-foot waterfalls

It’s kind of like selling goods to consumers with very bad credit and then being surprised when they don’t pay.

But before I get into that, we all know Greece owes Germany, the ECB, and the IMF a lot of money.

Last week I explained that if they went the “Grexit” route, 75% of Greece’s government debt would’ve been wiped clean. That’s $90 billion to Germany alone and about $250 billion to the rest of the euro zone. It would have hurt, but there’s no avoiding pain at this point, and now it’s only going to be worse.

But there is another level of debt almost no one is talking about.

In fact, we have a harder time getting good information on it because the EU has increasingly hidden it.

However, this debt gets at the heart of why Germany and some of the strongest opponents to a Grexit were so desperate to keep Greece in the euro zone.

This not-much-talked-about debt are the TARGET2 loans Greece (and other euro zone importers) owes the rest of them.

It’s a fancy way of saying “past due accounts receivables.” Another way of saying this: “The check’s in the mail.” Or: “We’ll pay you when we can.”

Fat chance.

The idea is that when German or other euro zone companies sell goods to Greek companies, the Greek companies hand off their payment obligations to the Greece central bank. That central bank then owes Germany’s central bank, which then pays the German companies who sold the goods in the first place.

The problem is that the southern European countries – PIIGS, or Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain plus Ireland – import a ton. When Germany sells to Greece, Greece’s central banks collects the money, but doesn’t pay the German central banks. These are called TARGET2 loans.

They’re not really “loans” in the sense that they are involuntary. The German central bank knows that if it pushes too hard for these payments on time, exports will slow or discontinue without such credit extension. It’s either extend credit to these subprime borrowers or lose the sales!

It’s such a huge issue because these economically weaker nations aren’t competitive exporters. They can’t afford these outrageous trade deficits they’re wracking up! They have run increasing trade deficits ever since the euro was created. The currency lets them borrow at a cheaper rate. And the stronger exporting countries are willing to extend credit to keep their gravy train going.

Under this backwards arrangement, Greece owes Germany 100 billion euros, or roughly $109 billion. The broader euro zone – almost totally the PIIGS – owes it 531 billion. That’s almost $580 billion.

This is the most contentious example, but the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Finland are extending credit to these weaker central banks too – though nowhere near the extent of Germany, which holds around 75% of these TARGET2 loans.

The following chart shows the TARGET2 balances across the euro zone. Blue is the extended credit from the four major net exporters. Red is what the five net importers owe them.

Before I even get into this, just take the chart at face value. Look at all that credit. It’s disgusting. We didn’t have this kind of foolishness prior to 2008. Now we live in an age where credit is king. Real value is supposed to be king. Cash is supposed to be king. Not credit. This nonsense has got to stop.

The edge of this graph shows the current balance for all TARGET2 loans: 709 billion euros ($774 billion). It actually peaked at 1.06 TRILLION euros in late 2012. Come on!

This gets at why Germany wasn’t in a hurry to let Greece leave the euro zone. And in fact, why it finally insisted they stay.

In government debt, Greece owes Germany 90 billion euros.

If Greece had exited, Germany would have had to write-off that amount overtime. The short-term affects for Germany would have been manageable.

But in addition to the government debt, Greece owes Germany another 100 billion in TARGET 2 loans. That would’ve been written off immediately. That’s much more painful and embarrassing to voters near term – which is the realm politicians live in.

That means Germany could see 190 billion euros – or $200 billion – in default if Greece exited. That’s much more than any other country by far.

To put this in more perspective, Germany’s GDP is about 2.9 trillion euros. 46% of that, or 1.3 trillion euros, is from exports. About 63% of that, or around 840 billion, goes to the euro zone. Exports are paramount to its aging economy that would otherwise already be slowing dramatically longer term!

That means the 531 billion in TARGET2 balances from the euro zone equals 63% of its exports, which means the payments are eight months late.

Any accountant worth his salt would lose his mind if account receivables were just three months late!

This is one of Europe’s dirtiest secrets.

To keep exports going to countries that can’t afford it, the central banks of the exporting nations have to extend high credit to the central banks of the weaker importing nations.

That way the stronger countries import more than they frankly should and the weaker nations live well beyond their means. This is the very imbalance that the euro has created since its inception in 1999.

Talk about denial.

Talk about not addressing the underlying problem.

Talk about kicking the can down the road!

This system won’t last. The euro won’t last. Watch out below in the months and years ahead when it finally cracks, or at best is restructured into a strong and weak version of the currency.

As bad as things will get in the U.S., there’s one bright spot: Thank god we’re not Europe. We will still be the best house in a very bad neighborhood ahead.

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How does sales operations work to improve sales productivity and effectiveness without becoming the dumping ground for any task that sits outside of the core selling roles? At Thomson Reuters—a company that employs 57,000 people and generates $12.5 billion in annual revenue—sales operations is far from a function that’s merely cobbled together.

“We have a very structured organizational model and a strategic and collaborative approach to sales ops,” says Lee Wood, Senior Vice President of Global Sales Operations, Planning and Strategy for the company’s Intellectual Property and Science business unit.

With 30 years of experience developing and executing sales strategies in the business information industry, Wood knows the value of deliberate design.

If you Google "How to close a deal", you'll quickly stumble across some tried-and-true best practices for sealing a sales deal.

But, in reality, sales deals can be unpredictable and often require sales reps to think on their feet.

Consider, for instance, how HubSpot Executive Dan Tyre once needed to speak at a client's Sales Kickoff meeting to close a deal.

Or how Caila Brandt, HubSpot's Associate Inbound Growth Specialist, took a telemarketing call and used it as an opportunity to convince the caller to purchase from her.

All of which is to say: Closing a deal is rarely a simple experience, and when necessary, you'll need to go above-and-beyond to earn the prospect's business.

Read on to learn the wildest ways five HubSpot sales experts have closed deals.

1. "I once convinced a telemarketer he needed HubSpot software to succeed."

HubSpot's Associate Inbound Growth Specialist Caila Brandt told me, "Having worked in sales for most of my adult career, I learned very early on, the power of receiving telemarketing calls and the opportunities that come with having a conversation — given I was the one being prospected." 

"Not only did I get to understand what you should not do on a telemarketing call, but I also suddenly had an influx of companies calling me, albeit to sell their own product or job."

Brandt continues, "On one occasion I had the same real estate manager (let's call him Ray) call me five times to try and get a family member's house on their books … and that's when it hit me. Yes, I've spoken to Ray five times, given him the same answer every time, and been asked the same questions each time. It was frustrating, to say the least."

"On Ray's fifth call of the week, after recognizing his number on my personal phone, I answered — little did he know he was about to get the pitch of his lifetime. He started with the same questions and I answered in the same way as our four other calls, and then once he finished his questions, I politely asked if he had heard of HubSpot, and used his prospecting time to add value and help with his process."

"After a good 20-minute conversation, Ray admitted to frustrations in their processes, and a real desire for change and support. A meeting was booked that day, and after a demo and process run, the deal was closed and the rest is history."

2. "I personally set up equipment at a client's house."

HubSpot Executive Dan Tyre says that, when he was selling computer hardware, he once had a customer who took one year to make the purchase.

Tyre says, "He researched everything to explicit detail. Then I didn't hear from him for three months, despite repeated calls and contact. At the last day of the month, he called me up and asked if I had the complete system in stock."

"He specifically wanted to know if I had a printer cable to connect the computer to a printer and I said yes. He said he would purchase on that day if I brought everything to his house and set it up, as long as I could do it before midnight. I did, and I got the deal."

3. "I took a Friday afternoon off to show up at their shop."

Elizabeth Grip, HubSpot Account Executive III, told me she once spontanously decided to take a trip to a diamond company's office space after a week of no responses. 

Grip says, "I had finished what I believed to be a very strong discovery call and demonstration with a local diamond company in Boston. They were looking into one of our enterprise-level offerings and I had all necessary stakeholders involved. After agreeing our next step was to review a contract together, and scheduling a call to do so — I was surprised to find no one in the Zoom when I entered the call."

Grip adds, "After an entire week of cold calling and emailing, I decided to take a Friday afternoon to just show up to their shop! Knowing they are a small business, I figured if anything I would get to browse some nice-looking diamonds and hopefully get an update on the opportunity. After traveling all the way downtown — I found out their storefront was closed for the day! Instead, I took a quick selfie of myself and sent it to them in an email."

4. "I sent pizza and flowers to a prospect's business."

HubSpot's Sales Director Tyler Rhodes told me, "My team has had pizza and flowers sent to offices to entice them all to get in a room to sign the agreement."

He adds, "I've also had reps who've used Cameo (personalized videos from celebrities) to close a deal."  

5. "I delivered a dozen donuts every week ... for eight months."

HubSpot Account Executive Ilias Pishev told me he once delivered a box of donuts to a prospect every week until he sealed the deal — which took eight months. 

He says, "When I previously worked in outside sales, I had a target account I had been working with for a while, and after getting to know the main POC, I learned they had quite the sweet tooth and enjoyed donuts."

Pishev continues, "As a point to show how determined I was to earn their business (and my love for donuts, as well), I decided I would pop my head in the prospect's office every week with a box of a dozen donuts."

"Eight months and 384 donuts later, we won their business and a happy customer! We even celebrated the deal over a box of donuts together."

6. "I stapled the proposal to my tie."

Dan Tyre told me about another time when he was with his manager delivering a proposal to the prospect.

"While he was handing the proposal over, it came apart," Tyre says, "so my manager grabbed a stapler and then stapled the proposal to his tie — which was unusual, but we won the deal."

Ultimately, these wild, unusual examples of sales reps closing deals should inspire you to think outside the box regarding how you might close your next deal.

Personalizing the experience for each client, and proving you're willing to be flexible to meet a client's needs, is ultimately key to successfully closing more deals. 

The New York Yankees are known, among other things, for putting together championship teams by paying top dollar for star performers. The Tampa Bay Rays, on the other hand, routinely build contending teams by identifying and developing up-and-coming talent that can be had for bargain bin prices.

Both strategies get you to the playoffs. And both can be applied to building your sales team.

Tested sales veterans and hungry rookies alike have the ability to add value to your sales staff. It's also true that hires from either group are bound to come with distinct challenges that may make them a poor fit for your business. And making a bad hire can cost you more than just new business. A 2012 report by the DePaul University Center for Sales Leadership notes that the average cost of hiring, training and replacing a sales professional falls just shy of $115,000.

With so much on the line, how do you know which route to take when building your sales team?

Let’s start with a look at the lineup. (And yes, there really is a baseball metaphor for everything.)

The Veteran

The Veteran is a known entity. She’s got a demonstrated history of closing big deals and has an established book of business with heavy hitters in your industry. She’s largely autonomous and doesn’t need a babysitter.

“You’ll have to manage an experienced salesperson much less than a recent grad,” says Elisa Cool. Cool is VP of Sales at Contently, a New York-based start-up that focuses on high-end brand publishing. “[They’re] going to be able to run their own book of business without you looking over her shoulder.” 

However, Cool cautions that The Veteran might be overly comfortable with her approach, her clients and her existing Rolodex. “If she’s spent years carrying a bag, she’s probably picked up some bad habits you’d like to see her lose,” Cool says. The Veteran may be resistant to change and may prefer to do things “her way” because they’ve worked in the past.

“Experienced salespeople may not need day-to-day management, but they may require some coaching on things like collaboration and sharing,” Cool says. “They can be territorial, and if you’re a young company with a transparent culture, that’s going to be an issue.” 

The Rookie

He’s young, he’s ambitious, and he costs a fraction of what The Veteran costs. He’s digitally savvy, energetic, and not burdened with bad habits cultivated over the course of a long career. He’s eager to learn and can bring new thinking to your team.

He’s also inexperienced. The Rookie requires training, development and plenty of handholding. He doesn’t come with a Rolodex. Plus, he might be hard to find. The Wall Street Journal’s Lauren Weber recently noted that sales is increasingly unattractive to recent college graduates, making entry-level sales jobs particularly challenging to fill, especially within the tech sector.

The youngest generation of workers, having lived through the financial crisis and recession, is more risk-averse, say sales executives, adding that young prospects are reluctant to enter a hard-charging work environment where success often boils down to a number.

In short, many millennials are looking for a sure thing, and jobs that compensate largely on commission are seen as risky. To combat that, Weber points out that some companies are rethinking how they compensate their sales teams, “favoring a higher base pay with a lower proportion of the riskier commission pay.”

Will this make them less motivated to close business? According to Cool, the answer is no. “Younger folks are more motivated by recognition, praise and upward mobility. They’re there to learn and to establish a career for themselves,” she says. “They’re not driven by money in the same way older salespeople are.”

The Right Hire for Your Industry

“Hiring based on maturity works best when it’s based on the maturity of the industry itself,” Cool says. “At Contently, we’re working in a space that’s very young, so it makes sense to skew younger in our hiring. If I were hiring salespeople for, say, the aerospace industry, I’d go in the opposite direction.”

Leaders of sales teams should also consider the maturity of the clients themselves. “When you’re talking about selling to media companies, for example, it makes sense to go with young and hungry hires,” Cool says. “They’re calling on agencies, and those agencies are staffed with young customers who are operating within a mature industry.”

Of course, that doesn't mean the more years a salesperson has on the job the better qualified she is. “It’s less about how much experience you have and more about how relevant your experience is,” she said. “Just because you’ve got 20 years of experience doesn’t mean I’m going to assume you can sell to decision makers in my industry. I’m going to want to know whether the customers in your Rolodex are going to be open to new products and services, or if they want to stick with the same solutions they’ve used in the past.” 

Bridging the Gap

But even if The Veteran is right for your company today, you should be prepared to hire at least a few millennials -- and soon. The HR experts at SHRM predict that millennials will occupy almost half of the U.S. workforce by the year 2020. Meanwhile, an estimated 10,000 baby boomers retire every day. That leaves precious few experienced salespeople -- we’re looking at you, Generation X -- on the market. Faced with the prospect of hiring and managing a generationally diverse team, how do you bridge the gap between experience and eagerness? 

One solution is leveraging the power of your organization’s network. Your younger hires will lack contacts, and your older hires have them -- and know how to use them. Your senior salespeople should mentor their younger peers, taking them on sales calls, introducing them to contacts, and helping them learn the skills they need to grow their own books of business. Then take it a step further by using new networking technologies to expand everyone’s network and gain access to decision makers within organizations that were previously impenetrable. 

The Takeaway

Building a sales team doesn’t have to mean choosing experience over innovation. A generationally diverse team, a culture that fosters collaboration, and the latest networking tools can help your business unlock new revenue opportunities and gain an edge over the competition.

We are very excited about working with hyperlocal publishers and businesses – we know all about the “challenges” of hyperlocal and we’re experiencing many of them. One thing we notice is a lack of understanding of exactly how the leading players in the industry got to where they are. There is this impression of “overnight success” that some of these companies simply opened up shop, showed up, and instantly became a leader in their category.

Let’s quickly review the background on the history of Google, Starbucks and Yelp – and how long it took them to become “mainstream”.

Google – Larry Page and Sergey Brin started Google while students at Stanford University in 1996. The company was incorporated in 1998 and raised $100,000 from Andy Bechtolsheim, who was an early executive at Sun Microsystems a very big and popular IT company in the 1990’s. Google’s first search engine ran on server’s at Stanford until they were taking up too much bandwidth and they had to move them. Google tried to sell the company in its early days to Excite and Yahoo (the “leaders” in Search at the time) but the Excite CEO turned down a $750,000 acquisition that one of his board members negotiated with Google. Google offered to sell to Yahoo for $1,000,000 but was turned down by Yahoo as well. They raised their first round of venture capital in 1999 ($25M). Google went public in August 2004. One of the most successful companies of all time nearly sold for less than $1M a few years after they started.

At the time, nobody really understood the value of search on the Internet, and there wasn’t that much content online anyway so how valuable could it be? They were rejected by (at the time) the two giants of Internet search, Excite and Yahoo. Their rise was meteoric after they raised venture capital and also once they added the capability to add advertising to search results (something that Google’s two founders were strongly against).
[Bottom line: 8 years to success]

Starbucks – The irony of Starbucks is they were the ultimate hyperlocal business for a long time before they became one of the most iconic (and some would say loathed) brands in history. Starbucks started as a single individual coffee shop in Seattle, WA in 1971. They moved from their initial location on Western Avenue to Pike Place in Seattle in 1976. They did not start to expand beyond the initial store until the early 1980’s.

Their expansion started in earnest when a former employee, Howard Schultz, bought the chain from the original owners. By the time they went public in 1992, they had 140 locations across the US. Today, Starbucks has over 21,000 stores in 65 countries. There were several times during the course of Starbuck’s history that they lost money trying new things and were almost on the brink of disaster. But their strong customer ethos and ability to measure and manage feedback effectively won the day.

At the time, nobody thought coffee was important or valuable enough to have retail stores, and why would you pay a premium for coffee? Most people simply wouldn’t do it. Many people refused to fund Starbucks during their expansion given the risk. Of course, Starbucks helped to shepherd the coffee revolution and changed behaviors across the board.
[Bottom line: 21 years to success]

Yelp – Yelp was started in 2004 by two ex-Paypal employees. Jeremy Stoppleman, one of the founders, was looking for a good doctor but couldn’t get any online recommendations. They say the best startup ideas are to solve a problem that you have yourself, so Jeremy and co-founder Russel Simmons started working on solving the problem. Their first solution to the problem failed horribly. It was an email referral network and based solely in the San Francisco market. After a few false starts and a complete redesign of the site in late 2005, it started to build up traction. By 2007, they were still only in 12 cities.

In 2008 and then again in 2010 Yelp raised outside capital to grow faster. They started acquiring other companies – many of them covering markets outside the US – to increase their footprint. Yelp went public in 2012 and had its first profitable quarter in 2014. There is no doubt that Yelp is the market and mindshare leader in online customer reviews. The are also infamous and loathed by many small businesses for “hardball” tactics. A crowdfunding campaign earlier this year raised over $90,000 to finish a documentary on the company called “The Billion Dollar Bully”.
[Bottom line: 8 years to success]

Yelp is not nearly as successful as Google or Starbucks, but they have created significant value in the 11 years they have been in business, and the main point is that it took them years to find a model that worked for them. Some could claim they are still searching for a working model, but yet they continue to invest and compete in the market.

The theme is that these businesses went through many iterations and years of slow growth before hitting on something that went “viral” and accelerated their rapid growth. All we see today are large and successful companies, but it’s easy to forget that they were small and finding their way. The impression of being an overnight success is just that! What they all have in common is the tenacity and perseverance to believe in what they were doing enough to keep trying until they got it right.

"First off," Scott Walker proclaimed, "we took on the unions, and we won. We won!"

Taking on the unions is usually first off for Walker, the Wisconsin governor and Republican presidential candidate. It is the very rationale for his candidacy.

And on Thursday, he took a detour from the campaign trail to appear here before the annual meeting of the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council, a group of state legislators dedicated in large part to defeating unions.

ALEC, which inspired many of Walker's anti-labor efforts in Wisconsin, drew several hundred union protesters as legislators arrived here this week for its annual conference — and this delighted Walker. "I understand you had a few protesters yesterday," he told the conservative legislators. "For us, that's just getting warmed up. That's nothing. We got 100,000 protesters."

Walker then went on to celebrate his triumphs over the demonstrators who objected to his dismantling of Wisconsin's public-sector unions, portraying the pro-union forces as violent thugs. "Those big government interests — they believe they can win by intimidating elected officials," he said. "There were amazing things they did to try to intimidate us. The good news is we didn't back down. We remembered the reason we were elected was not to serve the few in our state capitol, but to serve the masses."

This is the essence of Walker's appeal — and why he is so dangerous. He is not as outrageous as Donald Trump and Sen.Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), but his technique of scapegoating unions for the nation's ills is no less demagogic. Sixty-five years ago, another man from Wisconsin made himself a national reputation by frightening the country about the menace of communists, though the actual danger they represented was negligible. Scott Walker is not Joe McCarthy, but his technique is similar: He suggests that the nation's ills can be cured by fighting labor unions (foremost among the "big government special interests" hurting America), even though unions represent just 11 percent of the American workforce and have been at a low ebb.

Earlier this year, Walker likened the union protesters in Madison, Wisc., to the murderous Islamic State: "If I can take on 100,000 protesters, I can do the same across the world." Before that, he described public-sector union members as the "haves" taking advantage of the "have-nots" — the taxpayers.

He denounced the protests against his efforts to undo the unions as "thuggery." He described collective bargaining as a "corrupt system" and diagnosed union leaders as having a "sense of entitlement." After beating public-sector unions and surviving recall, Walker this year signed anti-union Right-to-Work legislation. He has said he doesn't think the minimum wage serves a purpose, and he has opposed prevailing-wage and living-wage requirements.

ALEC, which championed many of Walker's anti-union policies, provided a friendly reception Thursday. ALEC official Leah Vukmir (R), a Wisconsin state senator, introduced him by talking about the "unhinged wrath of the forces" who opposed him, and their "unprecedented vile behavior."

The bulk of Walker's stump speech to the Koch-brothers-financed ALEC was about how his "big, bold reforms took the power out of the hands of big government special interests" — namely, unions. Left unmentioned: how his big, bold reforms produced only half the number of jobs he promised, and resulted in delayed debt payments and deep cuts to education to overcome a budget deficit.

Walker, describing the bargain shopping he does at Kohl's department store, said he would do the same with taxes. Arguing that "few people could afford" high tax rates, he proposed that "we can lower the rates, broaden the base, and increase the value of people participating in our economy. Years ago, a plan like that worked pretty well . . . We called it the Laffer Curve back then. Today, I call it the Kohl's curve."

It was a zany analogy. Kohl's offers discounted merchandise for middle and low-income consumers. The Laffer curve, as the basis for supply-side economics, meant huge tax breaks for the rich that never trickled down.

But deception is the demagogue's tool. Walker spoke Thursday about "the death threats not just against me and my family but against our lawmakers," and about the nails put in the driveway of one lawmaker to puncture his tires. Such behavior is beyond the pale — though hardly unique to Walker's opponents. And some of Walker's claims — including the alleged threat to "gut" his wife "like a deer" and of protesters "beating" and "rocking" a car he was in — could not be substantiated by independent authorities.

Such deception, however, is only in the service of the larger deceit at the core of his candidacy: By scapegoating toothless trade unions as powerful and malign interests, he enlists working people in his cause of aiding the rich and the strong.

SEE ALSO: The states most dependent on the federal government are who you'd least expect

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We got hold of Ray Dalio's note on China to Bridgewater Associates' clients, and it's way worse than everyone first thought. Bridgewater is the world's largest hedge fund, and it is advising its investors to get the heck out of China because “There are now no safe places to invest.”

This is the context, per Dalio: "because the forces on debt are coming from debt restructurings, economic restructurings, and real estate and stock market bubbles bursting all at the same time, we are now seeing mutually reinforcing negative forces on growth.” He estimates that those negative forces may wipe between 1.8% and 4% off China's GDP growth. (Given that some people believe that China's real GDP growth is already as low as 5%, that would be catastrophic.)

Here are the highlights:

1: Chinese households lost more money than anyone in recent memory.

Retail speculators lost the equivalent of about 1.3% of the country's GDP gambling on stock prices going up. The market went down — and hard — losing about 22% of its value in a month.

They lost more than their American counterparts did during the the tech and finance meltdowns of 2000 and 2008. COMBINED.

2. The dumb money was really dumb.

67% of retail investors had less than a high school education and were borrowing money to trade.

3. Big companies also got caught up in the bubble. 

According to the note, people who should have known better were also taking losses. Dalio says: "We did not properly anticipate the rate of acceleration in the bubble and the rate of unraveling, or realize that the speculation in the markets was so big by established corporate entities as well as the naive speculators."

4. Economic growth is usually terrible after an asset bubble pops

China is targeting 7% GDP growth but very few people believe they can hit that. Dalio just added his voice. The psychological effects of people losing money on the stock market can quickly translate into lower growth and consumer spending.

Dalio said: "We believe the that the stock market was in a bubble that burst, and the fact that this is coming on top of both the debt bubble bursting and the economy transitioning growth from sectors that cannot sustain their growth rates to other sectors is more reason for concern."

5. The Chinese government is trying too hard to prop up the market

The Bridgewater note estimates the Chinese government has spent RMB 380 billion propping up stocks, and has a total war chest of RMB 3.5 trillion at its disposal. While this helps things in the short term, in the medium and longer term it can hurt credibility among investors.

Here's Dalio summing it up: "History has shown that smart investors tend to sell when the government is artificially supporting prices and buy when they are liquidating positions."

And concluding: "I believe that China's policy makers have both considerable resources and skills and the willingness to manage it well, though the new development makes me less confident it can be managed without a painful economic slowdown along the way."

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When you’re tasked with creating a slide show or visuals for team members/clients, relying on tools like Powerpoint and Word will rarely impress. While these tools were considered innovative in past decades, they offer nothing fresh to brand you as more inventive than your peers and competition. With increased online resources, it’s easier than ever for even the tech-challenged to create stunning presentations, infographics and posters.

Your peers and clients will perceive you and your information as having more value, based on the quality of packaging. Now you can quickly produce professional-quality materials in minutes!

Three Tools for Amazing Visuals

There are innumerable tools and resources online to help you generate stunning graphics. Below are a few of my personal favorites.

Prezi

If you’re tired of creating and viewing traditional, slide-based Powerpoint and Keynote presentations, Prezi is a great alternative. Rather than creating linear slideshows, you have the ability to create an overarching image and “zoom in” to parts of the image where you can create more images and text. As an example, if you were creating a presentation on anatomy, instead of a boring slideshow, you could start with an opening graphic of a human body and the title of your presentation. From there, you can zoom in to different parts of the body where you have labels, additional images and text. You can even zoom in further within the smaller text and images for additional sub points! Prezi works more along the lines of how humans process information. Additionally, people are just plain impressed by Prezis!

Canva

With Canva, you can design posters, flyers, infographics, and much more! Canva’s most impressive feature is its highly-polished template gallery paired with the ability for users to quickly customize projects to make them appear 100% unique. The site is extremely user-friendly with a very small learning curve. Even if you have an in-house graphic designer or department for design, this service is great for those smaller projects you wouldn’t normally use them for. Your materials will have your clients and peers swearing your project was professionally constructed!

Piktochart

Piktochart is extremely similar to Canva, allowing you to create flyers, reports, infographics, presentations, etc. using templates. However, this service has a particularly impressive template gallery for infographics specifically. If you want to simplify the information you’re presenting while creating a stunning visual, creating an infographic on Piktochart is a great strategy.

Becoming known for creating amazingly polished visuals while everyone else creates simple charts on Microsoft Word, will definitely help build a strong personal brand. I use all of the above services regularly to create eye-catching visuals. What are your favorites?

We’ve come from a world where our audience was addressable through a mass effort, rather than the precise pinpointed effort that we need today. The most challenging complexity that modern B-to-B marketers face is creating “individualism” within a mass-media framework. To speak to individuals, marketers require a model that directly addresses customer needs, wants and desires.

We have evolved from specific episodic programs that had a beginning, middle and end to continuous, seamless customer experiences developed to encompass the entire customer lifecycle. Moving from complex siloes of channel-specific marketing, we are challenged with simplifying messages to resonate with audiences through omni-channel branded experiences. No longer a one-way affair, with the advent and proliferation of social media, two-, three-, four- and more way communications are now the norm.

Our old processes were slow and methodical, with feedback coming back to us at a snail’s pace. Today we’re in the throes of real-time marketing, data collection, data analysis, marketing dashboards, and instant and automatic multivariate testing that allow us to optimize on the fly to continuously improve and streamline programs.

Recently, with the advent of technology-powered automated programmatic real-time buying, we have been able to break away from human-driven media buying, where limitations such as negotiations and time constraints have disappeared.

THE B-to-B MARKETER AND THE NEW GROUP DYNAMIC

In the face of all these changes, one incorrect perception for B-to-B marketers is that, when marketing products to business clients, they are marketing to a single decision maker. A recent study from the CEB and Motista confirms that, in almost every case of a complex enterprise sale, there are 5.4 decision makers on average involved in a group decision. TechTarget puts the number of people in a group decision team at seven. Everyone on your sales team knows that groups make buying decisions.

SiriusDecisions came to the same conclusion as we did. They unveiled a new B-to-B Buying Decision Process Framework at their May 2015 Sirius Summit in Nashville, Tennessee. SiriusDecisions outlined three types of buying scenarios: Groups buying by committee (six to 10 people in the buying group), groups buying by consensus (three to five people involved in the buying group) and independent buyers (one to two people in the buying group). They’ve determined that those buying independently are usually involved in deals for less than $50K. They detail the deal size for consensus buying at a range of $50K to $500K, and likewise call out the committee buying range at $500K to millions of dollars.

With all the complexities of marketing to the Modern Empowered Buyer, the impact on Modern Marketers is significant, causing marketers to rethink, relearn, retool and reconsider how and what their go-to-market strategy will be.

SEE ALSO: Chilling predictions for what the world will look like in a decade

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It’s not uncommon for me to see sales people desperately selling to buyers who don’t see they have a need for what they’re selling.

In #heykeenan Take 7 I break down how you can get buyers to see your value and why they need you.  It’s all about closing the gap.

And if you haven’t already, check out all the #heykeenan’s and subscribe to my Youtube Channel.  As I said the other day. I’m doing a lot more video and a little less writing. Same exciting, actionable, relevant topics as always, just now in video.

Author: Ellen Gomes

Marketing in today’s environment is challenging. Buyers are exposed to thousands of brand messages, have endless product options, and complete the majority of their research online. To effectively market in this dynamic and noisy environment, marketers need to adapt and shift their strategy towards engagement marketing—marketing that talks to a buyer in a personalized way, considering who they are, how they act, and where they are over time. Implementing an engagement marketing strategy is about creating cross-channel relationships instead of shouting your message broadly.

You have probably heard the buzz about multi-channel marketing. Implementing a multi-channel marketing approach in your campaigns and programs helps you be where your buyers are, which is essential in order to stand out in a crowded market. Each piece of the buyer’s experience should be consistent and complementary—that means you have to think about all of the channels where your potential or current customers engage.

Set Yourself Up For Success

But before you jump into evaluating channels and creating a multi-channel engagement strategy for your programs and campaigns, it’s important that you lay the foundation for success. To do this, you need to:

• Identify who you sell to: Do you have multiple buyer segments? For example, do you market to a specific type of consumer or segment—like small or medium businesses?
• Understand your business goal and objective for each persona: What path does each persona take when making a purchase?
• Pick the right engagement model for your business and your buyers: You will most likely use different marketing methods for each persona. For example, if you sell to large enterprises you may engage in account-based marketing. Depending on your organization you could have multiple models to choose from.
• Understand your buyers’ stage: Does a buyer purchase your product or service immediately or does it take several months?
• Identify the right message and content: Map this to the buying stages you have identified for your buyers.
• Determine how you will measure success: Make sure you have clear objectives and that your programs can be measured from the beginning to the end.
• Define and select your channel mix: For example, if you have a high volume of inbound web traffic, but struggle with conversions, you could align your channel tactics to address that issue.
• Test and iterate: Know how you plan to test your success and define your iteration intervals.

Choosing Your Channel Options

Promoting your programs and campaigns across channels can feel a bit like guesswork without a plan. To get the most out of your efforts, create a specific multi-channel plan for each individual campaign with associated goals. To create your plan, evaluate which channels fit your audience, your specific program, and campaign goals. Our Multi-Channel Marketing Workbook details the types of channels (for example, traditional, digital, and social) and the individual channels (for example, television, website, and Facebook), making it easy for you to evaluate which channels are right for your specific program or campaign.

Download A Multi-Channel Marketing Workbook to get started planning your multi-channel marketing activities and communicating to you customers at the right time and in the right place.

[Workbook] Start Planning Your Multi-Channel Marketing Strategy Now! was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

The post [Workbook] Start Planning Your Multi-Channel Marketing Strategy Now! appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

SaaS nirvana is a tempting, alluring place. Stories abound on TechCrunch, Forbes and other tech business press about the fortunes of those who make it. Multiples for SaaS IPOs tend to be among the highest in the tech industry. So there is a palpable pressure in a SaaS marketer to get there as fast as possible. But pushing against this headlong rush to El dorado is another force, a discipline required to get it right before growth – the ramp – kicks in. You can burn a lot of money if you don’t get it right.

Here’s a model I’ve developed after three SaaS head of marketing gigs. The idea is to demark what stage the company and product are in, and therefore what is required of marketing. It can feel like a chicken and egg problem, and there can be a lot of finger pointing. Is it the marketing or the market? Do we need to change the product or get more people to try it? Why can’t sales close more deals?It’s important to understand the stages of SaaS sales maturity and communicate them to everyone in the organization. Knowing what stage you are helps focus the team on the goals that are important, and put off those things that are not.

In order to achieve better team alignment, I recommend using these five stages. Agree what you are trying to solve for, and agree when you are ready to move from one phase to another. In general, marketing will need to provide content, some degree of awareness, and some demand generation in all five phases, but your level of investment and tactical focus will vary. Demand generation in the Product/Market Fit phase may simply be getting meetings for your CEO and head of product to discuss possible directions with prospective customers, for example.

The SaaS Marketing Maturity Model

Product/Market Fit – Finding buyers who want your product is the goal of any business. SaaS is no different, except the online delivery model affords faster product changes. During this phase of growth, the whole company needs to make whatever changes are needed to make the product indispensable to an identified set of buyers. Marketing should focus on market and buyer research, customer interviews, and competitive analysis during this phase.

Exit Criteria – A company can exit this phase when a significant percentage of customers finds the product indispensable and marketing can identify the profile of an ideal customer. (Sean Ellis, a well known SaaS marketer, uses less stringent criteria, requiring 40% of your customers to be “very disappointed” without your product.)

Timeframe – 6-18 months. Some companies will find product/market fit faster than others. Many will need to significantly change the product – referred to as a “pivot” – at least once. Forbes has a great article about business pivots, including Twitter’s transformation from podcast finder to microblogging service, and PayPal’s move from beaming payments from PDAs (digital handheld computers) to helping eBay users pay sellers over the Web.

Experimenting for Growth – Once you have product market fit, you need to figure out the best way to reach your ideal customers. Marketing should focus on crystalizing the value proposition, gleaned from discussions with existing customers. Close interaction with the sales team is really important – interview them and also sit in on sales calls to find out what really resonates with customers. The team should also begin marketing via a few different channels and do some rough A/B testing experiments to see what works best. The goal is to supply enough leads to feed the sales team.

Exit Criteria – A company can exit this phase when it can demonstrate a few marketing channels and marketing pieces that demonstrate superior performance in closing deals.

Timeframe – 3-12 months.

Optimizing for Growth – Building on successes, optimize conversion rates at all possible points. Invest even more money in channels that are generating the highest conversion rates. Get even more aggressive with A/B testing: conduct more tests, make the experiments finer grained, and get into a continuous improvement cycle. Evaluate each channel in the context of your business economics. Some channels may convert well but cost more. Make sure you can “afford” each channel by comparing it with your CLV. Throw out any channels that are ROI negative over the customer lifetime, and shift investment into those that are ROI positive in the shortest timeframe. The goal is to move beyond just supplying enough leads, but to mature to know which channels produce the best leads.

Exit Criteria – Organizations can exit this stage when they know their top converting channels and marketing assets, and know that money invested in these top channels will produce more demand and profitable customers.

Timeframe – 6-12 months.

Predicting Growth – With top channels and conversion rates known, marketing can predict future revenue based on marketing activity. Testing and optimization can continue, but a head of marketing should invest in people and tools with a focus on metrics and reporting. Marketing may begin to pay more attention to churn rate here, keeping a close eye and putting in place programs to reduce churn as much as possible. By this stage of maturity, the ARR has become a big enough number that a high or growing churn rate would be a problem. To reduce churn, marketing might invest more in a customer marketing function to improve customer satisfaction, or work with the product team to figure out features that increase the product’s stickiness. Achieving negative churn through aggressive upsell and cross sell might even be possible. By this stage, marketing should have matured to measure leads by channel and by cohort.

Exit Criteria – Organizations can exit this phase when they have two or three quarters of accurate revenue prediction by marketing and there is alignment that churn rate has settled at an acceptable level.

Timeframe – 6-9 months.

Driving Growth – With a tuned and predictable demand generation machine, the marketing team can be a growth driver. ARR should be well understood, and churn should be stabilized.

The timeframes above are general, but based on discussions with several SaaS CEOs and CMOs. Heads of marketing should focus on gaining consensus on what phase of growth the company is in and the activities marketing is focusing on. Maturing takes time. Executive teams may grow restless and want to move on, but until you have the time in the market and the data to back up your experiments, forecasts and predictions, you just won’t know if you were right. Marketing may need to stand tall and insist on discipline from other teams that want to skip phases or are looking for magic to happen.

Have thought on the model? Were your experiences different? I’d like to hear.

Built a sales funnel for your website yet? If not, you’re missing out on leads every single day.

Let’s face facts.

Only about 2% of your visitors are likely to buy anything on the first visit (and that’s being generous). Without a sales funnel, you have no way of staying in touch with the other 98%, who may never come back.

When setup correctly, an email funnel can turn a weekly drip of 2 or 3 sales a week into a flood of 20 or 30. But get it wrong and you risk burning through your entire list from the first subject line.

So what would you prefer? To wake up to rocketing conversions or disintegrating subscriptions?

Thought so.

To help you succeed, here are 7 sales funnel mistakes to avoid:

1. No Planning

A properly structured sales funnel needs to coax, prod and pamper subscribers towards spending money. It’s an emotional rollercoaster that can derail if any message is out of sync.

This is why it pays, literally, to work out what you are going to say in each email and how each one builds on the previous one to present a compelling path to profit.

There are many ways to do this. You can follow this seven step strategy, create a weekly course or harness the power of storytelling in your emails, like autoresponder mastermind Andre Chaperon. Whatever you decide, consider how you can create a series which subscribers will eagerly await to see arriving in their inbox.

2. Doesn’t ask readers questions

If you want to keep your emails out of the junk (and gmail’s promotions) folder, your readers have to show they’re interested. A great way of achieving this is to ask them questions about what their biggest challenges are and how you can help.

Not only will this turn leads into friends, but it will improve the health of your list and its deliverability as a whole.

3. No empathy or sales psychology

You can’t hound someone into buying something they don’t want. They have to believe it is something they need and feel it in their gut before they’ll slap down the cash. This is why your emails need to build empathy and trust. You can achieve this by following time proven marketing and persuasion techniques.

Forget about ‘tripwires’ and ‘lead magnets’ for a second. The principles of writing persuasive emails are the same as those used by generations of direct response copywriters. These are techniques powerful enough to get people spending money based on a single ad they see in the newspaper. Imagine what they can do when you’re able to get your copy in front of eyeballs every week, or even daily like Ben Settle (who does a great podcast, by the way).

Re-read some of the copywriting classics to remind yourself what these techniques are.

4. Sells from the first email

Newbie marketers (and those who should know better) will typically start pushing offers from the first email. But email marketing is like dating. You need to build the relationship first. Dont pressure them too early, or you’ll just scare them away.

Use your first email to introduce yourself and to build anticipation for what’s coming up. Then ask them email you back with their biggest problem. This will create engagement and provide you with priceless insights on your market’s pains and hopes.

5. Doesn’t sell enough

You don’t want subscribers thinking this is one long freebie info ride. ‘Selling without selling’ is all well and good. But you can’t assume subscribers will naturally make the jump without a little push.

Start small with a low cost entry level product. Now while they’re feeling the the buzz from taking action follow it up with an offer for the upgrade.

6. No segmentation

Segmentation is something most marketers dont do but can have the biggest impacts on response rates. Remember, when you try to sell to everybody you sell to no one.

Segmenting your subscribers based on interest, buying history and other variables enables you to fine tune your message’s relevancy. This then keeps them engaged, subscribed and spending money for longer.

Even after they’ve registered, you can continue segmenting by offering new lead magnets, conducting surveys or getting them to visit specific pages on your website. You can track all of these actions and use them as triggers to switch them to another email series more attuned to their interests.

7. No tracking, testing or tweaking

Email marketing is hard work. When you’re feeling mentally drained after writing a 21 part email series, it’s tempting to just hand them over and wish clients the best.

But unless clients track, split test and tweak the results they’ll never achieve the massive ROI that email offers. Track and test everything to see which emails are conversion monsters and which are duds. Smooth down the funnel’s edges and remove any friction to create a slick path that increases the order value, buying frequency and profits gained from every customer.

These are my top seven email sales funnel mistakes, but there are plenty more. What would you add to the list? Please share in the comments.

You could craft a sales pitch that moves your colleagues to tears, but it's not effective unless it moves prospects along in their buying decisions. 

The traditional sales playbook recommends starting a pitch with prospect pain points and then gradually introducing the solution -- your product or service. It makes sense. The buyer has a problem. You can solve that problem. Point A leads logically to Point B. 

But just because this type of sales pitch makes sense doesn't mean it's effective. You might make them laugh or cry, but will they buy?

To determine what type of sales pitch most influences prospects to sign on the dotted line, Stanford School of Business Professor Dr. Zakary Tormala and Corporate Visions conducted a study testing four sales pitch structures:

1. Respond solely to the prospect's stated needs
2. Respond to prospect's stated needs and then introduce a value-added service
3. Respond to stated needs and then introduce an unconsidered need
4. Introduce an unconsidered need and then address stated needs

Which was the winner? The pitch that led with an unconsidered need blew the others out of the water.

With this in mind, take some time to adjust your sales pitch to lead with a problem the customer might not even know they have. Then you can respond to the prospect's known problem and introduce your solution. 

For more on the study and its takeaways, check out the infographic below.