Rnordman

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Even with the continual introductions of shiny new tools for marketers, email remains the workhorse for lead generation. Most CMOs view it as effective and volume continues to grow.

But its popularity has led to overstuffed email inboxes. Consumers and business buyers alike have raised expectations of what’s required for marketers to get, and keep, their attention.

Based on the research below, here are five key takeaways for success in email and mobile marketing.

• Experiment with video. Integrating video with email marketing can increase click-through rates by more than 90%.
• Opt-in only. Getting permission before emailing isn’t just the law, it’s a great idea. 90% of C-suite executive say they never respond to cold calls or email blasts.
• Keep social media in perspective. Integrating social media with email can increase reach and impact, but prioritize email strategy. As noted below, 61% of adult workers cited email as “very important” to doing their jobs. Just 4% said the same for social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
• Open your wallet. Email accounts for 18% of digital marketing budgets on average,and 61% of marketers plan to increase spending on email this year.
• Mobile is untapped opportunity. Though half of B2B buyers are comfortable using smartphones for business buying, and 40% of purchases are directly influenced by smartphones, only 3% of digital marketing is allocated to mobile.

Find more insights and guidance in this collection of email and mobile marketing facts and statistics.

8 Email Marketing Stats and Facts

1. There were 191 billion emails sent every day on average in 2014. That figure is expected to increase to nearly 297 billion by 2017. (The Wonder of Tech)

2. 58% of CMOs say email marketing is effective. (AdWeek)

3. On average, email accounts for 18% of digital marketing spending. (MarketingProfs)

4. Video and e-mail marketing can increase click-through rates by more than 90%. (41 Stories)

5. U.S. spending on email marketing will reach $2.3 billion in 2015. (MediaPost)

6. 61% of marketers plan to increase spending on email this year. About half plan to grow their social media budgets while 40% will allocate for for mobile. Print and direct mail are areas most likely to see spending cuts. (Direct Marketing News)

7. 90% of C-suite executive say they never respond to cold calls or email blasts. (Biznology)

8. 61% of adult workers cited email as “very important” to doing their jobs. Just 4% said the same for social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. (MediaPost)

9 Mobile Marketing Facts and Statistics

9. Though the total number of new Internet users is now growing at less than 10% per year, the number of new smartphone subscribers ist growing at a 20%+ rate. (TechCrunch)

10, Mobile devices (tablets and smartphones) accounted for 25% of total web use in 2014. (TechCrunch)

11. 35% of CMOs say that mobile will account for more than half of their total marketing spend within five years. (AdWeek)

12. Though 83% of respondents identify mobile as significant or highly significant, only 3% of digital marketing is allocated to mobile. (MarketingProfs)

13. Almost 400 million Facebook users are mobile-only. (Ber|Art)

14. B2B buyers are comfortable using multiple devices for work-related purchases with half saying they use smartphones. (V3B Blog)

15. In 2014, U.S. adults spent 23% more time on mobile during an average day than in 2013. (iMedia Connection)

16. 40% of purchases are directly influenced by smartphones. (iMedia Connection)

17. 22% of corporate marketers cite mobile search optimization as a top SEO challenge. Just 1% say that mobile search optimization is the “most effective SEO tactic their company uses.” (MediaPost)

Author: Johnny Cheng

Marketers are always striving to deliver “best practice” marketing—marketing based on tested, tried-and-true data. But, for many marketing activities, marketers simply don’t have a strong benchmark to reference. This scene often feels too familiar:

You: Yes! Our last email campaign had a 5% click rate!

Your Boss: Is that good?

You: Umm…it’s better than our last one.

Your Boss: But is it GOOD?

You: Hmm…let me get back to you.

You go back to your desk and begin to fumble around random marketing websites containing “best practice” campaign performance stats. After an hour of research you’re left with more questions than you started with. Are these stats relevant or even reliable? What should I be doing differently?

Introducing Marketo Institute

Marketo Institute was started in 2014 by Marketo Co-founder Jon Miller. His vision was to gather data across all Marketo customers and provide marketers with fact-based insights and data-driven best practices to help them succeed in an ever-changing digital world. In short, the purpose was to help you answer the “Is it GOOD?” question.

Like Jon, I’m a data nerd at heart. We share the same passion for the SCIENCE of digital marketing, which is why he’s handed me the enormous mountain of customer data (220+ billion activities across 3500+ Marketo customers) to carry out the vision of helping marketers like you. Over the next several weeks, I am going to write a handful of blogs to share what I’ve learned from this data and will pull out best practice trends and correlations.

…And the first blog starts NOW! What is the topic, you ask? Well, it’s email performance! Yay! Specifically, we’ll be diving into whether batch, nurture, or trigger is best. This email performance “throwdown”, if you will, answers the most common question I get asked by customers: Which type of emails should I concentrate my marketing efforts on, and how much lift can I expect? Let’s get started…

Types of Emails

There are three types of email campaigns, each with their own use cases:

1. Batch Emails: Also known as “batch and blast”. These types of emails don’t have any “intelligence” built in. Instead they just gather a list of contacts and send them the same email. A great example of this is your company newsletter—it goes to everyone, no matter what.
2. Nurture Emails: This is a series of targeted emails based on personas (e.g. by industry, role, use case). Nurture emails are primarily used to lead prospects through the sales funnel and warm up leads for a sales handoff.
3. Trigger Emails: These are personalized emails that are delivered based on prospect actions. Some range of email “intelligence” is built in based on behavior (think of it as a two-way conversation of listening and speaking). An example of a trigger email would be this: a prospect visits your events webpage and then, based on that activity, receives an email invitation to an event in their area.

So, before we move forward with the email throwdown, go ahead and place your bets! Of the email campaigns that you’ve created, which type performed the best—batch, nurture, or trigger?

Which Earned a Higher Click Rate and Click-to-Open Rate?

This chart represents average click rate (top half) and average click-to-open rate (bottom half) across all Marketo customer email activities in 2013-2014. Average click rate is around 19% for trigger, 4% for batch, and 6% for nurture. Average click-to-open rate is around 35% for trigger, 12% for batch, and 14% for nurture.

Post throwdown, we can see two big takeaways immediately from the data:

1. Trigger emails perform 3x better than any other email type. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that’s done trigger emails. The power of personalized messages based on behavior is powerful. Imagine looking at a pair of shoes online. You add it to the shopping cart but decide not to buy. An hour later you get an email for 25% off that exact pair of shoes! Serendipity telling you to buy those shoes? No, sorry, that’s just intelligent marketing.
2. Nurture emails perform about the same as batch emails. This one is surprising. My initial bet would have been that nurture emails performed much better than batch (especially for click-to-open) simply due to the fact that they are targeted towards a specific audience for a specific buying stage. But then I thought about how my past companies did nurturing: forcing a target audience down a pre-determined linear funnel, then rinse and repeat. This is no different than a series of segmented, pre-timed batch emails, and the data shows it.

Key Take-aways

Now before you run over to your marketing operations team and tell them to cancel all nurture campaigns, here are a few things to consider:

1. Nurture emails CAN perform better than batch. The results were so surprising I decided to take a look at how our (Marketo’s) demand gen team does email campaigns. I found out our nurture emails perform MUCH better than our batch. But this takes time and resources, because you have to really know your segmented audience, the messaging has to be really relevant, and you have to utilize a ton of top-of-funnel content because no one likes a hard sell. Bad nurture programs act like batch and blast; good nurtures are built for the long-term and take time to realize results. That’s why it’s called “drip campaign”—not “firehose campaign”.
2. I’m going to make all of my emails trigger-based! Creating a trigger campaign for EVERY possible prospect interaction is impractical (unless you’re Amazon…or have the budget of Amazon), so just focus on the important ones. Look at your key lead drivers and put some email intelligence behind the behaviors you’re interested in. Good examples are late funnel high conversion points such as webinars, where several personalized triggers around invitation, reminder, and follow-up could mean more qualified leads.
3. Why do batch emails in the first place? Batch emails are the cheapest, quickest way to communicate to your prospects and customers. There’s definitely a time and place for batch and blast. Creating nurture or trigger-based company newsletters or product release notes doesn’t make sense. However if you’re still using batch emails to push prospects through the funnel then you should definitely consider focusing more resources on other more engaging and relevant email type

Do you have any questions about this blog, or do you have any suggestions on which data-based topic I should dive into in my next blog? Leave your comments below!

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Marketo Data Tells Us: Which Type of Emails Have the Highest Conversion Rates? was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

The post Marketo Data Tells Us: Which Type of Emails Have the Highest Conversion Rates? appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

Along with a desire to further control the work-life balance, passion for an industry is one of the top reasons for starting a business. Whether you dream of turning your talent for baking, graphic design or programming into a full-time job, technology makes it easier than ever to transform your dream into a profitable company. These tools can help you become the next Richard Branson, who turned his love of music into Virgin Records; the next Kelley Mason, who loved baby-wearing and created her own bestselling carrier; or the next John H. Johnson, founder of Ebony and Jet magazines. Here’s...

Read the full article: How to Turn Your Passion into a Startup: 7 Tools to Help You Do It

A small Christian college in Indiana has a new tuition model that it claims can save students nearly $45,000.

Grace College and Seminary first started making changes to its school in 2009 after seeing falling enrollment numbers, according to Chronicle of Higher Education reporter Beckie Supiano.

The main change was a three-year bachelor's degree program. While the accelerated degree attracted more students, Grace still faced challenges and in 2013 began to consider more changes to keep the school afloat.

For the upcoming academic year, Supiano reports, Grace is debuting a new plan that includes "a modest tuition cut, free textbook rentals, and a price that drops for returning students each year as they progress through college."

Explaining Grace's unusual new pricing model, the college's president told The Chronicle that the school thought, "if we're doing something, let's do it different."

So far, it seems to be working. While the full program officially goes into effect this fall, The Chronicle reports that Grace's enrollment stayed up after implementing the accelerated degree program, and student see excited by the new changes.

Here's how Grace College's new plan works, according to a video from the school:

SEE ALSO: This New York college is a top-ranked school that charges zero tuition — but there's a catch

A 9% tuition price cut will save more than $2,000 a year, the college estimates.

Grace also offers students free textbook rentals — the part of the plan that current students liked the most, Katip told The Chronicle.

Grace deducts $500 from tuition each year, setting itself apart from other schools that raise tuition each year.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

NOW WATCH: This drummer created a whole song by only using the sound of coins

Do you know what a Messaging Platform (aka Messaging Framework) is?

A Messaging Platform is a guide to help people in a company or people working on content (whether spoken or written) ‘sing to the same hymnal’ when it comes to talking about the company’s value proposition and offering.

It usually includes insights about the target audience, the company’s brand strategy (positioning, brand promise, offer overview, etc.), messaging approach inc. rules & policies (aka do’s and don’ts), and sometimes suggested sales angles and calls-to-action as well approved answers to customer frequently asked questions.

A Messaging Platform is used by marketers, sales reps, executives, writers, human resource personnel, designers, videographers, etc.  Everyone will have a different way of using it, but the main purpose of having a Messaging Platform is to have an ongoing resource that all stakeholders can use when creating sales/marketing messaging and content on behalf of the company. It is supposed to be a tool for creating communications.

The problem is: Many growing B2B companies invest a lot of money for a consultant or agency to develop a messaging platform because they know it’s important. But then it never gets used. I’ve seen it happen many times; people just forget about it or they work in silos and use their own ideas as time goes by.

If you want to create a messaging framework but never intend to use it, I’d say “why bother?”. You could put that money towards something else.

That said, below are a few examples for where a pre-planned messaging strategy comes in handy. This may not only help you decide whether or not to create a Messaging Platform, but also to motivate you to USE it.

Keep in mind: A Messaging Platform is not exact copy or scripts. It’s a guide to show the general idea of what needs to be communicated as well as the company’s tone, approved terminology, etc.

1.  Website

You: “I want you to revise the content on our website.”

Web agency: “No problem, please send us information about your brand and content strategy, relevant analytics, as well as your Messaging Platform (so that we can figure out good copy angles and images).

You: “We don’t have a Messaging Platform, but I can tell you in general what we want to say.”

Be careful. Your website may be the first thing people rely on to understand why they should care about you. This is a great example of where a strategic messaging approach can come in handy (your creative staff will love you and you’ll get projects like these done faster).

2.  Sales Presentations and Collateral

You: “I was able to get a meeting with the executive team at ABC, Inc. to pitch our story and solutions. I could sure use some help from the marketing team to put together the presentation; and I need it in 3 days please.”

Marketing partner: “I’d be happy to do it. I suggest we confirm the story and come up with a tight message so it flows well and engages them.”

You: “Great, let’s get started.  We can work late so that we meet the deadline.”

Both you and the marketing team would be better off if the general approach to a sales presentation was figured out long before a deadline. That way everyone could use the same template and just customize it for various situations. A Messaging Platform (that people know about and use) can help reduce content development fire-drills like this; not to mention it helps ensure consistency in how the company is being positioned by the sales team.

3.  Tradeshows and Conferences

You: “I will be speaking at a large conference about the benefits of our solution. I need some feedback on my presentation.”

Colleague: “The presentation seems all over the place. I don’t see any statements or angles that mirror the company’s Messaging Platform.”

You: “That’s because I just came up with it on the fly, based on what I know and think.”

Hmmm, so in an instance like this where a Messaging Platform actually exists, seems that the $10,000 spent on research and time to create it was a bit of a waste.

The point is: Investing in a messaging platform is a great idea, but not so much if you spend good money and never use it.

You’ve spent precious work hours writing this week’s company blog. Or maybe you’ve spent precious budget dollars to hire an employee or contractor to write it. Either way, writing a blog is an expense.

You want a return on your investment.

The good news is, it’s not that hard to significantly boost the ROI of your company’s blog.

Here are three quick, effective and easy-to-do tactics for increasing your business blog ROI.

Post It to Social Media

No matter how great your Google search rankings are, you can’t count on your audience to just find your blog posts. You need to put them out there.

Social media is a very effective way of reaching a broader audience with your blog posts.

Not every social media platform is the same, however. Spend the time to research and understand where your target audience is spending time.

In general, LinkedIn and Twitter are the best platforms for B2B companies. In fact, according to a 2015 B2B content marketing survey from Content Marketing Institute, 94% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn to distribute content, making it the most-used social media platform for B2B marketing.

No matter which platform you use, make sure you follow these two rules when posting your blogs:

• Respect the platform. Each social media platform is unique. Learn how to use them right so your content appears native – not foreign or salesy. For example, learn how to use hashtags to your benefit on Twitter, how to write an effective introduction to posts on LinkedIn or how to use images effectively on Facebook.
• Post other people’s content too. If your blog posts are the only content in your feed – on ANY platform – it will just look like a billboard for your company. To make your social media feed useful, insightful or entertaining (which will attract more followers), make sure you post things other than your own content. Share articles that your audience would enjoy, post behind-the-scenes photos of your company at work, or share other companies’ blogs. Whatever you do, don’t make your social media feed all about you. It should be all about your target audience.

Add It to an Email Newsletter

If you’re already sending out an email newsletter or marketing emails, congratulations. You are part of the 83% of B2B content marketers who have realized the value of this tactic. But are you using your blog content in your newsletters?

Including your blog content (or at least a link to your blog) in your email newsletter or marketing emails is a great way to get more bang for your blog buck. It helps your blog reach a wider audience and improves the overall value of the emails you are sending out.

If you’re not already utilizing this blog-value-boosting method, there are a few different ways you can try it:

• Put the full content of your blog into the body of the email
• Put the first one to three paragraphs into the body of the email with a link to read the rest on your website
• Write an introduction and include a link to read the blog on your website

Numbers 2 and 3 will also help drive traffic to your website.

Create a SlideShare Deck

SlideShare is quickly climbing the ranks of valuable content-sharing platforms. It allows you to upload presentations (PowerPoint, PDF, Keynote or OpenDocument formats) and share them as slide decks on the site itself, or embed them elsewhere.

Repurpose your blog content by creating a slide deck from it. Then upload it to SlideShare.

Doing this makes it easy for other people to share your content as interactive slide decks. It also makes it easy to repurpose your content yet again by posting it as a slide deck via social media, newsletters, future blog posts, etc.

Here is a great article from Social Media Examiner with even more ways to use SlideShare for your business.

Your Business Blog Is Not the End

Writing and publishing your blog should not be the end of your content marketing effort if you want to see a return on your investment. Stretch your blog content farther with social media, email marketing and SlideShare to boost the value and increase your ROI.

When you think of an inheritance, do you picture money or a headache? Probably money, I assume.

Unfortunately, for digital marketing agencies, taking on a new client often means inheriting an AdWords account. More than likely, the account is a mess – it has poor structure, expensive keywords and few negative keywords.

I know this because I work on WordStream’s agency team, so I talk to agencies all the time. You face unique challenges and our company understands this. As such, we listen to you and offer agency-specific solutions. This post is the result of numerous phone calls we’ve received from agencies new to the PPC medium. What we find is that many agencies fall into the trap of not effectively incorporating AdWords into their business model. I hear stuff like:

• “I only manage two or three accounts. I count up the hours and roll it in with the rest of my services.”
• “I built their website, shopping cart and started their SEO campaign. I don’t have time to get AdWords certified and launch a PPC campaign.”
• “It’s not worth the time.”
• “I’m just going to outsource it because it doesn’t make business sense to bill for it.”

There seems to be an assumption that PPC is an after-thought or a courtesy offering. Most agencies we talk to provide stellar customer service and value client relationships. They’re accustomed to meeting their clients’ needs whatever it takes. However, you need a business plan for this to make business sense. Among the most common reasons for agencies not to pursue a robust PPC offering and truly become full-service is that they don’t see dividends. I know this because I have this conversation about twice per week.

Your competitors who offer AdWords management services already have it figured out. With the right tools and the right revenue strategy, PPC can be your fastest and easiest offering. As for the revenue strategy, read on to get my best tips for adding PPC to your agency’s service offerings.

Charge Separately for PPC Management

This might sound like common sense, but I have this conversation about three to four times per week. Since many agencies don’t even list PPC or SEM on their own websites, they take over a few accounts and just bill for the hours worked along with their other services. This is very bad….

But Don’t Use Billable Hours

Your business plan likely works off some function of set-up fees and billable hours. Is that accurate?

Website development and SEO campaigns are time-intensive. Thus, billable hours makes a lot of sense. When digital marketers reach out to our team, they’re usually in the building stage of the SEM campaign and assume that billable hours works for their other services, so why not PPC?

The problem is that when you use a PPC management software solution, like ours, you can get fantastic results for your client in terms of conversions and ROI while literally only spending about 20 minutes per week in each account. Over the long term, billable hours will be a loss for your agency when you consider the tremendous value that you will bring to your client.

Instead, Charge for a Percentage of Spend

Perhaps the most effective way to charge for PPC management is a percentage of spend. Most typically, I hear agencies charging about 10-20% of AdWords spend (I’ve heard as high as 25%). This is fair for you and the client. The larger the account, the more conversions (hopefully) your client will get. Since you’re adding more value to the client, the percentage-of-spend model fairly compensates you while ensuring good ROI for your client.

Consider Adding Setup and Management Fees

This is not an either/or. You can charge a percentage of spend and a flat fee. In particular, if you’re building up the account or making structural changes beyond weekly maintenance, a management fee is appropriate. Again, with the right tool, you won’t be doing much of this after you take on a new account. Are you starting to see why this is such an easy revenue stream?

Please, Please, Please Do Not Outsource

Many companies outsource. Many companies talk to us about software and decide they’d rather outsource their profits than grow their business. This is the worst possible solution. More than likely, the agency you’re handing the PPC account to is using some kind of PPC management software. Now, you’re paying another agency and passing that cost onto your client. Essentially, you’re putting a middle-man between you and profitability. Also, how do you know what results they’ll get for your client?

Finally: Do Not Hire

On the agency team, we take pride in helping you NOT hire additional staffers. We get calls each month from agencies who say: “We’re taking on more and more accounts. It takes hours in AdWords to manage them. We’re going to hire a PPC coordinator.”

Do you enjoy the overhead involved in hiring a new employee? Add up the costs of salary, health insurance, paid-time off, 401(k), etc. That’s before we get to the time costs of training them. With all this overhead, you might as well pass on PPC altogether. Software is cheaper and can make you more efficient so you don’t have to add another head to your team.

I’d like to end on a philosophical note: The greatest risk is the one we never take. This is true of agencies that don’t vigorously pursue PPC as a revenue stream. Of course, some risks are just foolish. It all depends on how well you prepare for your journey.

About the author

Dave Rocco serves on a team specialized in helping marketing/PR/advertising agencies more effectively manage PPC. His goal for most agencies is reducing the time they spend on each AdWords account so they can grow their business. He’s from New Hampshire but hates the cold and loves the French language.

There’s a village in Japan where the dead outnumber the living, and I don’t mean the ancestors in the cemetery. The bodies are dispersed around the small town of Nagoro.

It’s a small community of some 35 people, most in their 60s or older. The place is so sparsely populated that the locals consider their 150-plus dead a part of their community.

OK, so they aren’t literal dead bodies. Instead, the locals erected scarecrow-like figures in their likeness. Scarecrows fill the schoolhouse whose students long since graduated. They wait by an old bus stop, even though there’s no bus to pick them up.

For the residents remaining, they replace the memories of those that have either passed away or simply moved away.

This is a stark example of Japan’s most systemic issues.

With all of the problems in Europe and China, the troubles in Japan have been forgotten for the moment. However, their issues are far greater and there are no obvious no solutions.

Among Japan’s biggest problems is a disproportionately large elderly population. That’s not going away anytime soon.

The country is in desperate need of an economic upheaval. Yet no matter what Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe does to reform their economy, they only amount to small changes.

The first arrow he fired in his three-arrow approach to revitalize the economy involved printing new yen with abandon. He was trying to push down the value of the currency, and it worked like a charm – it drove the currency down by 40%. Japanese companies selling cheaper exports raked in profits.

So far so good – but little of it flowed down to workers.

The second arrow involved a lot of government stimulus spending, like building bridges, tunnels, and earthquake-resistant roads – but the effects on the economy have been modest. Government spending did not lead to a buildup in private investment.

The third and final arrow calls for structural reforms. Those won’t happen until Japan stands at the edge of ruin. Changing the way business is done, particularly how companies hire, fire, and interact with workers, seems close to impossible. Total dedication to the company might not be how young Japanese view the system today, but it is certainly how all of the aging professionals who still have jobs see things. It won’t matter though. The structural changes won’t fix their bigger issues.

For all of the money and effort poured into shaking up the Japanese economy since 2012, the economy fell back into recession at the end of 2014.

The one positive sign was in May of this year. Household spending jumped by 4.8% over April. Unfortunately, that was the first positive reading in 14 months!

Japan can’t seem to get out of its own way. As of yet, no one has found a solution for the problems that ail them.

25% of its population is over 65. The birth rate remains stuck at roughly 1.4 children per woman of child-bearing age. That number would need to increase to two simply to replace the parents.

In terms of overall population, Japan has been shrinking for years.

In 2014, about one million children were born, but more than a million people died. The country shrank by 268,000 people last year, following a decline of 244,000 in 2013. The population has fallen every year since 2004 and shows no signs of stopping anytime soon.

By 2060, research shows the population will have fallen by 30%, while the percentage of people over 65 grows to 40%.

There are no plans of how to handle this eventuality.

The Chief Cabinet Secretary suggested that if the elderly moved out of expensive areas such as Tokyo, and took up residence in remote villages that have been shrinking, the cost of care would decline.

That’s a great idea on paper, but in reality few people in their twilight years want to uproot and move to a distant place where they have no relatives or friends. Besides, no one’s suggested how to pay for new facilities, staff, and treatments that would be necessary in each town.

Japan technically came out of recession earlier this year, but I expect it’ll will fall back again. However, this does provide us with investment opportunities.

Left without any good options, Japan’s prime minister will probably devalue the currency again. Not long after the first time, we picked up a short yen position in our Boom & Bust portfolio that’s up 125% over two years. I expect it will gain more ground in the months ahead.

Beyond that, there’s also the opportunity to ride the Japanese stock market higher, since the central bank is buying shares to drive up share prices.

None of this will put the country on the right track, but we have a few suggestions for what it could do. Massive immigration might help, but the Japanese are very anti-immigration.

Many wonder: “What’s going to happen to Japan?” Simple. If things remain the same, the country will fade from existence.

Join the conversation about this story »

Query: How much gold does it take to get international prestige while not ticking off the powers that be?

1,658 tons, apparently. At least officially…

But before we explain further, a look at the yellow metal. Gold’s down $11, at $1,132, near its November 2009 lows. Inflation numbers, as measured by CPI, printed this morning and met surveyed economists’ expectations. Maybe that’s why.

It could also be because of the gravitas Janet Yellen’s showed yesterday while telling Congress rates would increase this year. Or it could be something entirely else…

Either way, “there’s a difference,” as Addison explained in a NPR interview years ago, when gold was still rallying, “between being a gold bug and understanding the impact of Federal Reserve policy on the U.S. dollar. Gold bugs are overjoyed to be riding the gold price all the way to $2,000, and they should be. But you can count on it they’ll ride the price all the way back down to $1,000.”

Take your pick of the reason gold’s down today and then grumble or shrug depending on which characterization fits you best.

“Gold is the only real money,” Addison wrote on a different occasion, in one of The Daily Reckoning’s free reports, The 5 Best Ways to Invest in Gold, “and it’s value cannot be changed or controlled by government fiat.” That’s why “the ultimate dollar hedge investment will always be gold.”

“I find it funny that central bankers are always disparaging gold,” Jim Rickards told me separately on the Eurostar train from London to Paris last week, “yet they all hold gold.”

As he finished that thought, we daydreamed back to July 13, 2011. We were sitting in room 2128 of the Rayburn House Office Building, in Washington, D.C.

Congressman Ron Paul was questioning then-Fed chairman Ben Bernanke during a House Financial Services Committee hearing …

Dr. Paul: Do you think gold is money?

Ben Bernanke: No. It is a precious metal.

Dr. Paul: It’s not money?

Ben Bernanke: It’s a precious metal.

Dr. Paul: Even if it has been money for 6,000 years, somebody reversed that and eliminated that economic law?

Ben Bernanke: It’s an asset. Would you say Treasury bills are money? I don’t think they’re money either, but they’re a financial asset…

Dr. Paul: Why do central banks hold it?

Ben Bernanke: It’s… it’s is a form of reserves…

Dr. Paul: Why don’t they hold diamonds?

Ben Bernanke: It is tradition… a long-term tradition…

Dr. Paul: Some people still think it is money. I yield back. My time is up.

A moment for reflection…

“China increased its gold reserves 57%,” reports Bloomberg this morning, “overtaking Russia to become the country with the fifth-largest hoard in its first disclosure in six years.”

To bring you up to speed, since 2009, the People’s Bank of China has been mum on the country’s official gold reserves. That year it revealed its gold reserves as 1,054 tons, having risen 454 tons since its prior update in 2003. Since 2009, speculation and sleuthing have led to a range of predictions about China’s real gold hoard.

Meanwhile, on page 229 of The Death of Money, published in 2013, Mr. Rickards says, “the next update to the gold reserve figures can be expected in 2015” — a call made good this morning. According to the report, China’s official statement of reserves is now 1,658 tons.

“While the metal is no longer used to back paper money,” Bloomberg explains, “it’s a large part of central bank reserves in the U.S. and Europe. China may have stockpiled gold as part of its plan to diversify its foreign-exchange reserves.

Another explanation comes from a reader commenting on our website this morning, “The Golden Rule: Whoever has the gold makes the rules.” Mr. Rickards has diligently laid out the case for as much…

“Before I started talking about special drawing rights,” Jim told us recently, “people thought SDR stood for strawberry daiquiri on the rocks.”

Since then, the notions of the International Monetary Fund as proto world central bank… special drawing rights as the accepted world reserve currency… and currency wars seem to have become ubiquitous themes throughout the newsletter industry. Stay on top of other analysts’ forecasts, by all means, but remember you heard it from Jim first.

“The IMF officially demonetized gold in 1975,” Rickards wrote on April 14. “The U.S. ended the convertibility of gold in 1971. Gold disappeared ‘officially’ in stages in the mid-1970s. But the physical gold never went away.”

He continued to explain:

“Gold serves as political chips on the world’s financial stage. It doesn’t mean that you automatically have a gold standard, but that the gold you have will give you a voice among major national players sitting at the table.

“Here’s the problem: If you took the lid off of gold, ended the price manipulation and let gold find its level, China would be left in the dust. It wouldn’t have enough gold relative to the other countries, and because their economy’s growing faster and because the price of gold would be skyrocketing, they could never acquire it fast enough. They could never catch up. All the other countries would be on the bus, while the Chinese would be off.

“When you have this reset, and when everyone sits down around the table, China’s the second largest economy in the world. They have to be on the bus. That’s why the global effort has been to keep the lid on the price of gold through manipulation…

“The price is being suppressed until China gets the gold that they need. Once China gets the right amount of gold, then the cap on gold’s price can come off.”

While tapping this reckoning out, Jim called from the road. “China is feigning transparency with a ‘don’t rock the gold boat’ strategy,” he said in reaction to today’s announcement. “It’s a misrepresentation of the facts. They absolutely have more gold than they’re reporting.

“This behavior is consistent with the case we made in May,” he continued. “China is doing what it needs to do to join the SDR club, but nothing more. The gold reserves they reported are less than the IMF’s,” which, for reference, holds about 2,814 tons, “but enough to get noticed. The report today was also not enough to send the gold price higher, which suits China fine, since they’re still a buyer.”

Opinions and conjecture are bound to circulate in the coming hours. Now more than ever, it’s important to understand why Jim believes most gold bugs and bloggers are dead wrong about China’s gold reserves. That said, we’ve decided to republish Jim’s piece from May 18. Click here to read it in it’s entirety.

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Sometimes your strategy will fail. And it doesn’t matter which strategy your business has chosen.

Lowest Price Loses

You may not want to believe me, but it is very easy to lose on price. I see this happening more and more all the time. The sales organization believes the lowest price will win the deal, so they focus there instead of value. And then they are shocked to discover they’ve lost.

You can have a price point far lower than any of your competitors and still lose. Sometimes, your prospective client wants greater value, in which case price isn’t their dominating concern. Instead, “value” is what your prospect wants to buy. Lowest price can also look like the highest risk. Prospects run from risk. If they perceive that you can’t execute, they look elsewhere.

Price is always going to be a consideration, but it doesn’t mean that is it always weighted as heavy as we think it is.

Total Solution Loses

It’s easy to lose with the best total solution.

There are some prospects who have a tough time understanding the greater value that you create, even when you do everything in your power to help them understand the investment you are asking them to make. These prospects often underinvest in the outcomes they need because they struggle to understand the difference between price and cost. I have personally struggled with prospects who didn’t understand this even when provided with a straightforward, detailed analysis.

There are some prospects who weigh price so heavily in their consideration, even after being presented irrefutable proof that their costs will be higher, that they refuse a solution that would cost less.

The Best Product, Not

You can lose with the best product the world has ever known.

Some people don’t believe they need the very best product available. Instead, they want what is “good enough.” Other people don’t believe they deserve the very best product. They think that spending more than the minimum necessary would make them a spendthrift, or arrogant, or decadent. And there are some prospects who will never believe your product is the best, simply because a salesperson is the one extolling its virtues.

Some people won’t want the greater value your better product offers them. Some people won’t need it. Many people will believe that some other product is the “best product” for them, and they will purchase those products instead.

You can sell people and help change their perception. Often, a changed perception of value is what it takes to help your prospects produce better results than they are currently. But it is easier to go with the grain and sell to people who already value what it is you do—and how you do it. It’s easier to sell with your strategy than it is to sell against it.

The post Sometimes Your Strategy Will Fail appeared first on The Sales Blog.

SEOUL, South Korea – South Korea’s top economic policymaker says the bitter fight between Samsung and an American hedge fund over a contentious business deal shows that the country needs to do more to protect shareholder rights.

Finance minister Choi Kyung-hwan told foreign media Tuesday that South Korea needs to win trust from foreign investors by making sure that companies protect the long-term interests of shareholders as well as short-term value.

Elliott Associates tried to prevent a takeover between Samsung companies that was seen as strengthening founding family influence over Samsung Electronics.

Samsung narrowly secured shareholder approval last week helped by a last ditch campaign to woo support.

Choi said South Korea welcomes foreign investors like Elliott.

The post SKorea finance minister: Samsung-Elliott battle shows need to protect shareholder interests appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

Developing customer loyalty opens up an entire universe to your marketing department. It makes marketing and sales easier, lowers costs and increases customer lifetime value (CLV).

As CMO, you have great influence over the brand and ultimately CLV. Activate the brand to increase the lifetime value of your customers.

Read on to discover how marketing can sway customer behavior and increase CLV.

Every salesperson, regardless of company and industry, has to deal with price. And, where there’s price there will most likely be … price objections.

This can happen at any time during the sales process. At some point the prospect is going to ask the inevitable: “How much does it cost?” I’m sure we can all agree the least effective course of action you can take as a salesperson is to dive right in and answer the question. Rattling off figures, options, and discounts like no tomorrow is not a recipe for success. That’s called "dropping your pants." Don’t drop your pants.

There can be a number of reasons your prospect has asked “How much does it cost?” While the question might seem straightforward, it could belie any number of motivations. It’s your job to figure out what those motivations are.

Taking the question at face value and simply answering it is like jumping from Point A all the way to Point G. While that might feel expedient, you need to understand points B, C, D, E, and F first or risk torpedoing your deal. What you really need to uncover is the reason the buyer is asking about price in the first place. That means answering their question with a question.

If only it was that simple. Talking about money can be a tricky thing. If the prospect asks you “How much does it cost?” and you respond with something like “How much do you think it costs?” or “Why do you want to know the price?” all you’re doing is irritating the prospect. Let’s not forget that your prospect has plenty of avenues to research price. The odds are they already have a rough idea of the cost of your offering.

In my opinion, the key to dealing with a price objection is a response that sets context then asks a question.

Here’s what I mean. Before you ask a question to clarify what your prospect really means by “How much does it cost?” you need to add some context. Let’s look at three different questions that incorporate context to defuse this situation.

Question #1

Here’s the first:

“That’s an important question. Before I get too deep into our pricing structure, how much research have you done on what a typical investment is for a product/service like this?”

That’s a fair question, and it helps you get a clear picture of how much knowledge your prospect possesses regarding what the typical costs are for what you’re selling. That puts you in a strong position to respond effectively without having to start throwing numbers around. A question like this keeps your pants on.

Notice the context that comes before the actual question. The brass-tacks question we’re asking here is “Do you already know what something like this should cost?”

While you can come right out and ask that, you risk coming across like an a**hole. For some people that approach really works. I call them charismatic sellers. Those that succeed this way are actually pretty rare. Odds are that’s not you. And, that’s okay. No one likes an a**hole -- especially your customers.

Question #2

Here’s a second way to handle “How much does it cost?”

“Great question; in many ways, cost is relative. I’d like get some more insight from you if I could. Can you share with me how much experience you have buying a product or service like this?”

If they answer “none,” you now have an opportunity to provide insights and advice on the decision which can help establish trust without immediately putting numbers on the table.

If they answer “some” you have the opportunity to ask a follow up question on the past experience they had and what they learned from it. If they answer “a lot” you can recognize that experience and start to explore how they acquired it and how it informs their purchase process. Regardless of the answer, you have a degree of control before you start quoting figures.

In advance of the third question, I want to make a point about tone. The way you ask these questions has a direct effect on how well they will work. Word choice and voice tone are key. You want to be precise in your phrasing and neutral in your voice tone. It is also important to avoid weak language which will undermine your credibility. For more on this, check out my post 8 Bad Conversational Habits That Are Undermining Your Sales Performance.

Question #3

This one has to do with ROI. It applies more to B2B sales, although the question could be used in big-ticket B2C too. When your prospect asks about price, there is a high likelihood they are thinking through their value equation. Your prospects are asking themselves “What am I going to gain in return for the money I will spend if I buy this product or service?”

If someone asks “How much does it cost?” and you decide to go down the ROI road as a way to defuse the situation you might be tempted to ask, “What kind of ROI do you need to see from this investment?” Depending on the quality of the relationship you have with the prospect and the level of trust you‘ve developed, that question might be a bit blunt without some context.

I would consider asking something like this:

“Cost is certainly a key consideration in an investment like this. The other consideration is the return you get. What kind of return do you typically look for when you buy a product/service like this?”

You’re either going to get an “I don’t know,” “I’m not sure,” or “I expect to get X.” Regardless of the answer, you’ve retained control of the conversation and each one of those responses provides the opportunity to ask follow up questions or provide valuable insights to help the prospect make a good decision. All of which helps you to not respond too hastily with pricing information. It’s all about keeping your pants on, people.

There are many different perspectives on how to handle price and price objections, and I’m sure there are plenty of sales professionals that will disagree with the approach I’ve outlined above. That’s perfectly fine. That’s what makes the sales profession so interesting. While there is considerably more science baked into today’s sales processes, there is still quite a bit of art to be really good at it.

I have seen the three approaches above work very effectively when delivered artfully. Give them a try. Let me know if they worked for you. And, if you’ve got other successful approaches for handing price and price objections, share them in the comments below.

On July 21, 2005, China surprised the world by abandoning its peg to the dollar that had been in place since 1995. It immediately appreciated by 2% and gradually appreciated until the financial crisis hit in 2008. It then looked to have been "re-pegged until late 2010, when it began appreciating again.

Since that fateful 2005 decision, the yuan has appreciated by a third against the US dollar in nominal terms. In real terms, it has been somewhat more as China has experienced somewhat faster inflation than the US. In terms of consumer prices, US inflation has averaged 2.1% since mid-2005 while China's inflation has averaged 2.9%.

In the five years before the currency regime change, China's trade surplus with the US (using BEA data), rose dramatically. It doubled from $63.8 bln in 2000 to $162.3 bln in 2004. Over the next 10-years, China's trade surplus rose another 70% from $202.3 bln in 2005 to $343.1 bln in 2014. One clear implication is that currency appreciation alone as been insufficient to bring the trade accounts into balance.

From an even long-term perspective, note the sequence of events. When China began the liberalization process, there were several different exchange rates for the yuan. Overall the currency was being devalued. On the eve of the Plaza Agreement in 1985 to drive the dollar lower, there were a little less than three yuan to the dollar.

Chinese officials engineered a gradual depreciation of the yuan in the early 1990s and combined the exchange rates into a single one, managed a sharp depreciation. At the beginning of 1994 there were 8.7 yuan to the dollar. Some accounts of the origins of the 1997-1998 Asian financial crisis emphasize this significant Chinese devaluation as a key factor changing the competitive landscape in East Asia.

The appreciation of the yuan since 2005 brings it back toward the levels that were prevailing prior to the large depreciation in 1994. The IMF has recently indicated that it no longer regards the yuan as under-valued. The US Treasury disagrees. Some US officials see the widening trade surplus as evidence that there is still room for currency adjustment.

As many pundits pronounced 9/11 as the end of globalization, China joined the World Trade Organization in late 2001. Chinese officials have gradually accepted the importance of market mechanisms. As a results of China's own trajectory, encouraged by the Special Economic Dialog with the US, Chinese officials have indicated that they will no longer intervene in the foreign exchange market unless it needs to combat disorderly markets.

Unlike in earlier periods when its intervention was aimed at slowing the appreciation of the yuan, more recently, the PBOC seemed to act to avoid depreciation. China's reserves have fallen four consecutive quarters, even though the trade surplus is still rising on a 12-month average basis. China appears to be experiencing net capital exports, which also represents a change from the past.

Given the tumultuous moves in the capital markets, with the sharp appreciation against the major currencies over the past year, the yuan has been remarkably steady against the US dollar. Over the past year, the euro has fallen nearly 20% and the yen by 18.5%. Sterling is off 9%. The yuan as off by 0.03% according to Bloomberg data.

Since the second half of March, the dollar has been trading in a narrow range against the yuan CNY6.18-CNY6.22. And even this may exaggerate the range. It tested CNY6.18 once in late-March, and has rarely been under CNY6.19. The CNY6.22 level has been approached slightly more often, but the dollar hardly trades above CNY6.21. The dollar is trading near CNY6.21 presently.

Some suspect that China is engineering a stable yuan because officials think that it will enhance the likelihood that it is invited to join the IMF's Special Drawing Rights (SDRs). This goal may have also been behind last week's decision to reveal its official gold holdings. A stable currency is not one of the official criteria the IMF's uses for SDR purposes. It is more likely a defensive posture that avoids giving US critics more fodder for its reluctance to see the yuan in the SDR.

The key issue for inclusion in the SDR is not the level of the yuan though the IMF's assessment that it is near fair value is helpful. The decision will likely hang on whether the yuan is freely usable. Last week, while it was still deploying policies aimed at supporting the stock market, Chinese officials announced that foreign officials, including central banks, sovereign wealth funds and international financial institutions (e.g. IMF, World Bank, Asian Development Bank, AIIB) would not longer be bound by the quota system (QFII) and would have full access to the on-shore interbank bond market.

There is speculation that China may abandon its QFII and RQFII quota systems to inward bound investment. That would seem to enhance the likelihood of the yuan's inclusion in the SDR. Short of this, it would not be surprising to see other liberalization measures. One idea that gains some attention from time to time is for the 2% dollar-yuan band to be expanded. The other approved currency pairs trade in a 5% bands. While a wider band is possible, it may be a distraction from demonstrating that it is freely usable. Although the yuan tested the 2% band limits against the dollar in Q1, since the beginning of Q2 the dollar has moved in a 1.0%-1.5% band.

As part of joining the SDR, China would be expected to adopt the best currency practices. This means reporting the currency composition of its reserves. It would report them in confidence to the IMF who would incorporate them into its COFER report of allocated reserves. Using the COFER data, analysts would try to back into China's currency allocation. It is generally assumed that China's currency allocation is broadly in line with the global situation, with the US dollar accounting for a little more than 60% and the euro a little more than 20%.

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I’m not going to lie to you. Raising your rates with existing clients is easier said than done. Mainly because you take all the nerves, concerns and beliefs that you have about your pricing, and compound them with all the nerves, concerns and beliefs you have about communicating with clients. That’s scary. I get it.

But good news my dear Ambitious Entrepreneur! It’s more than possible. You can do it. And with practice, you can even do it without breaking much of a sweat.

Here’s how.

When To Raise Rates

Deciding when to raise rates with existing clients is less about the calendar, and more about your specific engagement with them. Ideally, you’ll be having the price increase conversation before the end of your work together. The goal? A smooth transition from one price to the next. For example:

Coaching Packages: If a client has purchased a 6-pack of coaching sessions, the best time to communicate the price increase is between the 5th and 6th meeting you’ll have with them. Why? Because it gives them time to wrap their heads around the new price, and gives you an opportunity to absolutely knock their socks off with a great final session experience. Seriously – they’ll be all loved up and excited to purchase another package. At the new price.

Ongoing support/contract/retainer services:  If you’re working under a contract that runs continuously, check the contract termination clause to see how much notice needs to be given before the end of the relationship. If it’s 30 days, aim to have a conversation with your client at least 60 days before your new price would take effect. This gives them time to rework budgets, and gives you time to – you guessed it – absolutely nail the delivery of services over the next 30 days. When they agree to the new price, you can amend the contract to reflect the new price well before it expires.

How To Communicate

You can have the most fabulous service in the world, but communicating a price increase can go south fast if you pick the wrong method. Here’s a guide to what works well, when.

In person

If you work with a local client and usually see them in person, this is the obvious best choice. Same goes if you’re not local, but it’s a mega-client. If your contract with them is worth big bucks, taking the time and energy to travel to them for an in person presentation of your new pricing structure may be worthwhile.

Why It Works: Being face-to-face is a great relationship builder, and it will be easier to answer their questions or tailor your approach to their feedback when you’re side by side.  Never underestimate the power of walking through a proposal with a client.

Phone or Skype

n addition to being far more convenient than hopping on a plane, if you regularly meet with clients using one of these platforms, it’s a great way to communicate an increase without having it feel dramatic. (We all know how stressed out we get when someone says ‘we need to talk…’ Same goes for our businesses.

Why It Works: All of the power of instant-feedback without the transit time.

Email

I’m a fan of email…but not for sending clients a price increase. There are two dangers to just sending over a quick email that far outweigh the relief you feel of not having to actually say the words ‘I’m raising my price’. 1) There’s no feedback! The news of the higher price lands in their inbox with a thud. And if they freak out, you’re not there to walk them through the change. 2) It’s a relationship killer. If you’ve been working closely with a client for any length of time, you’ve got a rapport. Maybe even a budding business friendship. Sending an email is cold.

How To Make It Work: Use emails as a follow-up to the conversations you have. Discuss the new price, explain when it will take effect, and answer any questions – and then send an email with a recap and reminder of the new price. It’s a must-have paper trail.

What To Say

Now you know when to raise your prices, and are giving excellent advance notice. You’re also putting on your Big Ambitious Entrepreneur pants and having a conversation about it, rather than lobbing an email grenade over the wall. But what will you actually say to the client? Here are some Pro Tips for you to use.

Pro Tip #1: Avoid giving too many justifications.

The more you go on about the cost of bananas increasing, how inflation is calculated this year, and the amount of research you did to calculate the new price…the more it’ll sound like you’re convincing yourself. No client is going to buy into that value if you haven’t.

Pro Tip #2: Avoid being apologetic.

Unless you’ve let this go until the last minute and are apologizing for giving short notice, there’s no need for ‘I’m Sorry’ to escape your lips. Don’t be sorry for charging a price reflective of the value you deliver to your clients. Ever.

Pro Tip #3: If you love working with a client, let them know it!

Don’t be shy to tell them how much you’ve enjoyed working on their project, getting to know their business, or even how much you enjoy working with them personally. People want to work with people who are enthusiastic about what they do.

Pro Tip #4: Roll out the proven value cart.

Have you helped them drop a dress size? Reconnect with their inner child? Finally see conversions on their site? Remind them of that. Especially if you’ve been working together for a while, they may have forgotten some of the early wins they had because of you.

What could this look like?

Opening the discussion: “Hi Sarah! I wanted to share some news with you that will effect our work together starting this Fall.”

Taking Care of Business: “I’ll be increasing the price of my consulting services to $2500 per month, starting October 1st when our contract renews.”

Showing enthusiasm: “I’ve really enjoyed getting to work side-by-side with you over the past few months.”

Reminder of value: “I love thinking back on where we started together, and all the greatness we’ve achieved. Your sales are better than ever, subscribers are growing by double-digits, and I’m still pinching myself about that feature in Hot New Thing magazine.”

Wrap Up: “I’ll send over an update to the contract for you to take a look at, and we can take care of the refresh now so that our work together keeps buzzing along.”

Of course, your client will be participating in the conversation – so don’t try and map out a whole script and then stick to it 100%. Just create some speaking points, give yourself a mini-rehearsal (especially when it’s time to say what your new price is! Funny how numbers get us all tongue tied…) and then go with the flow of the conversation.

Yesterday, I noticed a large, furry, dead bug on the hood of my car. It seemed to be attached to the outer lip of the hood - like the edge of a cliff - right where the hood drops down to the grill. I got out of the car to remove the chunk of dead fur and I was shocked to see how wrong I was. It was dead all right, and it was furry. I'm not a tall person, so I wasn't sitting high enough in the car to notice the distance between the bug and the lip of the hood, but my estimate was off by more than 2 feet! What I thought I saw was completely different from reality.

When salespeople don't call high enough into a company, they experience the exact same thing. What they believe they are seeing and hearing is quite different from what they would see and hear if they were higher up, talking with an executive that can communicate the entire story, rather than the partial view and limited information they get from a middle manager. This is Vertical Reach.

One area where vertical reach has a huge impact is selling value. I wrote a very important article on the role that emotions play in selling value for the Selling Power site last week.  

The ability to truly sell value is one of the competencies that elite salespeople have, but ineffective salespeople don't.  I have data from the nearly 1,000,000 salespeople and sales managers that have been evaluated or assessed by Objective Management Group (OMG). Regular readers have read about the elite 6% and the bottom 74%, but today I want to provide some additional eye-opening statistics that differentiate the very good from the not-so-good salespeople. What makes them different?

You have probably heard the buzz building in the marketing community about multi-channel marketing. Implementing a multi-channel marketing approach in your programs and campaigns will help you be where your buyers are, which is essential in order to stand out in a crowded market. Download this workbook to learn more information about multi-channel marketing strategy. Obtain useful worksheets for planning your approach on various channels.

It’s a sad fact that today’s average B2B sales person is still far more comfortable talking about their products than they are discussing business issues. However the average B2B buyer regards a sales person’s relevant business knowledge as being far more valuable than their ability to regurgitate product features, functions and benefits.

This terrible mismatch has profound consequences. It should be no surprise that on average 87% of the revenues in complex B2B sales environments are being generated by just 13% of the sales population. Needless to say, the gap between the best and the rest is far narrower in best-in-class sales organisations. What sets these top performing organisations apart?

There’s abundant evidence to suggest that one of the most significant differences lies in their ability to systematically create unique value to their customers through the disciplined application of value-based selling techniques across their entire sales and marketing organisation. And the results can be seen in top line revenue growth that far exceeds market averages.

So what does value-based selling entail? It’s not - as some early definitions suggested - just about maximising the value of your solution to the customer. In fact focusing on your value too early in the development of a sales opportunity can actually compromise your chances of success. Because if there is no problem, there can be no solution.

Before the value of your solution is in any way relevant to your potential customer, they must first - hopefully with your help - recognise the value of solving the problem the first place, and acknowledge the cost of inaction and the urgent need for change. Otherwise, the most likely outcome is that they will simply decide to stick with the status quo.

In fact, that’s exactly what happens in over 60% of apparently well-qualified sales opportunities today: after months - sometimes years - of consideration and the application of large amounts of sales energy and resource, the prospect simply decides to “do nothing” - at least for the moment.

Principle #1: focus on the value of solving their problem

That’s why the first principle of value-based selling is to focus on the value to the prospect of dealing with the issue they have identified. If the prospect cannot articulate the costs and consequences of the problem and the value of solving it, their chances of getting their organisation to agree to invest in any solution is remote - as are your chances of winning.

It’s dangerous to assume that your prospect is fully aware of all of these costs and consequences. In fact, a key role of the sales person in these early stages must be to help the prospect recognise the full horror of sticking with the status quo. Almost always, this will involve drawing their attention to aspects of the problem they may not have recognised or - even better - introducing high-impact issues that they may not have previously been aware of.

But if, despite all your efforts, the value of solving the problem remains unclear or weak, it’s usually best to qualify out the “opportunity” and defer it for future nurturing - even if you appear to have a good solution fit.

Principle #2: be specific about the value you offer

Marketers sometimes make a great deal of fuss about articulating your company’s “unique value proposition”. But no matter how agonisingly carefully they are crafted, these can only ever be generic statements designed to appeal to your target market as a whole. Value-based selling requires that you get very specific about the value you offer each prospect - in effect you need a personally tailored unique value position.

Rather than a broad description of all that you can offer, you’ll get much more traction by selectively identifying and highlighting the small subset of your total capabilities that are most relevant to successfully addressing the issue you have identified. And you need to clearly explain how you deliver unique and relevant value to every member of the decision-making team.

Principle #3: contribute relevant value in every interaction

If your contacts are serious decision-makers with substantial workloads, they will not appreciate being involved in conversations and meetings that leave them wondering why they just wasted their valuable time. So the third core principle of value-based selling is to seek to contribute relevant value in every customer interaction.

This value might be expressed by responding their questions simply, directly and completely rather than leading them around the houses with an ambiguous or deliberately obfuscated response. Or it might be expressed by sharing an insight that causes them to think differently or by revealing a relevant fact they were previously unaware of.

Principle #4: facilitate their buying process, not your sales process

Conventional sales processes are all-too-often designed around the needs of the seller, not the buyer. So it’s hardly surprising that things the sales person sees as important are often regarded by the prospect as irrelevant or (even worse) profoundly irritating, while at the same time their interests and concerns are being poorly served by the sales person.

That’s why your sales approach - and the key stages in your sales pipeline and CRM system - must be designed around the key stages and milestones in your prospect’s buying decision process. Your sales activities, sales enablement tools and shareable content must be designed to advance a well-qualified opportunity through their buying decision process.

Principle #5: if you can’t contribute distinctive value, qualify out

The final principle is simple: if your solution doesn’t offer a distinctively different and higher-value approach solving to the prospect’s identified problem than any of the other options they are considering, you need to either do something about it or qualify out.

So there you have it: five key principles of value-based selling. I’ll be expanding on each of these ideas in future articles. In the meantime, I'd welcome your comments: am I on the right track?

 

Without looking at a calendar, I always know when it is Tuesday. Every Tuesday at 11 a.m. it is inevitable that my email inbox explodes with emails urging me to download the latest guides on marketing know-how and friendly token-filled messages from sales reps simply “checking in”.

As a marketer, I have heard and read all sorts of tips for marketing automation success and campaign effectiveness. I am well aware that Tuesday at 11 a.m. is a recommended day and time to drip your database with the next relevant email in a demand generation program. However, I can’t help but wonder if these companies are studying their own data and have noticed that I have not opened an email that has been sent to me at that day and time in months? I simply don’t open them because my inbox is flooded with similar offers from their competitors, and they have unfortunately gotten lost in the shuffle.

Today’s marketers have a wealth of knowledge at their fingertips. There is access to endless discussion groups and “best practices” that encourage us to follow what works for other marketers in terms of effective demand generation planning. This post from Econsultancy still rings true and shows research many marketers adhere to when planning deployments.

The problem with what is working for everyone else is that everyone else is doing it. While good tips passed on from one marketer to the next may provide great insights, it doesn’t supersede the reality of your own business, which can only be discovered with accurate analytics. Your analytics.

So, what do analytics mean for today’s marketer?

• We have the ability to ditch the status quo and see what really works – Yes, Tuesdays and Thursdays boast sensational open rates for emails. However, with proper analytics, you may drill down on your data and see that despite all of the open-rates, your click-through-rates are suffering even on those days while another day is a top performer.
• We get to look at ongoing programs and tweak what isn’t working – Using the example above, you may take a look at the scheduling of your emails and after some testing determine that sending an email on Wednesday at 2 p.m. actually bodes well for your target demographic; following the implementation of a slight shift in your scheduling, you may see conversion rates soar. Even the simplest analysis of your data can provide you the opportunity to make small changes that provide a big impact.
• We can target prospects with sophistication and precision – Trust me, email open-rates and click-through-rates are barely even scratching the surface when it comes to today’s analytics. You can measure the effectiveness of just about anything with the implementation of a robust analytics software system, and properly mining that data allows you to approach your prospects fully armed with a knowledge on how they are behaving in your campaigns; giving you a leg up on how to interact with them using a precise strategy.

Simply put, analytics provide today’s marketers with the right tools to create refined and targeted strategies based on factual data of what works. However, it’s critical to remember that mining data with the right tools is only a small slice of the pie, and an effective underlying Demand Generation Strategy is always a must when tweaking your programs based on the findings of your analysis.

Trust the numbers and remember that the latest “best practices” may not actually be best for your organization. Dig down and analyze your own data for effectiveness because it’s all about your buyer and they don’t respond the exact same way as others buyers do.

Whitepapers are one of the most common content pillars among marketing teams. And who can blame them? When done well, whitepapers can position your brand as an industry authority and help influence buying decisions.

But to get those results, your whitepaper needs to successfully connect with your audience and compel them to engage with it. Following these four steps will help you to create the most compelling, authoritative and engaging whitepapers.

1. Know Your Point of View

As with any piece of content marketing, your whitepapers should have a clear point of view. This angle should guide the creation of your paper, helping your team to hone in on the best voice, topics, and presentation of the information. Just as importantly, your point of view should tie in directly with your target audience. Your brand’s purpose and position in developing a whitepaper should be obvious to the reader right away. In fact, it’s probably a major reason why they downloaded your publication in the first place: because they have a certain need that your whitepaper has promised to fill.

For instance, both AdRoll and DS SolidWorks have extensive libraries of whitepapers, and both companies trade in products or services that can be very technical. AdRoll offers ad retargeting and SolidWorks sells design and simulation software. But each brand has taken a very different approach to the point of view they provide readers.

AdRoll’s library of guides and reports mostly offers industry-wide insights. You’ll find “State of the Industry” reviews that focus on different countries. The point of view here is that top-down snapshots of the industry will help readers to make the best decisions about their retargeting practices.

On the other hand, SolidWorks has used whitepapers to delve into highly technical topics related to its product offerings. For instance, the description of “Streamlining Designs with Vibration Analysis” is all but incomprehensible to the average person. But for the company’s existing clients, this is a useful overview of how to make better and more cost-effective choices in their daily business. SolidWorks knows their audience as highly technical and knowledgeable experts, and position their whitepapers to help this audience find the exact answers they need.

2. Put Design at the Forefront

Even though whitepapers seem to be all about the words, making smart choices in the visual elements of how you present that text makes a big difference in how effective they are as communication tools. The design of your whitepaper includes everything from your font to your color choices to your layout. These elements all help to make your publication appear fresh and readable.

Also, the best whitepapers break up walls of text in resourceful ways. Got a crucial factoid or an amusing quote in the copy? Highlight it in a graphic to catch the reader’s eye. If you have lots of data points, think about whether they should be listed in bullet points or converted to a chart.

Hootsuite is a great example of how a smart layout can make your content look great. The company’s whitepapers combine a mix of font sizes, colors, and formatting to create a flow across the page. Important words and phrases are printed in bold, while the key takeaway of each section is written in a large typeface. The color schemes are harmonious together while offering visual contrast, favoring combinations such as the complementary blue and orange along with neutral blacks and whites. It also makes smart use of bulleted and numbered lists to draw the reader’s eye to the most important information.

3. Find the Best Information

No matter what the point of view is, your whitepaper should do everything possible to prove that its contents are worth the reader’s attention. That means finding and including the highest quality information possible.

For research and studies, look for the most recent data you can find. If it’s 2015 and you’re still citing information from 2011, that’s not as helpful for your readers. Also, be sure to find reliable sources. Be alert to study sizes and sources to make sure that your information is unbiased. If your audience notices that you’re using old or suspicious studies as the foundation of your arguments, they’ll be less likely to trust what you say.

It’s also good to keep an eye on quality when you’re looking for expert sources to quote in a whitepaper. If you’re offering advice to readers, be sure it’s good advice that they’ll listen to. Feldman Creative publishes well-respected whitepapers because Barry Feldman has such an established reputation as a marketing expert. People want to know his opinions and learn from his insights, so Feldman Creative’s eBooks tend to be big hits.

Even if you can’t find a source of this caliber, make sure to turn to experts who have worthwhile insights and can express themselves clearly. The best sources will know how to be compelling and informative, which will make your whitepaper even more engaging.

4. Give the Reader Actionable Next Steps

Your whitepaper isn’t a textbook. It’s not intended to be simply a series of lessons; it should have an action or actions that you want the reader to take when they finish. Make your end goals clear to the reader at every turn.

HubSpot is great at this part of creating whitepapers. Take its publication titled How to Acquire Customers With Social Media, for example. It’s packed with not just great information, but also direct missives for how the reader can put that information to good use. Same with the company’s other titles, which cover how-to steps for sales, marketing, social media, and other business topics. With “How-to” right in the title of so many publications, the reader knows that they’ll walk away with lots to put into practice if they read the whole thing.

To keep your publication compelling, be sure to think about all of the various steps that go into creating the desired result from your reader. Make each of those steps a call-to-action. You’re the reader’s guide, so you need to show them how to get the outcome they want, whether that’s finding customers on social media, learning about your service, or improving their own business.

A person who facilitates excellence in others facilitates potential change, usually by asking questions to identify the components of the problem and deciding between possible solutions while reinforcing the changes and maintaining a trusting relationship. To achieve excellence, it’s necessary to avoid the listening filters that could prejudice the interaction, such as:

Bias. By listening for specifically for elements of the stated issues – problems, hopes, missing skills or motivation – facilitators merely hear what they can recognize as missing. If the context is unique, if there are unspoken or omitted bits, if there are patterns that should be noticed, if there are unstated historic – or subconscious – reasons behind the current situation, facilitators may not find them in a timely way (if at all), causing the interaction to begin in the wrong place, with the wrong timing and potentially not even discovering the crux of the problem, creating mistrust with the client.

Assumptions. If the person facilitating has had somewhat similar discussions, it’s possible that s/he will make faulty assumptions or guesses based on their history that do not take into account the client’s specific, historic, unconscious, and certainly idiosyncratic challenges.

Habits. The facilitator may enter the conversation with many prepared ways of handling similar situations and may miss the unique issues, patterns, and unspoken foundation that may hold the key to success.

As I write in my book What? Did you really say what I think I heard? the problem lie in our brains. Once we listen with a specific mindset or expectation, we restrict all else: our brains interpret the words spoken according to what it has heard before, with varying/unknown degrees of parallel to the current situation and often missing the client’s real intent, nuance, patterns, and comprehensive contextual framework and implications. We may end up offering help that misses excellence.

To have choice as to when, whether, or how to avoid filtering out possibility, we must go ‘beyond the brain’ by disassociating – going up on the ceiling and look down – to remove ourselves from any personal biases, assumptions, triggers or habits, enabling us to hear all that is meant (spoken or not). [In What? I have devoted an entire chapter to explaining how to trigger ourselves the moment there is a potential incongruence.]

For those unfamiliar with disassociation, try this: during a phone chat, put your legs up on the desk and push your body back against the chair, or stand up. For in-person discussions, stand up and/or walk around. [I have walked around rooms during Board meetings while consulting for Fortune 100 companies. They wanted excellence regardless of my physical comportment.] Both of those physical perspectives offer the physiology of choice and the ability to move outside of our instincts. Try it.

It’s important to excel at disassociating, entering conversations without any sort of biases or assumptions, and doing whatever is necessary to restrict any possibilities. Too often our clients and employees seek real leadership from us, and all we’re doing is what’s most comfortable for us – never discovering the real problems or solutions that would make a difference. As facilitators we hold important keys to making a difference. Let’s not discount the power of our positions.

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See my new Entrepreneur Programs: Getting Funded; Creating a Selling Machine; Marketing to Buying Decisions

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Sharon Drew Morgen is the NYTimes Business Bestselling author of Selling with Integrity and 7 books how buyers buy. She is the developer of Buying Facilitation® a decision facilitation model used with sales to help buyers facilitate pre-sales buying decision issues. She is a sales visionary who coined the terms Helping Buyers Buy, Buy Cycle, Buying Decision Patterns, Buy Path in 1985, and has been working with sales/marketing for 30 years to influence buying decisions.

More recently, Morgen is the author of What? Did You Really Say What I Think I Heard? in which she has coded how we can hear others without bias or misunderstanding, and why there is a gap between what’s said and what’s heard. She is a trainer, consultant, speaker, and inventor, interested in integrity in all business communication. Her learning tools can be purchased: www.didihearyou.com. She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com 512 771 1117
www.didihearyou.com; www.sharondrewmorgen.com

What Should Coaches, Managers, and Consultants Be Listening For? is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

So many leads, so little time. Your marketing strategy is generating so many qualified prospects and you can’t keep pace.

Not you? Or perhaps you’re the eternal skeptic, thinking marketing technology services and generating leads online only happens through herculean efforts? The truth is that online lead generation is within reach — and it doesn’t take a super firm to pull off.

In our Online Marketing for Professional Services book, Hinge took an in-depth look at what professional services firms, including those marketing technology services, are doing to ensure a steady flow of leads. From our research, we uncovered 10 key strategies that not only work, but can be implemented no matter what size your firm is.

1. Make Your Website a Collaboration Between IT & Marketing

With today’s easy-to-use content management software (CMS), your firm doesn’t need to rely on a developer to update your website. Give the car keys to the marketing team and let them use the website as a living, breathing communication tool.

In our research, we found that 75% of high-growth firms are updating their websites as least weekly. In contrast, only 55% of technology services firms are updating their sites this frequently. This presents a big opportunity for technology firms. Put marketing in charge of day-to-day website changes and rely on your IT department for more substantial redesigns and overhauls.

2. Zero in on High Impact Activities

Most marketing teams cannot possibly cover every aspect of marketing technology services. Instead, they focus on the marketing techniques that will have the highest impact. This is where analytics come into play. The marketing tools and techniques that will be most effective for your firm will depend on a number of factors, like your audiences and available resources. Carefully tracking the results of your marketing campaigns will help to identify what’s working, what’s not, and what could be improved.

If you find that developing your firm’s professionals into Visible Experts℠ is generating leads and new business, continue to build their marketplace visibility. If writing blog posts on relevant topics and issues are having an impact on your business, continue to invest in your blog. If you’re getting a lot of traction from your discussions in LinkedIn groups, continue to set aside time to post meaningful comments. You don’t have to go for it all — and certainly not all at once.

3. Determine Your Website Offers

Your website should have a variety of calls-to-action to encourage visitors to further engage with your firm—and these CTAs should be closely tracked and monitored. For example, you might consider having offers geared towards attracting prospects, such as content downloads or registration for an upcoming webinar, and offers for late-stage prospects, like a Contact Us or Request a Proposal form.

Tracking the performance of your offers is an important step to building a lead generating website — and it is the only way you will know where you should invest more time and money.

4. Eliminate Friction

Many professional services websites have a major problem: they don’t provide a positive user experience. Remember that over 87% of technology services buyers are checking out your website before making a purchasing decision.

When these prospects get to your website, can they easily find the information they’re looking for? Are you clearly communicating your firm’s services and expertise?

Navigation should be straightforward and intuitive. Visitors should easily be able to contact your firm. There should be simplified web forms and clear calls-to-action. Your website can be your firm’s greatest business development asset.

5. Meet Your New Best Friend: The CRM

Firms greatly benefit from using some sort of customer relationship management (CRM) tool. This type of software allows you easily to create new web forms and offers, track leads by source, and segment your list of prospects for more effective lead nurturing and business development.

There are a number of CRM softwares out there, all with their own set of capabilities. Do your research upfront and have a clear idea of exactly what functionality your firm needs in a solution. In short, a good CRM software can dramatically increase the efficiency of marketing technology services.

6. Pick Low Hanging Fruit

When it comes to building visibility in search engines and ranking highly, finding the right keywords is essential. What issues are your audiences facing and trying to solve? What keywords might they use to find technology services like those that your firm offers?

Consider finding keyword opportunities (through tools like Google’s Keyword Planner and Moz’s Keyword Difficulty tool) that haven’t yet been saturated. Rather than target high-volume, highly competitive phrases, target many more-attainable keyword phrases. The traffic you’ll generate from these highly targeted “long-tail” keywords add up.

7. Declare Yourself the Authority, Then Back It Up

In the world of marketing technology services, trust is everything. Don’t stop at declaring yourself a thought leader. Take the next step and support the claim by publishing educational content for your buyers. Show that you understand their challenges and that your firm has the expertise to help overcome them. This long-term strategy leads to a brand that prospects can trust.

8. Blog on Topics that Generate Leads

When producing educational content, it’s useful to have a specific target audience in mind and to write about topics that are important to that audience. Where can you find inspiration for topic ideas?

• Through industry news
• Through what’s trending on social media
• Through your business development or sales team
• Through conducting primary research

Frame your blog posts around the issues that matter to your audience and topics that are of interest to them. And remember to keep your posts educational, not self-promotional. Speak the language of your target readers and you’ll build visibility and attract your audience.

9. Give and Thou Shalt Receive

Get into the practice of sharing interesting stories (your firm’s own content and other firms’ content) on your social media networks. This activity positions your firm as a trusted industry resource and creates goodwill.

10. Stick. It. Out.

You can’t climb this mountain overnight. It’s tough in the beginning, especially when you don’t have many subscribers and you start to think… is this worth it? But if you stick it out, you’ll reap the rewards of perseverance. At Hinge, we’ve lived it ourselves, and we have seen it work time and time again for firms across the technology services space.

If you take away only one point from this story, it should be this: marketing technology services online is completely do-able. And remember, you don’t need an army to prosper — just a smart marketing team with a good strategy.

Additional Resources

• Learn marketing strategies that will generate more leads and increase awareness of your firm in Hinge’s Online Marketing for Professional Services book.
• Download a copy of our Visible Expert℠ Research Study: Technology Services Edition to learn how to become a thought leader, all based on research.

True character appears in times of adversity. Here are 3 tactics for developing mentally tough sales teams.

Every sales rep, on every sales team, faces periods of adversity. Where revenue goes dry, promising deals evaporate, and once-interested prospects vanish like they just flew into the Bermuda Triangle.

So how do the top sales teams train their reps to barrel through these periods, without any collateral psychological damage?

Preparing a Sales Team for Adversity

Before we dive in, this seems like an applicable time to bust out one of my all-time favorite video clips — a supercut of Private William Hudson’s scenes in the movie, Aliens.

Not only is it a classic Bill Paxton performance, it’s the ultimate depiction of a man’s psychological death spiral in the face of adversity. From “ultimate badass” to “Game over, man!”

By contrast, the calm, quiet Ellen Ripley, played by Sigourney Weaver, maintains her cool. Guess which one survives to see Alien 3?

Not that guy.

Tactic 1. Apply Consistent + Low-Level Social Pressure

Breeding mental toughness via internal pressure and competition is a great way to prepare reps for the dogfight of sales.

In a Harvard Business Review article entitled, “Motivating Salespeople: What Really Works,” the authors found that “social pressure” resulting from a “high quality pipeline of new sales talent” had a distinguishable impact on rep performance.

In comparing a sales organization that had two districts, one lacking a “2nd string” set of performers and the other having a 2nd string, the “salespeople in districts with a bench player perform approximately 5% better than those without one.”

The phenomenon that is occurring here, as the authors suggest, is no different than a football team using internal competition during preseason practice to boost the competitive mindset and mental toughness of its players.

Competition is again the factor at play in another finding from the article, as previous studies from its authors revealed that:

1. “Contests with multiple winners boost sales effort and performance better than contests with winner-take-all prize structures.”
2. “More (rather than fewer) prizes should be awarded as the proportion of stars increases [and] executives should offer at least as many prizes as there are stars in a sales force.”
3. “Increasing the number of prizes in a contest increases the chances that a laggard or a core performer will win a prize in place of a star, which motivates stars to work harder.” “Motivating Salespeople: What Really Works.”

What the Harvard Business Review is talking about here is a culture, more than anything. One that breeds intense competitiveness and finds innovative new ways to incentivize performance across the entire sales force.

As outlined in the article, pervasive competition, a quasi-meritocratic environment and performance incentives that span the entire spectrum of performers are a great way to instill mental toughness across not just your top performers, but your core performers and laggards as well.

Tactic 2. Structure + Monitor Your Sales Process

In a January 2015 HBR article entitled, “What Top Sales Teams Have in Common,” the author delineates a common thread among top-performing sales teams – 50 percent of them have sales processes that are either closely monitored, strictly enforced or automated.

What does that mean? It means reps on those teams adhere to an explicitly codified sales process and are closely-tracked as to how well they follow it.

There are several enhancements this tactic offers in regard to facing adversity.

For one, reps don’t have to think about the broader picture of what they’re doing, as they’re dis-incentivized from questioning and deviating from their core process.

Reps on these teams are thus able to retain their focus on the hand-to-hand combat of sales, rather than the over-arching strategy behind their sales process. By keeping a narrow focus, reps can discover minor tweaks and micro-tactics that will improve their performance.

Secondly, reps who follow a structured, closely-monitored sales process are the beneficiaries of two keys to mental toughness and elite performance: Discipline and repetition.

Discipline is a byproduct of their sales culture and a character trait that, over time, will begin to permeate the rep’s psyche. When times are tough, they’ll be less likely to throw up their hands and more likely to keep their nose to the grindstone.

Beyond discipline, it goes without saying that repetition is the best way to become excellent at a core set of skills — and sales is no exception.

At a certain point, overcoming adversity becomes a matter of muscle memory. A well-trained rep will be able to recall past successes to get him through tough times, and will deploy only the tactics tried and proven to work, even during difficult times.

Tactic 3. Coach Creativity

This final tactic goes to two rising trends in the sales profession negatively impacting the mental preparedness of sales teams toward adversity.

The two trends are:

1. Automated outreach and reliance on technology.
2. The influx of Millennials into the sales force.

To the first point, marketing automation, email drip campaigns and other forms of prospect engagement have had massive benefits in creating initial engagement with prospects.

Once upon a time, initial prospect engagement was a duty that largely fell on front-line sales reps, who had a single, adversity-triggering tactic at their disposal: the cold call.

As inefficient as cold calling can be, an underrated, sorely missed benefit of the tactic in technology-reliant sales teams is the practice it gave reps in facing adversity, honing their messaging and developing creative, on-the-spot responses to overcome prospect objections.

For sales managers presiding over sales teams that rely mostly on marketing automation and other technologies to generate leads, it will be especially worth your while to conduct regular training exercises with reps that prepare them for prospect adversity and instill a creative, resourceful mentality.

The second reason many sales teams struggle with adversity involves the influx of Millennials into the sales force.

As John Barrows elucidated in our Sales Influencer Series interview — If there’s one area where new sales hires need coaching, it’s creativity and self-direction.

Millennial sales reps, he asserted, are across-the-board better at following direction than they are at thinking for themselves. They respond well to a formal sales process, but struggle with thinking on their feet when facing customer objections, disinterested prospects and other forms of day-to-day sales adversity.

As much as you practice following a rigid sales process, practice working with Millennial reps on thinking creatively and developing a resourceful mentality when going toe-to-toe with prospects.

In doing so, you’ll help prepare young sales reps not just to develop the proper mentality to overcome adversity, but a mentality that will lead to success.

In turn, you’ll prevent their experiences with a much more perilous form of adversity that comes with prolonged poor performance — self doubt.

Sales Culture that Welcomes Adversity

A common thread amongst all three tactics described above is that they embrace adversity, rather than shy away from it.

Sales is a profession where success is quite literally decided by your ability to overcome adversity, be it the micro-adversity you face on a cold call or the macro-adversity you face during a lengthy sales slump.

The best sales managers proactively combat adversity by bringing it to the fore.

You don’t have to transform your sales bullpen into Parris Island to create a battle-ready team. Just subtly, consistently integrate social pressure, healthy competition, process disciple and creativity into your day-to-day sales operations.

You’ll end up with a team full of Ellen Ripleys, not Private Hudsons.

Thanks for reading.

At the Content Marketing Institute, we talk a lot about content marketing, content strategy, and intelligent content. And we have a lot (a lot) of internal conversations around how these fit together – and specifically why marketers need to understand each and how we at CMI can best help.

The short answer: What makes your brand exceptional is the entire set of experiences people have related to your organization. The experiences created by your content marketing go only so far.

The longer answer? Keep reading.

The fundamentals of content marketing

Since its inception, CMI has been advancing the practice of content marketing. When done right, content marketing provides useful, entertaining, relevant content that customers want, even crave. (As a side benefit, this kind of marketing is a joy because you’re truly helping.)

Because content marketers are tasked with building an audience – and ultimately, increasing sales – content marketing success often is measured in conversions and leads. The danger is that they may have a hyper-focus on conversions and leads, neglecting content quality and failing to align with content generated elsewhere in the enterprise. The result often is a poor customer experience with the brand’s content as a whole.

Enter, content strategy

As I wrote in my recent post, even the best content marketers usually don’t have their customers’ entire content experience in mind. (And who can blame you, as you have so much else to do?) While it’s easy to understand why your content may be disjointed, though, it hurts the brand. Here’s how Ann Rockley puts it in her book Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy:

When information exists in multiple areas, it often differs based on content, style, tone, and message. Customers don’t know which one is correct, most up to date, or comprehensive. When customers encounter these inconsistencies, they become understandably confused. Sometimes confusion leads to aggravation. Inconsistency damages customer experience.

This is where content strategy comes in.

Content strategists aren’t motivated by “likes” and conversions. They want users to have the best possible experience – and they have processes in place to manage content as a product, which is to say, as a business asset. (Note: Content strategists are not the same as content marketing strategists.)

Marketers don’t need to be experts in all things content strategy. But they do need to understand some of the basic concepts. They also need to connect with strategy-minded people who can help them provide the best possible customer experience with their content and, in turn, engender even more trust in the brand.

What about intelligent content?

Of course, here at CMI, we also talk a lot about intelligent content. We are passionate about this concept for two reasons:

• Content marketers want to provide the right content for the right person at the right time. Few brands know how to do this well. If you want to create an exceptional experience, you need to figure this out.

• Marketers need better processes and workflows to manage all this content. While quality content is always a priority, we also need to figure out how to automate what we can so that our efforts scale.

At the same time, we have observed through countless conversations that most brands aren’t there … yet. Those brands that are “there” often keep their stories to themselves because they know what a competitive edge their intelligent content approach gives them. So, to meet the current needs of the CMI audience, we are starting by bringing together the worlds of content marketing and content strategy.

We believe that this initial focus serves marketers where they are today, introducing them to things content strategists know, laying the groundwork for the day when content marketing is ready to meet intelligent content.

Three worlds unite

As Noz Urbina and I briefly discussed in some comments on a recent post, only by bringing together the worlds of content marketing and content strategy and intelligent content – oh my! – will marketers be able to best help brands delight customers (and, in turn, benefit the bottom line).

With this goal in mind, we at CMI aim to find and share stories of brands that are bringing together these worlds. We aim to provide practical, approachable advice to help us all provide better content experiences for our customers. You’ll also now see all posts about content strategy and intelligent content on the CMI blog, as we believe these are issues that should be core to what content marketers are considering.

Are you in?

To learn more about content strategy – as it applies to content marketing – sign up for our weekly email newsletter. Not only will you get an exclusive article from our Chief Strategy Officer Robert Rose, but you’ll also learn about content strategy, which, I guarantee you, will help you think about your content in a more customer-centric way. 

I would love to hear from you. How do you think marketers need to evolve?

Cover image by Jeff Sheldon, Unsplash, via pixabay.com

The post 3 Worlds Unite: Content Marketing, Content Strategy, and Intelligent Content appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

Marketers are always striving to deliver “best practice” marketing—marketing based on tested, tried-and-true data. But, for many marketing activities, marketers simply don’t have a strong benchmark to reference. This scene often feels too familiar:

You: Yes! Our last email campaign had a 5% click rate!

Your Boss: Is that good?

You: Umm…it’s better than our last one.

Your Boss: But is it GOOD?

You: Hmm…let me get back to you.

You go back to your desk and begin to fumble around random marketing websites containing “best practice” campaign performance stats. After an hour of research you’re left with more questions than you started with. Are these stats relevant or even reliable? What should I be doing differently?

Introducing Marketo Institute

Marketo Institute was started in 2014 by Marketo Co-founder Jon Miller. His vision was to gather data across all Marketo customers and provide marketers with fact-based insights and data-driven best practices to help them succeed in an ever-changing digital world. In short, the purpose was to help you answer the “Is it GOOD?” question.

Like Jon, I’m a data nerd at heart. We share the same passion for the SCIENCE of digital marketing, which is why he’s handed me the enormous mountain of customer data (220+ billion activities across 3500+ Marketo customers) to carry out the vision of helping marketers like you. Over the next several weeks, I am going to write a handful of blogs to share what I’ve learned from this data and will pull out best practice trends and correlations.

…And the first blog starts NOW! What is the topic, you ask? Well, it’s email performance! Yay! Specifically, we’ll be diving into whether batch, nurture, or trigger is best. This email performance “throwdown”, if you will, answers the most common question I get asked by customers: Which type of emails should I concentrate my marketing efforts on, and how much lift can I expect? Let’s get started…

Types of Emails

There are three types of email campaigns, each with their own use cases:

1. Batch Emails: Also known as “batch and blast”. These types of emails don’t have any “intelligence” built in. Instead they just gather a list of contacts and send them the same email. A great example of this is your company newsletter—it goes to everyone, no matter what.
2. Nurture Emails: This is a series of targeted emails based on personas (e.g. by industry, role, use case). Nurture emails are primarily used to lead prospects through the sales funnel and warm up leads for a sales handoff.
3. Trigger Emails: These are personalized emails that are delivered based on prospect actions. Some range of email “intelligence” is built in based on behavior (think of it as a two-way conversation of listening and speaking). An example of a trigger email would be this: a prospect visits your events webpage and then, based on that activity, receives an email invitation to an event in their area.

So, before we move forward with the email throwdown, go ahead and place your bets! Of the email campaigns that you’ve created, which type performed the best—batch, nurture, or trigger?

Which Earned a Higher Click Rate and Click-to-Open Rate?

This chart represents average click rate (top half) and average click-to-open rate (bottom half) across all Marketo customer email activities in 2013-2014. Average click rate is around 19% for trigger, 4% for batch, and 6% for nurture. Average click-to-open rate is around 35% for trigger, 12% for batch, and 14% for nurture.

Post throwdown, we can see two big takeaways immediately from the data:

1. Trigger emails perform 3x better than any other email type. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that’s done trigger emails. The power of personalized messages based on behavior is powerful. Imagine looking at a pair of shoes online. You add it to the shopping cart but decide not to buy. An hour later you get an email for 25% off that exact pair of shoes! Serendipity telling you to buy those shoes? No, sorry, that’s just intelligent marketing.
2. Nurture emails perform about the same as batch emails. This one is surprising. My initial bet would have been that nurture emails performed much better than batch (especially for click-to-open) simply due to the fact that they are targeted towards a specific audience for a specific buying stage. But then I thought about how my past companies did nurturing: forcing a target audience down a pre-determined linear funnel, then rinse and repeat. This is no different than a series of segmented, pre-timed batch emails, and the data shows it.

Key Take-aways

Now before you run over to your marketing operations team and tell them to cancel all nurture campaigns, here are a few things to consider:

1. Nurture emails CAN perform better than batch. The results were so surprising I decided to take a look at how our (Marketo’s) demand gen team does email campaigns. I found out our nurture emails perform MUCH better than our batch. But this takes time and resources, because you have to really know your segmented audience, the messaging has to be really relevant, and you have to utilize a ton of top-of-funnel content because no one likes a hard sell. Bad nurture programs act like batch and blast; good nurtures are built for the long-term and take time to realize results. That’s why it’s called “drip campaign”—not “firehose campaign”.
2. I’m going to make all of my emails trigger-based! Creating a trigger campaign for EVERY possible prospect interaction is impractical (unless you’re Amazon…or have the budget of Amazon), so just focus on the important ones. Look at your key lead drivers and put some email intelligence behind the behaviors you’re interested in. Good examples are late funnel high conversion points such as webinars, where several personalized triggers around invitation, reminder, and follow-up could mean more qualified leads.
3. Why do batch emails in the first place? Batch emails are the cheapest, quickest way to communicate to your prospects and customers. There’s definitely a time and place for batch and blast. Creating nurture or trigger-based company newsletters or product release notes doesn’t make sense. However if you’re still using batch emails to push prospects through the funnel then you should definitely consider focusing more resources on other more engaging and relevant email type

Do you have any questions about this blog, or do you have any suggestions on which data-based topic I should dive into in my next blog? Leave your comments below!

Email is the smart marketer’s secret weapon. Despite all the rumors about it being boring or dead, email marketing quietly remains the powerful engine that drives most successful marketing campaigns today.

There are dozens of studies and stats touting email’s awesomeness. The most often quoted may be the Direct Marketing Association’s 2013 Statistical Fact Book which clocked email marketing in at generating a 4300% return on investment. A whopping $42.08 earned for every dollar spent. (If only my 401K could do that.)

While I love that stat, 4300% ROI is so huge that I’m not sure everyone believes it. So while the DMA stat gets lots of play, this chart from Ascend2 is my favorite proof of how well email works. Tabulated in September of last year, the data compares different types of digital marketing. Then it ranks them according to most effective and most difficult. Email hits the sweet spot on both fronts: It gets the best results and it’s the easiest to use.

Maybe you didn’t need to be told how well email works. But if your email marketing program has room for improvement (never mind falling a little short of the DMA’s 4300% ROI mark), these nine best practices might help you get there.

1. Ask for an email address in exchange for access.

Ascend2’s January 2015 Email List Growth Survey named “website access” (aka form-based registration) as the best way to build a list. Content downloads came in as a close second.

2. Use a pop-up.

Adding a pop-up as a list-building tactic was not included in the Ascend2 report, but there’s plenty of evidence of efficacy elsewhere. There are reports of pop-ups lifting opt-in rates by 1000%. That is not a typo.

While it’s unrealistic to expect a marketing miracle, if you add a pop-up and don’t get at least 20% more opt-ins, you’re probably doing something wrong. Dan Zarrella showed a pop-up doubling his opt-in rate with no effect on bounce rates.

Hate pop-ups? Refuse to give in to their evil ways, no matter what? Consider a scroll box. It’s an overlay opt-in box that slides down from the top of the browser into the bottom corner after a user has scrolled down the page. It’s less invasive and nearly as effective as a pop-up.

3. Personalize.

I’m sure you’ve seen more than a few articles about personalizing emails. There’s a reason it gets written about so much. It works.

Here’s some recent data from MarketingSherpa. It’s sliced in an unusually interesting way, in that it shows how personalization can boost open rates in different industries. The study found personalization increased open rates by 29.3% overall.

While I love the chart, it leaves out what might be the biggest find in the study: “The impact didn’t end at the open. Transaction rates were 49% higher (0.09% compared to 0.06%) and revenue per email was 73% higher ($0.15 compared to $0.08) with personalization.”

Sadly, only 35% of brands are personalizing subject lines, again according to the study. That means a lot of marketers are missing out. It also means you’ve got a nice opening to get ahead.

4. Send a welcome series.

Welcome emails get some of the highest open and clickthrough rates of any email you’ll ever send. Given how hungry we all are for subscriber engagement, you’d think welcome emails would be more common. But they’re not: A recent study from Return Path found only 75% of retailers send welcome emails. Keep in mind that’s B2C, which tends to be more proactive about welcome emails than B2B firms.

Speaking of revenue, it ends up welcome emails don’t just boost clickthrough rates. They kick up the revenue, too. That same Return Path study broke out how much someone would spend based on how many emails of the welcome series they read. This is what it looks like:

Given this data, even if you are among the smart marketers sending a welcome email, seriously consider sending a series of welcome emails.

Already doing that? Take email marketer Diana Primeau’s advice and test the order of your welcome emails. Diana is the director of member services at CNET. She gets to test and plan mailings for over twenty different niche email newsletters that go to millions of different subscribers. Her talk at the Email Summit 2015 about how she optimized CNET’s welcome emails is amazing.

5. Optimize transactional emails.

Wanna know the other type of email that gets crazy open rates? Transactional emails. Earlier this year Vero released the results of a study of over 100 million sent emails, and found:

The click rate for transactional emails is 42% higher than the click rate for a newsletter. That’s 142 clicks for your “thank you, you widget will be shipped on Tuesday” versus 100 for your “Here’s your newsletter” emails. Make sure your transactional emails support your branding and encourage engagement. Don’t outright sell; you don’t want to turn it into a commercial email. But don’t overlook this opportunity, either.

6. Test email subject lines.

These stats blew me away. A/B testing your subject lines is a best practice, with phenomenal results. But most marketers aren’t doing it. Well, this is just another place you can grab a competitive advantage. Trust me, take the time to do this and it will pay you back. Also, check our this terrific post about the ins and outs of writing awesome subject lines.

7. Increase click-through rates with the right call to action.

The single biggest win of my career was from a call-to-action test. It was the simplest little test – I just changed the words on the button of a landing page of an online service. It doubled the conversion rate. That netted out to nearly a million dollars in extra revenue for the client that year.

I may never pull off something like that again, but maybe you will. Maybe you have already. If you haven’t, start tinkering with your campaigns’ calls to action.

The mighty power of call to actions also came up in Act-On’s Email Marketing Trends Survey published just last month. Calls to action actually make the top of the list for most effective ways to increase click-through rates.

Calls to action also came in surprisingly high for how difficult they are to get right. If you’re having trouble crafting calls to action, check out this blog post for some tips.

8. Segment your lists.

Experts across the email marketing industry say that the era of batch and blast is over. I heartily agree. Subscribers expect email messages tailored to their interests and needs. If you want to keep them engaged, you’ll have to deliver that.

Remember the Act-On survey I just mentioned when I was talking about calls to action? Guess what made item #2 for effectiveness? Yup – list segmentation. If you’re ready to get started, here’s a guide to defining segments.

9. Use responsive emails.

It’s hard to overstate how critical mobile email is. If your emails aren’t mobile friendly, just fixing that one issue may be enough to skyrocket your results this year. To give you an example of how big a result you can get by using a responsive design, consider this test from our own marketing, as described in the KISSmetrics/Litmus webinar, Beyond Email Open Rates: How to Unlock the Potential of Your Audience. We more than doubled our own clickthrough rate with responsive email and significantly increased the number of sales-ready leads (SLRs) generated.

Those are the best of the best for effective email marketing techniques… unless you know of one I missed. If you do, tell us about it in the comments.

Want more tips to improve the results of your email marketing? Download the Amazingly Effective Email Guide to learn how to create more successful – and profitable – campaigns.

Often it seems as if sales and marketing work for different companies, and often, they wish they did. However grim this may seem, truly effective B2B prospecting can’t be achieved without cooperation.

Our experience is that sales usually follows-up on only 30% to 34% of marketing leads. The stated reason is no confidence.

“Why should I follow-up stuff from marketing when I have real opportunities to work?”

Here’s our 5 Step process for integrated sales and marketing based on demonstrated trust. We have found it can generate a 100% or more increase in lead follow-up, to an average of 60% – 85%.

Step 1: Define the Integrated Sales and Marketing Playground

We need a team to make this happen. Empowered representatives of each department are a leaner, more agile team. Not incidentally, this means fewer personalities to contend with.

This team is tasked with developing ideas, trying them, and defining success.

Step 2: Build Good Fences

The team must hammer out a Service Level Agreement (SLA), defining the new cooperative relationship between sales and marketing. Some suggestions:

• There are interim measures and resulting measures. Interim measures, such as open rate or contacts may be specific to marketing or sales. Resulting measures, such as lead quality and sales, must be shared. Criteria may include:
  • Source—where did the lead come from (g., referral).
  • Need—How important is the product or service to the prospect.
  • Timing—Where are they in the consideration process.
  • Budget—Has one been established.
• What are the checkpoints for an for analysis and dialog?

Step 3: Focus

The purposefully integrated sales and marketing team is not going to work unless we share a clear understanding of the prospect on two levels:

1. Corporate—Decisions are made by the buying center, which consists of several functions. Who is in it and what is the contribution of each executive?

2. Personal—These executives are not just functional titles, but people, with often contradictory business and personal drivers.

Create prospect personas for executives important to the buying center. Each is an archetype, with substance, form, and personality. This will unify our vision and understanding of these prospects.

Prospect personas must be based on new external research with current prospects and customers, or we will perpetuate the mythology that divides us. Proprietary research among marketing professionals shows that 77% of effective personas were based on new external research and 72% of ineffective personas were created from existing information.

The research will also generate what we call the Key Prospect Insight (KPI), which provides competitively superior insight into these real people regarding their needs, information behavior, attitudes, and motivations.

Step 4: Walk a Mile in Their Shoes

The consideration path to a B2B purchase recommendation is a conundrum and may vary by persona. The process maps the journey to help you:

1. Identify the most powerful touch points.
2. Understand how to maximize value and engagement.
3. Align company sales and marketing.

If this map isn’t based on new research with current customers and prospects, we’re kidding ourselves.

Step 5: Go Big

It’s time to take this hard work down off the lift and get out on the road. Let’s see where this working relationship is strong and where the components need to be fine tuned.

Publicize the results, concentrating efforts initially on higher management. Cooperation, where it didn’t exist before, constitutes cultural change, and that does not happen from the bottom up. People will only get on the bus if management is driving.

Then engage the rank and file and show them three things:

1. This was developed based on trust.
2. It requires continuous improvement.
3. It generates more leads and more sales.

Interestingly, purposefully integrated sales and marketing is not hypothetical but is a pain point for many organizations. What works (or doesn’t) for you?

Do you have a blog for your online store ?

If the answer is no, or you don’t give your blog much attention, then why not?

A blog can be an awesome tool to use for your online store – and it comes with a ton of benefits. Take a look at this blog to find out 5 reasons why you need to keep your blog up and running today, and how you can use it to your advantage:

#1. It will drive traffic

• Websites that blog will typically have 97% more inbound links.

Blogging and SEO go hand in hand. Now we’re not saying you should create hundreds of blog posts and stuff them with keywords in the hope that you’ll drive traffic to your store. This is an old technique that doesn’t work. What you need to do is start creating actionable blog content that your customers can learn something from.

How to drive traffic with blog posts:

When a person jumps on Google, they have a question that they need answering. What you need to do is find out the questions that your customers are asking, so that you can start to create content that specifically focuses on answering those questions.

That way, you’ll be naturally using keywords in your post that will help drive targeted traffic to your site – and because that content is highly useful and written around a topic within your niche, this will encourage other sites to link back to that content as a valuable resource, which in turn will increase your inbound links.

#2. It will increase your social following

• Interesting content is one of the top 3 reasons people follow brands on social media.

When it comes to your social strategy, it can be difficult to know what to post to keep people engaged and increase your followers. And that’s what’s so great about a blog. It gives you a voice on social to help you stand out from the noise and connect with your customers.

How to increase your social following with a blog:

Coming up with a regular publishing strategy will ensure that you have enough content for your social feeds. So long as you come up with topics that are relevant to your audience, and that you follow the 5:3:2 rule to make sure that you don’t overload your feeds with promotional content, then you’ll boost your fans.

Last week we talked about how to make your store stand out on social , so check out our post to find out more about the 5:3:2 rule.

#3. It will attract leads

After you’ve got the traffic to come to your site, your next step is to turn them into a lead. We probably don’t have to tell you that this isn’t as easy as it sounds, but did you know that you can significantly increase your leads by applying a conversion strategy for each blog post you create?

How to attract leads with your blog posts:

The key to attracting leads is to include downloadable content within your blogs – and it could be any type of content such as an ebook or a checklist. The idea is that once they click to download it, they’ll be taken a separate landing page in which they’ll need to enter their contact details to receive that content – and there you’ll have gained your lead!

Just remember to ensure that your downloadable content is related to the topic of your blog post, yet provides something extra so that it encourages the reader to download it.

#4. It will influence people to buy

• 61% of consumers have made a purchase based on a blog post that they read.

This is probably one of the most attractive benefits for you to see. It’s true – a blog really can help you sell more stuff! But you gotta make sure you’re smart…

How to influence people to buy with your blog:

The trick is to talk about your products, but in a non-promotional way. So how do you do that? Well, your customers have a problem that you can solve with your products. So by creating ‘top-tips’ or ‘how-to’ blogs that show how your products can solve their problems, you’ll be focused on their needs ahead of yours – which will result in them realizing that they need to buy your product!

#5. It will build up trust

• 70% of consumers prefer to learn about a company through its blog, rather than ads.

Yep that’s right, blogging isn’t just a tool to drive traffic, leads and sales – it’s also a platform that people like to see when they visit your site. Once you start blogging, you’ll help to educate people on your brand which will build up trust and a following.

How to build up trust with your blog:

It can be hard to dedicate time to creating blog posts, but once you have a dedicated strategy in place, you’ll help to build a subscriber base of people who will tune in to read your posts. Do your research, find out who your audience is and come up with ideas that specifically target them. This will also encourage them to share your posts with their followers – and you’ll be well on your way to creating raving fans for your store!

Takeaway

If you want to improve SEO, increase leads, build up trust, and sell more products then you should really consider blogging. It’s a great tool to use and it doesn’t cost a lot to maintain! So long as you target your topics to your audience then you’ll quickly see all of the above benefits!

Take a look at our previous post to find out how to set up your Ecommerce blog using Spark Pay. Or if you want to take our ecommerce solution for a spin then give us a call today!

If your organization is struggling with long sales cycles and an unreliable sales forecast, it’s likely you need to tweak your sales execution. When organizations need to improve their sales process, they’re often experiencing problems like:

• misalignment with the buying process
• inconsistent opportunity qualification criteria
• reps taking shortcuts during the sales process
• frequent losses to “no decision”

The first step towards improving your sales process is to assess where you are now. Here‘s a list of questions to ask about your organization. Use the answers to start a path towards sales process success:

1. How hard or easy are we to buy from?

2. How hard or easy do we want to be to buy from – and why?

3. What do customers say about this and how we sell?

4. What do our sales people say about how our sales process supports their selling effectiveness?

5. How do our best performers sell? What are the best practices?

6. How does our sales process direct and empower our sellers to:

a. align with their customers?

b. articulate value and differentiation?

c. forecast accurately?

d. access and utilize assets, resources and people effectively and efficiently?

7. How does our CRM system facilitate “selling in the process”?

8. How do we bring together the various assets, resources, people and actions to bear in the buying & selling processes?

9. What is the case for a different sales process?

10. How do our demand generation, inside sales, service renewal, channel, government, consumer, retail, commercial and enterprise sales teams relate to their clients?

Work back from what’s most important to your customer and you’ll improve deal velocity, qualify your deals with more predictability and most importantly, develop a system your sellers will use effectively.

If you really want to drive change with an improved sales process, you need to focus on the execution of it with your sales team. Qualifying and advancing leads requires your processes to be well-defined and consistently reinforced.