Rnordman

Microsoft Azure recently announced that it would be raising its prices in order combat global currency fluctuations. In the world of geopolitics, Greece and other countries within the Euro region are currently battling severe financial issues that have impacted the value of the Euro. According to Google,  1 Euro is currently equal to $1.10 in USD.

Microsoft says that it will be raising its Azure prices by 13% in regions that are billed in Euros. In addition to the rise in price for the Euro region, Azure in Australia will also see a price hike. Azure pricing in Australia is set to go up 26%. These prices are subject to go up as of August 1^st 2015.

It should be noted that some users within these regions will not see a price increase at all. In fact, Microsoft says that those who are under an Azure Enterprise Agreement or have an Azure Enterprise Subscription Agreement in place will have price protection on their services. Microsoft goes on to say that those who have Server and Cloud Enrollments (SCE) will also be protected from the price hike.

At this time, it is unclear whether or not Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform will retaliate with price increases of their own. In the past, CloudWedge has significantly covered IaaS's race to the bottom in terms of price. It comes as somewhat of a shock to see Microsoft increase it's Azure pricing within Europe. Typically, as we've reported in the past, once one of the "Big Three" in cloud computing announce a price reduction, others tend to follow suit. What about in the case of a price increase?

The conditions are obviously different now. According to chart found on XE.com, the Euro was worth $1.35. The Australian dollar has also taken a nose dive as it was at $.94 a year ago and the AUD is currently worth around $.74.

The post Cloud Pricing War Gets Interesting – Azure Raises Prices appeared first on CloudWedge.

The customer is king! The customer is always right! But are they?

For many, these statements are as relevant now as they ever have been. At the end of the day, ‘the customer’ is where the business gets its money from. Nobody put it better than Sam Walton, who said:

“There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.”

However over the very many decades since these statements came into the public consciousness, they have come under scrutiny. We might ask ourselves about those customers who ‘game’ offerings, or those dishonest consumers who might steal or attempt to sabotage our businesses. Surely these people are not ‘king’ and ‘always right’?

There are, of course, always exceptions to the rule. These statements were never intended to be as absolute as they sound. So, in order to fully contextualise the enormous dollops of truth within these statements, people have created variations that have attempted to qualify the truth. One such variation is:

“The customer is king…but only if the company is able to generate long-term profit from the relationship.”

There is a lot of sense in this statement. At the end of the day, both the customer and the business need to be realising value from the relationship for it to work. There may be some instances when one side or the other doesn’t make profit or receive positive value from a single transaction, yet they remain loyal to the other in recognition of the longer-term benefit. And in loss-leadership scenarios, where a loss-making product or service may be required within a portfolio, it may be necessary to make a loss when serving certain customers in order to ensure that a complete service-offering is available to other profitable target customers.

However, there seems something quite cold and calculating about this particular statement. Those people who tend to see things in terms of absolutes might shudder at the very thought of questioning the authority of customers over the enticement of profit, irrespective of how correct or relevant it may be. In a discussion in one particular online forum, I came across a guy who took the view that rather than ‘sacking’ unprofitable customers, the business should be finding ways to service every single customer profitably.

This is certainly a very worthy sentiment. Of course, if the business can quickly and easily find a way to keep the customer happy and make a profit, then it makes perfect sense. However the reality is that this might not always be possible. In some instances, the cost of finding a new delivery solution or proposition outweighs the benefit of retaining that (and other) relationship(s). It may also be the case that the knowledge and skills required to service the customer do not reflect the core competencies of the business.

Most businesses understand the importance of segmenting the market and only targeting those customers who they can make a profit from and who will benefit from the delivery against their core competencies. Such is the nature of business strategy.

So, with this in mind, the time has come for the next iteration of the statement:

“The customer is always right…but they might not be right for us!”

Rather than encouraging us to ‘get rid’ of unprofitable customers, this statement simply tells us that there might simply be a misalignment between the two parties. In fact, what businesses should really be focusing on is how they should be helping those non-target customers find the right solution, even if it means pointing them in the direction of the competition.

Do businesses really want to help their competitors? Ideally not, however you never know when there might be good alignment between you and that customer in the future. Furthermore, you never know which of your other potential customers they might be speaking to!

We’re always encouraged not to quit. But today, there’s one role I’d suggest you walk away from right now that is the cause of most of your problems and challenges.

Get your head out of your spreadsheet for a moment. If you really want to become the type of leader who truly inspires, transforms talent and delivers rock star results, you’re not going to find the answer in your data or reports. That’s why it’s time to abandon toxic thinking and focus on the inner game of leadership.

Beliefs Precede Experience

If you’re only focusing on the metrics, KPI’s, and skills needed to become a champion and you aren’t focusing on how you think, your attitude, and your mindset, then you’re only developing into half of the champion you can be.

Sometimes, becoming the leader who inspires, drives positive change, and authentically develops their people requires giving something up. That’s right. In order to grow, you have to let go.

“So, are you ready to turn in your resignation today as Chief Problem Solver?”

A bit reluctant? I can understand why. After all, if you’re no longer going to be the CPS, then what role are you going to take on? The one as coach. But before we begin that transformation, it’s important to have a clear understanding as to why leaders fall into this toxic management trap in the first place.

Why is it that leaders feel they must be the subject matter expert for their team, have all the answers and solve all the problems coming at them?

For one thing, the majority of leaders, regardless of geographic location or industry, would agree that the value they feel they bring to their team and to their company is their experience and their ability to solve problems efficiently and effectively.

After all, that’s why you were hired to be a manager in the first place, right? Or better yet, you were a super salesperson and someone in management thought it would be a good idea to take their top performer out of the field and away from the customer and put you in the role of sales manager—without any training, coaching, or onboarding!

How to Disempower Your Team

Let’s explore this at a deeper level to identify what’s really at stake. For example, if you were my manager and every time I went to you seeking help, you provide me with the answer or solution instead of coaching me to self-assess and work through my challenge and arrive at my own solution, what reaction might you get from me?

“Wow boss, you’re so awesome, smart, and experienced! I don’t know what I’d do without you. Thank you so much for helping me! And thanks for continuing to solve all of my problems (so that I don’t have to think on my own).”

Here’s where leaders learn the wrong lesson. It is in this defining moment when the leader reinforces the misbelief that their overarching value is being a subject matter expert.

Why are leaders compelled to provide answers and solutions? Because when you do, you get to feel the love! You feel included. You feel special. And most important, you feel needed and valued. The Ego is being fed. You are now making this entire exchange about you and how you feel, rather than focusing on the other person and leveraging the developmental opportunity for someone else to shine and grow.

Many leaders also believe it’s expected of them. “Well I’m a leader. My direct reports expect me to have the solutions.” Maybe so, but where do you think they learned this from? Clearly, having a team who is overly reliant on you comes at a great cost.

Two very misunderstood and overly used words today are “empower” and “coach.” Not only are these words used out of context, the majority of leaders who think they’re empowering and coaching people, in fact, are not.

Here’s the definition of empowerment: to give strength or power to. Unfortunately, it’s not empowering to provide solutions to someone. Put yourself in their position for a moment. Do you think they feel empowered when they’re being told what to do, instead of being asked?

When you’re giving the answers, you’re not empowering someone. You’re disempowering them.

The Gift of a Challenge

Just think about the last time you were presented with what may have been initially perceived as an insurmountable problem or challenge. You took the challenge head-on, and you worked through it on your own. Do you remember how you felt? Probably really good. It may have even boosted your confidence, as well as your skills and competencies.

As a manager, every time you solve other people’s problems, you’re robbing them of this experience. You’re not building their confidence. Instead, you’re depriving them of the opportunity to feel exceptionally proud of the work they do, their contributions and their capabilities. And you’re certainly no longer developing these people into the future leaders of your organization.

Leaders Create What They Want to Avoid

Another leadership paradox exists. We create what we want to avoid. Leaders create the very problems and challenges that they wish they didn’t have to deal with.

I have yet to meet a manager who doesn’t want a team of highly independent, accountable team members. But follow this line of thinking — if I’m your manager and every time you approach me with a problem I give you the answer, what’s the underlying expectation being set? That every time you have a problem, come to me and I’ll fix it for you.

Here’s the painful irony. If the answer or solution I provide you doesn’t work, whose fault is it? It comes back to me.

“Hey boss. You know that solution you shared with me? Well, it didn’t work. It’s not my fault. I was just doing what you told me to do. My hands? They’re clean on this one.”

When functioning as the Chief Problem Solver, instead of authentically coaching people to generate their own ideas and solutions, you’re the one who’s now responsible for the results. Your people are no longer accountable for the outcome and you’ve also succeeded in making them more dependent on you.

Remember, people resist what they hear, but believe what they say.

If you want people to take greater ownership around their roles, goals, and the daily challenges they face, let the right question be the answer they need to further develop and refine their skills, thinking, and strategy. Otherwise, if you continually solve everyone’s problems, their problems become your problems—ultimately making you accountable for the outcome!

Change the Conversation

After thirty years of coaching thousands of international leaders who are working at the world’s most innovative and successful companies, I can say with great certainty, coaching is simply a learned language. It’s a way you choose to communicate and engage with people because it supports the very ideals, values and culture that most companies and leaders want to create.

Consider this truth. If you have time to be the Chief Problem Solver, fight fires, and solve other people’s problems every day, then you have time to coach.

In case you missed Google’s latest mobile search update, effective April 21^st the search engine will rank websites in search results based on their mobile friendliness.

In fact, it’s already happening. Why is this important? Well, with some 953 million smartphone subscribers today and another 6 billion mobile users who’ve not yet adopted a smartphone but who are flipping quickly, those are some big numbers.

Even more compelling—within the next five years it’s predicted that the majority of Internet use will be device-driven. And when those searchers are looking on their devices for information, Google wants to give it to them in the most user-friendly manner possible.

Google’s latest algorithm change, the “mobile-friendly” update, also dubbed “Mobilegeddon” by the tech space (and predicted to be even bigger than the Panda and Penguin updates of recent years,) is pushing businesses toward mobility–whether they like it or not.

The changes have already started to roll out, and will continue over the course of the next several weeks. I noticed a difference this weekend when I was Googling some information. Take a look at the result below – see the “mobile friendly” notation that leads the result:

An aside, but an interesting point about the search results above? Notice the result pulled from a Google+ post – showing up on first page of search results. Naysayers negate the value of Google+ on a regular basis, but when you see a result like this it illustrates there’s at least some value in the platform.

Back to an emphasis on mobile in search results — this was an inevitable move. Google has been very vocal about a commitment to improving the mobile search experience over the past couple of years, and has preached the “design for mobile first” mantra for a long time now.

For marketers and SEOs who have been paying attention, this is no surprise. However, this announcement has made it official – businesses can no longer expect to do as well in search results without a mobile-optimized website. Period. Why does this matter? When was the last time you, as a searcher, looked beyond the first page of Google when you were looking for something to buy or a store to visit?

If you don’t have a mobile enabled site, chances are extremely good that you’ll not be appearing early in search results. How is it, then, that customers will find you? Can your business afford to take that risk?

This newest update also reveals that Google is using information from indexed apps to rank search results for logged-in users who have those apps installed. For instance, Twitter. By way of example, Google pulls from the Twitter firehose for its search results, it knows I’m a Twitter user and that I’m logged in and using the Twitter app. As a result, content from indexed apps (in this example, the Twitter app) will feature more prominently in search results.

How will this move impact your online initiatives, and what steps should you take to stay compliant with Google’s mobile search policies? Let’s review.

Evaluate your Mobile Optimization Status

As mentioned above, with the proliferation of mobile devices, websites not optimized for mobile are not truly serving the needs of their audience. This latest Google change has just rubber stamped that fact. Try and see this new update as a “last call” for businesses, a “ding ding” of the bell to alert those who have outdated websites and/or websites that aren’t mobile enabled to get going. That said, those who have already embraced mobile platforms are not entirely out of the woods. Not all “mobile optimized” sites are created equal. As such, it’s a good idea for owners of existing mobile-friendly sites to do an SEO audit to determine the effectiveness of their mobile content.

Start with Google Developers’ Mobile Friendly Test Tool, which is as complicated looking as this:

It will help you gauge the level to which Google recognizes your site as mobile-friendly. Next, take a deeper dive into different elements of your website such as images, CSS, content size, Flash, etc., and make sure they are all contributing to, rather than hindering, your users’ mobile experience. If you haven’t been using Google’s Webmaster Tools, this is the time to be proactive. Google has recently added the Mobile Usability feature to the Webmaster Tools Suite to deliver a more comprehensive snapshot of issues that could be making your website less mobile-friendly. You can view your website’s performance in graphs against parameters such as viewport status (akin to meta tags), touch elements like clickable links and buttons, font size, Flash content, etc., and take action to fix any issues you discover.

You should also check how well Google is able to scan your mobile website. The smartphone tab on the Webmaster Tools’ crawl errors page reveals hidden pitfalls lurking within your site’s architecture, including server errors, as well as blocked, missing, and misdirected pages and links.

You can opt for a deeper diagnosis with the “Fetch as Google” feature in the Webmaster Tools, which enables you to view your most important web pages the way Google’s smartphone crawler would. There are a host of other tools available – both paid and free – that allow you to access similar data for all platforms, including Screaming Frog and Moz Campaign (paid), or GSite Crawler and Xenu’s Link Sleuth (free).

Check your Website’s Mobile Search Visibility and Mobile Web Traffic

Understand that your desktop site and its mobile cousin will not yield similar results in terms of search ranking, visibility, and traffic. If your website shows up at ‘X’ number of spots on a desktop search, it likely will rank differently on mobile search results. It is critical for you to evaluate how your performance differs by platform, and isolate what the determining factors are. The mobile option of Google’s Webmaster Tools’ Search Queries Report allows you to review these factors in detail.

Google Analytics will also help you understand the finer points of your site’s mobile search visibility, and uncover patterns in mobile user behavior, including which devices are being used to access your content. Chrome’s Device Mode and Mobile Emulation tool is also a great way to check your mobile website’s responsiveness across various screen sizes, and assess its performance across varying connection speeds.

Top Seven Mistakes for Webmasters to Avoid

If you’re a webmaster and/or if your web team is working on ensuring that your site is mobile ready, Google published a list of the top seven mistakes webmasters make when going mobile friendly. Avoid them!

Think of Mobile as an Integrated Strategy Rather than a Standalone

When it comes to building a successful online presence for your company, it is important to think beyond your website, and understand how your customers are interacting with your brand online. Ask yourself questions like: Is email marketing part of your customer engagement strategy? Or social media? What about E-commerce? Make sure all of your marketing efforts and every way you touch your customers and prospects in any way are optimized for delivery to your audience’s mobile devices.

Odds are that you, as a consumer, have already embraced mobile devices for your own use. How do you interact with businesses when you use your phone or tablet? What drives you crazy when trying to access a site not properly optimized for mobile. Think about the experiences that appear seamless and learn how to emulate them in your own marketing efforts.

Online marketing has evolved, and the key to survival is adaptation. Take the steps necessary to keep your competitive edge. Take your cue from early man who flourished by embracing the use of tools. Google has provided a specialized set for you. They’re free. Use them.

 

Photo Credit: Johan Larsson via Compfight cc

If there is anyone who knows the difference between a good and bad sales pitch it is Robert Herjavec of “Shark Tank” and its Canadian predecessor, “Dragon’s Den.” Herjavec has recognized patterns among those that work and those that flop and provides details for fans and business people to see. Herjavec is a Croatian-born Canadian businessman, investor, and media personality.

A dynamic entrepreneur, Robert has built and sold several IT companies to major players such as AT&T. In 2003 Robert founded Herjavec Group, and it quickly became one of North America’s fastest growing technology companies, scaling from $400K in annual sales revenue to a run rate of $150 million. Today, Herjavec Group is recognized as a global leader in information security specializing in managed security services, compliance, incident response and remediation efforts for enterprise level organizations.

Find your talent, be great at it and apply it to the best of your ability. @Entrepreneur http://t.co/WPqWV44O3K

— Robert Herjavec (@robertherjavec) July 2, 2015

Regarding Shark Tank’s filming process, Herjavec said, “We film 12 hours a day, seven days in a row sometimes. We’re cold. We’re hungry. We’re miserable. So like anything in life, if you can’t sell yourself, you’re not going to be able to sell your business. So that’s what we look for. You gotta engage us. You gotta go out there and you gotta make an impact right away.”

Although Herjavec respects a “controlled aggression” in a businessperson selling their company, the investor said that a business’ value is based on research and performance. Too often, entrepreneurs will pitch a company to Herjavec and his fellow “Shark Tank” investors at a valuation “far beyond the amount that the real world will accept.”

Logic will take you from A to B, imagination will take you everywhere – Albert Einstein #motivationmonday

— Robert Herjavec (@robertherjavec) June 29, 2015

This is a signal to Herjavec that the entrepreneurs either don’t know what they’re talking about or that they’re being greedy.

“They forget that we are Sharks because we do measure and watch how we spend our money, and are realistic about the profits we hope to earn from it,” he writes in his book. “In many ways, we are not spendthrifts; we’re tightwads.”

Herjavec wrote that he will often see entrepreneurs so wrapped up in what they have practiced that they do not actually engage the investors or answer their questions. He suggested a bit of improvisation to the questions asked of them instead of relying on a well-rehearsed speech.

“I know they’re nervous, and I know it’s intimidating to stand in front of us and explain why their gizmos or companies can’t fail, but they have to overcome their nervousness, listen carefully to our questions and understand our response to their answers,” he said.

His inspiring books, “Driven” and “The Will to Win”, were simultaneously Top 10 Bestsellers that earned him the title of “Best Selling Author”. Robert’s motivational business advice has received millions of impressions through TV, print, radio and digital media. He shares his expertise with other entrepreneurs each week as a leading Shark on ABC’s Emmy Award-winning hit Shark Tank and will be showing his dancing prowess as he competes for the coveted mirror ball on the popular show, Dancing with the Stars.

What do you think of Herjavec’s comments on making a pitch? Sound off below.

[Photo Credit: Source]

The label "cold calling" might not have changed, but the practice it describes is vastly different than in past decades. For instance, prospects shouldn't pick up a cold call totally cold. Why not? Because an astute sales rep will introduce themselves in some other way before they dial.

Similarly, salespeople who go into a cold call with no knowledge about the person they're calling are wasting both parties' time. You don't have to have a tailored solution ready to go from the very first sales touch -- in fact, this would be impossible before a conversation. However, you should take the time to research the prospect and familiarize yourself with their professional background, the major trends impacting their company, and even their personal interests. Anything less than this level of insight is unacceptable to today's ultra-busy buyers.

What else should you do to warm up a cold call? CPA Australia has put together a handy six-step guide. Review the SlideShare below before your next prospecting session, and reap the rewards after.

Pushing extra and unnecessary features onto buyers won't work. To win the sale, keep one very simple, easy-to-remember concept in mind: do what's in the best interest of the customer. These two steps will help ensure you match their problem with the right solution.

How do your digital marketing skills compare?

Developing your Digital Marketing skills is now crucial to staying relevant in your career and, for employers too, 'digital talent development' is vital to stay competitive. Through our resources and blog articles we're keen to help members develop their skills and of those in their team. To help here, we will be grateful if you take our new Digital Skills research survey which will show which skills are most sought after and the best techniques to gain and develop your skills.

To develop this new research we have again teamed up with the organisers of the TFM&A and eCommerce Expo where the research will be presented - thanks for their input too - full details of the upcoming eCommerce Expo conference is available at the end of the survey.

We will let you know by email when the full report is published and available for download. By completing this survey you will also be entered into prize draw. The winner will be announced by the end of July 2015. 1^st prize is a £100 amazon voucher, and the 3 runner up prizes are two seminar vouchers for eCommerce Expo.

I'll be presenting findings from the survey  at eCommerce Expo, taking place 30 September – 1 October 2015 at Olympia, London. eCommerce Expo is the UK’s biggest marketplace for buyers and suppliers of the latest ecommerce technology, products and services.

• Take our survey to help paint a picture of the key skills in digital marketing TIA!

 

Today’s marketplace is in the midst of a profound transformation in how sales are generated and sustained. Nowhere else is this more apparent than in the changing relationship between sellers and buyers.

Gone are the days of pure transactional selling. Buyers don’t wait for you to come to them anymore. Instead, they seek out what they’re looking for. When they’re prepared, they choose to do business with those who best meet their needs. More than ever, the strength of the connections you cultivate determines how successful you’ll be in positioning yourself in the minds of your buyer as that top pick.

Let’s discuss how you can act on opportunities in the marketplace today.

Build Relationships Within Sales Communities Like Farmers Markets

When you look at the current selling landscape, you could say it resembles the rise and success of the modern farmers market. These operate on a small scale across multiple communities and thrive on local connections. You see your neighbors all the time, which is community building, and vendors all promote each other through a rich network of selling goods and services.

For example, the local heritage pig supplier recommends buying tomatoes at another farmers market up the road for a delicious sauce to compliment the meat. Or the bread maker tells customers that the cheese and jams of the neighboring vendor are second to none. A buyer can confidently find what they’re looking for in these networked communities. And the seller’s work and reputation is measured by how useful they are to both the marketplace and customers.

In other words, success at farmers markets hinges on relationships. The same is true of today’s selling landscape. Sales communities are where relationships get forged now, and to be part of a community means to put in the time to share what you know so that you help something meaningful grow for the benefit of others.

4 Types of Sales Communities to Establish

To adapt and grow a sales force that can thrive in a marketplace without boundaries, there are four types of sales communities your organization needs to build and sustain. Each of these should be a formalized part of the platform that you create to offer to prospects and customers.

1. Intelligence communities.

Information and field-tested insight are highly valuable commodities in today’s marketplace. People are hungry for good ideas, and that’s why it’s important to share what you know. When I say this, I don’t just mean on a personal level; this applies just as much to groups of people you manage.

Today, many businesses are building intelligence communities to better engage their prospects and customers. They’re posting videos, publishing case studies, developing whitepapers and eBooks, and posting fresh ideas to their blogs. The content that you generate has more than just “new release” shelf appeal today. It also creates a valuable backlist — just like a publisher (who, it’s worth noting, generates a significant percentage of their sales in this area). The more you add to your knowledge backlist — especially if you post your content online — the more valuable the information becomes for your audience today and in the future.

2. Specialist communities.

No matter what line of work you’re in, you’ve been honing your professional skills throughout your career and have built up a library of know-how. Multiply that by the number of people in your sales force and you’re looking at an incredibly deep pool of expertise for audiences to draw from.

Skill complements knowledge. It adds proof to the promise of good ideas. That’s why specialist communities help nurture prospect relationships. They help build trust, proving your competence and adding value so you can establish and retain more customers in less time. They showcase the mastery of your sales force or your executive team — how you use your sharpened skills to achieve great results. Building specialist communities can also include your clients, giving them the opportunity to share their expertise or even to talk about how they have benefitted from the skills they’ve gained by doing business with your organization.

3. Business communities.

What I’m seeing in the marketplace today is smart leaders in sales working hard to develop a good corporate rapport with their clients. In particular, they seek multiple buying influences inside their own accounts. They create a community of advocates inside their best customers. The outcome is that they gain a broad base of support throughout the organization while building a library of knowledge about how that client’s business operates.

This is about more than mining a corporate hierarchy for influential decision makers. In fact, every point of contact has value. Every conversation is a good conversation — whether it’s with a CEO or a gatekeeper. Insight comes in many forms, and each contact you make in that corporate community plays a role in the sales process. You will never lose business by forming too many of these relationships, but you’re sure to lose business if you fail to engage too few of them.

4. Education communities.

Create a community of clients who talk about how you’ve helped them solve challenges, helped them make more money, saved them money or time, or retained their employees. You can leverage that learning opportunity to help grow your business even bigger.

Learning communities come in many forms. It can be as simple as forming an advisory group or a user forum. It can feature shareable best practices or case studies, each one underlining the advantage of doing business with you. Smart, successful companies today recognize the power that results from bringing people together. They don’t settle for sales teams who operate in isolation. They create these communities where everybody can learn from each other and gain from that expertise.

Why These 4 Sales Communities Count

Just like with farmer’s markets, buyers today are looking for more than a transaction: they want to do business with people who can provide knowledge and insight on top of the products or services being offered. That meeting point can only be achieved if you take the time to build a rapport with your prospects and customers. This means you put their needs first: help them learn and grow, and deliver value far beyond what your product or service provides.

Amazing things can happen when you embrace change as an opportunity to work differently than you’ve done in the past. Find ways to build your own sales communities. Think about how you can become a trusted part of today’s marketplace without boundaries. In doing so, this year could be your most profitable one ever.

We live in a time of instant connections, instant information and – potentially – instant gratification.

We live in the era of Facebook Messenger, iMessage, and Whatsapp – and while these new apps and social platforms do offer you instantaneous contact, they’re not forgiving. Stalker Sarah can’t pretend that Beau’s lack of a response is because he hasn’t read her message – Facebook shows a check and alerts her that her message has been seen. iMessage shows her message as Read and tells her exactly when he read it. And Whatsapp (I know, girl is persistent!) presents her with two green arrows.

We live in the era of Snapchat – not only does Sarah know that Beau saw all of her snaps (and continuously chose to ignore her), but she can see that he likes someone else (one of her Snapchat friends – the scandal!) better than her.

Establishing A Relationship

We live in a world that grants us so many opportunities to make instantaneous contact with an interest of ours that we oftentimes are not strategic about our approach (hello, Stalker Sarah above). In doing so, we risk missing out on what could be a beautiful relationship. Very often, we are too hasty, we are too persistent, and we go about things the wrong way. Take Stalker Sarah for example: Maybe she could have waited until they both swiped right (right?) before sinking her claws in him, letting the charming pickup lines of Tinder make magic happen.

Unfortunately, when we look at Sales Sally instead of Stalker Sarah, we see a woman going through the same struggle, trying to figure out how to best make contact with an interest in a way that will create a beautiful, fruitful relationship. Sales Sally has to consider the same things – how to make contact, when to make contact, and what to say – except for Sales Sally, not doing something right can cost thousands of dollars, as opposed to just a bit of pride. And believe it or not, once you know you’re going after the right person, success can come down to a few details.

How Do You Reach Out?

Let’s be clear; in today’s Do-Not-Call meets Spam-Blocker world, you don’t cold call. While it may have worked for Lloyd in Say Anything, it probably won’t work for Stalker Sarah, or for you. People respond to stimuli differently now – they don’t just up and buy the first thing they see. In fact, it now takes eight cold calls just to make contact, whereas in 2007 only 3.8 were required.

That’s not to say calling can’t be effective – it can be, but only if you’re expected.

When deciding how to make your first follow up, consider this: the natural, open-ended flow of a personal conversation can accomplish more than an email, whose results are already limited. Phone calls allow you to:

• Garner an opt-in – actual permission to send more information
• Discover whether your recipients are influencers or decision markers
• Discover your recipients’ roles
• Understand exactly what they want to know
• Adapt your sales process to their buying process
• Actually build a connection

Once these foundations are built and a connection is established, your name will be recognizable. Thus, sending follow-up emails from your name instead of a generic sales@ address will have a better chance of actually getting opened, read, and clicked through.

When Do You Reach Out?

In the age of instant information it may be tempting to reach out to a lead as soon as your Sidekick notifications pop up showing that someone has viewed your site or your content. But don’t do it. Don’t be Stalker Sarah. In today’s world, people buy differently than they used to. They want to be the ones to do their research and come to their own conclusions. In fact, in today’s world where the buyers have the power, they want to be nearly 60% through their own buying process before they are approached by a salesperson.

Where your customers are inbound buying, you need to be inbound selling.

But, you say, as a salesperson, I need to reach out soon – like, within the hour soon.

While this may seem a bit Stalker Sarah-ish, it’s actually key to being an effective salesperson. Research by South Korea’s Sungkyunkwan University (included in the Harvard Business Review) states that companies that try to contact potential customers within an hour of receiving queries are nearly 7 times as likely to have meaningful conversations with key decision markers as businesses that try to contact prospects even an hour later.

So the key is reach out within the hour – but only reach out once the lead is qualified. Wait until they’ve downloaded pieces of your content that demonstrate their progression through the buyer’s journey. Don’t just jump on the first poor soul to view your website. Be strategic, Sales Sally! Have patience and wait for qualified leads to come in – and then act intelligently.

At this time, only 37% of salespeople respond within an hour. Do you?

Be Strategic

I’m not trying to harp on Stalker Sarah, but she and Sales Sally are practically soul sisters. They’re both in very similar positions: Each is trying to create a fruitful relationship with a person of interest. The only difference is that Stalker Sarah uses every possible way to create a connection and does so all at once, whereas Sales Sally uses each channel of contact, but uses each at different points, each with a different objective.

Because Sales Sally takes the time to understand her interest’s wants and needs, and targets those specifically, Sales Sally is on the road to inbound sales success, and soon to be in a committed, mutuallly beneficial, sales relationship.

Brad had a “problem.” He had more referrals than he could handle. (Is there really such a thing?) Using a homegrown program, he’d booked more business in one quarter than in the entire previous year.

“I have about 200 referrals since working with you, and I literally cannot keep up with the volume,” he told me. “I plan to catch up next quarter. Right now my staff and I need a breather.” Brad’s advice for sales leaders: When you commit to referral selling, you get what you ask for, so get your team ready to service your new referral business.

John faced a similar challenge when he decided to go on a “referral tour” and meet with his clients. He’d been depending on his consultants to ask for referrals, and (surprise, surprise) they almost never did. Throughout the tour, John expanded business with his existing clients, who then introduced him to their connections. By the time he returned to the office, he had more new business than he’d ever imagined.

John now makes it a priority to ask for referrals—and to ensure his team knows how to do so—and he continues to receive introductions to prospects that know his value and actually want to talk to him. John’s advice: “You’d better have the infrastructure in place to support all of the referrals you’ll receive.” To help his team organize and follow up on all the great leads, John is now researching referral automation platforms that integrate with Salesforce.

Referrals Don’t Manage Themselves

Want to have Brad and John’s problem? Simply tap into the business opportunities your team has been leaving on the table.

Referral selling eclipses any other business-development strategy. When you implement a strategic referral program, you:

• Double your sales force without adding to your payroll
• Penetrate prime accounts with personal introductions to exactly the decision-makers your sales reps want to meet
• Get only qualified meetings at the level that counts
• Ace out the competition and seal the deal
• Convert prospects to clients more than 50 percent of the time

Yet, few companies have a disciplined, systematic process to build referral skills for their teams, and to create solid metrics that ensure accountability for results.

6 Barriers to Referral Success

Implementing a referral process sounds simple in theory, but it’s easier said than done. Here are the challenges—or better put, the excuses—that can derail your best referral intentions:

1. “Other things took precedence in my business.”

Really? That means you haven’t truly committed to referral selling. You still think it would be great if referrals just happened. You don’t have the guts, the will, and the resolve to put a stake in the ground. What’s more important than getting new, qualified clients for your company?

2. “My reps forget to ask.”

Do they “forget” because they’re still not comfortable asking? Or because you haven’t incorporated referrals into your sales process? Either way, you have a choice. You can continue to let them “forget,” or you can put a process in place to ensure they remember, with rewards for referral success.

3. “I’m way too busy to track referrals and make sure my reps follow up.”

Some say that salespeople are lazy. Wrong! We just have tons of balls in the air, and they get dropped from time to time. We need tools to simplify our processes, accelerate customer acquisition, and ensure customer retention and loyalty. Sales doesn’t want the operational hassle of managing a referral program at scale. That’s why we need referral automation software that helps remind reps to follow through, extend their relationships with customers, and ask for more referrals.

4. “My salespeople don’t have enough time to implement their referral plans.”

Salespeople bemoan that referral selling takes too long. They believe dialing for dollars builds their pipelines faster. No way! Referrals do take time. Salespeople have to reach out to their networks, actually talk to them, and meet with people in person. But considering the dismal success rates of cold calling, and the 50-plus-percent conversion rate of referred prospects, what’s the problem here?

5. “My team hasn’t identified enough people.”

If your salespeople haven’t identified enough referral sources, they haven’t identified everyone they know. Their job is not to evaluate whether people would be great referral sources. Their job is to get their contact lists together. Your job as a sales leader is to help them understand that everyone knows someone, and referrals often come from the most unexpected places.

6. “I haven’t set specific metrics for referrals.”

Maybe you’re afraid to be accountable for leading referral success? If you don’t establish specific referral metrics, you’re off the hook for coaching your team to success with a new prospecting system. But more than likely, you just aren’t sure what referral metrics look like.

Keep your metrics simple. Set too many, and you’ll confuse people. You could create metrics for the number of referral introductions reps will ask for each week, how many referral meetings they’ll conduct, the number of new clients you expect them to bring in through referrals and in what timeframe, or increases in revenue and profit.

A referral automation platform helps you set goals and track performance. It also helps your team manage follow-up, track referral activities, and enroll customers and colleagues in your referral program. This takes the pressure off reps and guarantees a dependable and measurable referral process, which is half the battle.  The other half is ensuring reps know how to leverage their referral networks and ask in a way that gets results.

Referral Selling Is a Complete Shift

Like any new way of working, a successful transition to referral selling is common sense but not common practice. It seems easy, but it takes work—including regular feedback and coaching to help your team learn and grow.

Clarity is essential. Stay focused on your referral-selling strategy. What is the cost of NOT executing your plan? When you can answer that question—for yourself and for your team—then referrals are yours for the taking.

But first, you must let go of your sacred cows—the way you used to prospect. There are many traps that can undermine your best intentions to build a referral business. But to successfully shift your sales team to referral selling means integrating referral activities into your sales process and making it your #1 priority. And that all starts with you—the sales leader.

The faster you transition to referral selling, the more introductions you’ll receive, and the faster your revenue will soar. Remember Brad and John’s problem? It could be yours.

Want the secrets to building your pipeline — and keeping it growing? Download the free Salesforce e-book.

By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca 

I find it amusing that people still debate whether sales is a numbers game or not. There is just so much wrong with that not the least of which is that sales is not a game. The “sales is not a numbers game” crowd usually revert to the “quality over quantity” argument, valid, but still leads to a point that requires a sales rep to know and deal with how many, the number of, qualified, quality and quintessential opportunities they will need to prospect and close to retire or exceed quota, which by the way is a number.

Most pundits who take the “sales is not a numbers game” usually do so as a means of appeasing those sellers who refuse to take accountability for their numbers. Without accountability everything is OK, without measure there is no accountability, funny how the same pundits will get behind the mantra “if it’s not measured, it doesn’t count”.

So let’s get past the feel good BS that sells books but does not help you sell, and ask the real question about sales numbers:

Why that number? Or in the day to day world of real sales, why those numbers?

For instance, a question I’ll often ask reps, why the number of appointments in your calendar, why not three more, why not two less? Some tell me that it is what they were able to do, all time allowed for. This last one opens up the whole discussion of how they spend their time, and how that impacts their ability to hit their number, sorry, quota. There are any number of variations on this question, why the number of new prospects engaged in a given month, or why the number of opportunities at any given stage of their pipeline. The answer is the same for them all, “that is the number I need to make my quota!”

This will differ from rep to rep, even at the same company sitting side by side. One may be a great prospector, yet be weak at discovery, the other may be average at prospecting, but great at qualifying and moving to close. Each will have a different number at each phase. The key is that successful sales people not only know their numbers, but own them. Most sales people know their favourite ball player’s number, not their own. Why do we not hear about the quality/quantity argument when it come to their favourite athlete? Because in the end it is not how nice the play was, but whether they got the points at the end of the game or not.

Knowing your number at each stage of the sale allows you to plan and execute more directly and efficiently, which in turn drive quality. It is true that it is not about just “more”, but there is an element of needing “at least” at each stage of the sale.

Knowing why “that number”, and having “that number” be directly anchored in your quota drive the quality the pundits and excuse makers talk about. Not owning your number often leads to great quality in insufficient quantities, which means you need to change aspects of your sale. Increase prospect, improve your approach to discovery, uncover value in a more meaningful way, or other elements. All of which the “sales is not a numbers game” are reluctant to do.

“That number” is what you and I are accountable for. If you don’t know and own that number, there is no accountability in sales, no accountability for your actions or outcomes, a reality you need to live with, whether you are a sales rep, a manager, a VP of Sales, or a quality relationship touting pundit. And without accountability, there is no sustainable success in sales, and that is “why that number!”

Tibor Shanto    

In my last blog post, I promised to reveal the three best questions to ask an inbound lead.

Ask the wrong questions and you’ll either miss hot prospects or spend a ton of effort on those who won't buy from you. Ask the right questions and you’ll be able to quickly tell hot prospects apart from time wasters.

There are a lot people who say you shouldn’t call someone who completes a form on your website because they’re not ready to buy, so you pepper them with more and more content, hoping they’ll call you when they’re ready. Now, I agree that a completed form doesn’t mean the person is ready to buy. But research shows that 70% of decision makers want to talk to salespeople during the early stages of their buying process.

So the next time someone completes a form on your website, pick up the freakin' phone!

But this prompts two questions: When is the best time to call, and what are the best questions to ask during the conversation?

When Is The Best Time To Phone?

Research by MIT shows that when you follow up with an inbound lead in five minutes or less, you’re over 10 times more likely to reach the person who completed the form than if you waited just 30 minutes. In addition, research by InsideSales.com shows that the first vendor to respond wins the sale 50% of the time.

Many sales experts, including myself, are firm in their belief that the more relevant a call or email, the more likely the prospect will engage with a salesperson. But how can you research a prospect to make your call relevant when you have to call them in less than five minutes?

Because they’ve demonstrated their interest in a certain resource, I would argue that you already know enough about the lead to get you through the initial follow up call. Once you discover what buying stage the prospect is in during the initial phone conversation -- and how you should engage with them going forward -- then you can perform the necessary research.

Here’s a simple way to remember this. With inbound leads, salespeople should act, then learn, then act. With outbound leads, it’s learn, act, learn.

Every minute that ticks by after you receive an inbound lead reduces your chances of earning a new customer. So don’t wait -- pick up the phone. Those with cat-like phone reflexes will win in the end.

What Are The Best Questions To Ask?

When you pick up the phone, simply say, “I’m following up on your information request. Can I take two minutes of your time and ask three really quick questions?” In all the years that I’ve used this method the answer has always been “yes.”

Then, launch into the following three questions:

1) “Did you get the email with the link to the resources you’re looking for?”

Before anything else, you want to make sure they got what they were looking for. If they misspelled their email address, you can resend the information to the correct address. If the collateral ended up in their spam folder, you can tell them how to get it out, or route it to them via another channel.

Follow through on this initial interaction between your company and the prospect to demonstrate your reliability.

2) “When you read about this or saw this, what resonated and made you say, ‘Hey I should check this out’?”

I typically include the question, “How did you hear about us?” in my forms, so I don’t need to ask this during my follow up. Instead, I pose this second question to uncover the specific words, images, or themes that compelled the prospect to click.

This information is relevant to both Marketing and Sales. Part of a salesperson’s responsibility is to help their colleagues in Marketing understand what’s working and what’s not, and this type of feedback goes a long way towards that goal.

In addition, learning about what words grab buyers’ attention helps salespeople tailor their emails and communication for maximum engagement and response.

3) “I’m curious. What happened recently that made this content more relevant or more important?”

This question not only uncovers the trigger event that drove your customer to your content, but also reveals what buying stage they’re in (for more information on buying stages, check out this post). And once you know the stage, you also know how to proceed:

• Status quo: Nurture. Put this prospect in a lead nurturing program until they enter a Window of Dissatisfaction™.
• Searching for alternatives: Ignore. This lead has already chosen their preferred vendor and is now just getting prices from other providers so they can justify their choice to others.
• Window of Dissatisfaction: Sell. This is a hot prospect. Now is the time to use the Seven Second Sale and reel them in!

Sometimes the hardest part of selling is knowing when the best time is to reach out to inbound prospects again. I’ll cover that issue in my next blog post on the three best times to follow up with an inbound lead.

P.S. With buyers who are already searching for alternatives, the only strategy I’ve seen effectively work to win the sale is to position yourself as the least risky choice alternative and keep calling back to see if their preferred choice has let them down. Once they’ve been let down, they become even more risk-averse; since you are now the least risky alternative, you become the new preferred vendor. 

Every time I write a post that takes a slightly contrarian view to the status quo, I get hammered by the entrenched pundits who spin this into “Mark is saying that marketing is dead”… or social media is dead … Or that kittens are bad. You get the point.

Today I am going to point out a THREAT to inbound marketing to make you think about what we have considered traditional dynamics of inbound marketing in a new way. I am not saying anything is dead. Really.

Let’s take a look at some of the current marketing trends and how they might make inbound marketing much more difficult in the future.

The goal of inbound marketing

Inbound marketing is a term coined by Brian Halligan of HubSpot to describe a way to promote a company through blogs, podcasts, video, eBooks, newsletters, social media marketing, and other forms of content marketing which serve to attract customers.

Inbound marketing refers to marketing activities that bring high-potential visitors in, rather than relying on sales people having to make cold calls to garner “outbound” leads. Inbound marketing earns the attention of customers, makes the company easy to be found, and draws customers to your website like a magnet.

Hubspot tends to view inbound marketing as an engine for leads. I tend to view Inbound marketing as an engine for relationships. But in the end, the goal is the same — sales.

Inbound marketing is art and science, and done well it works really well. Because it’s so effective, most brands are spending dramatically more on content marketing, creating overwhelming information density in thier niches (or Content Shock), but that is another story.

The game is changing

The economics of the social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn are also driven by content, but their metrics are different. They’re not trying to generate leads for a discrete product. They are trying to:

a) Collect more personal information about you so…

b) They can charge advertisers for targeted display ads.

The economic driver for both of these priorities is time on site, also known as dwell time, which is becoming a factor in SEO, Facebook content visibility, and content marketing strategy. The more time you spend consuming a piece of content, the more information is collected and the more ads you can see.

A few years ago, the major social platforms were happy to have your links to great content but now they are transforming themselves into virtual news and entertainment channels because they want you to spend time on their site, not yours.

For example the Facebook content strategy now includes a video viewer to keep people on their newsfeed they are wooing major content channels to publish directly on their site. LinkedIn has become a significant content publishing platform featuring some of the biggest names in business.

No content creator should be happy about this development but the biggest channels may get a cut of the action. Facebook has proposed hosting content from the New York Times, National Geographic, Buzzfeed, and other major news sites and involving them in a revenue-sharing deal. (Here is a prediction: Facebook will eventually begin to acquire content sites and produce their own original content like Netflix).

The implications

So if you’re not The New York Times or Buzzfeed and can’t expect to make money from posting content directly to Facebook, what do these trends mean for you?

If you have been counting on Facebook, LinkedIn and other platforms as a primary distribution strategy for your content links, increasingly, the best way to gain exposure in those places is to actually post the full-form “sticky content” on those sites to achieve massive dwell time. This is probably the best strategy to at least achieve exposure for your content through organic reach.

The option that seems to be developing is, post the full-form content or get relegated to the dustbin. And that means those posts are NOT driving people to your website like the good old link used to do. The inbound traffic is now headed away from you, to Facebook and LinkedIn, instead of the homebase. Now the content magnet is on Facebook instead of your site where you have all those dandy calls to action.

What’s a marketer to do? I don’t have all the answers. That’s why I have a comment section and a community of super-smart people. Let me know your thought on this, won’t you?

Something free for you! If you would like to download a copy of the infographic from today’s post as a full-size image to use in your own blog or presentation click here: The changing landscape of inbound marketing graphic (vertical) or The changing landscape of inbound marketing (horizontal). Please provide a professional level of attribution.

Many people are too cautious in sales processes and as a result when they present their solutions they end up sounding milquetoast and undifferentiated from anybody else in the market. In this post I advocate taking a harder stand on where your product or solution differentiates in the market – even if it means you lose some deals as a result.

I recently wrote about the three rules of sales

1. Why Buy Anything?
2. Why Buy Me?
3. Why Buy Now?

The first of question is about qualifying your potential customers aka leads. Many sales organizations or inexperienced startup CEOs spend their time with leads who either aren’t a good fit for their solution, aren’t decisions makers in their organization  or don’t have budget and therefore they aren’t likely to buy. I call these NINAs (no influence, no authority).

Inexperienced CEOs do this because often NINAs will give you lots time even if they don’t plan to buy – I guess you could call them window shoppers. And it’s easy to fool yourself into thinking you have a buyer when they spend lots of time with you and it’s certainly easier to be with people who seemingly want to spend time with you, but it takes away valuable time from people with real credit cards in their pockets.

That’s why anybody with real sales experience will tell you the three cardinal rules of sales, “qualify, qualify and qualify” your leads. I boil this process down to “Why Buy Anything?” meaning finding out whether your lead has a known problem that you can solve and are you talking with a real buyer who has budget. You can read more about this if you click the link above.

When I counsel startup entrepreneurs I give them my blunt dose of reality, “If you can’t easily identify target leads who have a problem you can solve then hang up your cleats – you’re not going to succeed.”

“Why Buy Anything” is by far the easiest stage of selling.

Why Buy Me?

Once you have found a “lead with a need” and a buyer with authority and budget – the real sales process begins. People new to sales make the mistake of assuming that just because you have a buyer talking with you or even somebody who clearly wants to do business with you that it means you’ll get an order. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

The first thing you need to realize is that you’re likely not alone. Once a buyer decides they want to make a purchase the first thing most companies will do is check out what other options are out there to make sure they’re not making an uninformed decisions. I’ll put it in simple terms for non salespeople. If you decide you want to buy a Toyota and you know the model, you’re very unlikely to spend $40,000 without double checking that at least Honda doesn’t have a better model. You might look at higher quality / higher price solutions like BMW or Mercedes or you try to see if you can find a bargain with the similar features like a Kia.

Either way, it’s natural that buyers “shop around” so expect it as a healthy part of the process. And also to stick to the analogy if a man or a woman comes into your store to buy your BMW 5-Series don’t assume that he doesn’t have a husband or wife that is more practical and is pushing behind the scenes for the less expensive Audi A6.

Take nothing for granted. Assume competition and assume within the buying organization you have enemies. Make sure you stand out. It requires that you be unique and stand for something. In sales we often call these USPs (I wrote about them here: Unique Selling Propositions).

Often if you’re pushing hard on USPs you’ll find that these won’t resonate with certain leads and therefore it feels easier to stay within your comfort zone and avoid taking a hard stand on why somebody should buy your product. This is often a mistake because if you’re undifferentiated you’ll likely lose more deals because the buyer doesn’t see anything that sets you apart.

I built my first software company in the early days of SaaS and there were few models to go by. One thing I observed was that many customers wanted an “on premise” version of our software and were willing to pay extra money for it. This was a dilemma because while it seemed like easy money and a reasonable request I knew it was going to drive up our support and maintenance costs and become hard to manage. It is the opposite of what SaaS is supposed to be.

So we took a stand. We said to customers, “We only sell SaaS and we think that’s the right solution for you. In the long run it will be cheaper, better maintained and even more secure.” There is no doubt in my mind we lost some customers this way but if they were only ever going to buy on-prem software then I’d rather know early.

We learned the obvious objections we’d encounter and we’d teach our teams how to respond to them. I call this arming & aiming and it’s critical in building a sales organization. We knew that all buyers would be concerned about security, privacy, back-ups, data protection and so forth. So our pitch went

“Listen. If we did give you an on-premise solution – where would you put your servers? Oh! In a hosting facility? Us, too. It’s probably the same one we’d use since we are stored in the top-of-the-line facility in London.

Who will manage yours? Oh! You’re IT department. How responsive are they to your needs now? Do they carry pagers and respond to outages 24/7/365? Because we have an entire tech-ops team whose sole job is to support our up time.

You see – running a SaaS platform for customers like you is the ONLY thing our team does. If for any reason any of our customers couldn’t access our solution for long periods of time or if we betrayed security we wouldn’t be able to stay in business.

We’re hosted in the same type of facility as you but my bet is that you’ll get better responsiveness from us than your IT department because we depend on our customers for our existence. If you want that kind of service focus I think we’d be a better fit than your internal IT department.”

You see, we knew that many of our customers wanted a SaaS solution specifically because they were tired of the unresponsiveness of their internal provider. If the business unit had enough power and budget we’d usually win that debate and if the IT department had a lot of power we were never going to win that sale anyways. It would be like turkeys voting for Thanksgiving.

Some of our competitors offered on-premise solutions and that was ok. We weren’t going to win every deal but I knew when I found a buyer with a shared value system my harder stance on SaaS was going to win me business and my attack on competitors who offered it was to point out to my buyers how much time, money & staff they were going to have to dedicate to helping all of their on-premise implementations.

Let me give you another simple example from my experience as a VC at Upfront Ventures. When we went to raise funds we faced lots of competition as there are of course many other VC funds in the country. We are a mostly A-round shop, have been around for 20 years and have a long track record including one fund that is the single best performing fund in the United States for its vintage year. There are probably 30 or so funds in the US that have similar backgrounds so while we feel great about our track record, our team and our performance but it’s hardly enough to say why you MUST invest in Upfront.

I think that’s where many startups and even VC funds go wrong. You FEEL unique but when you meet your ultimate fund-raising customers (investors) the law of large numbers means that they’ve seen a bunch of companies saying nearly identical things as you are.

VCs all say:

• We are entrepreneur friendly
• We are hands on
• We have a great screening process
• We have strong theses in key technology areas
• We work with other top-tier VCs

And so on. Everybody likes to feel unique but most of the things VCs tell themselves are just table stakes in our business and most of the things that entrepreneurs tell us in their fund-raising processes also sound like every other startup.

You need to be different.

For Upfront, the fact that we’re based in LA is unique in that there are only a handful of firms here and it happens to be the 3rd largest tech startup market in the country and the fastest growing. There was a meme that started going around LPs around 2005 that “I’m not sure LA is really its own venture market” and some LPs actually believed that. They either convinced themselves that no big tech companies would ever be built in LA or that LA-based investors wouldn’t have strong enough returns or that “Our strategy is to invest in the top ten firms in Silicon Valley.” (effectively a “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” sort of argument).

My job was to identify people who had this view and if it wasn’t changeable then I didn’t want to waste time in this fund-raising cycle on them. I’d put a note down against their name reminding me of this view they had and then between fund-raising cycles I’d include them on data that we had showing LA’s continued development and growth (including SnapChat, Tinder, Maker Studios, Riot Games and others).

This is true for startups, too. You must know when to sell to leads and when to market to them. Spending cycles selling to the unconvinced is wasted effort vs. finding aligned buyers.

It’s true that Upfront is a national firm and our biggest successes over the years have come from Chicago, Baltimore, Las Vegas, NYC, London and LA as well as from Silicon Valley. But you can’t escape the fact that we’re a large fish in an attractive non-Silicon-Valley market and pretending otherwise would be naïve. So we did the opposite and leaned into it adopting the “Why Buy Me” strategy of seeking people out who either understood the power of LA or were persuadable.

I even adopted a line early on in our discussions to qualify for this

“Listen. We do a lot of deals in San Francisco. And we have national deals in New York, DC and Chicago. We even do some international deals in London or Finland.

But we do 50% of our deals in Southern California from San Diego to Santa Barbara and we think that’s part of what makes us special.

If you’re looking for the 81st firm on Sand Hill Road we’re not that. And we’re not trying to compete directly with that. We’d rather partner with those firms.”

Boom. It’s out there. I can’t hide from it now. We’ve staked out a unique position that some will agree with and others won’t. But here’s the thing. If I talk to 10 potential investors and 5 disqualify themselves because they “don’t really believe in LA” but 2-3 lean in because “We already have 12 managers in Silicon Valley. We’re looking for differentiated exposure” now I know that I have found people who have passed the Why Buy Anything and Why Buy Me criteria and I’d rather spend a lot more time on 2-3 qualified leads than spread my time across the other 7 unlikely buyers.

Summary

So this is the mistake as I could boil it down for you. Inexperienced sellers spread their bets across too many potential leads of which many aren’t likely (probabilistically) to purchase. Since selling takes time, effort and focus – figuring out who wants or needs your unique product offering is what increases your win ratios and thus your top-line revenue.

Take a few more chances in the sales process by developing sales & marketing materials that are more differentiated. Don’t be afraid of a “firm no” because if you get it quickly it’s a blessing – a “no” was likely going to come eventually anyways and it’s better than a “muddy maybe.”

If the easy part of qualify, qualify, qualify is figuring out whether there’s a need, a buyer and a budget – the more difficult but more valuable part is figuring out whether the buyer wants what you uniquely sell. Your USP.

Take chances. Be unique.

Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was named No. 1 on Business Insider's Silicon Valley 100 list this year due to her remarkable rise to success.

Since dropping out of Stanford at age 19 to found her health-technology company in 2003, Holmes has raised $400 million in venture capital and become a billionaire in the process.

Theranos is founded on the idea that a single drop of blood can provide enough information for a complete, inexpensive blood test. It already has a deal with Walgreens and in early July reached a major achievement when the FDA approved Theranos' herpes test.

In an interview with the Academy of Achievement nonprofit last September, Holmes discussed several books that helped shape her worldview. 

'The Iliad' and 'The Odyssey' by Homer

Holmes says she was an introverted child and that books were her "good friends." Two of the books she enmeshed herself in at a young age are Homer's ancient Greek epic poems about the Trojan War and Odysseus' journey home after it, "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey," respectively.

"I've always been fascinated in the fact that so much changes in our society technologically, but as humans we don't change a lot," Holmes said.

Robert Fagles' translation is especially accessible while remaining true to the source material.

Buy them here >>

'Moby-Dick' by Herman Melville

The 1851 American classic is another book Holmes fell in love with as a girl.

While many of us are familiar with the general story of Captain Ahab and the white whale because of its place in pop culture, the story has many more layers than you may be aware of, and it is a rich allegory on what constitutes morality and how we create meaning in life.

To appreciate the many allusions Melville played with, check out the Norton Critical Edition.

Buy it here >>

'The Complete Story of Civilization' by Will and Ariel Durant

From 1935 to 1975, author Will Durant wrote 11 volumes on Western history, finishing with the Napoleonic era only because he and his wife died weeks apart. His wife, Ariel, is a coauthor of several of the final volumes, and they both won the 1968 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction for the 10th in the series, "Rousseau and Revolution."

"I've really been fascinated and inspired by reading books about history, because there's so much wisdom in understanding how these great people and great leaders built great organizations, led groups of people, and effected change," Holmes said.

She thinks there is "very powerful" insight contained within the Durants' massive work. "It shapes your frame of thinking when you encounter people and situations," she said.

Buy it here >>

Or, if you'd rather start with a series of essays by the Durants on overarching themes of their work, read "The Lessons of History."

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Odds are you’re guilty of at least one of these misconceptions. Let’s set the record straight when it comes to outsourcing sales. Honestly, if it were a scam or service that didn’t provide real value — A) I wouldn’t want to be a part of it, and B) Organizations like the Stevie Awards wouldn’t be giving out awards for it!

So here it is — 5 misconceptions about outsourced sales and why any sales professional should care.

1. Outsourcing is a bad word.

It’s not. Often people confuse “outsourcing” with “offshoring” which carries a more negative perception. Outsourcing just means utilizing a strong skill set of an expert team outside your company. It lets you focus on the core of what makes you successful in your business.

2. It always costs less to outsource than firing up an internal team.

While that is often the case, it’s not always true. To weigh the apples to apples, you can’t just compare the cost of an external sales resource versus an internal resource. You need to consider: results and effectiveness, real estate, benefits, management costs, and the other support costs to run a business or sales program.

In the end, those are a lot more to manage… And ultimately, the cost of getting it wrong with a sales partner will be much lower than getting it wrong with an internal team.

3. You don’t need to do anything to make it work.

If you are not invested in the success of the program, it will fail.

Outsourcing sales with experts like Invenio Solutions® means you can use their data, technology, and expertise. But without reasonable collaboration and contribution from the client’s side, companies can hurt themselves, and hurt the external sales partner in the process. That’s why Invenio is so selective about the companies with whom we choose to work. Sales professionals are on the front line of conversations for your brand. For them to be able to represent your company adequately requires a reasonable amount of input.

If you are not invested in the success of the program, it will fail. End of story.

4. Pay-for-performance is the way to go.

See #3. Pay for performance means you don’t pay until the sales show up. On the face of it, it sounds like a great deal. The problem is that companies tend to invest little time, money or effort into the success of pay-for-performance programs, leading to poor results. Neither you nor the external sales partner want that.

5. Outsourcing steals away jobs from your internal team.

No, in most cases, we augment the needs of the team. If an internal team needs leads qualified, we can fit that picture. If just qualified appointments need to be set, we can do that too. In the end, we are there to augment the overall needs of the team and drive revenue. If we don’t, WE get fired. Period.

(c)iStock.com/binabina

Everyone is looking for that silver bullet which makes their cloud implementations a success. It’s little wonder that events such as Cloud World Forum and Cloud Expo are at the forefront of executives’ minds.

At Cloud World Forum in London last week, MongoDB VP strategy Kelly Stirman spoke of five directions in which the industry is changing, and how companies can make their cloud success a reality: embrace failure, double down on ops, and pick your partners wisely.

Rule number one, Stirman argued, was to embrace failure. To be able to embrace failure, you need to iterate quicker. “Today, customers expect applications faster,” he tells CloudTech. “When you wake up in the morning, you look for apps to have been installed on your phone, and to do that people need to embrace a more iterative project development lifecycle.

“Cloud makes this possible because the lead time to do things and the cost to do things is so much less, that it becomes reasonable to screw up and then recover,” he adds. “Most people aren’t comfortable with that.”

Quick iteration links in to point number two – move beyond lift and shift. Amazon is not doing releases every few days, but every few seconds. It’s a world away from where most companies are, but Stirman argues simply taking your existing application stack and moving it to the cloud isn’t going to give you a huge amount of value.

“Most people think ‘it’s going to take eight weeks for IT to get my infrastructure ready for my application, and the cloud can be just a couple of minutes’, but that’s kind of it,” he says. “If your application didn’t scale, or you had some limitation in your data centre, it’s going to be the exact same problem – or worse – with cloud.”

Stirman adds: “Things that are really important about the cloud, like elasticity, paying for what you actually use, different storage products so you can optimise for hot and cold data, programmable automated infrastructure – that’s what really is powerful and valuable about the cloud, and you need to make that part of how you think about using [it], not just lift and shift.”

Vendor lock-in, although a long-term enterprise IT issue, has long since been a worry for businesses moving to the cloud, finding the implementation is not for them as their business needs change and then finding they can’t get out of it. But it still warrants a warning note from Stirman.

He explains: “The slightly controversial assertion I made [was] in my lifetime, the tow most proprietary technologies that have come to market have been Apple and cloud. These cloud vendors [are] all based on open source software, and different types of standards – but they themselves are highly proprietary. It is inevitable that you are going to get locked in.”

Cloud products are ‘carefully designed’ for a lock in, he argues. The pricing models are the same, you can’t compare prices between offerings, there are charges to get data in, there are charges to get data out, and so on. “All of these players are adding value on top of the core stack, and the more you use those, the more you get locked in,” Stirman says.

Stirman took to burst two myths around the cloud. The first was regarding the security of the cloud – a subject which is often a bugbear for executives as survey data bears out. “It’s just not true,” he says. “Most of these guys are vastly more secure than any of us can design in our own systems.” Secondly, the idea that if you move to the cloud your operations teams halve is also a red herring. “You need them more than ever, because what you’re going to do is use way more infrastructure,” he says. “The operational obligations you have are directly proportional to the number of operating systems. So if you take a big server and slice it up for virtualisation, you are increasing your operational overhead.”

The MongoDB exec saved his most controversial comments for last; there will only be three players in the cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) space; Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Everyone else will run out of money. “The real cloud opportunity is going to be products that are mostly infrastructure as a service agnostic; they are layers you could play in a cloud vendor, or across those three that give value add services,” he explains.

“What’s going to be interesting to see is, are Amazon and Google and Microsoft going to let other vendors come in and play in their infrastructure stack, or are they going to hold people out, the way Apple does, and really own the value added services on top of the stack?

“You’ve got to pick your partner carefully,” he adds.

A couple of weeks ago, we asked a few of the industry’s top sales development reps to see what they’ve found to be the most effective motivator on a daily basis. From friendly competition to a little game room action, these SDRs are finding plenty of ways to stay motivated on the job.

Now it’s time to hear from their bosses. We asked some of the top influencers, SDR managers, and industry thought leaders what they believe is the best way to keep reps motivated and prevent churn in the sales development role. Here’s what they had to say:

Jay Tuel, Demandbase

​If you have a good team that places company goals ahead of individual priorities, it’s easy to motivate.

I bring in people to our team that have a competitive streak, but at the end of the day are team players, so naturally they are numbers driven. Also, a good manager should know what each individual is aspiring to do, have a plan in place to promote them, and work with that team member to get them to the next point in their careers.

Jon Parisi, Guidespark

I listen into each team members’ cold calls for 30 minutes a week to provide real-time feedback and coaching in the moment. We then review during our bi-weekly 1:1s and regularly check into our OKR (objective key results) system to make sure we are on track.

We also do weekly spiffs that allow each RDR to gun after a specific target, and the prizes range from cash, dinners, sports games, sales training, working from the opposite coast and so forth. It really mixes things up each week.

I think motivation ultimately comes from within the individual – and it’s easy to get caught up in the day to day of this job.

It can be challenging to see the big picture, which ultimately is to learn how to become better sales people and build the foundation of the attitude, behaviors and skills that will make each RDR (Revenue Development Rep) successful longer term.

Richard Harris, The Harris Consulting Group

When I was an SDR manager, I motivated with incentives like cash spiffs and tickets to ball games. On top of that, the entire executive team was on board to support them. The norm for us was any Director, VP, or Senior executive would take the team to drinks and dinner.

In addition to that, we made sure the team was constantly getting trained and that ALL SDRs would sit in on qual calls and first calls with the AEs. We also had an SLA with the AEs that part of their job was to help teach the SDRs real world scenarios. The relationship specifically designed to help create a strong bench.

Steve Dodsworth, Captora

Keeping my team motivated and excited about their role is one of my top priorities. While we take the role very seriously, we try hard to keep the vibe fun and loose. That said, here’s what we like to do:

1. SDRs assign push ups or burpees to other team members when they book a demo — 10 push ups or 5 burpees per meeting. We track how many are given and received each month and it provides tons of energy throughout the day.
2. We do daily huddles to set goals for the current day and review the previous day’s accomplishments. If goals were not met, SDRs need to discuss why.
3. We do tons of spiffs around activity and results. Prizes vary from very low value (like a $5 gas card) to more extravagant (like a trip to Vegas).

Phill Keene, Tinderbox

To keep your team motivated, provide clarity for every aspect of their roles: the particulars of their jobs, how to improve and move up the ladder, and how they get paid. It’s also critical to make sure each SDR learns how to grow personally, and how to contribute the growth of their company.

—

As a manager of a Sales Development Team, how do you keep your SDRs motivated? Leave a comment below to share your tips and tools for success!

The post Keeping Your Sales Development Team Motivated, One Spiff at a Time appeared first on SalesLoft.

At the peak of Andrew Carnegie's career, he crossed paths with an impressive journalist named Napoleon Hill, who he trusted to document — and share with the world — the strategies that turned him into one of the wealthiest and most successful businessmen of all time.

"It was Mr. Carnegie's idea that the magic formula, which gave him a stupendous fortune, ought to be placed within reach of people who do not have time to investigate how men make money," Hill wrote in the preface of "Think and Grow Rich," the result of his collaboration with Carnegie.

In addition to analyzing Carnegie, who became the richest man in the world after starting with little more than a penny upon arriving in the US from Scotland, Hill studied more than 500 self-made millionaires over a span of 20 years.

His interviews and research culminated in the 1937 bestseller, "Think and Grow Rich," which shares what he calls the "money-making secret" in 13 principles.

There is no mention of "money," "wealth," "finances," or "stocks" within Hill's text; he takes a different approach, focusing on breaking down the psychological barriers that prevent many of us from attaining our own fortunes.

This approach is still relevant today, 78 years later. As personal finance expert Farnoosh Torabi said on episode one of her podcast, "Mastering your money has more to do with psychology and mindset than anything else."

Here are Hill's 13 steps, in his words and ours:

1. Desire: You have to want it.

All of the super wealthy started with a certain amount of dreaming, hoping, planning, and desiring before they became rich. They imagined riches before they saw them in their bank accounts, Hill explains:

Wishing will not bring riches. But desiring riches with a state of mind that becomes an obsession, then planning definite ways and means to acquire riches, and backing those plans with persistence which does not recognize failure, will bring riches.

This is not so different from the modern-day concept of visualizing a savings goal with a specific price tag.

2. Faith: Believe that you can achieve your goal.

Growing rich starts with your mindset — with the belief that you can accumulate wealth. Hill writes:

Riches begin in the form of thought! The amount is limited only by the person in whose mind the thought is put into motion. Faith removes limitations!

As self-made millionaire and author Steve Siebold writes, "Being rich isn't a privilege. Being rich is a right. If you create massive value for others, you have the right to be as rich as you want."

3. Auto-suggestion: Use affirmations to reach your goal.

Turning desire for money or success into reality requires sending your subconscious mind phrases and mantras that support your goal. You have to repeat out loud what it is that you want, and how you plan to get it, so you become obsessed with your purpose, Hill explains:

Your ability to use the principle of auto-suggestion will depend, very largely, upon your capacity to concentrate upon a given desire until that desire becomes a burning obsession.

For example, if you aim to save $1 million for retirement by putting away money every week, you would repeat, "I will set aside money this week to have $1 million in retirement savings," as many times as possible each day.

4. Specialized knowledge: Gain experiences and continue learning.

Knowledge is potential power. An education only becomes powerful and leads to great wealth when it is organized and applied to life. It also must be continually sought after. You're never done learning, Hill emphasizes:

Successful men, in all callings, never stop acquiring specialized knowledge related to their major purpose, business, or profession. Those who are not successful usually make the mistake of believing that the knowledge-acquiring period ends when one finishes school.

Many modern-day successful and wealthy people are voracious readers; they never stop learning and challenging their minds.

5. Imagination: Come up with ideas and visualize your success.

If you can imagine it, you can create it, says Hill:

Ideas are the beginning points of all fortunes. Ideas are products of the imagination ...

Man's only limitation, within reason, lies in his development and use of his imagination.

Don't be afraid to come up with, and develop, ideas. "Whoever you are, wherever you may live, whatever occupation you may be engaged in, just remember in the future, every time you see the words 'Coca-Cola,' that its vast empire of wealth and influence grew out of a single idea," Hill writes.

Consider Sara Blakely, whose small, disruptive idea — making an incision in a pair of pantyhose — amounted to her booming, billion-dollar business, Spanx, and rocketed her into the limelight.

6. Organized planning: Take action.

Once you've visualized your success, you need to take action and go after exactly what you want. You must act with persistence and enthusiasm. Hill explains:

Opportunity has spread its wares before you. Step up to the front, select what you want, create your plan, put the plan into action, and follow through with persistence ...

Most of us are good "starters" but poor "finishers" of everything we begin. Moreover, people are prone to give up at the first signs of defeat. There is no substitute for persistence.

For instance, if you're looking to build wealth, start with forming a financial plan, and determine exactly where you want your money to go.

7. Decision: Defeat procrastination with decisiveness.

A key trait Hill recognized in all of the individuals he studied who acquired great wealth was decisiveness. Those who settle on decisions quickly know what they want, and they tend to get what they want. He writes:

People who fail to accumulate money, without exception, have the habit of reaching decisions, if at all, very slowly, and of changing these decisions quickly and often.

Decisiveness is not just a trait of the wealthy, but one of the most important qualities a leader needs to possess. At the end of the day, making a bad decision is better than making no decision at all.

8. Persistence: Don't stop until you get what you want.

Persistence is crucial when trying to accumulate wealth, yet few people possess the willpower required to turn their desire for money into actual money. Hill writes:

Riches do not respond to wishes. They respond only to definite plans, backed by definite desires, through constant persistence.

The most successful people tend to have dealt with, and overcome, failure. "I've learned that it doesn't matter how many times you failed," Mark Cuban told Smart Business. "You only have to be right once. I tried to sell powdered milk. I was an idiot lots of times, and I learned from them all."

9. Power of the Master Mind: Surround yourself with the best.

The wealthiest people create a "Master Mind," meaning they surround themselves with talented friends and colleagues who share their vision. The alignment of several smart and creative minds is exponentially more powerful than just one, Hill explains:

No individual may have great power without availing himself of the "Master Mind" ...

A group of brains coordinated (or connected) in a spirit of harmony will provide more thought-energy than a single brain, just as a group of electric batteries will provide more energy than a single battery.

This may explain why rich people tend to make friends with other rich people. "Exposure to people who are more successful than you are has the potential to expand your thinking and catapult your income," writes self-made millionaire Steve Siebold. "We become like the people we associate with, and that's why winners are attracted to winners."

10. The Mystery of Sex Transmutation: Choose a compatible partner.

Sexual energy is an incredibly powerful human energy — it creates physical life and develops emotional life, and when it is harnessed and redirected, it can enhance our creativity, passion, enthusiasm, and persistence, all which are crucial in accumulating wealth, Hill says:

Sex desire is the most powerful of human desires. When driven by this desire, men develop keenness of imagination, courage, willpower, persistence, and creative ability unknown to them at other times.

Love, romance, and sex are all emotions capable of driving men to heights of super achievement. When combined, these three emotions may lift one to an altitude of genius.

While this step may feel like a bit of a stretch, having a supportive partner is important to career success. Research also shows that having a conscientious spouse can boost your salary by $4,000 a year.

11. The Subconscious Mind: Master positivity and dismiss negative emotions.

If you truly want to be rich, you have to plant that desire, and then your plan, into your subconscious mind. Hill writes:

The subconscious mind will not remain idle! If you fail to plant desires in your subconscious mind, it will feed upon the thoughts which reach it as the result of your neglect.

Positive and negative emotions cannot occupy the mind at the same time. One or the other must dominate. It is your responsibility to make sure that positive emotions constitute the dominating influence of your mind.

If you want to be successful and grow rich, it is critical that the positive emotions dominate any negative ones that arise, Hill says. He was on to something: Today, research shows that positive, happier people are more likely to perform better at their jobs and are less likely to be unemployed.

12. The Brain: Associate with other smart people and learn from them.

Our brain is a "transmitter and receiver of thought vibrations" — it absorbs thoughts from other individuals surrounding us, making it even more important to associate with intelligent, creative, and positive individuals. Hill writes:

Every human brain is capable of picking up vibrations of thought which are being released by other brains ...

The Creative Imagination is the "receiving set" of the brain, which receives thoughts released by the brains of others.

This principle is simply application of the Master Mind principle. It takes it one step further — rather than just surrounding yourself with people who are smarter and better, use the members of your group to find solutions to problems or brainstorm ideas. Hill calls this "blending of several minds into one," and suggests sitting down with a small group of people and diving deep into the problem at hand.

13. The Sixth Sense: Trust your gut.

The final principle — the "sixth sense" — occurs only after you've mastered the other 12 principles. You'll experience a sort of mind-shift, Hill says: "Through the aid of the sixth sense, you will be warned of impending dangers in time to avoid them, and notified of opportunities in time to embrace them."

While this principle isn't the most straightforward — Hill admits it is generally not attained until age 40 — his basic claim is that your intuition will change. You'll have achieved a level of wisdom that will allow you to start making smart financial and life decisions naturally.

Although it takes a while to master the final step, you can still get a lot out of the other 12 principles, Hill says:

No matter who you are, or what may have been your purpose in reading this book, you can profit by it without understanding the principle described in this chapter. This is especially true if your major purpose is that of accumulation of money or other material things.

The chapter on the sixth sense was included, because the book is designed for the purpose of presenting a complete philosophy by which individuals may unerringly guide themselves in attaining whatever they ask of life.

SEE ALSO: The practice legendary tycoon Andrew Carnegie credits for his riches can be used by anyone

Join the conversation about this story »

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It always amazes me how many B2B sales people, and even their entire companies, ignore their largest and most trusted source of new revenue.

And this happens, especially in tough economic times, when B2B sales people struggle to meet their revenue targets.

And they simply blame the economy for their lack of success in bringing in new revenue.

As CSO Insights (a B2B sales research firm) points out,

In looking for factors that caused this significant drop in performance, three major trends emerge:

1. The Economic Decision Maker Disappeared: The ability of a single person to make a real buying decision on his or her own was replaced by consensus-based buying, where reps needed to get signoffs from multiple stakeholders to close a deal. This is more the norm now.

2. Decision Times Got Longer: Each purchase was reviewed and scrutinized to ensure there was a solid business case for why the purchase needed to be made now versus later.

3. Existing Relationships Became More Valuable: Buyers became more risk adverse and looked to do business with vendors that were already known to them. This is most important.

But the real key is that these vendors have basically ignored their clients for a long time.

There are many ways to grow your current clients, and it does become tougher in a hard economy.

Three great strategies for achieving this are;
• Cross-selling/up-selling,
• Introducing new products, and
• Farming additional opportunities out of existing accounts.

And there is a simple way to do this.

Get an appointment with the main decision maker, and ask him/her three simple questions.
1. Why did you do business with us in the first place?
2. What results did you receive from using our products and services?
3. What areas are you having trouble achieving your goals in right now?

Then go back and figure out a way to help him/her, based on these three question and all of the information listed above.

Get to know your current clients better. Stop ignoring them for more sales. They should be your main source of new revenue.

You don't want more leads. Seriously! Well not more bad leads, anyway.   Your B2B advertising strategy will need to be shaped to attract the right new prospects. There's no point spending money or time chasing the wrong leads.   With digital advertising, you get so much powerful and immediate feedback that you'll get quickly absorbed into the cycle of ideating / creating / testing / measuring / improving. In itself that's a great thing, can be richly rewarding and a whole lot of fun (if you're a marketing geek). But your B2B advertising strategy needs to be sharp. There's simply no point in getting better and better at attracting more and more of the wrong buyer. Your advertising dollar will be wasted and your sales time will likely cost even more so should be even more-jealously guarded. In this week's show, we'll explore how to set your strategy for B2B advertising to attract more of the right type of buyer.

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"Always Be Closing" is a phrase Alec Baldwin's character, Blake, uses in the movie Glengarry Glen Ross. Blake is the epitome of the high-powered, low-empathy, money-driven salesperson and gets what he wants through fear, intimidation, and profanity-laced speeches.

After threatening and terrorizing a group of salesmen ("No women allowed in this boiler room!"), Blake gets to his point – salespeople should "ABC": Always Be Closing.

Here, we'll discuss exactly what ABC means, how effective it is, and explore a more modern alternative.

Table of Contents

What is Always Be Closing?

Is Always Be Closing effective?

Always Be Closing Alternative

Why You Should Always Be Helping

How to Always Be Helping: 5 Strategies

Although closing deals was a major focus for salespeople long before the release of this film, "Always Be Closing" was a catchy hook reps could hold onto. It required persistence, determination, and a willingness to use whatever tactics necessary to close a deal.

But is it the best sales advice for modern reps? Not necessarily.

Is Always Be Closing effective?

This kind of selling may have worked in the 1980s when David Mamet penned the play the movie is based on, but fast-forward to today, and things are very different.

Today's buyers are less susceptible to gimmicks and empty claims. They independently seek out information about products or services without ever speaking to a sales rep. 

The "Always Be Closing" school of thought ignores they buyer entirely and places the salesperson at the center of the sales process, taking a brute-force approach to closing deals. This approach will fall flat for modern buyers.

Research shows that customers are most motivated to make a purchase when they see a sales rep as a trusted adviser. What's more, 61% of buyers say they have a positive sales experience when the sales rep isn't pushy or aggressive.

That’s why taking an "Always Be Closing" approach today would likely scare off your customers before you get a chance to close the deal.

Always Be Closing Alternative

Blake would never give up control of the sales process to a prospect. Yet that’s exactly what a top salesperson today needs to do.

To effectively sell, modern salespeople need to follow a totally different mantra: Always Be Helping.

What is Always Be Helping?

Your job, of course, is still to sell. But abandon any strategies that involve force-feeding prospects a product they don’t want and don’t need. As Dale Carnegie famously said, people don't want to be sold to – they want to feel as if they're buying.

Instead, as your prospect moves through the funnel, create a customer-centric experience and provide resources and guidance as they attempt to solve a complicated business problem. Always Be Helping.

Why You Should Always Be Helping

Seller-focused selling doesn’t play anymore in either B2B or B2C sales processes. The balance of power has been tipped away from the sales rep and toward the buyer. With the transparency and availability of information online, and the ability to tap into third-party reviews, buyers are far savvier than they used to be.

High-pressure selling has stopped working because it treats customers as interchangeable piles of money. But that's not really true. Prospects' situations and needs are as diverse as the people themselves, and while one buyer might be successful with your product, your offering may actually hurt another.

So, while Always Be Helping is simply the right thing to do, it's also just better for your business. Selling to poor-fit customers is a stopgap solution that will cause customer turnover, lost income as clawback penalties, and in the most dramatic cases even shutter a business if churn gets too high.

On a less concrete scale, Always Be Closing tactics also hurt the brand. As soon as your company gains a reputation for having aggressive and selfish salespeople, it'll be much harder to gain customers in the future — even ones you actually could have helped.

This outline lists the five things all sales reps must do in the age of Always Be Helping.

How to Always Be Helping: 5 Strategies

1. Determine if the prospect has a problem you can solve.

If the prospect has a problem completely out of sync with what your company offers or doesn’t need any help for the foreseeable future, get out! They don’t want to talk to you; they don’t need to talk to you, and chances are you don’t want to talk to them.

Why?

Because you can’t help everybody, and you shouldn’t be. Working with bad leads is like throwing money down the toilet. Picking who to help is a significantly better use of your time.

Asking the right questions is a surefire way to gauge if a prospect has a problem you can help them solve, as you’ll clarify their pain points, understand where your offer fits in, also making it easier to create a value proposition when the time comes. 

If you pick correctly, you’ll have no problem making 110% of your quota every month. But spending an equal amount of effort or time on every prospect – no matter how qualified or unqualified they may be – is a surefire way to continually miss the mark. 

2. Understand where your prospect is in the decision making process.

The kinds of conversations you engage in with your prospects should vary significantly depending on what point they’re at in the buyer’s journey — whether they’re in the awareness, consideration, or decision stage.

• Awareness Stage: Your prospect knows they have a problem they want to solve but hasn't decided upon a solution or done vendor research. Only 19% of buyers want to connect with a salesperson during this stage, so marketers control lead nurturing. If you reach out to a prospect in this stage, use an extremely light touch or pass them back to marketing.
• Consideration Stage: Your prospect is aware of their problem and is committed to spending time and effort to develop a potential solution. Potential buyers will sniff around the edges of a resolution but won’t have defined how much of a material commitment they’re willing to make. The desire to speak to a salesperson increases to 60% during this stage, so it’s crucial to make contact. 
• Decision Stage: Your prospect has thoroughly researched their problem and potential solutions. They might not have a specific vendor in mind yet, but if your company’s a big player, they’ve probably at least come across your resources. This is also the point where BANT (budget, authority, needs, and timeline) gets defined.

To determine where your leads are at in their journey, you can do things like track their interaction history with your business, like if they’ve opened a sales email or viewed your pricing page multiple times. 

When you know where they stand, you can create a personalized sales process that speaks to their exact position. And, when you personalize, you’re championing Always Be Helping by prioritizing the customer and creating an experience based on their needs.

3. Engage with key decision-makers.

Once you’ve determined the prospect is a qualified lead and you know your product is the best fit, you want to engage with key stakeholders, like gatekeepers, influencers, or decision-makers. 

If you find you begin the process not speaking to a final decision maker, you don’t need to be too worried. By engaging with all the appropriate people, you can verify your solution is the right one, and you can better understand the perspectives of those involved in each step of the process, from purchase to adoption.

In addition, the information you’ve gathered in your initial research and later conversations will help you prepare for conversations with the decision-maker so you can present a value proposition that is tailored, educational, and convincing.

4. Tailor your process to make it easy for the customer to buy.

Always Be Helping means giving up control of the buying process. It does not, however, mean that salespeople must let prospects drive the bus. Strike a balance between how your prospect wants the process to play out and using your expertise to guide them in the right direction.

Your value in the sales process is that you, unlike your prospect, have successfully sold this product many times before. They don't know how to get internal buy-in or structure a process that will get them the solution they need.

But you do.

Work with your prospect to understand their decision-making process and the perspectives of all relevant stakeholders, and then use that information to sell your product successfully.

5. Focus on educating.

Focus on educating your prospects on the viable solutions to the problem you have previously identified. By taking a consultative approach, you can cultivate meaningful relationships with your buyers by building trust, having genuine conversations, and making sure your prospect feels heard throughout the process. 

Once you have built a solid foundation of trust with your buyers, you are in a stronger position to educate them on the viable solutions to their problem (likely your product) meaningfully.

To ensure you’re always educating, prioritize sharing content that speaks to each of the unique stages that a buyer may be in when you speak to them. 

• When prospects are in the awareness stage, they’re looking for answers, so you can share educational Ebooks or videos that answer the questions they have. 
• When prospects are in the consideration stage, they may do heavy research into your business to assess whether you’ll meet their needs. You can share case studies about other customers who have been successful in helping them visualize what could be to come if they do business with you.
• When prospects are in the purchase stage, they’re making a final decision. To help them decide, you can offer incentives like free trials or coupons.

Ultimately, the Always Be Helping salesperson has to establish trust and confidence before they can close the deal. Modern salespeople help their prospects connect the disparate dots to form a coherent solution. The era of the intimidating "always be closing" salesperson is officially over – and that’s a very good thing.

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

 

To be or not to be on Facebook is not the question anymore. With social media marketing spreading like a wildfire, it is impossible and potentially damaging for your business to stay away from Facebook. Most business owners decide to open up a Facebook account, and create a Facebook page, without being entirely aware of the do’s and don’ts and about how to get the most out of their Facebook pages.

To be able to capture your costumer’s attention, you will need to put together a decent Facebook page, which can garner a lot of genuine engagement. Of course, it will involve the application of a few simple marketing strategies, along with a pinch of creativity.

Creating your page

The first rule of setting up a Facebook page for your business is to not create a page with a fake Facebook account. You might be tempted to create the page under a dummy account to prevent any accidents like posting content meant for your personal profile, on your business page or to ensure that your employees don’t have easy access to your personal account. But instead of having a page linked to a fake account, you can train your employees to publish meaningful content and to think twice before they hit post.

Creative profile and cover photo

Also important, is to have an engaging profile and cover photo. You might love your pets, but they definitely don’t belong on your profile or cover photo. The very first thing that visitors to your page will notice is your cover photo. So, naturally, your cover photo needs to be attractive. For example, Sprite nailed it with their cover and profile photo on their Facebook page.

The image of the fizzy drink shooting out of the bottle, will definitely want to make you grab a bottle yourself.

Create and post good content

Other than images, you want to have great content on your Facebook page. Many businesses make the mistake of creating a page, and then abandoning it. For your consumers to visit your page and to keep visiting, you need to hook them on to the content that you publish. Think about the your target demographic, their hobbies, their interests, and create content that they will find appealing.

If you’re not great with words, and can’t seem to find the time to look for suitable content, you can always take some help from a social media management tool that can discover content and publish it to your pages.

Market your Facebook page

After you have created a brand new business page, you are ready to roll it out to the world. The process doesn’t just stop at creating the page. You will also have to promote your newly created page using an existing business network. Send out an email to your clients/consumers to inform them of the new addition and ask them to “Like” your Facebook page. By asking them to “Like” your page, you are automatically getting exposure on their newsfeed, and every time you post something new, your consumers will get direct notifications.

Focusing on social media marketing, instead of just social media can really help you get noticed. Promote your business page on the rest of your social media pages as well. Tweet a link to your page, add your page URL to your LinkedIn profile, or put the link in the description box of any YouTube videos that you might have uploaded. If you run a blog, you can even add a link to your Facebook page on your blog.

Promote upcoming events and offers

You can drive a lot of traffic to your website, or your Facebook page by posting details about any upcoming events, sales or offers. Many brands, like to give their audiences a little something to keep them coming back to the brand’s Facebook pages. Not just brands, but also film franchises and production companies occasionally post teasers of upcoming movies or television episodes to create a buzz around it. The makers of Game of Thrones posted a small glimpse of the season finale, which had fans raving about the last episode.

Some brands even run contests or have giveaways on their Facebook pages to promote their product. This leads to the target audience returning every day to check for more contests and giveaways – giving you the kind of engagement you need.

Engage in offline marketing

While online is the way to go, a little bit of offline marketing never hurt anybody. Tell your family and friends about your business page, and ask them to spread the message to people in their circles. You can also get the link to your Facebook page printed on your business cards so that people you give your cards to, will be aware of your business page. If you are giving presentations at a conference, or speaking at a seminar, be sure to include a link to your page on the last slide of your presentation, and ask people in attendance to visit your page.

Your Facebook business page can lead to many conversions, but it is not going to help you get a lot of engagement, if people don’t know about it. So, start creating and start marketing!

Image Credit: Firm Bee via Pixabay

First impressions matter. And, for many online visitors, a landing page is the first impression or interaction they’ll have with your business.

Visitors will typically arrive at a landing page from Google AdWords, social media, display advertising, or as part of a product launch campaign – the goal being that visitors to the page complete a desired action like sign up or submit their email. Optimizing landing pages on your website enhances the user experience and is a much more effective, ROI-friendly way to drive conversions than by just throwing more traffic at the page.

One of the most high-impact ways to boost top-of-the-funnel conversions is through A/B testing and therefore optimizing your landing pages. Landing page optimization is a method of improving your landing page design to increase engagement, generate more leads, and produce more desired actions. Landing pages are lucrative places to focus your optimization efforts because they are the hub of lead generation efforts for your business, and quite often, they’re templatized. Uncovering a win on one landing page could lead to exponential wins on similar landing pages as well.

Here are some key ingredients to help you build a well-optimized, high converting landing page.

The 3 Ingredients for a High Converting Landing Page

1. Congruence and context – A successful landing page matches the expectation and need of the visitor based on their previous interaction with your business, whether they clicked through an ad, social media, or other initial channel.
2. Trust and value – Through compelling copy and a clear value proposition, the landing page clearly articulates the value of what is being offered to a visitor and establishes credibility for your business.
3. Ease and simplicity – The design of your landing page limits the number of actions a visitor has to take on the page, making it incredibly easy for them to convert.

These ingredients are the foundation of any successful landing page and can be applied directly to the design, user experience, and content of each page you build. Let’s take a look at what that looks like in practice, and how testing and optimization can help you get there.

How Add These Ingredients to Your Own Landing Pages

1. Congruence and context

A successful landing page uses congruence and context to keep users focused and interested in whatever your page has to offer. Congruence is the concept of ensuring that each element supports your core value propositions. Context reminds visitors why they landed on the page in the first place. Matching their expectation is key.

Start with a clear headline

Your landing page’s headline will likely be the first thing a visitor notices once they arrive, so make sure it’s clear, consistent, and emphasizes your value proposition, like Apple’s product landing page for the Apple Watch. The headline makes their message very clear: “The Watch is here.”

A few ways to optimize your headline:

• Experiment with making your headline as specific as possible. Chances are, when users know what they’re going to get, they’ll be more likely to convert.
• Test the tone you take with your headline messaging. Try emphasizing benefits versus loss versus a question to visitors to see which drives more conversions.

Provide a consistent experience

Your landing page should mirror the message and design of whatever channel (ad, social, etc.) users clicked through to arrive there. Consistency reminds users why they landed on the page in the first place and provides a more seamless, high converting experience.

Our most successful landing page test was a three-word change that made our Pay Per Click landing page symmetric with our SEM ads – this experiment saved Optimizely hundreds of thousands of dollars and lead to a 39% increase in sales leads.

Stay focused with the “1-1-1 Rule”

In most cases, you’ll want to follow the “1-1-1 Rule”: one value proposition, one clear message, and one CTA for each landing page you build. Trying to pack too much into your landing page will only serve to distract users from the goal at hand: converting.

2. Trust and value

Consider the top questions users may have and try to answer these questions upfront through clear, compelling copy on the landing page.

Emphasize what you have to offer

“What’s in it for me?” will likely be the first questions visitors have upon arriving on your landing page. That’s why it’s critical to make it it easy for them to understand the value and benefit your business has to offer – whether that’s a specific product, piece of content, cat meme, or other offering. Understand what you have to offer and make sure to emphasize that value proposition clearly in your form.

Here’s how trust and value work:

Example 1: Landing page lacking a value prop:

“Register for our monthly newsletter now!”

Example 2: Landing page with a strong, clear value prop:

Register for our newsletter! Each month, you’ll receive:

• The latest product and feature updates
• Case studies from industry leaders
• Exclusive, VIP invitations to upcoming events in your city
• Tons of cat memes!!!

Example 1 provides very little information and does nothing to show visitors the value the newsletter will provide. On the other hand, Example 2 has a clear, strong value proposition. It details how often readers will receive the newsletter (monthly) and what benefits a subscriber will receive (product updates, case studies, event invitations, and cat memes.)

A few ways to optimize your value prop:

• Different benefits will resonate with different audiences. Test out different messages (you can even segment them by audience) to see what drives more conversions on your page.
• Try adding the value prop to the header or title of the page to see how it impacts conversions.

Prove that your brand is trusted

Visitors are more likely to convert if they know other people or brands, especially those whom they admire, have done the same. Place emphasis on this by using social proof on your landing pages or any opt-in form on your site.

Social proof can come in many shapes and sizes. Here’s an example from Intercom on their blog subscribe opt-in form.

Ask your customers or industry influencers for a quote about why they use your product. Some brands opt to use customer logos as a form of social proof, a strategy that was hugely successful for comScore, increasing leads generated by 68%. Many successful landing pages include the number of social followers or “Likes”, or the total number of subscribers to an email list as social proof as well.

Ideas for optimizing social proof include:

• Experiment with adding customer logos to your landing page.
• Try showing the number of Facebook followers or “Likes” your brand has.
• Add a quote or brief testimonial to see if it improves landing pages conversions.

3. Easy to convert

The design and user flow of your landing page should make it insanely easy for users to convert in seconds. Here are a few ways you can achieve that.

Leverage your CTA

Once you catch a user’s attention, the CTA on your landing page is the most powerful way to nail that conversion. Make your CTA as eye-catching as possible, like this big, colorful example from Marvel App.

Your CTA copy can also have a tremendous impact on sign-ups – for Code.org that translated into 12 MILLION more sign-ups. Depending on the audience, different messages might resonate more strongly, which is where testing and optimization can come into play. For instance, try adding your value prop into the CTA message (“Sign-up now!” vs. “Sign-up for daily deals!”).

Some test ideas to try on your form CTA include:

• Experiment with different designs to make the CTA button pop.
• Optimize for button proximity. Try making the CTA button as close to the form field as possible, so a reader’s eye is drawn naturally to it as a next step.
• Experiment with your CTA copy.
• Check out more ideas for optimizing your CTA button in this post.

Optimize your lead generation form

The goal of many landing pages is to collect visitors’ information using a lead generation form.

Prominence, design, and and ease-of-use are all extremely important elements of a successful landing page lead generation form. The ease at which readers can locate the form and input their information plays huge role in garnering subscriptions and sign-ups.

Take this example from Slack. They do a great job in making the lead generation form as prominent and easy to use as possible. It was the first thing that caught my eye when landing on the page, and I only needed to complete two simple form fields to get going.

Focus on making each element of your form as eye-catching as possible… and keep it simple. Your team may want to collect as much information as possible, but since information gathering comes at a cost, it may not be worth it. Take Expedia as an example: The company found that removing just one form field (an address confirmation field) from their purchase form increased annual profit by $12 million dollars.

A few ways to optimize your lead generation form include:

• Experiment with different imagery. Adding images (in particular, those of people) will help evoke an emotional response from users and make them more likely to pay attention to that area of the page.
• Try increasing the size of your form fields. Oftentimes, larger form fields are more likely to catch a reader’s eye.
• Keep it simple. Experiment with removing all unnecessary form fields to increase your overall completion rate. You can always follow-up with engaged users to progressively build on the information you already have.
• To collect accurate information, make sure visitors know with certainty what information you’re asking them to submit. Experiment with autocomplete options or different labels for each form field.

Conclusion

Landing page optimization is one of the most powerful ways to increase leads, subscriptions, and sign-ups, and small changes can have an incredible impact. The ingredients outlined in this post provide a great starting point. You can easily apply them to your current landing pages or create a completely new form with them in mind. Of course, what works for one (or even most) landing pages won’t always be the best option for yours – and there’s always room for improvement. A/B test and optimize each of these elements to maximize conversions from your unique audience.

Have more tips or suggestions that have helped you improve the performance of your landing pages? Share them in the comments!

Email marketing, as most of us know, is a very powerful and economical strategy for reaching our most active potential and/or existing customers. It doesn’t just boost our direct sales, but our referrals and credibility as well. However, while initiating your email campaign, you’ll inevitably run into spam filter issues. According to a study, you can expect 10-20% of your emails to become mixed up in cyberspace, usually because of overzealous filters. You can’t afford to invest time, energy and cash making email campaigns just to have them arrive in the spam filter.

Spam filters are regularly neglected with their underestimated projects that could conceivably make us happier and more profitable. They keep our inboxes clean and we scarcely ever acknowledge them. But like all other humanly designed things, spam filters are not perfect. The reason we love them as a subscriber is the same reason we hate them as senders; they are exceptionally protective of the inbox. It’s painful to see our hard work end up in the spam folder.

How Spam Filters Work?

Spam filters recognize spam based on a long list of criteria, but usually they consider:

• Reputation of the IP address and sender domain
• Relationship with subscriber
• Quality and safety of links in email
• Quality of email subject line, teaser, and content
• Inclusion of text version of email
• Ratio of images to text and links to text
• Presence or absence of images

This isn’t even close to a comprehensive list of reasons that spam filters consider, but these are likely the most important.

How to Avoid Spam Filters?

1. Avoid Spam Trigger Words and Phishing Phrases

Disappointingly, there is no complete list of spam trigger words. Also, it is not usually the case that your email will face the spam filter simply by using a particular trigger word.

The key thing to remember is that a spam filter is trying to uproot commercial promotions and advertisements. So, for the most part, words that are common in such emails must be avoided or used sparingly.

Best Practices for Email Marketing in 2015

2. Break Large Lists Down

There are plenty of good reasons to break down large email lists into smaller ones. However, one of the best reasons is that by doing this, there won’t be as many spam complaints when you send your emails. Unfortunately, it is sometimes unavoidable because even your loyal subscribers may mark you as spam.

By dividing up your large lists into smaller portions, the email provider (Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, etc.) will see less spam complaints packaged together at one time.

3. Email Early

While gathering email addresses for your subscriber list, don’t wait until you have 1000 subscribers to send out your first campaign. Sending emails to a large number of addresses will trigger spam filters. While you are in the process of organizing your list, start sending emails to a small group first.

4. Test Your Email

Before sending the message to your entire list, send a test message to each of the big email providers (Hotmail, Yahoo, MSN, Gmail, AOL and one generic address that is seen as an Outlook customer). Send the test email using exactly the same server and data that you’ll use with your main list.

If most of your messages for your test email are going to a junk folder, then it means you’ll get the same result for your regular email list. The pre-send test shows that you can try various titles and email content in your attempt to figure out what sent you to spam.

5. Watch Your Text to Image Ratio

People will sometimes try to circumvent spam by using pictures to share their offer because spam filters can’t read what is in the picture. However, spam filters look distrustfully upon emails that contain almost no content but only a large picture so be sure to balance your text to image ratio.

Even if you are following all of these things correctly, your emails may still wind up in the junk folder. Email spam filter criteria changes every day and can be affected by things that are beyond your control. On the other hand, if you habitually send good email that your customers really want to see, more than likely you’ll succeed and get into their inbox.

Following a vow he made last week that Turkey "will never allow the establishment of a new state on our southern frontier in the north of Syria," Turkish president Recep Erdogan has been suggesting military intervention in northern Syria to curb growing Kurdish autonomy. 

But between Erdogan's poor election standing, the threat of unrest in Turkish Kurdistan, and the Turkish military's reported reluctance to be drawn into the Syrian quagmire, it is unlikely the nation will launch a military incursion along Syria's northern border anytime soon. 

"This is not the first time that Turkey has threatened to intervene since the Syrian civil war has begun, and in the past the bluster has been either an attempt to get NATO more involved or a domestic political gambit," Michael Koplow, program director of the Israel Institute and an analyst of Middle Eastern politics, told Business Insider.

"Ultimately I think the far more likely scenario is looser rules of engagement for Turkish soldiers manning the Syrian border, and perhaps airstrikes, but no ground troops," Koplow added.

Turkey has been heretofore reluctant to join the fighting on its border. Last year, Ankara watched a failed ISIS campaign to take the Syrian border city of Kobani after it was met with US airstrikes and fierce resistance from the Kurdish YPG militia.  

Last week ISIS militants, disguised as YPG militiamen, re-invaded Kobani, killing over 200 civilians in just over 48 hours. The militants were eventually driven out by Kurdish forces, who later accused Turkey of allowing at least one ISIS bomber to cross freely into Kobani.

It remains unclear where the militants came from, and this is not the first time Turkey has been accused of letting ISIS thrive along its border.

Koplow noted that all evidence so far suggests that the fighters who overran Kobani last week did not come in from Turkey.

"But given the huge distrust of Ankara among Kurds — and Turkey’s obvious distress at the gains made by the [Syrian Kurdish party] PYD — the perception matters more than the truth at this point," he added.

The PYD, for its part, has denied that it is trying to establish an autonomous state along the border. Nevertheless, following the fall of Syrian border city Tal Abyad to the Kurds in May, a pro-government newspaper declared the Kurdish PYD to be "more dangerous than ISIS."

Still, Erdogan currently lacks both the political and the popular support to wage a military incursion into northern Syria. 

"There are a number of serious obstacles to Turkey putting boots on the ground in Syria," Koplow noted, including "the fact that it will cause huge upheaval in southeastern Turkey if the operations are perceived to be aimed at tamping down Kurdish sovereignty in Syria" and the "unpopularity of the government’s Syria policy among Turks in general."

Erdogan may also lack support from his own military: Generals have reportedly expressed reservations about getting drawn into the conflict for fear of retaliation attacks from both ISIS and Kurds inside Turkey, the Daily Beast reported.

They are also reluctant to take orders from a government that is "basically deposed," an anonymous security source told Al-Monitor in Ankara. Erdogan's governing Justice Development Party lost its parliamentary majority during elections in June.

“This risk really worries the military," the source said. "Erdogan and the AKP [his political party], with their massive media power, could engineer a major perception of victory and use that to go for early elections."

“Such an operation requires clear operational orders, a clear strategic goal, clear rules of engagement, clear definitions of friend and foe and a well-drawn-out calendar," another source told Al-Monitor. "At the moment all these are very unclear, even obscure. Under such uncertainty, how can you issue operational and tactical orders to your units?”

Establishing a Turkish military presence within Syria without a clear strategic goal would mean, in some areas, the Turkish Army “fighting ISIS street to street," Aaron Stein, an expert on Turkey and an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, told the New York Times. 

“The rhetoric is getting overheated,” Stein said. "I think the possibility of a ground invasion is remote."

SEE ALSO: Why Turkey would invade northern Syria

Join the conversation about this story »

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Remember the Three Basic Stages of the Buyer’s Journey: Awareness, Consideration, and Evaluation…

We all know that content marketers are focused on creating good, quality content that resonates with their audience. According to recent content marketing research, however, 62% of marketers also struggle with creating content that is useful for nurture programs within the buyer’s journey. But what really is the buyer’s journey? I’ve seen a number of ways to dissect the “buyers journey,” but what I want to do is simplify it down to a consumable format that you can easily remember and reference when creating or planning your content programs.

Sometimes, to get your head wrapped around which stage you need to align to, it’s useful to have a creative way to think about each of the audiences and the needs – like the mnemonic device for planets “My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pickles” (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto). Below, I’ve built a framework that makes it easy to remember each stage of the buyer’s journey, and what to think about when you’re creating content.

I call it the “Aw, Hmm, Yes!”

Awareness Stage: AWWW! It Hurts! (Pain)

Prospects don’t realize they have an issue, or they have an issue, but have no idea where to begin in addressing it.

Marketer/Creator: You need to be hyper aware of the challenges that these folks come across, what creates pain for them, and / or the roadblocks they encounter. Of course, you may also need to help your buyers help themselves by bringing to light the problems they may not know about yet, but which you know they may have from your experience.

Successful Content at this Stage: Makes your buyers realize they have a problem, identify the pain, and begin to feel a compulsion to fix it.

Consideration Stage: Hmmm (Pain vs Gain)

Prospects realize they have an issue, and need to decide which direction to head – which option to choose and how they make that choice.

Marketer/Creator: You need to begin to answer the critical questions your buyers are having as they start to consider a solution to their problem. Your buyers want to know what are their options, what are the available solutions, how much effort does it take to make that change, etc. Your goal is to push the prospect in the direction you think is right.

Successful Content at this Stage: Helps your buyers come to a decision on where to go next, and is starting to reinforce that decision.

Evaluation Stage: Yes! (Gain)

Prospects have made the decision, but they need certainty – they often want to avoid the dreaded buyer’s remorse as well. They need reinforcement of the decision they have already made that it’s correct and that they need to charge in the decided direction. (Hopefully, it’s in the direction you’ve guided them towards!)

Marketers / Creators: You want to reinforce the Gain — think case studies, or content that says “here’s the benefits,” “here’s the immediate results,” “here’s others who have done it successfully,” etc.

Successful Content at this Stage: Guides your prospects through to the end of their buyer’s journey — helping them to make a well-informed and confident decision. It must also set the stage for a new journey, the customer’s journey, so that your buyers are set up to succeed from the start.

For more information on the buyer’s journey and the customer’s journey, check out my latest research with my colleague, Omer Minkara: The CMO Dilemma: Bridging the Gap Between Love and Money (May, 2015).