Rnordman

A killer marketing plan could have you swimming in a pot of gold at the end of a beautiful rainbow. But knowing how to get started can be a challenge for small business owners, especially since there is always so much other work to do. Don’t let marketing come second or even third on the to-do list because it could be just the thing that helps you go from breaking even to breaking records.

Here is an easy step-by-step guide to tackling your marketing plan:

1. Define your business.
You have a product or service, and you have the elevator pitch down. While investors might grasp the concept, you might not have given as much thought to your customers. The next step is showing your customers the value of your product or service. How is this going to help them? How will it improve their life?

Now is the time to think beyond the practicality of what you’re offering. Now is the time for having vision. You need to find your company’s voice and create a full-fledged brand. Come up with a motto or philosophy that describes your culture both for potential employees and customers. Use that as a guiding force for everything you do moving forward.

2. Determine your target market.
Ok, I know you’ve perfected a product or service that customers absolutely need. But the most successful businesses determine their niche market and cater to those customers first. Narrowing your customer base makes marketing more manageable and also helps you stay tuned to their needs, so you can evolve accordingly.

3. Conduct competitive analysis
Every business has competition. Your job is to find out which companies are your biggest competitors and then determine what they’re doing right and what they’re doing wrong. Learn from both. Most importantly, you need to figure out what makes you different from them. You’ll have to point out what makes you unique (and therefore better) than your competitors as you create campaigns and have a dialogue with consumers.

4. Write a marketing plan.
After you have all these other pieces to the puzzle in place, write down your intentions for marketing. Be specific. For example, spell out which social media outlets are right for your business and what you anticipate your cover photos to be across these sites. Include your final logo and decide where you are going to advertise and what the campaigns will be like. Write down any plans related to promoting the business.

Finally, present your strategy to partners or other senior executives. Hash out the details, and tweak it according to recommendations. Of course, you get the final say but defer to the expertise of your colleagues when appropriate. Then, take action and follow through on the vision.

In the end, businesses that take the time to navel gaze a bit and truly set themselves apart from competitors will have an edge over others when it comes to creating a marketing plan. Having an in-depth understanding of what you are as a brand will help you share your story with others and convince consumers to buy whatever you’re selling.

How did you determine your marketing plan? Any advice for others? Leave your comments below.

My colleagues and I have been in the tech marketing space for well over a decade. Back in the old days it was simple (ish). We used direct input from our customers to shape different kinds of online communities, build social programs, facilitate face-to-face meet-ups and run advocate groups for various purposes. Our goals were to extend customer support, capture ideas and help our IT Pros make the most out of our products. Today, we are tasked with selling and communicating the value of IoT, Big Data, Mobility and BYOD, XaaS, VDI, Software Defined (fill in the blank), Hyper-Converged….I could go on. “IT Trends” have become a noisy space that is understood by a few.

It’s complicated. Emerging technologies and new categories have put us in a position of communicating a vision as the broader context for selling hardware, software or services. On the consumer side, it is much simpler. The Apple Watch is cool and people want it just because. IT Decision-Makers, on the other hand, are some of most skeptical people on the planet and one of the hardest sells of all.

In time, however, just like Cloud adoption, the above technologies will likely be nearing mainstream or at least on the IT priority list for the near future. But, for those of us who don’t have the luxury of time in a highly competitive industry, I give you three philosophies to adopt based on our experiences.

Beware of the Balderdash Effect

There is an old game called Balderdash that is about guessing the correct meaning of an obscure or unknown word among a bunch of fake definitions supplied by the other players. How is this relevant? Conduct a mini experiment. Do some quick online searches on any of the above terms. How many different flavors of definitions for each of these technologies surface? Ironically, some vendors contribute to the confusion by defining the technology based on the features and benefits of their own solution.

IT Decision-Makers have to spend an enormous amount of time wading through the hype and trying to ascertain what things really mean. It is very difficult to evaluate the technology AND compare competitive options. This can become a potential barrier to adoption based on uncertainty (and maybe even fear) on the part of your prospective customers. What and who are they to believe?

Buzzwords Sting

Source: Tom Fishburne

In an effort to up-level the conversation our industry (like many others) has slipped into this “jargon-speak” and vendors start to sound the same. Below is an example of a real statement by a large tech company (that will remain nameless) followed by my version with the literal translation of the buzzwords in bold used.

“Cloud is at the nexus of dramatic innovation with mobile as the activation point, data analysis driving differentiation and security as the enabler.”

So if we replace the bolded words with their literal definitions we get this:

Cloud is at the central place of sudden and striking new ideas with Mobile as the hastening point, data analysis driving the product that stands out among the competition and security as the thing that makes it possible.

IT Decision-Makers have a low tolerance for marketing speak and just want the facts and the language above impacts credibility. Here is a nice roundup of current messaging out there today and some terms to use with care or avoid altogether.

Remember to Flaunt your Bhatt

Source: YouTube

One of my favorite advertisements of all time was Intel’s co-inventor of the USB, Ajaz Bhatt. He struts through the Intel campus with Beatle-like fanfare. It has been shared and viewed on YouTube so many times it can’t be quantified.

The point is this. The brains behind your “innovations” need to be front and center. These are the real rock stars of IT and should be talking and demonstrating what’s possible. Attend any event or trade show and geeks flock to them like groupies. Fold this tactic into your broader marketing efforts and showcase them on multiple channels. Behind the scenes stories and conversations hold so much more value and make things more real than a piece of collateral. It will also help put some excitement behind what’s possible.

Keeping these philosophies in mind will help you help your customers on their journey towards new technologies. I’ll leave you with a simple mantra: be clear, be real and be awesome.

For years, digital marketers have been shackled to an increasingly outdated technology known as cookies, which are still used to measure and target digital ads.

Cookies — bits of code dropped into web browsers — are known to generate poor approximations of how many people view a digital ad, inaccurate estimates of how many times any given individual sees an ad, not to mention unreliable measures of clicks and sales. Worst of all, cookies are a non-starter within mobile apps. 

In an in-depth explainer and report from BI Intelligence, we dive into how Facebook-owned Atlas aims to take digital marketing beyond the cookie. Atlas is notable for how it leverages anonymous Facebook identity data to correct cookies' inaccuracies and shine a light into what's happening within the cookie-less world of mobile apps. In addition, Atlas' ambition is to be able to connect offline purchases and conversions to digital ads shown across mobile and the web.

Access The Full Report By Signing Up For A Full-Access Trial »

Here are a few of the report's main takeaways: 

• Facebook's Atlas is an ad server that also allows ad buyers to measure, target, and optimize digital and mobile ads across digital (i.e., not just on Facebook). Atlas operates separately from Facebook, does not access personal information from the social network or share marketing data with Facebook. 
• Atlas is pitching itself primarily based on the claim that it can go far beyond cookie-based measurement to more clearly establish the ROI of digital ads, particularly when mobile is involved. Taking measurement beyond the cookie means marketers can focus on metrics beyond the last click, and observe the multi-device process that often leads in purchasing online or offline. 
• Atlas' ambition is also to be able to connect offline purchases to digital ads shown across mobile and the web. To do so, it must have access to advertisers' customer data or consumer data from third-party data vendors. 
• Atlas has a particularly strong advantage when it comes to measuring mobile ads. Cookies don't work in mobile apps, so many marketers are flying blind when it comes to in-app ads. Atlas matches device-ID data with anonymized identity data of the user that accesses Facebook on the same device. 
• It's important to remember that Atlas works with ad buyers, not ad sellers. Some major brands and agencies are already using or at least testing Atlas. 
• Despite some clear advantages, Atlas has some crucial limitations, which are spelled out in the report. The principal one is that it will be very difficult for Facebook to wean the digital-media ecosystem off its reliance on Google's DoubleClick platform, which is so well-entrenched.  

In full, the 22-page report: 

• Explains how Atlas plans to take digital advertising beyond cookies, and the advantages this entails
• Lists the limitations and barriers faced by Atlas in the context of the ad-server space
• Discusses how a few agencies and brands have moved tentatively to adopt Atlas as their ad server
• Includes 8 charts and 3 explainer slides on how ad serving works, how Atlas measures mobile ads, and how Atlas measures ads within browsers
• Analyzes the difference between ad serving and measurement and how Atlas advances each function
• Delves into market-share numbers for ad servers in the digital-ad industry

To access the full report from BI Intelligence, sign up for a 14-day full-access trial here. Full-access members also gain access to new in-depth reports, hundreds of charts, as well as daily newsletters on the digital industry. 

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Want to be hired? Want to sway a jury? Want more productive employees? Want to win at work? Want to win in life? Then, it's simple: stop being such a jerk!

It turns out a new study from Harvard Business Review says that insensitive and abrasive communication is what drags down executives and prevents effective leadership.

HBR polled 1,000 U.S. employees and found that a great many reported their bosses lacked some basic communication skills, which decreased their effectiveness on the job:

Not recognizing employee achievements: 63%

Not giving clear directions: 57%

Not having time to meet with employees: 52%

Refusing to talk to subordinates: 51%

Taking credit for others’ ideas: 47%

Not offering constructive criticism: 39%

Not knowing employees’ names: 36%

Refusing to talk to people on the phone/in person: 34%

Not asking about employees’ lives outside of work: 23%

Really? It takes a survey to figure out that insensitive and abrasive communication is what holds people back? I've been preaching this for years! I've written about how to recognize others' contributions at work. I've written about delivering feedback. I've written about the importance of names. And on and on.

I’m a communications expert because the most important aspect of success in business and in personal life is positive, effective communication with others. It is particularly striking that more than half the bosses were perceived to be guilty of the first four communication failures. Many managers out there still need to hear my message.

I'm not convinced people don't already know what they should do. However, I believe that many people just feel they don't have "time for it." In fact, I recently read a New York Times article that makes a similiar point. And the situation seems to have been getting worse over the past couple decades.

Why? Work stress has increased. Stress makes people feel rushed. Because they feel rushed, they are less civil, which decreases the productivity of employees, which further increases stress, and so on. Several studies referenced in the article indicate that simple rudeness can not only make people sick, it can dramatically decrease their ability to think and perform.

The bottom line is this: Just like eating healthy and exercising, yes, civility takes time and effort, but the results are worth it in the long run. By paying attention and practicing basic social skills, it turns out we end up multiplying our time and our results.

SEE ALSO: It's incredible that cancer isn't more common

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Learning a second language is great for traveling and getting a better paying job, but it can also make your brain healthier.

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TORONTO – North American stock markets look poised to open lower on Monday as capital controls took effect in Greece where concerns escalate that the country could be headed for a debt default.

The uncertainty weighed heavy across the globe, with Asian and European markets lower. Greece’s market remained closed for the week.

The Canadian dollar is down 0.26 of a U.S. cent to 80.94 cents.

Wall Street was poised for a lower opening, with Dow futures and the broader S&P 500 futures down 1.2 per cent.

In commodities, the crude contract was down $1.24 at US$58.39 a barrel and the August gold contract rose $4 to US$1,177.20 an ounce.

The S&P/TSX composite index closed Friday at 14,808.09, after falling 89.41 points.

The post Worries about Greece’s debt problems likely to hit North American markets appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

Greece is a total mess right now, and the heightened uncertainty surrounding its ability to avoid default and remain a member of the euro has markets a bit freaked out.

But should traders and investors really be that surprised by what's going on right now?

Indeed, we've repeatedly heard people say things like "Greece doesn't have the money to make that debt payment," or "Once again, they're playing chicken in Europe," or "There's no way Greece leaves the euro."  We've heard it for years, and we're going to continue hearing it.

But the market's violent sell-off isn't about what we knew and what we didn't know.  It's about complacency, and what happens when investors and traders are caught a little off guard because they bet all their chips on what appeared to be a high-probability, low-risk event.

You see, everyone from professional traders to the executives of big companies have learned to ignore the Greece story and assume things will just work itself out. This, as they suffered from fatigue of all things Greek, or "Gretigue."  Everyone took comfort in the idea that, once again, Greece and its creditors would cobble together a last minute deal to avoid a default.

Unfortunately, the low-probability adverse scenario is now increasing in probability.

"It is hard to put a probability on it, but it is fair to say that the market was pricing a high probability, say 80-90% of a deal being around the corner," Nomura's Jens Nordvig said as he discussed last week's subdued market activity. "Against this background, we clearly have a negative outcome on our hands."

Two week's ago, JP Morgan's Jan Loeys discussed market complacency in the context of the unfolding Greek crisis. Here's Loeys (emphasis added):

"We find that there are two very different views on this among investors, both using the recent calmness of markets as evidence. The first view, prevalent in Europe, is that everyone knows that Greek exit is a lose-lose situation for both sides and that the current standoff is simply a normal negotiation stance, if not a game of chicken, where somebody will swerve away from a collision at the last moment. That is, the market is calm because the risk of an accident is low. The alternative view, more prevalent outside Europe, is that everyone knows that the Greek-Europe marriage is doomed by a mutual lack of appreciation for each side’s views and needs, which will lead to a divorce, which hurts Greece badly, hurts the Euro area slightly, but has little impact on world markets, beyond a week of volatility. Hence, markets are calm either because nobody expects a Greek exit, or because it will have little impact on world economies and markets. This analyst is biased to the second interpretation. But some investors will surely be dismayed by a Greek exit and will consider changing their allocations."

"Changing their allocations" is another way of saying dump risky assets and move into safer assets, a phenomenon we're witnessing today.

"Someone once told me 'it's priced in,'" BTIG's Dan Greenhaus said sarcastically.

Right.

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NOW WATCH: Forget the Apple Watch — here's the new watch everyone on Wall Street wants

The pace of innovation in marketing technology over the past decade has been nothing short of breathtaking. In the B2B marketing space, one of the hot new technologies is predictive lead scoring. There’s no doubt that predictive lead scoring is still in its infancy, but it’s beginning to gain some traction in the market. Last fall, SiriusDecisions published a report that provides valuable perspectives on the current state of the predictive lead scoring market. According to SiriusDecisions:

• Fewer than 500 B2B companies are currently using predictive lead scoring. But. . .
• The market is growing rapidly. In 2014, there were nearly 14 times more B2B companies using predictive lead scoring than there were in early 2011.
• 78% of the companies using predictive lead scoring are in the high tech industry.
• Over half (56%) of current users have annual revenues of $50 million or less.
• Nine out of ten current users say that predictive lead scoring provides more value than traditional lead scoring.

No one wants to be that offensive, insensitive tourist.

While you may not do it intentionally — or even realizing you're doing it — certain kinds of behavior that Americans wouldn't think twice about aren't as accepted or favored in other countries around the world.

We spoke to Robert Hickey, the deputy director of the Protocol School of Washington, and author of "Honor and Respect: The Official Guide to Names, Titles, and Forms of Address," to find out what some of these faux pas are.

Take a look below so you know what to avoid next time you're in a foreign country.

1. Don't assume that it's ok to address someone informally.

Hickey points out that most other countries are more formal than the US when it comes to addressing people.

For Americans, Hickey says, "intimacy equals respect." Whereas in most other countries, "formality equals respect."

So while calling someone you hardly know by their first name in America is a sign that you have a good relationship with them, in other countries calling them by Mr. or Mrs. is seen as a sign of respect, which in turn signifies a good relationship with that person.

"The Koreans work with someone for 20 years and they call them 'Mr. last name,'" Hickey said. "It doesn't mean they're not great friends, it just means they show one another that respect. In our culture that's distance."

2. Don't dress to impress.

According to Hickey, originality and individuality is valued much more in the US than it is in most other countries. Americans constantly strive to differentiate themselves — often with what they choose to wear — while in many other countries, such as those in Asia, it's not good to stand out.

"For us, getting dressed is a creative moment in our day because we're all struggling to be unique and different," Hickey said. "Most of these cultures don't value originality all that much. So in some ways, when you go there, dressing a little more in a boring way with less personality is seen to be respectful."

3. Don't assume all foreigners want to be like us.

Hickey says that while people from other countries around the world are often curious about Americans — mostly because of the prevalence of American media — they don't necessarily want to be an American or live in the US.

"They don't want to be like us," Hickey said. "They want to be citizens of the world, just like we're citizens of the world. They want to be comfortable anywhere. But they don't want to be like us because they see the holes in what we have."

4. Slow down while introducing yourself.

In all of his classes, Hickey does an exercise where participants sit in a circle and throw a ball around. Whomever receives the ball has to state their name, but they have to pause in between their first and last names. Hickey says this is because names are important, and we have a tendency to speed through our names, which can confuse foreigners, especially since this may be the first time they're hearing that name.

"When you're dealing with internationals, slow down," Hickey said. He also recommends expressing interest in someone else's name by asking them about it, since people love to talk about their names, and there's often a story behind it. "You learn so much. Names are really cultural."

5. Don't only talk about the US in conversations.

When someone is talking about how things are done in their country, it's easy to reply with how things are done in your country. But Hickey says the conversation won't go anywhere this way, and that it's better to express interest in another country by asking follow up questions.

"It's not playing tennis; tennis is not a conversation," Hickey said. "A conversation is getting to know somebody. If you say, 'we do it this way in Chicago,' the other person can ask, 'has it always been that way, do you think that's the way your parents did it or has it changed in the last 30 years?' Then it becomes a conversation."

SEE ALSO: How NOT to behave in 15 countries around the world

FOLLOW US: BI Travel is on Twitter!

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We live in a multichannel world –– that much is clear. We work on computers when at a desk, a tablet when lounging at home and on our phones when on-the-go (though state laws are increasingly reminding us that this is not a good idea). In fact, not only is our attention spread thin across multiple technologies, but we ourselves have become multichannel –– with profiles, interactions and personal transactions that take place across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn, to name only a few.

This natural evolution into multichannel management in both our personal and professional lives is causing quite the disruption in the commerce industry. Long heralded as the strategie extraordinaire, retailers have worked hard to gain ground in the perfect physical space, bought search engine optimized domains and integrated feeds into their ecommerce technology backends to ensure products that work well on marketplaces (like Amazon or Etsy) automatically show up there. You know this strategy well as a life-long consumer living in a capitalist world. After all, it is marketing 101: be everywhere your customers are.

The issue isn’t the managing of multichannel commerce. No, the issue is instead the seamless integration and cohesion of those channels. Retailers are testing every possible idea in order to provide a digital experience in the physical world, and a physical experience in the digital world. Many ecommerce stores feature videos of their products to give online customers a more in-store feel of the product. Others, like Neiman Marcus, have built in-store tablets, so to speak, so that customers can order the exact product they want whether or not the store they are in currently has it in stock.

One strategy working consistently well for retailers with both a brick-and-mortar and online presence is in-store pickup –– and an unlikely brand is leading the charge.

Home Depot’s Holistic Multichannel Strategy

Over the past several years, Home Depot has invested nearly $300 million into upgrading its ecommerce offering –– specifically focusing on distribution capability, supply chain management and fully integrating their web and store inventory. In 2014, the company’s investment began to seriously pay off, to the tune of $3.5 billion in online sales –– an increase of $1 billion from the year prior.

More impressive, though, than the supplier’s ecommerce revenue is that nearly half of their ecommerce transactions involve in-store pickup.

“About 40% of our orders leverage our existing physical assets,” said Kevin Hofmann, Home Depot senior vice president and president of online, at last week’s sixth annual Goldman Sachs dotCommerce conference.

And with the buy online, pickup in store option continuing to be the brand’s fastest growing ecommerce channel, the company is focusing on another area as well: figuring out how to use those fleeting in-store moments to remind customers of the additional value-adds available mere feet from where they are picking up an online order.

“We always talk about Home Depot [as a store] for what you thought you wanted but you leave with what you really needed. So, as you come into pick up that order, [we’re thinking about] how we can remind you of the other great values and the other great offers we’ve got in our store. That’s another area of focus for us: how we leverage and monetize those footsteps.”

Of course, Home Depot isn’t the only retailer succeeding in combining online and offline commerce. Indeed, brands from Walmart to Apple are testing out the order online, pickup in store option, and to impressive results.

Walmart, for instance, began testing out grocery pickup facilities in five U.S. cities over the course of the last eight months. These facilities allow customers to order online and drive-thru to pick up their items in as little as two hours after the digital purchase. These facilities will also deliver groceries to central offices including campuses, for instance. So far, Walmart executives are pleased with the results of interweaving digital and physical offerings.

“Our customers needs are changing very rapidly. They’re more digitally engaged than ever before. They have more choices than ever before. And they are telling us they want more convenience and more simplicity and that’s what we’re trying to achieve with this test,” said Jane Ewing, SVP of central operations for Walmart U.S. “We believe we’re uniquely positioned to allow our customers to shop how they want, where they want and when they want.”

Uber and Amazon are also testing out local, speedy delivery options for online customers. While apps including Instacart and Drizly, the former dedicated to grocery delivery and the latter to alcohol delivery, have been gaining mass popularity throughout 2015.

In all, the multichannel movement has come and gone. It is now a customer expectation that your brand be on social media, have its own website, be easily findable on Amazon and perhaps even have a brick-and-mortar the customer can visit, whether they are a local or just a passing tourist. And now, customer-centric brands are taking multichannel one step further –– fully integrating the online and offline experiences to maximize convenience, brand awareness, customer service and even average order value.

If you are a brick-and-mortar with an online presence, it is a wise time to begin offering in-store pickup for your digital customers. After all, the big box brands are continuing to prove its value.

Photo: Flickr, Mike Mozart

How To Attract Evangelists Online For Your Brand

Can your business create a buzz like a large company such as Apple can?

If you answered No, and would like to attract more word-of-mouth advertising, keep reading!

When it comes to building a reputation that resonates with your core audience online the message that will be most attractive is what makes your business unique to its customers. A company like Apple, for example, has created a loyal following of brand ambassadors who make purchases based not so much on the products, but what the brand represents for them, which is “Think Different.”

A well-crafted reputation management strategy will prompt people to spread the word about your company, and turn silence into positive reviews and feedback. This all begins by understanding the needs of your target market, and projecting a message that reflects your community’s desires. When their values and emotions are understood these customers will provide free advertising for your brand as they tell their friends and family about the good news.

Webster’s Dictionary defines an evangelist as:

Someone who talks about something with great enthusiasm.

The bottom line is when your community truly believes in you it is easy to sell your products or services to them, and spread the word about your brand. Whether your are a startup or need to create more visibility for your company it is not too late to develop an evangelist strategy. Here are four ways to attract an audience and generate a buzz:

1. Encourage sharing through reminders

While it is generally not good practice to tell your audience to spread the word on your business it is perfectly fine to remind them to share what they have enjoyed. Amazon does a great job with this after their customers make a purchase. Their reputation is built by reviews, and one way to encourage feedback is through a simple follow-up like this one:

2. Rally your community around a cause

What can your brand root for that will appeal to its target market? TOMS shoes, for example, is based on providing footwear to those who cannot afford them with promotions such as their recent one-day social media campaign, #withoutshoes:

2. Offer incentives for return customers and positive feedback

A great way to grow your loyal following is to reward them for great reviews, participating in social media contests, making a repeat purchase, recommendations online, blog comments, and more. Coupons with a high level of value are always a good idea, as well as freebie events. Even in the midst of a negative situation that Starbucks recently faced with a system outage, you can attract more customers simply by going the extra mile for them.

3. Be a real example of your mission statement

A good tactic that humanizes your brand is one in which your founder(s) or employees can show your audience that what you represent is really being lived out at your organization. Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Airlines, represents his mission and cause well with regular photographs featuring his business and charitable causes. American Airlines often showcases stories on its employees and happy customers.

4. Keep it fresh

Stale content and product development fall flat for customers. By staying on top of the latest trends for your market and offering a mix in your marketing you can tap into their joy and happiness centers. Evaluate whether what your business has to offer ‘wows’ your followers, and keeps them coming back for more. Is this something your community can’t live without? Start with that and be creative according to who your audience is.

Attracting leads and customers as loyal evangelists is a consistent, day-by-day process of building trust, and knowing ahead of time what your market desires through precise target market research. With the use of powerful online tracking tools like Hootsuite, Sprout Social, and Twitter Advanced Search you can literally see in real time what your audience needs and desires. By being actively involved with your community and turning negative situations into incentives you will slowly create a lasting following who will recommend your brand to others online.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a goldmine waiting to happen, says a new report from management consulting firm McKinsey & Co.. However, according to its findings, we may be waiting a long time. 

The tech industry seems to have reached full lather over this trend, with companies big and small rushing in to connect all manner of gadgets, home appliances, even cars and other technologies, to the each other and the Internet. 

See also: Why The Internet Of Things Is Still Roadblocked

The reason is obvious: McKinsey points to $4 trillion to $11 trillion of positive economic impact each year by 2025. But its report also highlights roadblocks that stubbornly refuse to go away. Increasingly, the world is going to need to turn to open source to get the standards "unstuck." 

The Slices In The $11 Trillion Pie

Not all industries are created equal when it comes to IoT's disruptive force. McKinsey has highlighted a few areas where the trend could have the biggest financial impact. 

While smart homes may be the consumer face of this movement, the broader potential lies in other areas—like manufacturing, connected cities, healthcare and retail. 

The findings unsurprisingly tracks closely to how McKinsey sees big data influencing various industries in a separate report:

Apparently some of the biggest opportunities for data—specifically, IoT data—to change the world won't be found in Silicon Valley. Instead they'll be found in croplands, factories, and other supposedly low-tech industries. 

In other words, the older and more hidebound the industry, the greater the potential for IoT to up-end it. 

What's Blocking The Future

Unfortunately, there are plenty of factors impeding this data-rich future. The problems range from the 400-plus competing IoT standards to lack of global Internet connectivity, and more. 

McKinsey also offers a range of complicating factors. Topping the firm's list, rightly so, is the matter of varying standards which prevent many systems and devices from communicating with each other. The firm describes this incompatibility as the primary roadblock: 

Interoperability between IoT systems is critical. Of the total potential economic value the IoT enables, interoperability is required for 40 percent on average and for nearly 60 percent in some settings.

The report goes on to suggest two fixes: "Adopting open standards is one way to accomplish interoperability. Interoperability can also be achieved by implementing systems or platforms that enable different IoT systems to communicate with one another." 

Vendors largely control the 400-plus competing standards, but the battle for developer hearts won't be won by a corporate logo-laden home page. Open source, however, could help, allowing developers to focus on interoperable code, rather than interoperable vendors. 

Stop Hoarding Data—Use It

The other major problem with IoT efforts, which is endemic in big data generally, is that the vast majority of the information that companies cull never actually gets used to its fullest effect. 

See also: Big Data Depends On Big Community, Not Big Money

By McKinsey's estimates, just 1% of such data finds an actionable purpose—largely because tech makers use sensor data to capture anomalies in the system, not to optimize or advance their technology. 

This may surprise anyone who believes that IoT begins and ends with the Apple Watch. But in that case, roughly 70% of its value will be captured in business-to-business scenarios—not from consumers nervously twitching at every buzz and chirp of their wearable device. In other words, there's more money to be made from optimizing connected irrigation systems, rather than your next work-out at the gym. 

Regardless of environment, universal standards could buoy efforts across the board to increase the overall size of the market, while some strategic thinking about all that data could improve its utility. Otherwise, without some foresight, we could wind up falling back on Apple and Google to make it all happen. 

Who Wins?

What seems increasingly evident is that Google may be the best positioned of the two tech giants to capitalize on the IoT opportunity. 

See also: Google Is Readying Its Own OS For Running The Internet Of Things

Apple appears to be relying on its traditional strength of enticing consumers with new products or gadgets. In contrast, Google unveiled two new initiatives, its Brillo IoT operating system and its Weave communications protocol, which trod new ground by branching out into industrial applications, connected agriculture and remote infrastructure. 

Given these moves, the market may not wait around for open-source standards to finally get everyone on the same command line. With as much as $11 trillion at stake, it could just take the fastest route and rely on Google (or Apple) to deliver IoT products. 

Either way, customers will be the real winners. McKinsey estimates that, of the enormous potential IoT fortune, 90% of the value will go to customers, not vendors—though even a 10% sliver that $11 trillion pie would be plenty for a dominant player to feast on. At least it will be, whenever it is that the connected future arrives.  

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

America may not be moving any closer toward equal distribution of wealth, but around the world the trend is clear: Poverty is disappearing.

Those are the findings of Tomas Hellebrandt and Paolo Mauro, two economists who recently published the paper "The Future of Worldwide Income Distribution."

They found that emerging-market economies, such as China and India, have generated the greatest reduction in inequality with the wealth they've created over the last decade. Even developing countries, like those found in Latin America, have reduced their inequality greatly, Hellebrandt tells Business Insider.

But population growth is still an issue in many African countries, where babies are born into poverty and cause the distribution to skew.

"If we didn't see as much population growth in Africa, income inequality would be falling even faster," Hellebrandt says. "But it's because we're adding people to the poorest countries that it's partly keeping inequality higher."

That's actually good news in a way, he concedes, because it leads graphs like the one below to underestimate the true progress. 

The two researchers pulled data on countries' wealth and standardized it according to Purchasing Power Parity — a method of determining the relative value of currencies in different countries.  

As their data shows, income inequality has fallen considerably since 2003 and will continue to fall well into the 21st century. 

SEE ALSO: The Sad State Of American Inequality In 12 Charts

Join the conversation about this story »

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We all know the value of a powerful headline. Modern readers’ attention spans are notoriously short, so if your headline doesn’t capture their immediate interest, you might as well have no article at all. Catchy headlines are a necessity these days, and some have even argued that the headline of your article is more important than the article itself.

Unfortunately, the importance placed on headlines has led to some questionable practices in the content marketing community. Desperate to attract attention for their writing in whatever ways they can, writers and marketers concoct sensationalized headlines that deviate from the topic or resort to cheap tricks that make readers feel cheated or put off. These gimmicks might earn you a few dozen extra clicks in the short term, but if implemented consistently, they can ruin your brand’s reputation.

Seizing reader attention is important, but not at the cost of your business’s image. When creating your headlines, stay away from these seven dubious tactics:

1. Implying a Threat Where There Isn’t One

Readers are often driven to articles (or landing pages, for that matter) because of a sense of urgency. If a headline implies an article isn’t very important, it has a very low likelihood of being clicked. The extreme opposite, however—trying to imply that there is a threat to the reader when there isn’t one—is a surefire way to lower your reputation.

For example, if a new study finds that a small percentage of bananas have a strain of relatively harmless bacteria, the headline “Deadly New Bacteria Found in Common Household Food” would imply a threat that simply isn’t there. It creates a “cry wolf” scenario; once the reader finds the headline to be untrue, they’ll be unlikely to trust you again.

2. Strongly Picking a Side of a Controversial Issue

There’s a caveat to this gimmick. In reality, picking a side of a controversial issue can be very beneficial for your reputation. It shows integrity and strengthens your identity, but only if you commit to your position through logical argument and substantial content.

Deeply committing to one side in your headline immediately alienates half of your audience and forfeits any chance of winning their respect through the strength of your content, so be sure it’s something you’re ready to stand behind, or don’t pick a side at all.

For example, the headline “Social Welfare Programs Need to End. Period,” would only harm your reputation, but rephrasing it as a question (“Do All Social Welfare Programs Really Need to End?”) takes a more neutral approach.

3. Using the Word “Secret”

There are certain innocuous uses of the word “secret” in headlines that can be permissible—such as when “Top Entrepreneurs Share Their Biggest Secrets” or something else that downplays the significance of the secrets themselves.

“Secret” becomes a problem when it’s played up as the only reason to click on the article in the first place. For example, using the title, “This Deeply Hidden Secret is About to Change Your World” for an article about cupboard organization barely warrants such strong wording.

Using headlines to tease your content is a good way to attract some extra links, but when you exaggerate the significance of your material to this degree, you’ll only end up disappointing your readers and damaging your reputation.

4. Making Bold or Unsubstantiated Claims

Outright lies in your headline will damage the public perception of your plan—I would hope this much would be obvious. But making bold exaggerations or citing possible facts as absolute can do just as much damage.

For example, introducing a new medical technique by stating “This New Technique Has Saved Thousands of Lives” without empirical evidence to back up your facts will do more harm than good. Readers will actually turn against you when they click through and see nothing of value or significance (or truth) on the other side.

5. Suggesting Content That Isn’t in Your Article

Thankfully, this technique is being used less and less. Since Google, Facebook and other publishers are using bounce rates to indicate the level of authority in a given piece, inappropriate titles naturally work themselves out of circulation.

Still, if you use irrelevant titling for your piece and start attracting clicks, you may find that your readers leave with a negative perception of your brand. This gimmick is easy to avoid; just make sure your article title is relevant to the content it headlines.

6. Using the Phrase “You Won’t Believe”

This phrase, in its many forms, has come to represent the entire “clickbait” phenomenon. Titles like “A Dog Walks Up to a Little Girl—You Won’t Believe What Happens Next,” or “You Won’t Believe What Doctors Have Been Keeping From You Your Whole Life,” are alternative forms of the “secret” problem I mentioned above. They imply a level of significance and urgency to an article that probably isn’t there, and readers click through seeking only to satisfy a fleeting curiosity. When the content doesn’t live up to their expectations—and most of the time, it won’t come close—they leave, and they’ll be far less likely to ever trust your brand again.

7. Using the Word “Click”

This, too, is becoming an antiquated practice. Google explicitly forbids the use of the word “click” in its PPC advertising as well as headlines that make it to its News section. Similarly, Facebook and other syndication platforms are weeding out content that contains the word click. Based on sight alone, many users will instantly get a bad impression of your brand if you try to entice more clicks directly. It’s a form of cyber-begging that comes off as desperate and annoying.

Don’t be afraid to use simple tricks to make your headlines stand out—compelling action words, short phrasing and numerical references are just a handful of examples of healthy tactics. The problem comes when the structure of your headline takes precedence over the quality of your content. Extra attention is good, but only when your brand’s standing is positive, so keep your reputation as the ultimate priority in your content marketing strategy.

B2B marketing organizations are now spending more than 25 percent of their budgets on the development, delivery and promotion of content to drive business. Sales reps spend about 30 hours a month trying to locate this precious content –  to ensure they have quick access to sales-driving information during their sales conversations.  Ideally, this tedious preparation will result in a successful sales interaction helping to close deals. Were sales reps able to access the sales-driving content they needed to drive deals forward? Post meeting, how can sales reps gauge prospect’s interest level for effective post-meeting follow up? How and when should they follow up? Is there strong potential to convert this prospect into a customer?

Through content tracking and the ability to capture prospect’s interactions with the content, sales reps can gain visibility into the post meeting stage of sales conversations. When content is trackable, sales reps can easily gauge a prospect interest level and identify company’s key stakeholders. Sales managers can use insights to monitor content success, communicating these insights to their respective marketing teams to improve their content creation process.

Here’s an in-depth view into four ways content intelligence will transform your sales by identifying prospects’ interest level, identifying key stakeholders, establishing best practices and improving the content creation process.

Identify Prospects’ Interest Level:

Hopefully, sales reps leave their meetings confident that their presentation was effective in disrupting their prospect’s mindset. But, regardless of how a sales rep might believe their meeting went, there is a critical blind spot post sales meeting. This leaves sales reps without any insight into how interested their prospect is in their offering.

With a solution that captures a prospect’s interaction with shared content, sales reps can accurately identify interest level by monitoring: when the prospect opens the shared content, how long they spend digesting each specific piece of content, and who within their organization they are sharing the content with.

Eighty-nine percent of the time, sales reps follow up with prospects who aren’t interested or aren’t ready to have a conversation. Unsuccessful follow-up strategies are a waste of sales reps’ time and resources. It’s simple: By tracking who’s viewing content, when, and for how long, sales reps can use these pivotal signs to formulate their follow-up strategy to maximize their time and target their most promising prospects to close more deals faster.

Identify Key Stakeholders:

Unless sales reps are targeting key stakeholders within their prospect’s organization, their deals are likely to remain stagnant. According to Gartner Group, in a typical firm with 100-500 employees, an average of seven people are involved in most buying decisions. Without any insight into who should be included in the series of sales conversations, reps will continue to schedule conversations without the key decision makers.

Establish Best Practices:

The strongest sales organizations are comprised of teams who analyze and evaluate their selling strategies on an ongoing basis, continuously looking to implement improvements. Twenty percent of top salespeople close 80 percent of all deals. This means that 80 percent of a sales force fights over the remaining 20 percent of the business (Greenberg & Greenberg, 1983). Unfortunately, since managers are unable to sit in on every sales meeting, they often lack the insight to understand why this might be. With insightful analytics, this mystery can be eliminated; allowing managers to track the content that sales reps are using in the field, directly correlating it to their success rates. By gaining insight into sales reps’ processes and content usage, management is able to establish and implement best practices for the rest of their sales team.

Improve Content Creation Process:

Due to the imminent lack of alignment between marketing and sales, marketing teams spend valuable time and money creating content that often fails to drive sales in the field. Sales reps see firsthand which content is effective, but the communication gap between marketing and sales teams often prevents marketers from receiving this constructive feedback. There is great potential for sales excellence that could be achieved if marketers gained visibility into insights to understand the performance of specific pieces of content in the field. Using this insight, marketing can create more successful content in the future. With analytics, marketers can easily identify which content drives sales to prioritize how to best invest their time and resources to create sales-driving content.

Sales enablement solutions that provide analytics shed light on the post meeting mystery – enabling sales reps to follow up as experts, targeting the right prospects, at the right time to increase the probability of a successful sales interaction. Capturing prospect’s content usage and interaction will allow sales reps to quickly identify a prospect’s interest level, identify the company’s key stakeholders, improve the overall quality of the sales team, and improve the content creation process. These key insights into sales interactions lead to more effective conversations and, ultimately, shorter sales cycles. To learn more about implementing a Sales Enablement Solutions, check out the Ebook on 4 Drivers of Mobile Sales Enablement Success.

This article originally appeared on the Showpad blog.

Are you regularly negotiating with clients over price?

After a recent event, I got the following email from an executive recruiter running his own staffing practice:

Hey Ryan,

I was thinking about something you said on pricing.

Recruiting is commoditized and there’s a lot of competition. I often find clients will offer a 20 percent fee for an executive search — take it or leave it. Many of my competitors are willing to accept that rate, versus my standard fee of 25 to 30 percent. I know I can fill jobs with better people, faster, but most buyers will close the door strictly on price.

What are your thoughts?

Do you relate?

I do. Most products and services are getting commoditized in a similar way. My business is pretty similar. Someone will always speak or train for less (or even for free). And there are always clients that lead with price.

To elevate the conversation beyond on price and demonstrate your value, you need to consider three crucial elements: story, strategy, and execution.

How Are You Telling Your Story?

The executive recruiter believes in what he does and that it’s clearly differentiated. That’s a great place to start.

“I know I can fill jobs with better people, faster, but most buyers will close the door strictly on price.”

I challenged him to consider these questions:

• How do you know you’re better and faster than your competition?
• Can you prove it?
• Do you have evidence?
• Is that evidence visible?
• Is it validated by someone other than you?
• Are you leveraging that proof of concept in a way that clients can quickly and simply understand?
• Is that resonating in a meaningful way with customers?

The answers to these questions will help develop and define his story – his value proposition.

A good value proposition is:

• Authentic (you can deliver it consistently),
• Differentiated (it clearly sets you apart from your competition), and
• Compelling (strong enough to earn attention and convince clients to consider making a change and pay more for your work).

How Are You Delivering Your Story To The Marketplace?

Once you have your story down in a way that really resonates, the next step is considering strategy. How do you get your story to clients? How do you share your story with the marketplace? How do you earn attention?

In my business, blogging is an ideal way to share my ideas, contribute value and connect people to my work. This helps me earn attention and generate interest in our services. I know if I am not getting referred or found, I’m going to be left relying on traditional, interruption-based sales tactics that are both diminishing in effectiveness and would ultimately force me to compete solely on price. Our strategy includes working every single day on getting our story into the marketplace, constantly evaluating our efforts, and looking for opportunities to improve.

Your strategy for getting your story to clients will be unique for your business. But when you’re always laying that groundwork and a client comes to you focused on results, it’s easy to elevate the conversation beyond price.

Are You Executing Consistently On Customer Experience?

Finally, think about execution. If you’re not delivering on your brand promise every single time, nothing else matters. You have to work hard and develop a process you can deliver consistently that turns customers into evangelists for your business.

It’s also worth considering: Are your own customers helping tell your story? When customers are in awe over what you deliver, it’s very likely they will become passionate advocates and help you elevate the conversation beyond price. You’ll get more when you demonstrate you give more, consistently!

If you can successfully craft your story, get it into the marketplace, and execute on your promises, you can remove price from the conversation.

Master The Art Of Non-Negotiation

So when people ask me how to get better at negotiating price, this is the advice I give them. In my business, my goal isn’t to be a better at negotiating. My goal is to stop negotiating completely.

This didn’t happen overnight, but six years into this business, Lynn and I rarely negotiate anymore. We have a story that resonates, a solid strategy for delivering it to the marketplace and we obsess over executing on the promises we make. We have plenty of clients helping us tell that story, which has elevated demand. And the interest in our work has eclipsed our available inventory (specifically for live events). Quite simply, we no longer are in a position where we need to negotiate on price.

When you discount your product or service, you change the customer’s perception of value.

This Entrepreneur article,The Dark Side of Discounts, resonates:

To maintain higher prices, you have to instead be adept at selling value. Discounts erode your ability to do that. Any reduction in prices can damage your price integrity. Later, getting the same customer to stop thinking about price and re-focus on value can prove difficult.

Not only that, studies show that discounts actually reduce the effectiveness of whatever is being discounted. In a buyer’s mind, the discounted offering literally does not perform as well as it did at full price. That sounds impossible, but double-blind studies using prescription drugs and over-the-counter health products, cosmetics and other products have shown this to be true.

If you want to be a premium brand, offer a premium service, deliver value consistently, and don’t back down on price.

Get to know your sales tools in just 2 minutes a week. This week, Nancy profiles Unboxed, a guided-selling solution that simplifies the decision process in complex sales.

Sales ToolSkool Video Transcript:

Today I’ll be talking about a mobile sales platform that helps simplify complex decision making. I’ll be talking about Unboxed.

Unboxed is a new kind of sales solution that thinks outside the box.

If you have a complex product line that requires consultation and guidance, you’ll want to consider “Assistant” by Unboxed.

Assistant – helps your salespeople simplify the decision-making process for their buyers. You customize Assistant with your own branding. Then create, step-by-step qualifying questionnaires that guide the buyer to the solution that is best for them.

The last thing you want is for your salespeople to doing all the talking. Assistant helps them guide the sales discussion in an interactive, way that breaks down walls.

With Assistants built-in Advisors tool, you can create interactive demos for use at just the right moment in the discussion.

Assistant uses proprietary up-sell and cross-sell, logic – as well, so that recommendations are comprehensive & complete.

And last, Unboxed Assistant is tightly integrated with your internal systems like CRM, Order Fulfillment, and Product databases.

Remember at the beginning when I said that Unboxed solutions think outside the box? Unboxed is not your typical SaaS solution.

It’s for anyone who wants a ready-to-go guided selling system that’s customized and fully tested, to work like you want it to from day 1.

Sales tools are only good if they deliver what you hoped for. That’s what Unboxed delivers and they do it without charging any per-user fees!

Assistant simplifies complex decision-making, helps your salespeople cross-sell & up-sell more effectively, and helps your buyer’s make decisions more quickly and that’s why we’ve named Unboxed Assistant as one of our top sales tools of 2015. Go to www.unboxedtech.com to learn more.

That’s it for this week’s ToolSkool. They’ll be no newsletter next week so check back for a new Recommended Tool of the Week on July 12th.

Until then…Sell Smarter, with smart selling tools.

Is your company looking for ways to improve it’s image? Maybe you are asking, “How can we look better?” or “How can we make more people fall in love with our brand?”

The premise behind those questions is cause for alarm. That’s because sales are never about you. They’re always about your buyer.

Have you heard the old adage, “Tell, don’t sell?” Perhaps no truer three words have ever been spoken in the business world. People hate feeling like they’re having a product pushed down their throat by aggressive salesmen. On the flipside, everyone loves listening to a good story – especially when they’re the hero.

To get your marketing messages heard by your customers, you need to tell your target buyer’s story. Here’s how.

Interview Past Buyers

Before you start telling your future buyers story, why not let past buyers do the work for you?

Interviewing previous customers about their experience from start to finish with your business will help you pull out key elements in the purchase process. But don’t rely on your past customers to open up with all the details you want to know. You’ll have to pull it out of them by encouraging them to tell their story.

Here’s how.

Set the scene. Asking open-ended questions might get your interviewee talking, but it could stifle how many details they’re willing to give. Set the scene by asking your buyer to tell you specifics. For example, start each interview off with, “Tell me about a time when…” This type of open-ended question immediately sets the tone for storytelling, which has a very different feel than a typical question and answer session.

Get experiential. As you progress in the interview, walk your interviewee through the process of telling his story. For example, encourage the person you’re talking to, to start at the beginning. Here’s one way: “Tell me about the moment you realized you needed product X.” That’ll bring the interviewee back to a particular moment in his life.

Focus on the sequence of events. This is where the meat of the interview lies. Focus your buyer on walking you through each stage of his experience step by step.

• How did the purchase decision start?
• How did he know he was ready to buy?
• What was his process for finding your product?
• What made him choose you over a competitor?

Talk sequentially to avoid jumping around the story and forgetting any important details.

Use these interview tools to conduct about ten to twelve interviews. When you’re finished, you’ll notice a few common threads floating to the surface. Use these threads when weaving your buyer’s story together.

Frame Your Story

With the story your past buyers told you about their purchase process, you’re in a good position to frame the story you’ll tell to your customers. You know the process your target market goes through when deciding to buy from you, putting you in the perfect position to use this process as your marketing framework.

The closer you can hone your marketing message to your customer’s journey, the better you’ll be able to penetrate your target market.

Choose Your Approach

With the framework in mind, decide how you will approach your customer with the story your business wants to tell. To do this, focus on some of the fundamental elements found in every good tale:

• There is tension.
• There is a hero (this will be your customer.)
• There is a journey.
• There is a happy ending.

Take your buyer through each stage. The tension is your customer’s pain points. It’s the things that keep them up at night. The hero is always your customer. The journey is their path to purchase. The happy ending is all of the benefits that happen once the purchase is complete.

Creating narratives that take your audience on a journey provides new paths or solutions toward solving their pain points along the buyer’s journey. – Text100.com

Ready To Tell Your Target Buyer’s Story?

There’s a lot more that goes into targeting your buyers. With the right story in place, you can create a stronger marketing message, escalating your company’s growth. To learn more about how fast growing companies make this happen, check out our free report called, “The Ultimate Marketing Guide for High-Growth Companies.” In it, you’ll learn how these stories are used to drive sales more effectively.

The rise of digital content over the past few years has resulted in two fundamental changes in the B2B buying process:

1. Buyers are more empowered and well-informed than ever
2. The number of stakeholders involved in a technology purchase has increased

This creates a unique challenge for B2B marketers that are trying to identify and reach out to relevant stakeholders within a company. Nowadays buyers can collect more information about products while remaining anonymous and the growing dynamics of a technology purchase result in marketer’s not having full visibility about buyer needs.

So traditional marketing and lead management processes have resulted in very poor conversions. That’s where Account-Based Marketing comes in.

What is Account-Based Marketing?

Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is a strategic approach in which organizations consider and communicate with a group of stakeholders rather than an individual. The approach of seeing the collective and grouping them into an account allows companies to realize greater revenue by fully understanding their needs, and sharing effective content that helps them move through the buyer’s journey.

Put in simpler terms, it takes into account the various stakeholders that are involved in the technology purchasing process. Rather than focusing on making investments anywhere and everywhere, Account-Based Marketing helps you focus your investments on those opportunities with a higher ROI. The core principles surrounding ABM also require marketing and sales to be aligned so that companies can build a relationship with specific targeted accounts.

How does it differ from Lead-Based Marketing?

Traditional Lead-Based Marketing is a reactive process whereas Account-Based Marketing is more proactive. With lead-based marketing you usually need a lead to initiate the engagement with you in some way i.e. show interest in a product, ask for information, or download content. You get their contact details and then follow up with more relevant information, content or even put up some ads on sites they often visit. The process works great but it can be a hit-or-miss, which is clearly reflected in the sales funnel where you see very low conversion rates.

Account-Based Marketing on the other hand, allows you to group all your leads based on the account or company that these leads represent. Imagine you have two or more leads for the same client, but they were collected from different sources and assigned to different sales executives. These leads could have originated from different parts of a client’s business, different geographical locations or most probably from the same business but different stakeholders. Typically, each sales executive assigned to these leads would pursue them individually. With Account-Based Marketing, all the leads linked to a client can be viewed at an aggregate level, which would help in formulating a strategic approach to tap on the combined potential that focuses efforts on these important deals.

Consequently, ABM helps draft a more strategic approach based on a variety of factors, which helps you to focus on more high-value leads.

What’s the Importance of Account-Based Marketing?

Traditional lead-based marketing efforts are broad in nature and can quickly overload B2B sales organizations with leads that have not been converted into customers. ABM allows you to improve efficiencies by focusing on a smaller number of accounts and focusing efforts on quality, rather than quantity of leads generated. You can also cut through the “noise” that’s prevalent in the digital space and deliver a personalized message to the right person at the right time.

Account-Based Marketing offers an easy way to understand your customers’ needs, get the full picture (by engaging with all relevant stakeholders) and target accounts at the right time.

But with ABM being at such an early stage in the adoption cycle, does it make sense for companies to make it a part of their B2B marketing strategy? And if so, what players are currently in the space and how do their offerings differ from each other?

Stay tuned for the details in my next post on Account-Based Marketing.

Greece's government shut the country's banks and restricted ATM withdrawals until July 6, to stop Greeks bleeding the banks dry — but now it looks like they're emptying petrol stations and supermarkets of their goods too.

The president of gas station owners in Chania, Vangelis Kotsos, revealed to the Greek press that around half of its petrol stations are now dry and  “a lot have been coming in carrying cans so they have extra reserves.”

He added, in interview with state-run TV channel, ERT 1 that: “panic is mounting, for example I opened at 7.30 a.m. BST (2 a.m. ET) and by 10 a.m. BST (5 a.m. ET) I had sold the amount (of gas) that I would normally sell by tomorrow afternoon. But I foresee that soon things will normalised, more reserves will be brought in.”

Meanwhile, Channel 4 news is reporting that many petrol stations are restricting customers to only €20 (£14.10, $22.20) worth of fuel, per visit:

Some people on Twitter are reporting that only diesel fuel is available at some stations while some places are shut completely:

Elsewhere, the Guardian reported that there is "mayhem" in some of the supermarkets, including  one in the country's "upmarket district above Syntagma Square." The newspaper said that "panicked buyers were snapping up everything in sight, not least staple foods such as sugar and flour."

It is perhaps unsurprising considering the emptying of supermarkets over the last few days.

Greeks are clearly worried that food prices are likely to be hiked imminently. Greece's Syriza government is battling against a proposed value-added tax on food service to 23%. Food VAT is currently at 13%.

Not only will this massively increase the cost of food, the head of the association of restaurant chains SEPOA, Thanassis Papanikolaou, warned last week in the Greek press that the VAT hike would cost thousands of jobs and businesses.

"We have the experience from 2011 when the increase from 13 to 23%  in food service brought the shutdown of 4,500 enterprises and the loss of 40,000 jobs," he said to Greek news outlet Ekathimerini.

Join the conversation about this story »

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For those who just can’t get their heads around the intricacies of home cooking, June is a smart countertop oven which can automatically program itself to cook the food put inside it. June uses a digital camera, food recognition technology, an in-built digital scale, thermometer and Nvidia processors to recognize the raw ingredients and work out how to cook them, adjusting oven temperature and cooking time accordingly.

June was created by Nikhil Bhogal and Matt Van Horn — former employees of Apple — and boasts a 1.0 cubic foot capacity. It can be used for baking, roasting, broiling, toasting, and slow cooking — anything from elaborate roasts to oven pizza. The smart oven is accompanied by an app which enables users to monitor their meal via their smartphone and adjust temperature or cooking time remotely. It uses carbon fiber heating, advanced insulation and convection fans to ensure maximum efficiency.

June is currently available to pre-order for USD 1,495 — buyers are required to place a USD 95 deposit and pay the balance when the first shipments are sent out in 2016. The price will rise to USD 2,995 next month.

Website: www.juneoven.com
Contact: www.juneoven.com/contact

Media can be the great differentiator. It can take your LinkedIn profile from ho-hum to phenomenal–and compel viewers to contact you about your products and services, job opportunities, and more.

My recent LinkedIn User Survey showed that only 39% of the respondents are taking advantage of this powerful profile feature. Don’t tell anyone at LinkedIn that I said this, but I think it’s so good that they could probably charge for it.

In a nutshell, prominently displaying media or links to media on your profile is an awesome way to share your professional brand with the whole world. And if you’re part of the 61% of users who aren’t taking advantage of this incredible feature, I doubt that’s because you don’t think it would be helpful and pretty cool but because you can’t figure out how to do it or you don’t know what you should share. So let me help you with both.

How do I add media to my profile?

You can add media to three sections on your LinkedIn profile–Summary, each Job Experience entry, and each Education entry–and it will be displayed at the bottom of the selected section. These entries not only add additional information about you, but they add a certain level of visual appeal and interest to your profile.

It’s as simple as clicking the Add Media icon and then cutting and pasting the link or uploading the media file. For more detailed instructions, follow the steps outlined in the LinkedIn Help Center by clicking here.

What type of media should I share?

Like most of the information you share on your profile, it depends on your specific LinkedIn strategy. Here are some suggestions of what you might want to include, and I’ve categorized them by some pretty typical LinkedIn strategies.
.

Improving your overall branding and market presence
.

• Pictures, slide presentations, pdf files of some of your work samples
• Articles or videos where you are mentioned
• Certificates or awards you have received
• Articles you have written or coauthored
• Link to your personal blog or other social media pages
  .

Generating sales leads
.

• Slide presentation of your company’s capabilities, products and services offered, and markets you serve
• Articles or videos of your products in action
• Case studies or testimonials from your customers
• Registration page for upcoming events
• Link to sign up for your company newsletter or other free resources (ebook, tip sheets, white papers, etc.)
• Link to your company’s blog or other social media pages
  .

Finding a job
.

• Upload of your resume (traditionally written or video)
• Pdf upload of letters of recommendation
• Video links or uploads of examples of your work
• Detailed list of references
• Personality test results or strengths-related information
• Slide show summarizing your career or job experiences
  .

Helping your favorite nonprofit or school
.

• Videos or articles that mention the organization
• Links to register for upcoming events
• Articles highlighting accomplishments of members, alumni or students
• Uploads or links to examples of student projects
• Link to sign up for the organization’s mailings
• Link to a form for updating alumni contact information

Now that you know how to add media and what types of media you should share, take a few minutes right now and add some media to your profile so I can not only read about your accomplishments and interests but I can also see them. Trust me–a few keystrokes can greatly enhance your professional image.

The post Does Your LinkedIn Profile Need a Boost? Add Media! appeared first on Wayne Breitbarth.

By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca 

Sales people have an interesting relationship with their pipelines, definitely emotional, sometime rational, and often, regardless of how they protest, predictable. The key is that how they manage their pipeline very much reflects how well they execute their sale, and how successful they may be.

First let’s look at the notion of pipeline and how it unfolds in sales. For the most part it is built around the concept of “Flow”. If you look at pharma, it looks at the flow of product from concept to being brought to market. There are several stages along the way, some products make it all the way, and some will die along the way for any number of reasons. In the oil patch, again flow, carrying the product from Alberta to points south (well it would if politics didn’t get in the way). But it’s all about flow, anything impeding or adversely affecting the flow, including speeding it up too much, creates an imbalance, a lack of efficiencies and desired results. In sales, that is clearly a lack of clients and revenue.

In sales there are two common pipeline conditions that result in insufficient sales. The first we will not deal with in this piece, specifically a lack of new things coming into the pipeline, no prospecting, leading to an empty pipeline. The second is an overly full pipeline. Some may not see this as an issue, but it is. The first problem is that sales people have their emotions driven by the state of their pipeline, when it is full, they have less propensity to prospect, “look man, I have so much sh#t in my pipeline, let me go close it.”

This leads to the second problem, the fact that there is so much in their pipeline, specifically a lot of sh#t. These people think of their pipeline as something to fill, not about flow, having it full is their goal, not moving it through from lead to client in a consistent and repeatable fashion. This usually results from either their unwillingness to take things out of the pipeline, constrained; or inability to close prospects they have in their pipe, constipation.

Constrained – we have seen these sellers, partly optimistic, partly naïve, partly lazy, and mostly squandering time and their success. Nothing ever dies, every opportunity is sacred, just like a scene from a Monty Python movie.  These sales people feel they are more successful as they have a bigger and bigger pipeline, I have some tell me that as long as they can bring more opportunities, the more are like to close. These where the downside of relationship selling shows itself. “If I can engage and have relationships with more and more buyers, deals will close themselves.” No they won’t. If they cleared out the trash from their pipeline they would not only see this, but would feel the urgency to act more decisively. Often these sellers have skills, they just don’t apply them, their optimism and naiveté constrain their ability to deal with more of the right prospects and close more deals.

Constipated – these are sales people who have difficulty closing. To their credit, they prospect, and prospect well, they continue to bring opportunities. What they lack is the skills to qualify, or more accurately, disqualify, leading them to grow their pile of prospects. They also can’t engage well enough to conduct a proper discovery with prospects, and as a result can’t close the sale. Often if you can hold your nose, and pick through, you’ll find prospects who have long bought elsewhere. They are good at the front end, but blocked at the back end, constipated.

Once in a while you can flush these out, but unless you change the pattern, it gets blocked again. The answer to both is having a clearly defined process and active management. The process with stages, actions, objectives, tools, and evaluation to determine if the opportunity has merit, ready to go to the next stage, or needs to be dispatched to the recycling bin. Notice not garbage bin, but recycling, yes, leads are recyclable, you can always come back when the timing is better. This will help create balance and help opportunities “flow” through to results.

Active management is important to help both type of clogs to be cleared. And to be fair to sellers, it is often their managers that contribute to the problem. An active manager can help both sellers be better sellers, or as we like to say around here Sell Better! Active management focus them on the right activities at each stage of the opportunity, and allow them to get rid of things that don’t belong. This may lead to a thin pipeline, then active management needs to turn to better prospecting. But in both cases management needs to have an active role beyond highlighting the problem.

So go ahead, give your pipeline a flush, and then focus on flow not volume.

Tibor Shanto    

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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. Even Facebook ads will keep you on the Facebook app or site, interacting with advertising content directly within Facebook instead of clicking through to your site.

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.

The post Facebook content strategy is a time bomb for inbound marketing appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

        

Comments

• Thanks for commenting Dexter. by Mark W. Schaefer
• In the end, our focus should still be on creating great ... by Dexter Patterson
• Boutique communities are viable, but tend to be a B2B/niche ... by btrandolph
• […] Facebook content strategy is a time bomb for inbound ... by Monday Recap: Facebook Content Strategy, ROI Social Measurement - nutribe - social media agency
• By: Recap du lundi: stratégie de contenu Facebook, 25 chiffres à connaître, page d'accueil inbound - nutribe - social media agency by Recap du lundi: stratégie de contenu Facebook, 25 chiffres à connaître, page d'accueil inbound - nutribe - social media agency
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Gone are the days when marketing and sales could sit on opposite ends of the office pointing fingers at one another. Technological advances, like CRM and automation software, along with a shift in customer behavior have brought these two previously feuding organizations closer by necessity. And why shouldn’t sales and marketing work together? They might be two completely different functions, but they’re charged with the same goal: to increase revenue. They’re beginning to realize that they can’t achieve that goal without some serious and ongoing collaboration.

Break out the biscuits! Enjoyed this ad from SalesforceUK.

Get aligned or fall behind

According to Aberdeen Group, highly aligned organizations achieve an average revenue growth of 20% compared to a 4% decline for their poorly-aligned competitors. And SiriusDecisions reports that B2B organizations with tightly aligned sales and marketing operations achieved 24% faster three-year revenue growth. So alignment isn’t just a matter of getting ahead—it’s a matter of staying afloat.

But what does it mean to be aligned? To help answer that question, we’ve broken things down into nine different categories of alignment.

1. Culture

There’s no denying that sales and marketing professionals come from two different worlds. But that doesn’t mean they can’t work together. Getting started is sometimes just a matter of wanting to cooperate. If team members try and see each other as equals, or agree to appoint one or the other to lead, they can begin a path to alignment.

2. Language and Terminology

If teams can’t agree to speak a common language, what hope is there for understanding? Sales and marketing organizations must be on the same page. That means leads, contacts, opportunities, scoring, process steps and every other term have just one meaning.

3. Process

In order to achieve the shared goal of increased revenue, processes must be integrated. Demand-generation, funnel stages, lead scoring, lead nurturing models and pipeline probability criteria are mutually agreed upon and clearly communicated. The intersections of processes are understood, hand-offs are well defined and each team has visibility into the efforts of the other group.

4. Metrics

Without properly aligned metrics, both teams are navigating in the dark. Both organizations must have visibility into conversion rates, average deal size, ROIs, cost per lead, forecast accuracy, and more. Start simply, identify a few critical metrics and track those. The goal is to get at “one version of the truth.”

5. Programs

When teams operate their programs from silos, time, money effort and opportunity are wasted. In an aligned organization, on the other hand, marketing campaigns and initiatives are integrated to reach the right prospects with the right message at the right time. Conversion rates improve and teams grow more confident in one another.

6. Messaging

Prospects are surprisingly perceptive when it comes to misaligned messaging. If marketing’s saying one thing and sales is saying something just a little bit different, something doesn’t “feel” right. Aligned messaging gives prospects a clear idea of who you are and what you have to offer. They’re more comfortable, and therefore more likely to buy.

7. Content

One piece of rogue collateral can turn a prospect off. Aim for messaging continuity throughout the buyer’s journey. Where possible, repurpose marketing materials in the sales process. If marketing materials can’t be repurposed, work together to modify them, maintaining as much consistency as possible.

8. Infrastructure

When systems aren’t integrated, inefficiencies abound. Teams have no clear picture of their prospects or customers and can’t make effective decisions. An aligned infrastructure, on the other hand, drives efficiency, enables scalability and ensures metrics are accurate.

9. Skills

In any organization, teams bring a variety of skills to the table. Sometimes, these differences can prevent them from communicating effectively. Skills alignment starts with training—from messaging and lead management to database skills and even sales process. This creates cross-functional capabilities that foster better problem solving and process design.

The ball’s in your court. Don’t wait for your sales team to reach out. You can begin to get everyone on the same page by offering training, templates and tools that will help sales drive conversions. This content should be created early on and then updated on an ongoing basis to stay aligned with the rest of the campaign messaging.

Training should begin as early as possible in the campaign cycle. From videos to PowerPoint presentations, articles to product brochures, there are a multitude of ways to train the sales organization. Another helpful tool in the training docket is a sales playcard. This cheat sheet gets to the gist of the campaign, provides some background, describes the various touches and outlines the main value propositions. When it comes to training, think of yourself as a sales person—you’re trying to sell the idea to your sales team. If they believe in it, so will their customers.

Make it easy for your sales team to speak the same language you do. Create templates they can easily draw on in their communications with customers, from emails for each touch in a campaign to phone conversation guides they can follow at every stage of the sales funnel.

Help your sales team drive conversions by working with them to create tools that can act as business case builders. For example, an ROI calculator allows sales to demonstrate the financial payback from investing in your solution. Not only will this help convince prospects to invest, but equips them with the information they need to convince their peers and other decision makers within the organization.

All of this might seem like a lot to take on, but getting started is easier than you think. It all begins with a shift in attitudes, a willingness to collaborate on both sides of the divide. Teams that want to work together are already halfway there.

I spend a lot of time in group meetings or 1 on 1’s with sales people trying to understand how they do their jobs and trying to understand what they need to be more effective and drive bigger numbers.

To be honest, most of the time I have to bite my tongue as I listen to the litany of things they need to be successful.

It always starts with more and better products–along with the lowest prices. When I hear that, I think, “If we have that, why do we need you?”

It then goes on to laundry lists including, more and higher quality leads (what they really want is people ready to issue a PO to us), more and better collateral, more and better case studies, references, tools, demos, better competitive information and good “knock-offs,” easier contracts, better customer services, stronger marketing programs, stronger corporate branding, better value propositions, better insight pitches, better call scripts, and—don’t forget—tons more and better quality leads–purchase ready customers.

There are also complaints about how much time they are spending on non sales activities, how tough things are, how unreasonable quotas are and how bad the commission plan is.

Then they want the formula, they plead, “Just give me the formula, the magic words to use, the things to do that will make the customer immediately pull out a PO.” Stated differently, they are asking, “Tell me what to do.”

Inevitably, at the end of the session I say, “We’ll see what we can do–what fits the priorities and is affordable/doable, but in reality you will never have all the stuff you want to have, but you still have to make your numbers.”

This always provokes the response, “Then what will we do? How can we possibly make our numbers?”

In my ever sympathetic and sensitive way, I respond, “(Wo)man up! It’s your job to figure it out!”

In truth, that’s really our jobs as sales people—Figuring it out–for ourselves and for our customers.

We’ll never have the customer who will open up completely, tell us everything they’re thinking, have a well defined buying process, a clear decision making process, well defined needs-that happen to fit our solutions perfectly, an unlimited budget, and plenty of time to listen to us. It’s not maliciousness on the customers’ parts, they are struggling as much as we, they often just don’t know.

We’ll never have just the right products at the right prices (free is never the right price). We’ll never have all the programs, systems, tools, materials, support, and other things we’d like. It’s simply impossible and unaffordable to do this.

We can’t wait, we can’t do nothing, we can’t complain.

It is what it is, so if we are to help our customers address their opportunities and improve their businesses; if we are to achieve our goals, we have to figure it out!

The real difference between top performers and everyone else is they have already figured this out.

They aren’t waiting for the answers, programs, tools, leads, whatever it is. They aren’t deterred by a customer who “just doesn’t know.”

They’ve already figured out that their job is figuring it out.

They get creative, they try something new, they find answers in the most unusual places. They aren’t afraid to fail or make a mistake, because they know that’s part of figuring it out.

They know the customers are probably struggling themselves, that they haven’t figured it out—so they recognize part of the value and differentiation they create is helping the customer figure it out. It may be through unique insights. It may be through collaborative conversations. It may be through wandering around, talking to a lot of people–then sorting through the information.

They’ve also discovered they don’t have to be right. Since both they and the customer are on a journey of discovery, they will find the right answers and the right approach on that journey.

Where their peers may be looking for answers and direction, top performers are looking for ideas and willing to experiment.

Top performers are never deterred by not having what they need–they figure out.

Figuring it out is a critical sales competency–in fact it’s a critical competency for anyone who wants to be a top performer in their profession, organization, or business.

Figuring it out is “learnable.” We aren’t born with a “figure it out gene.”

Figuring it out is not aimlessness, in fact it is very purposeful and goal directed. People who “figure it out” are doing it to achieve something. They don’t spend a lot of time doing things that don’t help them reach their goal.

Figuring it out requires curiosity, an insatiable appetite for learning, an ability to think critically and a desire to be a problem solver. It requires openness to different ideas and points of view, a willingness to be wrong, and a willingness to fail. Figuring out requires understanding where we’ve made mistakes or failed, learning from these and improving.

Ultimately, I think figuring it out is more about a choice we make.

Your customers need you and your help. Do you have the ability and willingness to figure it out?