Rnordman

Europe today is a continent of borders. The second-smallest continent in the world has more than 50 distinct, sovereign nation-states. Many of these are part of the European Union. At the core of the EU project is an effort to reduce the power and significance of these borders without actually abolishing them - in theory, an achievable goal. But history is not kind to theoretical solutions.

Today, Europe faces three converging crises that are ultimately about national borders, what they mean and who controls them. These crises appear distinct: Immigration from the Islamic world, the Greek economic predicament, and the conflict in Ukraine would seem to have little to do with each...

No matter your industry, B2B sales are always a human-driven process. Even with new approaches to marketing automation and the growing use of innovative technologies, your customers are still humans looking to meet their specific needs.

Human-driven, customer-centric sales aren’t mutually exclusive from a scientific approach, however. In fact, the only way to measurably improve your customer-centered B2B sales process is with scientific metrics that quantify your team’s strengths and weaknesses throughout the sales cycle.

Here are three insightful and valuable B2B sales metrics you shouldn’t overlook:

Metric #1: Factor In The Right Sales Team

The right sales team makes or breaks your revenue generation efforts. That’s why hiring and training the right team is an integral part of successful B2B sales.

Before hiring a sales team (or before outsourcing sales to a partner), ensure candidates complete a hiring assessment that tests specifically for sales-oriented strengths such as aptitude, logic and aggression. There are plenty of reliable, high-quality tests available, but it’s important to use the same one consistently and leverage the resulting data.

As more and more candidates take your hiring assessments, measure which results indicate the best hires. Then, as you collect more data, establish hiring rules within your desired range of test results to increase your chances of hiring salespeople with the highest success rate.

Metric #2: Iterate And Improve Sales Training

At most companies, sales training is limited to an initial orientation, which sets up even the best hires for eventual failure. Instead, your team needs both initial training and ongoing mentoring at both the group and individual levels.

Furthermore, you shouldn’t just be training your salespeople for today’s tasks, but rather, you should be developing them for long-term sales success.

However, determining the best mix of initial training and ongoing guidance isn’t always easy. That’s why you need metrics and feedback loops at every stage of training to inform you on how effective your training efforts have been. If a particular cohort of salespeople has been underperforming compared to other salespeople, your metrics should be able to pinpoint exactly which aspects of their sales training fell through.

Metric #3: Don’t Let Your Sales Database Go Dormant

One of your company’s biggest revenue-generating assets (besides your sales team) is your extensive database of leads and prospects who haven’t bought from you yet. You need to start leveraging this information for all it’s worth.

Start by multiplying your rate of contact with current leads in your database. Not only does this provide a steady influx of opportunities into your sales funnel, but it also ensures you’re not missing out on any potential revenue.

A solid metric to use in this case is to set a goal of contacting your entire sales database 2 times per year. By calling (and culling) through your sales database on a defined schedule, you clean out old contact information and unearth latent leads.

No matter whether you have an in-house or outsourced sales team, this single step of multiplying your contact rate with current prospects increases your chances of closing deals without requiring any new outbound prospecting.

While certain B2B sales metrics stand out and draw your attention, ensure you’re not overlooking the ones, such as a salesperson’s talk time and number of dials, that make the most difference in generating more leads and closing more deals. With the right metrics informing your decisions, your sales team is set up for success.

Looking for a more reliable way to scale your sales growth? Click below to download this free whitepaper from Invenio Solutions® and discover a proprietary five-step formula to a more scientifically precise B2B sales process.

Marketing often gets thrown on the back burner because it feels like time away from your business.

You’re happiest when you’re talking to your audience directly.

You’re telling them all about a product, service, or cause that you care about — and there’s a level of connection there that marketing can’t touch.

Or so you think.

It’s true — there’s plenty of yawn-inducing marketing material out there that makes you wonder if the writer herself was asleep at the keyboard.

But your business can do better than that. You can share something with your audience that awakens their attention, evokes emotion, and fosters ironclad loyalty.

Can storytelling really do all that?

Stories are the seeds of connection. They have staying power — think back to all the stories you can still remember from your early childhood.

And they’re more important than ever as a way to stand out from your competition.

Here are a few things storytelling can do for your business:

• Draw people in: Stories pull us in like moths to a flame. Think about your favorite TV show or the last book you couldn’t put down. Don’t worry — your brand’s story doesn’t have to be a murder mystery to get people’s attention. Just think about the basic elements of any story (characters, plot, conflict, dialogue) and how they fit into your business.

• Open their eyes to the people behind the business: How does your audience view your business or organization? If you’re good at what you do, there’s a good chance they think of you positively. But what if you could really show them what your business means to you? Make your product, service, or mission come alive by sharing how it motivates and inspires you each day.

• Be unique and unforgettable: There will always be businesses with new techniques and fresh approaches that claim to do something better than you. Don’t fall for the trap of trying to do what they do better — focus on doing what you do better. Think about you business’s story and figure out what makes you different. Make this a theme in the marketing materials you create and share.

• Provide value (to your audience and yourself): Stories deliver both entertainment and education. If you write a blog post sharing how you got involved in urban sustainability you’re educating readers and also reflecting on your personal story. Putting ideas into words helps you solidify your thoughts and gain confidence. This can come in handy the next time you decide to push yourself further and speak at an upcoming industry conference.

How can you start incorporating storytelling in your business?

Once you start to see the benefits of storytelling for your business, you’ll start wondering how you can start using it right away.

Luckily, you have plenty of outlets at your disposal. Let’s look at five of the big ones:

1. Your website

Start with your About Us page. Read it aloud. Does it sound like it was written by a real person or a robot? If you’re leaning towards the latter, that’s ok. You can fix it.

It’s hard to bring the same amount of energy to a screen that you do to your customers. Overcome this challenge by finding web copy that you enjoy. Pick apart why it speaks to you and try something similar. Or think back to the first few times you started telling your friends and loved ones about your business. Where did your initial spark come from?

Write down as many of these ideas as possible and then cut it down after. Ask someone you trust to help you identify the most important parts. By the end of this process, the most important thing is that your About Us page sounds authentic and speaks to your customers.

2. Your email campaigns

You know that your email newsletters and announcements are a great place to promote your latest content, and the products and services you offer. But don’t forget about the personal connection you share with your readers.

The people on your email list have voluntarily asked to receive updates from your business. While they likely said no to other companies who asked for their email address in the past, they said yes to you and have continued to show an interest in what you have to say.

How you communicate with your audience will go a long in showing that you value this relationship.

Let them know why you started carrying a new product. Update them on office renovations; invite them to participate in a quick one question online survey to help you decide which wall color to go with.

These gestures might seem small, but they make a difference. It’s easy to ignore business emails if they feel impersonal. Put in your personality and look for opportunities for two-way communication where you can involve them in your story.

Work it Out connects with customers through shared values.

3. The company blog

Inside every blog post you write there’s a story trying to escape. Let it.

Let’s say your business offers recruitment software and you want to write about interview tips. An obvious approach would be to offer advice about preparing for the interview and explain how to effectively follow up.

But what if you started your post by reliving your worst experience as an interviewee and then detailing everything you learned from that experience? See how that draws the reader in? Sharing this story will also make you seem more relatable because you’re showing that you’ve been in a similar situation to your audience.

4. Social channels

Show your customers what’s going on at your store by taking pictures of everything from major events to part of your daily routine. Share your favorite quotes or attention-grabbing statistics and explain how it relates to you and your business. Check out our Photo-a-Day challenge if you’re short on ideas.

Beyond images, look for ways to add video into your storytelling toolkit. Introduce a staff member in a 15-second Instagram video. Ask them to give their name, their role, and their favorite part of their job. Once you gain some confidence, you can try shooting longer videos and add them to your YouTube channel.

5. A podcast

Podcasts are a great way to share stories because you’re hearing a story straight from the source. Podcasts are also convenient for your audience because they can listen easily while driving to work, doing household chores, or taking a break from staring at a screen.

And they’re a smart alternative for people who aren’t comfortable writing, but still want a creative way to share their story.

Here at Constant Contact, we recently launched a new podcast called Small Biz Stories. We’ve interviewed some amazing small business owners to hear all about how they got started, the challenges and mistakes they’ve encountered along the way, and the best advice they have to offer.

The biggest storytelling mistake to watch out for

Storytelling is all about putting your own unique stamp on your marketing to create a connection with your audience. The biggest pitfall to avoid is getting so wrapped up in your own story that you forget to show your customers how they fit in.

You don’t want your stories to feel one-sided. Even if your story is engaging, your audience will start to tune you out if it’s all about you.

One of the most powerful ways to showcase your business’ value is through a case study. Case studies declare to the world that your product works, and proves how effective it can be in helping customers solve problems.

A case study will build social proof far better than any other content format, and it has the potential to do more to increase conversion rates than you probably thought possible.

By demonstrating to potential customers exactly how your business is able to satisfy their needs, case studies kick off the sales process. Far more specific than your average testimonial, case studies underscore your past successes and enhance brand authority.

All those benefits, however, only apply if your case studies are well written.

When writing a case study, keep the following list of best practices in mind. These strategies will help you maximize the impact and positive impression that your studies will have on every visitor that reads them.

Select the Right Customer Experience to Study

Not every customer who uses your product will have an experience appropriate for a case study.

Sometimes, even though the overall customer experience is positive, the actual outcome won’t be relevant to your entire target audience and is unsuitable for a study that all your website visitors may potentially read.

Another thing to consider is the significance of the results. Writing a study on a customer that had less than stellar results won’t paint a pretty picture of your brand. Rather, only profile customers that have experienced exceptional results.

When selecting a candidate for a case study, ask yourself the following questions:

• Did this customer see results that my target audience would be happy with if they use my product?
• Will this customer experience make for an evergreen case study that will still be relevant several years from now?
• Is this customer a recognizable brand that my target audience might know and respect?

Use Numbers and Measured Metrics Often

Authentic data is the key to a well-written case study. Without it, studies have zero credibility and aren’t very believable.

To see how data can add value to a case study, consider the relative impact of the following statements in a case study written by a company that sells remarketing software:

1. By using our product, company XYZ was able to significantly increase customer retention rates
2. Over a three-month period of using our product, Company XYZ doubled their 34% customer retention rate to over 70%

The first statement is ambiguous and lacks authority.

The second, however, uses specific numbers and measured data that makes it much more credible. Furthermore, the latter statement also puts a timeline on the results, which gives readers an idea of how soon they can experience similar results.

By plugging in real-life numbers, you’ll give clear, indisputable proof that your product offers results.

Visualize Data Whenever Possible

The human brain processes visual information at 60,000 times the speed of text and responds 40% better to it.

It makes sense, then, to present data to readers visually whenever possible, rather than in long walls of repetitive text.

The most appropriate place to use visual content is when you’re showing growth in a specific metric. For instance, continuing from our previous example of a case study for a remarketing company, the business could show the month-by-month growth of Company XYZ’s customer retention rates in a bar graph.

Almost any type of data can take visual form, whether it’s as a bar graph, pie chart, flowchart, etc.

Emphasize the Human Story

Data is great at building credibility and making your product look desirable, but data alone is not sufficient for a case study.

Without a human story to back up the data, a case study has no emotional connection with readers and won’t be nearly as appealing.

More than anything, you want your readers to identify with the case study. Use storytelling to highlight your customer’s struggles before using your product. Explain the challenges the customer faced and overcame.

Finally, end on a positive note: talk about the benefits the customer now receives, having achieved the ideal result. Conclude the study by revealing their plan to continue using the product to take their company to even greater heights.

Often, the best way to give your case studies a human touch is by adding quotes directly from your customer. Ask the top executives in the business you’re profiling to add insight about the positive changes they see in the company after using your product, and use the quotes to hammer home important points.

Case studies play a key role in building social proof and validating brand effectiveness. Are you currently using case studies to boost credibility for your company? If so, what does your writing process look like—and what rules do you keep in mind while writing? Share your experiences in the comments below!

Some of us have a harder time negotiating than others, and it can be especially intimidating to negotiate salary. If you’ve done it successfully, tell us how.

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It’s really hard to believe, but I have to say that one of the most—and possibly the most—profound changes I’ve made in my life over the last several years was the simple decision to start carrying a pocket notebook and a pen with me wherever I go. Unless I’ve made a mental miscue when swapping out a finished notebook or something, I do not leave the house without my pocket notebook resting in my hip pocket or my shirt pocket, with a trusty pen right there beside it for jotting notes.

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The Google+ notification system, which appears nearly everywhere that you’re logged into Google, is getting a major change. Now, you can get notifications for Google Photos or YouTube. You can even filter which ones you want to see.

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Professional triathlete Andrew Starykowicz wearing the Recon Jet 3 smart glasses.

Following last week’s purchase of Vancouver-based web-enabled sports eyewear maker Recon Instruments by chip-maker Intel Corp. for a reported US$175 million, I spoke to Recon co-founder and CEO Dan Eisenhardt about the deal, what it means for both companies, and the opportunity in the wearables market.

CB: How did this deal come about?

Recon Instruments’ CEO Dan Eisenhardt.

Dan Eisenhardt: We’ve had Intel Capital as an equity partner since 2013. We got to know them pretty well. We don’t use their chips in our platform but we were evaluating them, so we had our eyes on them. We weren’t really looking to sell, but [when they approached us about an acquisition] the synergies were so obvious. Intel is looking to be a player in the wearables market. We’re already here. We’re leaders in the heads-up display market and we’re looking at consumer and enterprise and that’s the next frontier. Smart watches are already out there. The next thing you’re going to see over the next two to five years is a lot of these smart glasses.

I wouldn’t have thought of that as part of Intel’s core business. What made them so interested in Recon?

They kind of missed the boat on the mobile phone revolution. They basically had a monopoly on the desktop business. Now they don’t want to make the same mistake in wearables. It’s a huge market. Any person could have any number of wearables on them whereas most people only have one phone. It’s like an unbounded opportunity.

Will there be any changes to your operations?

We’re staying in Vancouver. I’m staying on. In fact everybody’s staying on. We don’t have one person who isn’t. We may have different titles but we’re still responsible for the same areas. In many ways we have increased responsibilities, as we’re part of a new devices group at Intel. Now we’re part of an ecosystem that’s bigger than it was before, made up of 700 or 800 people. Our brand continues, our product line continues. But we’re not a subsidiary; we’re part of Intel.

PREVIOUSLY: 6 Questions: One-on-One with Dan Eisenhardt, CEO, Recon Instruments

Did you need to raise money one way or the other with your launch this year of your own line of glasses, Recon Jet?

With Recon Jet, it’s a consumer product. Before, we were going through eyewear companies—Oakley and Smith and those guys—shipping them our heads-up display. They would put our display in their goggles and sell them through their channels. Now we have that still going strong, but we also have our own eyewear. We’re in the fashion market now. Suddenly we have our own inventory, our own distribution and sales channels, so suddenly our costs are also increasing. We’d have to raise quite a lot of money to get to the next level. Here we could ally ourselves with a strong partner where we could continue what we’re doing and we get access to technology and resources that will really propel us to the next level. It was really a no-brainer for us.

Did you consider an initial public offering? A lot of Canadian tech companies are at least talking about that right now.

If we’d gone the IPO route it would have been later on. There’s risks when you go too early. We evaluated the Intel offer carefully at the board level and thought this is just a great match.

The purchase price was reported to be $175 million. Can you confirm that?

I can’t confirm or disconfirm that. Every term of the deal is under covenant.

Anything else you’d like to add?

I’d like to thank all our supporters. We’ve had a lot of help along the way. Having such a big company and a great company invest in us, and then we stay here, is a great testament to the ecosystem of technology that is blossoming in Vancouver. There are many stakeholders we owe a debt to: UBC, where we took the entrepreneurship course and where the founders met. BCIT and SFU as well; we’ve got post-grads and post-docs that we’ve used for our research and we continue to hire out of their programs. And BCTIA, the British Columbia Technology Industry Association. Stuff’s really happening here. I think you’ll see multiple exits here over the next three to five years.

MORE ABOUT INNOVATION, STARTUPS & VANCOUVER:

• Vancouver’s booming Gastown tech startup scene, mapped
• The 15 Most Innovative Canadian Companies of 2015
• How Stewart Butterfield built a billion-dollar company in eight months
• How Vancouver’s Food.ee is disrupting corporate catering

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The post Interivew: Recon Instruments CEO Dan Eisenhardt on selling to Intel appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

Trashed Blackberry phones sit in a bucket during the NBC Today Show in New York April 21, 2008. The phones were to be used by students in an art piece and then recycled for Green Week. (Lucas Jackson/Reuters)

WATERLOO, Ont. — BlackBerry Ltd. (TSX:BB) delivered another loss in the first quarter as the company struggled to sell its smartphones, but investors appeared pleased with some of the headway made with its turnaround effort.

The Waterloo, Ont.-based company’s stock was ahead nine per cent to US$10.04 in pre-market trading in New York, as BlackBerry managed to grow its software licensing revenue by 150 per cent.

That appeared to be a bright spot in an earnings report which showed other areas of weakness.

BlackBerry posted an adjusted loss of US$28 million or five cents per share, which compared with expectations of a three-cent per share loss, according to a survey by Thomson Reuters.

Revenues of $658 million were also softer than the $679 million analysts anticipated. Total revenue was down from US$966 million a year earlier, but about steady with the previous quarter ended Feb. 28.

Growth of software revenues to $137 million — about one-fifth of the total in the quarter ended May 30 — appeared to overshadow some of the problems with BlackBerry’s hardware business.

Missing from the initial financial results was much insight into how the recent launches of the BlackBerry Passport and Classic phones have fared when it came to sales.

The company, which only recognizes revenue on devices when they’re sold to customers, booked revenue on 1.1 million BlackBerry smartphones during the period, a steep drop from the 2.6 million phones sold a year earlier.

Smartphone revenue fell to about $263 million from $379 million a year ago.

In a separate announcement, BlackBerry said it will receive an unspecified licence fee from network equipment manufacturer Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO) for patents, as part of a long-term agreement. The company did not offer any further details.

Chief executive John Chen has been focused on transitioning the company away falling handset revenues and towards sales in its software business.

“Those of you know me know how I hate losing money,” Chen told analysts on the company’s first-quarter conference call.

“I believe these investments are prudent as we transition to growing a bigger software business,” he added later.

The length of the turnaround has tested the patience of some investors, and BlackBerry’s share price has fallen about 11 per cent on the TSX since the start of the year. The stock closed Monday at C$11.32 on the Toronto market, down from $12.74 on Jan. 2.

BlackBerry (TSX:BB) is also scheduled to hold its annual meeting on Tuesday morning in Waterloo.

The post BlackBerry results show struggle persists, analysts find optimism appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Digital + Recurring Revenue = Win. Easier said than done, right?

As discussed last week on New Rainmaker with Brian Clark, digital products and services plus subscription revenue are The Two Components of The Perfect Online Business Model. Let’s talk a little more about the subscription side of things.

This week, author and entrepreneur John Warrillow joins Brian as co-host, and they’ve got three models for you to contemplate when piecing together your perfect business. John is the author of The Automatic Customer: Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry and the founder of two recurring revenue businesses.

In this 32-minute episode of New Rainmaker with Brian Clark, John and Brian discuss:

• The only business model investors want to talk about
• How to start a bidding war for your business
• The priceless value of online recurring revenue
• How to make a membership subscription model work
• What the “Netflix” model can do for your business
• The growth power of the network subscription model
• The psychology of selling a recurring subscription
• How to overcome “subscription credit card fatigue”
• Copywriting tips for selling recurring subscriptions

Click Here to Listen to
New Rainmaker with Brian Clark on iTunes

Click Here to Listen on Rainmaker.FM

About the author

Rainmaker.FM

Rainmaker.FM is the premier digital marketing and sales podcast network. Get on-demand business advice from experts, whenever and wherever you want it.

The post Three Subscription Revenue Models for Digital Content and Services appeared first on Copyblogger.

It happens to most of us at one point or another. You just bought something. Probably something fairly expensive. Like a car. A new phone. A computer. A house. You’ve done your research and feel confident you made a wise purchase and got the best deal.

But then, sometime shortly after the purchase, a nagging thought invades your subconscious which soon blossoms into questions like ...

*(Oh yeah, it even occurs in marriages. But, that’s a story for another day.)

These thoughts stem from cognitive dissonance and the paradox of choice. You have a full-blown case of buyer’s remorse.

Well, the same thing happens, to some extent, in the business world. The prospect you spent months captivating, cultivating, and cajoling, was finally convinced your product or service could help address all their problems. They felt good about their decision to go with you.

Then, a few days after their decision, you get a call from that formerly happy person. They proceed to voice concerns. They start asking questions about the contract. Or the implementation timeline. Maybe the CFO questioned the purchase after the sale because she was on vacation when the decision was made. Or your competitors found out and started filling your client’s head with negative comments.

You get a sinking feeling as you visualize your commission check morphing into an origami crane and flying out of your wallet.

So, is buyer’s remorse something important to address? Absolutely. It’s like the old adage, “The day you sign a client is the day you start losing them.” 

Buyer’s remorse usually presents itself within the first few days after the business is awarded. So, it needs to be addressed sooner rather than later.

Here are a few things you can do to reduce the FUD factor and related buyer’s remorse.

1) Remember, it’s all about value ...

Make sure you have created a solid foundation for your relationship. One based on agreed-upon benefits which have been included in your proposals and/or contract.

2) ... Over the long term.

Make sure your customer retention and loyalty programs are kept current. Provide program updates and conduct client reviews on a regular basis. 

3) Set expectations.

Immediately after the sale is complete, explain to your client (verbally and in writing) what they can expect to receive from you and your company. Provide a document listing how their account will be handled, how invoicing will work, and whatever the next steps are in the process. Then abide by it.

4) Send a thank you note.

You’ve already expressed your thanks over the phone or in person. But as soon as you can, send a thank you note. Actually, go out and buy a box of them -- they’re cheap.

Write your note by hand, expressing how much you appreciate their decision to go with you and your company. Then snail mail it. Is it better than an email? You betcha. Why? Because not many people do it anymore. It’ll be a welcome surprise.

A phone call from your supervisor or an executive would be an even bigger surprise if you can make it happen. Time it so it occurs after or even around the same time your thank you note arrives.

5) Provide contact information within 24 hours (if not sooner).

Send each client stakeholder a list of all the relevant people who will be working on their account. Also list upper management contacts, including finance. Provide direct phone numbers, email addresses, cell numbers, any appropriate blogs, and social media information. Guarantee someone will always get back to them in a specific amount of time if they have any issues.

6) Introduce user groups.

If your company maintains user groups, introduce your new client to key individuals in the groups.

7) Share the love.

Create a master client profile complete with all pertinent information (phone numbers, emails, contracts, billing information, etc.) and make sure it’s easily accessible by everyone in your company who will be working on the account. Hold an internal meeting to make sure your colleagues know what you know about the new client’s objectives and expectations.

Buyer's remorse is a very close relative to customer attrition. So even if your customer doesn't immediately experience remorse, it’s a good idea to keep these tips in mind.

If your sales team is responsible for closing complex enterprise deals, you know that the process can be lengthy and complex. You’re probably also painfully aware that it can be fraught with peril. Anything from an unexpected objection to a shift in leadership can undo your team’s progress and kill the deal.

High-performing sales teams, understand that the key to closing more deals lies in a critical understanding the buyer’s process. These high performers leverage that understanding to anticipate obstacles and effectively drive the process to completion.

Here are six questions to help your team members gauge the strength of an opportunity.

1. What steps are included in the customer’s decision process?

Take the time to understand how many stakeholders are involved in the process, who they each are, and when they will each become involved in the process. What are the key concerns for each stakeholder, and what questions will they ask? What obstacles might they each introduce? As a seller, you need to know the people who will be part of the buying decision and be audible-ready to articulate how your solution can impact their component of the business.

2. Have I documented all the activities involved in validating and approving the solution?

Once you understand the steps involved, identify the activities and communications necessary at each stage to address key concerns, validate your solution, and win approval from the relevant stakeholders. When you move through multiple decision makers in your buying organization, you need to determine the positive business outcomes, the required capabilities, and the metrics that are important to each buyer. Approach each decision maker as a new discovery opportunity. Are the required capabilities, and metrics others indicated in previous conversations, just as important to this particular decision maker? If not, you need to determine and understand the discrepancy.

3. Have I developed a reverse timeline accounting for all events, responsible parties & dependent activities? Do I know who could alter this timeline?

Determining the customer’s buying time frame will help provide the benchmarks you need to move forward. Start with the desired outcome and then work backwards. Determining the customer’s buying timeline will help provide the benchmarks you need to move the deal forward.

4. Are both my customer and myself vested in this timeline? 

Is your customer looking to make a decision this year? This quarter? Has funding been allocated to the project? Maximize your time as a seller. Determining the time frame and then identifying next steps will help you either move the deal forward or put it aside to concentrate on more ready-to-act customers.

5. Have I reviewed these timelines with my Champion, the Economic Buyer, finance, purchasing and/or anyone who could veto a decision that favors you?

When you have multiple decision makers, it’s critical you are not only validating the PBOs, Required Capabilities and Metrics, but also the overall timeline. This will help prevent suprises along the sales process.

6. Who can change the process? Who is controlling the process? 

Remember, understanding the people involved in the buying process will help you understand who can change the process and who ultimately will make the final decision. Understanding the players will help you continually create and capture value for the customer in your sales conversations.

Simply following a structured sales process doesn’t guarantee the deal will close. You need to have a solid understanding of who can change or control process. Make sure your team is consistently qualifying all opportunities with a validated qualification process. It’s a sure way to prove an opportunity warrants your investment of time and resources.

Ever had a sales conversation with prospects who seemed like a good fit and were really engaged with you? Then their 'engagement' goes over the top and they just keep asking questions, and more questions, and even more questions.

Each answer you give just yields two more questions, and at some point there are a myriad of details that nibble away at the deal and steal your thunder. All the momentum is gone. Details have derailed your deal.

Details are a double-edged sword. Initially, it's a good sign when prospects ask detailed questions. But the more details you discuss, the more details need to be resolved. If you get lost in the details, you'll lose the deal.

Getting buried in detail questions

When you're speaking with prospects who bury you in questions and they keep asking and asking and asking... at some point (especially at a later stage of the deal), it's important to manage their questions more effectively than just responding to each and every one of them.

I see a lot of salespeople do the wrong thing. They either:
a) respond to every question the prospect has in sequential order.
b) become impatient with the prospect.

Neither is the way to go. It's not your prospect's job to manage the deal - it's yours!

Questions that lead nowhere

When prospects ask dozens of random, unrelated questions that don't move the conversation forward, it's time to intervene.

Here's an example of what a scatterbrained series of questions might look like:

Prospect: "Can I utilize your API to integrate your solution with my accounting software and analytics in a way that automatically displays the correlation between X and Z as a percentage?"

Sales rep responds.

Prospect: "When I send an email to your support team, when can I expect a response?"

Sales rep responds.

Prospect: "So, you mentioned that feature X is not on the current product roadmap. Can you tell me what's next on your product roadmap?"

Sales rep responds.

Prospect: "Aha. And can you generate PDF reports that get sent out twice weekly to a set of specific email addresses, or do we need to log in to the dashboard each time?"

This goes on and on, without ever leading anywhere. What should you do in a situation like this?

Keep the bigger picture in mind

As a sales person, what's your main responsibility? What's your job really about? Why are you talking with a prospect?

It's not about 'hitting the numbers' or 'making money'. That's a byproduct.

Your real job is to figure out:

• Is your offer a good fit for this prospect?
• How are you going to deliver and create value for this prospect?
• Why is your solution the right choice for this prospect?

Everything in the sales conversation should be about that! Your prospects are busy and distracted by a million things. Every time they talk to someone within their company about your offer, more questions get raised.

Their mind is all over the place when it comes to this deal. Too much clutter, not enough clarity. It's your job to provide clarity and help them focus on what really matters.

You're the CEO of this deal, the captain of this ship

Don't become a training and support person. It's your job to champion the deal, to make it happen, to get it done.

Paint a vision, provide roadmap, help them prioritize.

It's your job to steer this ship to its destination; and that destination is a good decision. You just want to move through the land of indecisiveness as quickly as possible.

Enforce priorities

What are the dealbreakers? What are the top five questions? What are your most important priorities?

Focus on the absolute must haves.

There's nothing worse than spending hours answering a series of 100 questions, and then at the end being asked:

"Oh, can we install an on-premise version of your software?" - "No, we don't do that." - "Well, then we can't do this."

That's why you want to start with the top priorities, the deal breakers. Talk about the must-haves before you talk about the nice-to-haves.

What to say to a prospect

So the prospect is asking a thousand random questions that lead nowhere. Here's what you say:

“Hey, I know there are so many questions and the more your organization grows within this area, the more questions there will be. It’s just the nature of things. That means our partnership is growing, your company is growing, it’s a good sign.

“But to make sure that we’re investing all our time and energy on the right things, let’s prioritize. Out of the 25 questions that you have, what are the top five questions? What are the most important questions we have to figure out first? The deal breakers, the deal killers, the absolute musts. Once we figure that out, once we address the musts, what are the likes and what are the nice-to-haves?

“For today’s call, we’re going to only focus on the absolute must haves, making sure that we check off on them, because if we have the must haves, this deal is moving forward, right?

“Right. Okay. But then we still have the other 20 questions, and we need to answer and address those in the onboarding phase. And I promise you, as you come on board, there will be more than just these questions and that’s totally fine. But if we prioritize right, we know that we can decide to move forward now, and handle the minutia later on.”

Got an email with 30 questions?

Someone sends you an email with a long list of questions? Rather than working your way through it one by one, or trying to figure out what the most important questions are, just reply this:

"Hey,

Can you do me a favor? I want to make sure you get the best answers to your most important questions.

Please tell me in order of priority the most important five questions out of this long list questions you sent me. What are really important ones and what are nice-to-have ones but not really that important to you, that crucial to you?"

Priorities before details

Never dive into details before you've set priorities. Identify the must-haves and the deal breakers upfront. Keep the big picture in mind and move the deal forward by helping your prospects to focus on what matters and make a good decision quickly.

Want more? Check out these resources:

Are your prospects postponing the purchase? Do this!
Have a prospect that would be a perfect fit, yet puts off the purchase indefinitely? Here's how buying your product becomes a priority for your prospect...

SaaS Sales: How To Create Urgency To Close Deals NOW
How can you accelerate a sale when a prospect is delaying the purchasing decision? Three SaaS sales strategies + 4 tactics to close the deal sooner.

Maybes are killing your startup
The path to success is paved with clear outcomes: good or bad. It's the maybe quagmire that's slowly exhausting and eventually killing startups.

To some, ball bearings are boring, even though these small steel spheres are what keep everything from factory machines and wind turbines as well as cars, trucks, planes, and trains moving smoothly and safely. But to Sweden-based SKF Group — the leading company in the $76 billion global market for ball bearing systems — these objects are heroic, destined to become the “brains of rotating machinery” by transmitting data to boost performance, reduce downtime, and prevent accidents.

Yet even though SKF has a century-long track record of keeping the wheels of industry turning, this new vision of bearings with brains by no means assures that SKF will prosper in the changeover in technology represented by the internet of things, in which every conceivable object can become a node on the net.

So far, much of the attention around smart, connected products has been around consumer-facing goods like watches and thermostats. Industrial companies have tended to be among the last to create digital strategies that harness the new opportunities arising from the proliferation of smart products. That lag poses dangers. Tech titans such as Google and Amazon are working to connect more and more types of objects to the web by offering mobile interfaces for managing just about anything. If someone else designs the apps and software that allow customers to monitor machines, the ripple effects across value chains could force industrial giants into the role of being mere suppliers of commodities.

Building an industrial internet strategy. In this respect, creating an industrial internet of things is an even more urgent endeavor, because industrial systems represent huge capital expenditures, have longer lifecycles, and are placed in mission-critical and often hostile environments that can cause costly and dangerous systems failures. “In some offshore wind applications, changing the main bearing on a turbine is so expensive that it undermines the business case for building the turbine in the first place,” said Filippo Zingariello, director of global strategic development at SKF.

Such challenges, he says, require industrial companies to take a fresh approach to strategy. After all, the technology now enables a different kind of relationship with customers.

Insight Center

Recognizing this, SKF two years ago announced SKF Insight, a way to turn its industrial products into digital services. The first step involved hardware — installing tiny sensors into bearings that are powered by the kinetic motion of the machines themselves. Those systems can now transmit real-time data about the performance of industrial machines as well as the components of energy and transportation systems. Railway operators and wind farm owners were among the first to deploy the concept.

Turns out, data from all of these little things can make a big difference. SKF now provides 45 different iPad apps so managers can monitor the maintenance, speed, and reliability of up to 8,000 kinds of smart objects. This has led to new business models, putting SKF squarely in a position to provide “knowledge as a service” (KaaS), as more than a half million machines are already connected to the SKF Cloud.

The race toward new industrial business models. SKF is just one of many industrial companies adopting new business models based around the increased interactivity between smart objects. Companies like John Deere have launched new business models for selling digital subscription services to farmers and operators of construction and mining equipment.

By changing the basis of competition in old-line industries, smart, connected products are precipitating three strategic shifts that we believe will eventually transform virtually all companies that manufacture things:

• From selling equipment to selling outcomes. This is analogous to the shift to outcome-based business models taking place in other industries such as healthcare. You don’t buy a piece of equipment; you buy what that equipment can do for you. Bristol Siddeley (later purchased by Rolls Royce) originated the “power by the hour” model of selling aircraft engine uptime more than 20 years ago. Now, the industrial internet has enabled companies like GE, Cummins and Caterpillar to apply the idea across multiple dimensions. For instance, Caterpillar’s Cat Connect solutions emphasize machine uptime, fuel efficiency, and increased safety.

• Designing solutions that transcend the notion of products and services: Instead of thinking of the world in terms of products or services, industrial companies need to create hybrid solutions. The provider goes in with a mindset of creating an integrated offering building on the value and decision making enabled through data analytics. For instance, GE’s Predix cloud platform is all about the performance metrics of water plants, gas turbine plants and other industrial systems, rather than the features of all the hardware and software that makes it happen.

• From value chains to value networks: New stakeholders and types of relationships are causing companies to think beyond current industry value chains to imagine new industrial ecosystems. This requires industrial companies to reevaluate the sustainability of their current position, the viability of expanding into new roles, and the set of organizations they see as “competitors.” One could argue, for instance, that ExxonMobil is now competing against Google in telematics. And while Daimler and Volvo want to create their own telematics systems, commercial vehicle fleet owners want integration across brands, challenging the notion of proprietary systems. Companies that want to remain focused on their core products need to watch out for organizations that are capturing customer mindshare through such new services.

These three big shifts are now playing out in nearly every industrial market, regardless of whether it is B2C or B2B, high- or low-asset intensity. The scope and speed vary, but the shifts are more fundamental.

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The reality is if you build it, they are not guaranteed to come. According to a recent Venturebeat Insights report, nearly 70 percent of apps in the app store collect less than 5,000 downloads and 60 percent never see an update after launch.

Clearly, releasing your app is only half the battle. Getting people to use it ultimately determines whether you have a success or just another dud.

Here are six steps to kickstart your acquisition funnel and set you on the right path to generating ROI positive users:

1. Lay a foundation

Imagine your app store page as the face of your funnel. It’s perhaps the most important gateway a user engages with before installing your app. Ensure your presence here is optimized and compelling. This entails having a catchy app title (don’t forget the app icon!), a detailed set of screenshots, and a description copy that is concise and utilizes keywords your users are searching for. Also consider adding video creatives in your app store page. “If a picture says a thousand words, then a video is worth a million.”

Virality and social proof are also important prerequisites for a strong acquisition funnel. Set the stage by providing a creative outlet within your app to generate word of mouth. Whether you reward in-game tokens or remove ads momentarily, encourage users to share in-app content and invite friends.

Apps live and die by their reviews and ratings. Pay close attention to this area in your app store page by addressing all customer complaints in a timely and professional matter. Neglecting this will reflect on your app, tarnishing its ratings and turning away installs.

2. Consider a soft launch

Soft launching presents invaluable awareness for product validation. But moreover, it provides key insight around pricing metrics preemptive to jumping into your primary market.

For instance, if you harbor any reluctance in your UA strategy for the U.S. market, launch in a region with similar characteristics like Canada. Observe your incent to non-incent traffic. Which ratios worked best? What did you pay per user segment? Did it generate a return? How long did your campaign run before experiencing diminishing value?

Create a comparable checklist like the one above and test the waters to build buyers’ confidence. Extrapolate what works and apply in your desired market.

3. Focus on performance channels

Traditional methods like PR, social, and ASO (App Store Optimization) are cost-effective ways to attract organic users. These strategies, however, are standard to every developer’s marketing plan and often not enough to warrant high volume growth.

Extend your reach by supplementing with performance mobile marketing. Mobile advertising will be the biggest contributor to app installs and can kickstart a much larger flow of organic users to your app.

If your goal is to reach top charts or rank in a specific category, burst campaigns are your best bet. Burst campaigns, structured purely around user volume, increase your app’s discoverability in the app store resulting in significant organic lift.

If your goal is to boost user engagement, compliment your paid acquisition with a series of sustained campaigns. Performance advertisers will explore sustained campaigns with no specific volume goal but rather user ROI. These are typically carried out on weekends (when the app store is the most active), after an app update, or when engagement is in a lull.

4. Scrutinize the user LTV

User LTV (lifetime value) is a pivotal metric to know inside and out before you begin marketing your mobile app. Understanding this will define the elusive break-even point and help plan your acquisition budget around profitability.

Start with Lloyd Melnick’s unofficial formula for user LTVs:

• Monetization: how much revenue each customer segment spends or generates over their lifetime in the game or app. This includes KPIs such as ARPDAU (average revenue per daily active user), ARPPU (average revenue per paying user) and ARPU (average revenue per user).
• Retention is how often people come back to your game, how frequently within a certain period of time (for example, every day, every week, every month) and how often they stay in the game when they play.
• Virality is how many additional (free) users each user will bring in (also often measured over a specific period of time).

To generate ROI positive users, work strictly in a model in which each user segment’s LTV exceeds its correlating CPI (cost per install). As long as this differentiation is made, continue advertising this segment, frequently adjusting your CPI around its return.

If CPI’s begin exceeding the lifetime value of a particular user segment, the profit margin is lost and no longer sustainable. At this junction you have one of two options: optimize this channel by adjusting rates and formats, or stop this campaign altogether.

 5. Utilize high performing ad formats

When deciding on ad formats, it’s important to prioritize each based on the user quality output. Focusing purely on click through rates or engagement is dubious and does not guarantee a delivery of ROI positive users.

Once you recognize that install ads are an extension of your apps onboarding process, the better you can prioritize your budget. Banner ads, although economical and easy to scale, generally deliver bottom-of-the-totem-pole type users with low LTVs. These formats are considerably disconnected from the app experience and do not say enough about your app to provoke a quality install. Conversely, formats such as video app trailers and HD interstitial ads are much more enticing and informative, delivering a higher percentage of quality users.

Every format has their perks and price. Determine a mix that makes sense for your budget.

 6. Optimize and scale

Before committing your entire UA budget, strongly consider running a test campaign. You’ll typically want to run these for a minimum of 20 days to gather enough behavioral data. Observe these results to scale only the well-performing ad sources while adjusting the poor.

The best partners and campaign managers will work closely with you to optimize your user traffic and adjust rates on the fly. Using post-install metrics, they can automatically white or blacklist ad sources ensuring your budget is spent wisely.

As always, A/B test your ad creatives and CTAs to present only the best-performing combinations. These will ideally be carried out during the test period, maximizing your install performance come game day.

The myriad of variables involved make mobile user acquisition quite enigmatic, and something only experience and testing can solve. Industry veterans know there is no one size fits all and as the ecosystem evolves, so must their strategies.

At the end of the day, every user has a price. It’s up to you to determine if they’re worth it.

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OneNote is one of those Microsoft products that seems completely useless when you first start using it, but it isn’t until you actually make use of the product that it’s true value starts shining through. As a task and project management tool, OneNote is one of the best tools out there. Why not just use the Tasks feature in Microsoft Outlook, you ask? Well, there’s really no reason you can’t use both. Each have their place in your productivity toolbox, and they each compliment each other as well. In this article, I’ll show you how you can integrate Microsoft Outlook...

Read the full article: Turn Outlook into a Project Management Tool with OneNote Integration

I’m all for competition, in fact I love it. It’s important for a variety of reasons the least of which is that competition often brings out the truth about how you can improve your product; and it can motivate your team to work harder. Having said that, when your competition starts “winning” deals by simply buying business, a red flag should go up: for you, your customers, and everyone who is impacted by your business.

This past quarter, my company lost out on two significant projects — significant to us, but not for the reason you might think. Projects are won and projects are lost; that happens in the business world, but the reason why these two carried so much weight from our perspective was the way we lost them.

We were underbid. Not just by a little, but a lot: 50 percent, in fact.

Think about that: half of your standard revenue would be gone, but you’d spend your standard resources to fulfill the job. Some customers will always bite at the lowest price, but what do they lose when they choose an extreme low bid over options with established reputations? Quality, customer service, reputation, relationship, scalability, and all of those other factors get thrown by the wayside for everyone involved when prices are underbid by 50 percent.

The more I thought about it, the more the practice worried me — not as an individual business owner, but as someone that’s actively involved in our industry and the business community as a whole. I took a deep dive into the topic, and no matter how I looked at it, I kept coming to the same conclusion. It’s fine and expected to bid competitively on price, but things turn into a severe underbidding war, the collateral damage includes both your company and the your industry as a whole. Here are five reasons why:

#1 Your bottom line suffers

Profit margins are all about input and output. If there’s less input, then your profit margin suffers, and that’s not a sustainable business strategy. Think about the things impacted over the long haul: overhead, quality control, product/service development, customer service, etc. All of these critical items are eventually compromised because of extremely low bidding. Some early-stage companies may think that it’s a viable practice to do whatever it takes to “win” business (and maybe you need to do this with your first 5 to 10 customers to prove out your model and get some wins) but this does not scale. In fact, for SaaS margins and bookings ACV (Annual Contract Values) are more important.

#2 Your internal morale suffers

Employee morale can make the difference between a successful company and one on life support. So how are employees supposed to take it if they hear that the company is using this strategy? Simple logic dictates that it will raise anything from questions to doubts, and that could lead to loss of motivation or even loss of talent, and that puts an anchor on your long-term viability. Your engineering and product team is working hard on building an amazing product, and rest assured when they see you giving away the platform for “free” it will get to them.

#3 Your external reputation suffers

Some businesses do make purchase decisions based solely on cost. These businesses eventually either go away due to poor quality control or they get burned by poor quality, and then decide to look at the bigger picture when deciding. If you develop a reputation for being the “cheap” option, you may see a short-term spike in contracts, but as resources become limited and value suffers, word will get around and competitors with greater means of talent retention and quality control will start to get the work.

I have often noticed that customers do not always want to work with the lowest price vendor, but the one that provides the best service. The same way it puts up a red flag within your company, it will likely bite you in the ass outside of your four walls.

#4 It limits your contract options

For businesses that run on regular and renewable contracts (i.e. a SaaS application), the low-bid model introduces a variety of problems. If it’s a low-bid month-to-month contract, there’s no option to recognize it as an annual contract, which is a necessity in the industry. Also, what happens if you underbid a price and that leaks out to your other customers? Will you deal with the hassle of renegotiation, set a new universal price point, or try to find another way to appease them? You may have won a new contract, but that contract also opens a Pandora’s Box of business problems.

#5 The industry is deflated

In business, companies are often guilty of employing copycat strategies as a reaction. Now imagine if a small but significant percentage of companies used this extreme low bidding method to win business. Suddenly, the market price has recalibrated but expenses and overhead have not. That means resources are drained to compensate employees, thus leading to frustration and burnout. How can an industry grow if it shoots itself in the foot over and over?

What are your options besides price?

Instead of focusing purely on bid price, the conversation should turn to other value propositions. What does your company do that distinguishes itself from the competition? What does your company history and industry reputation say about you? What do you do to spur internal innovation, and how has that pushed your company offerings? What kind of resources do you dedicate to customer relationship management?

Price is always going to be a big part of any bidding process, but it doesn’t have to be the only factor. By eliminating extreme underbidding and focusing on competitive overall value, we lift our respective industries as a whole — and that’s truly good for business.

Editor's Note: This is the 10th installment of an occasional series on water scarcity issues around the world that Stratfor will be building upon periodically.

Despite being "water rich," Canada will experience increasing regional water stress as demographics and climate variability threaten the natural resources in the country's prairie. Suggestions about the possibility of Canada exporting water will emerge sporadically, as they have in the past.

But such plans are highly unlikely to come to fruition, both because public opinion opposes the commoditization of water and because the exporting water would not be profitable. While Canada will continue to protect its freshwater resources, it will not turn them into a traded commodity.

Analysis

Canada's wealth of resources and comparatively small population allow the government to capitalize on the export of a number of goods, including oil, natural gas, fertilizer and wheat.

But although Canada holds roughly 7 percent of the world's renewable freshwater resources and less than 1 percent of the total global population, water is not poised to become another exported commodity — even as other areas of the world continue coping with water stress and water scarcity.

Canadian citizens generally view access to water as a basic human right and oppose attempts to sell it for profit. In addition, logistical difficulties and economic infeasibility — not only in Canada, but globally — ensure that bulk transfers of water across long distances will remain rare. 

Canada's Deceptive Abundance

The amount of renewable fresh water available to each Canadian citizen is more than 80,000 cubic meters per year. Even other countries that are not typically considered water stressed have far less water available per citizen. For example, the United Kingdom's annual per capita water availability is just over 2,300 cubic meters per year, and the United States has just over 9,500 cubic meters per person.

However, Canada's surfeit of water is greater on paper than it is in reality. The country's water prices are among the lowest in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, encouraging overuse of the resources.

Moreover, as in the United States, Canada's water is not equally distributed. The majority of Canada's population lives in the southern part of the country, but 60 percent of the country's renewable water drains to the north, so access to water resources is limited. In fact, some areas of Canada are already experiencing some degree of water stress.

The prairie provinces of Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan are typically more arid than other parts of the country. An expansion of agricultural and industrial activity in the region, along with population increases in recent decades, has led to greater water stress in parts of these provinces, and the pressure is expected to increase in coming decades.

Agricultural and extractive industrial activity can be expected to continue in the region even as existing resources dwindle. Glaciers that feed the headwaters of many of the major rivers in the region have shrunk by roughly 25 percent in the past 100 years. Increasing temperatures and more frequent droughts are predicted, likely further increasing the strain on the water supply.

Constraints on Water Exports

Even with the rising pressure on water supplies in certain parts of Canada, the stresses on the country's water are not as immediate or as great as other regional deficits on the continent. For example, California is in the midst of a severe drought, the Ogallala aquifer in the U.S. agricultural heartland remains severely overexploited, and the Colorado River is overallocated. Simply moving water from locations of abundance to areas of demand is often proposed as a solution. But ultimately, moving water is far more complicated than piping it from point A to point B.

In radical cases where political will and extreme demand overcame logistical barriers, countries such as China and Libya have undertaken large internal water transfer projects. And the idea of transporting water from Canada to areas of higher demand in the United States has been around for more than 50 years.

A number of potential transfer projects have been proposed, none more extensive than the North American Water and Power Alliance. Conceived in the mid-20th century, the project would use existing waterways and a series of new canals, pumps, reservoirs and other infrastructure elements to redistribute water throughout the continent. However, despite revisions over the years, the project remains little more than lines on paper.

A slightly more limited project, the Great Recycling and Northern Development Canal of North America, was conceived at roughly the same time and aimed to gather freshwater runoff in James Bay and reroute it south to the Great Lakes.

The project was projected to cost an estimated $100 billion in 1960 (more than $800 billion today) to construct and $1 billion a year to operate. Quite simply, water is expensive to move. Water is heavy, and elevation changes require energy-intensive pumping to keep it moving. Costs vary depending on the project, but moving water over long distances can be more than five times more expensive than local desalination or recycling options.

The large expenses might be justified if there were the potential for profit, but water prices often do not reflect a traditional supply-and-demand market. It remains unlikely, even in cases of severe stress, that prices in the United States would ever reach a point where such transfer schemes would make economic sense. Although some limited transfers occur near the border, without economic viability, corporations and governments are unlikely to undertake any large transfer projects.

Political Constraints on Water Transfers

Even if it were economically viable, public sentiment and the political environment would likely prevent the export of water. Canada is acutely aware of the importance of maintaining control of critical water resources and would not make a deal to cede control of those resources to its powerful southern neighbor. Federal water policy in Canada has typically been unfavorable to large-scale transfers.

Indeed, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a Canada-U.S. free trade agreement and later the North American Free Trade Agreement ignited the debate over whether water was considered a tradable good. Six companies initially received approval to export water out of British Colombia, but strong public resistance prevented those exports from ever materializing. A voluntary accord proposed by the federal government in 1999 sought to ban the withdrawal and transfer of water in quantities that could damage the environment.

The Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin Water Resources Compact of 2005 allowed basin-wide cooperative management of the water resources between the two Canadian provinces and eight U.S. states that border the lakes. It also effectively limited most bulk water transfers.

Even as Canada seeks to protect its resources, some of the Canadian public remains wary of using market-based methods to encourage water conservation and is concerned that if water were considered a good, it would be subject to the same trade requirements as other commodities.

While the North American Free Trade Agreement does not compel a participating country to start exporting a good, market pricing of water in Canada could open the door for legal action on the part of the United States or Mexico — something that many Canadians do not want to risk. Freshwater may become scarce in the coming decades, and because Canada holds a large amount of that scarce resource, the government will likely continue to be protective of its water supplies.

The close relationship between Ottawa and Washington, the intricately intertwined Canada-U.S. trade and energy infrastructure and the two countries' ability to manage shared water resources in the Great Lakes region would seemingly make Canada and the United States ideal candidates for international water transfers. But even if such transfers were to occur, the politics and economics of the situation would not allow water to be traded in the same way as oil or natural gas.

Access to useable freshwater resources will remain a geographic constraint for many countries in the future, but the diversion of large amounts water from water-rich countries to areas of water stress or scarcity will not follow in the footsteps of coal or oil. Economic realities will prevent it. Even if water were priced to market demand, public sentiment would still make such transfers unlikely.

Canadian society does not perceive water in the same way it does other commodities. In the popular view, water is more of a right than a good, and even nations with abundant water seek to protect it. And as the strain on water resources increases in the coming years and decades, that sentiment is unlikely to change. 

Join the conversation about this story »

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Most people are familiar with Swedish design through IKEA. But the country has a new hot designer: Big Data.

Between January and October of 2014, a Swedish online housing portal called Hemnet, collected data from more than 200 million clicks, gathered from 20% of Sweden's population.

The idea was to create the ultimate image of democracy: a home built by the people, for the people.

It's called the Hemnet House, or, more affectionately, the House of Clicks. It represents the most popular specs of all houses clicked through on the site, spanning more than 86,000 listings. 

Staffan Tell, spokesperson for Hemnet, says the project was inspired by a simple and straightforward goal.

"It really was an experiment driven by curiosity," he tells Business Insider. 

Looking at companies that use big data as the bedrock of their decision making — Tell points to Netflix's model for user recommendations — Hemnet wanted to understand what the country's nine million or so citizens wanted from a house.

Turns out, it's simplicity with a touch of the familiar.

The House of Clicks is a red wood-paneled cube. But it's not just any red. It's Falu red, a deep red native to Swedish barns and cottages that evokes an old-world feel.

Inside is much different. The rustic sense is replaced by white-walled, open-concept rooms.

According to the data, gray sofas, fireplaces, and stone countertops are must-haves. 

Swedes want their kitchens nestled next to their living rooms, without obstacle, so as to easily entertain their guests.

In total, the House of Clicks features four rooms spread across 1,115 square feet. Tell says the anticipated listing price will fall near 2.8 million krona, or roughly $345,000. 

Whether that's affordable depends a lot on where potential buyers live, Tell concedes.

"If you're close to Stockholm," he says, where prices are the highest, "that would be considered very modest. But if you're somewhere far up north, that would be a high cost."

Construction is anticipated to begin in the spring of 2016. If the demand is great enough, the House of Clicks could be just the beginning.

Data from the online portal could clue architects into a wealth of preferences, including desired home sizes, interior designs, and even migration trends. 

It's good for people and it's good for business, Tell says. "It's going to affect a lot what kind of services you need to have, both for city and regional planning."

SEE ALSO: The 18 Most Interesting Homes On The Planet

Join the conversation about this story »

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A large portion of sales reps' time is devoted to composing emails -- to prospects, customers, potential referral sources, and even colleagues. It's a shame if all those hours went to waste. 

But if you write emails like the rest of us -- sweating over the body copy and simply slapping on a dashed-off subject line at the end -- that's precisely what's happening.

Before you can sell a prospect, they need to open your cold email. How do buyers determine if they want to read your message or not? The subject line.

Your emails' subject lines are just as (if not more) important than the body copy. Writing a click-worthy subject line is more than half the battle in prospecting.

If your subject lines could use a little more pizzazz, check out the following SlideShare from Galaxy Weblinks Inc. The presentation gives examples of three types of email subject lines that prompt prospects to open. (Plus, it's chock full of minions. And who doesn't love minions?)

What sales subject lines perform the best at your organization? Let us know in the comments. 

There's a bidding war starting in one segment of the energy industry: pipelines.

Williams, a provider of natural gas pipelines, announced Sunday that it turned down a buyout offer for $64 a share from Energy Transfer Equity. 

In a report Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal's Alison Sider wrote that this is an indication that a scramble for mergers and acquisitions in the pipeline space is coming.

The Journal notes that energy companies have been on the prowl for their cheaper competitors, but many companies have turned down offers hoping to find higher ones.

Also, the oil crash has not impacted pipeline company earnings the same way it has affected drillers, making companies like Williams a little more attractive. 

Investors took the news of a possible Williams deal well. The stock surged 26% on Monday, closing at an all-time high of $60.90 per share; shares are now 35% higher year-to-date.

Energy Transfer Equity has been after Williams for the last six months according to The Journal reported, and its latest offer was dependent on Williams' completion of its of planned acquisition of its Williams Partners subsidiary for $13.8 billion.

And after the unsolicited offer, Williams said it will continue to explore "strategic alternatives" for a possible merger. 

Head over to the Wall Street Journal for the full story »

SEE ALSO: A 'worrying sign' for oil prices is floating on the Atlantic

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There is never a shortage of marketing books to read. However, when you find a book that shares essential bits of information to help improve your marketing, case studies that share valuable insights and practical solutions to maintain relevance, that is a rare gem. See what author, speaker and CEO of Marketing Interactions, Ardath Albee had to say about her newest book, Digital Relevance and why marketers need to constantly stay on their toes to remain relevant.

Q: What prompted you to write your latest book, Digital Relevance?

Albee: The best way to answer this question is with a brief excerpt from the introduction of the book:

“I wrote Digital Relevance for the marketers, corporate communications professionals, consultants, and entrepreneurs faced with the need to build relationships with elusive buyers whose context can change in a nanosecond. Technology was billed as the answer. But it’s only confused the issue because the strategy is lacking. Marketing has changed—and changed fast—leaving marketers adrift without the foundation, mind-set, and skills they need to master the dynamics of digital engagement when faced with shrinking attention spans and the increasing noise and velocity of content publishing. Meanwhile, the pressure for accountability builds every day with marketers unsure how to prove what they do matters. Yet matter it does.”

Read the full introduction to Digital Relevance here.

Q: What’s the number one reason relevance is so difficult for B2B marketers? What’s the first step in trying to remedy this?

Albee: The biggest reason I see is the lack of true understanding of and knowledge about buyers. Nearly tied with this reason is the lack of strategic approach. The first step to remedying irrelevance is to go do the work to learn about your buyers. I help clients do this with personas. But not those flat one-dimensional demographics-based personas that I see so often. And not based on only internal thinking. You need to interview your buyers and customers to understand their perspectives, work environment, challenges and goals. And, in B2B, you need to gain clarity about who else is involved with the decision, as well as how they interact with each other.

I’m often approached by companies that want me to just develop content. They don’t want to take the time to do the work or spend budget on personas because they don’t understand the value. But, my question to them is always; “How do you create content that’s highly relevant, will address the correct context and make connections with these people if you don’t truly understand what they need or care about? It’s kind of like trying to carry on a conversation with someone who has a bag over his head. You have no way to tell if anything you’re saying is resonating.

Add this limitation to a lack of strategy and you can see the problem. Relevance doesn’t just happen. You have to apply concerted effort to achieve it. And, relevance isn’t static, so it takes a continuous improvement approach to maintain. With buyers in control, a lack of relevance will just widen the gap between companies and their buyers and customers.

Q: We know B2B marketers are struggling to connect with their buyers today…but what are they doing right? Are there any areas that we are getting better at?

Albee: I see pockets of brilliance all the time. So there is improvement going on. I see companies creating centralized content agencies within the enterprise to achieve consistency in the brand story that’s being told across divisions and product lines. These are huge change management efforts, but very worthy undertakings that help to scale content marketing, as well as relevance.

I see commitment to nurturing programs designed across the continuum of the buying process that are producing conversion to revenue based on the ability to sustain engagement over the longer term through content that helps their prospects visualize the bigger story.

I see creative approaches by companies to support their industries without pitching their products, but by telling bigger stories and building community involvement.

I also see instances of marketers working hand-in-hand with sales teams to execute fluid transitions in conversations held across the buying process, generating outcomes that are truly inspiring.

There are definitely some great things being done by marketers, but the thing that continues to limit overall success is the pockets (or silos) of brilliance. Until the entire marketing organization can work together collaboratively, interweaving their various programs and keeping the buyer at the core, there’s work to be done. Until we can sustain engagement across the entirety of the buying process rather than pushing out one-off short term campaigns based on what we want to say, marketers won’t achieve the level of relevance they need to become seen as a profit center worthy of becoming the respected conductors of experiences that contribute to business growth.

Q: Can you create relevant content without buyer personas?

Albee: That’s leaving a lot to chance. More than $40 billion is spent producing and using custom content in marketing programs each year. Do you really want to make that spend based on a hope and a prayer? You know what they say about assumptions…

Q: Where does strategy fit into Demand Generation?

Albee: Strategy is the core of demand generation. Demand generation in B2B companies can span years. It’s nearly impossible to engage a single buyer, let alone a buying committee, over the longer term without a strategy.

A demand generation strategy sets the baseline for:

• Who you will engage
• What you want to help them choose to do or learn at each stage of the decision to build momentum in their consideration of solving the problem
• How you will engage them (content, channels, context)
• How you will measure success, as well as to identify areas for refinement along the way

And, it should include collaboration with the other marketing teams in relation to how their programs will touch this audience to ensure consistency in messaging with every touch point—although, admittedly, this is most likely a future state. In many companies I’ve seen that one marketing team actually has no idea of who else is touching or interacting with the buyers they are pursuing. It’s important to understand this to avoid saturating your prospective buyers with too much information and the possibility of conflicting messages that lessen relevance and irritate your audience.

Q: What one piece of advice would you share with marketers looking to make an impact in their organizations?

Albee: Don’t try to bite off too much at once. If this is new to you, create a pilot that you can run in isolation to prove the concept to your organization. This way you can test it out, gain some quick wins and understand what kind of organizational change needs to happen to enable higher relevance with buyers across the enterprise. But do make sure that any pilot you create includes the related sales team. Getting buy-in from Sales will ensure your pilot has a chance at success. Defining a pilot will also require that you create a strategic plan that will enable you to prove impact and gain approval for expanding the program.

I’ve had many clients who have had to create pilots with just one persona to prove the value they bring to a content marketing program’s success. In all but one case, we’ve been able to gain approval for expansion when the results come in.

*Digital Relevance is available via Amazon.com.

Author: Erika Goldwater CIPP/US @erikwg VP of Marketing, ANNUITAS

Uber, Google, and Facebook are among the biggest, most powerful tech companies in the world.

But when they were founded, these companies were scrappy startups with small staffs. They hired interns — usually college kids or recent grads — to help keep things chugging along.

So where are the earliest interns from these companies now? We did some research to find out. In some cases, these companies' first interns have stayed onboard, moving up to new positions. Others have left to start their own companies or pursue other ventures.

Twitter's first intern, Kevin Systrom went on to found Instagram, which he sold for $1 billion to Facebook

After graduating from Stanford in 2006 with degrees in engineering and management science, Kevin Systrom interned for Odeo, the company that would eventually become known as Twitter.

After his internship, he worked at several tech companies: he had a stint at Google, at a travel advice website called Nextstop, and finally, a startup he founded called Burbn. Burbn would eventually morph into what's known today as Instagram. Today, Systrom is best known as the co-founder and CEO of Instagram.

Facebook's first intern, Darian Shirazi, became CEO and founder of Radius

Darian Shirazi became the first intern for Facebook when he was 19. Prior to that, at age 15, he had caught eBay's eye as a power seller on the website. The company invited him to intern there when he was 15. He stayed on for two summers in high school.

He stayed on board at Facebook, reporting directly to Mark Zuckerberg, for two years, first as an intern and then as a software engineer. He left to take classes at Berkeley at his parents' request. Now, Shirazi is the founder and CEO of Radius, a company that collects data about small businesses for sales and marketing purposes.

WeWork is now a $5 billion co-working space, and its first intern Alex Seeman, still works there as a digital product manager

Alex Seeman was an early intern at WeWork, the $5 billion company that divides up big, rented office spaces and sublets them to startups and other businesses.

Seeman started as an intern at WeWork in summer 2012, and now serves as a Digital Product Manager at the company.

Wanna know something annoying?

If you’re working sales in a startup or small business, your sales stack is made up of a bunch of awesome apps that help you get your work done. And when I say awesome, I mean affordable, easy-to-use, gets-a-particular-job done, awesome.

Ok, so what’s annoying about that?

Well, if you’re doing it right, you’re evaluating the performance of your sales team by tracking sales activities completed and the quality of those sales activities – things they can control. The idea is that more high-quality sales activities equal more revenue.

Right. Still waiting on the the annoying part?

Here it is:

All of those sales tools you’re using, those amazing tools that do one thing exceptionally well, don’t always play nice with your other sales tools.

“Not playing nice” is a nice way of saying you’re doing a lot manual data entry and copying/pasting to keep all of the tools in your sales stack in sync.

Hubspots, The State of Inbound Sales: 2014-2015 Report, found that many sales professionals are spending more than 60 minutes per day keeping their CRM updated and humming along. That’s 60 minutes wasted on just one tool in your stack!

And that’s the annoying thing.

Your manual data entry does not count as sales activity. It’s a necessary evil that interferes with your ability to hit and exceed your sales activity quotas. Fewer sales activities mean less sales, and less sales makes you and your company much less awesome.

Think of the places where you probably waste time doing manual data entry and not closing deals

• Getting captured leads from sign-up forms, slide in pop-ups, exit pop-ups, lead capture bars, landing pages, and contextual micro-surveys into your CRM and email marketing apps.
• Enriching basic lead data with pieces like their name, company name, company revenue, their social media profiles, where they’re from and so on.
• Moving customer data up, down, and around your sales stack to keep everything in sync. To up the difficulty level, you might even do this differently for each lead depending on pre-defined criteria and lead scores.
• Creating and updating your sales activities. This is so annoying, am I right?!
• Tracking sales activities like emails sent, phone calls made, and demos given.

Now that we’re on the same page,

Here are 2.5 ways to integrate and automate your sales stack so that you can complete more sales activities and smash quotas.

1. Get your developers to connect your apps for you

Try not to let your eyes dry up while I quickly walk you through this process at 30,000ft. You owe it to your dev team to know a bit about the work they’d actually have to do for you.

First, they have to work through pages upon pages of API documentation to hunt down the many different triggers and events that can be automated between one app and another. Every app has a different way of doing this.

Here’s a link to a fraction of Slack’s API documentation, and theirs is one of the most organized in the biz.

Your engineers have to go through documentation that is much worse than this for every single app in your sales stack and then figure out how to connect them to each other. No app-to-app integration is identical to another, so they’re always starting from zero.

Oh yeah, then they have to manage these integrations to make sure they don’t go down and keep up with any major API changes for every single integration. If they don’€™t, you risk losing important data.

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If you’re in a startup or small business like I am, you just chuckled a little bit at the thought of asking your engineers to do this for you – didn’t you? If you’ve already asked like it’s no big deal, you might be blushing.

Your engineers already have black circles under their eyes, they’re not eating, and they are the only reason Red Bull was able to sponsor the space jump without batting an eyelash.

They are already killing themselves for your company by doing some combination of the following:

• Getting your product to market.
• Keeping your product competitive in the market by adding new functionality.
• Keeping your product from imploding by fixing bugs.
• Responding to technical customer support inquiries.
• Not ripping their hair out (or yours) when you pivot…again.

Repeat after me:

I will not ask our developers to connect our sales stack.

It’s insensitive and a poor use of their talent. By asking them to reduce your manual work by integrating and maintaining your sales stack, you’re asking them to increase the mundane work they have to do. It’s work that takes them away from building your product – you know, that thing you get paid to sell.

There are, however, three scenarios where it might make sense to have your developers do a custom job:

1. You’re a huge enterprise with a bazillion dollars and you have engineers to spare. Oh, how we startups would kill to have this luxury.
2. You’re working with a lot of software that’s been built in-house such as custom CRM jobs. It’s going to be difficult to find an affordable solution that will help you integrate with your custom builds because it’s not as scalable for the provider.
3. You have sadistic engineers that would love to work overtime wrangling some API’s for the fun of it.

If you don’t fit into any of the above situations – there’€™s a better way.

2. Use an Integration-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform to integrate your sales stack

Boy, do I have good news for you!

IaaS platforms, affectionately known as “SaaS Glue” by those in the know, let people like you and I get our workflows off the ground with basic integrations and automations.

We’re talking the If This Then Thats (IFTTT) and Zapiers of the world.

Showing a simple Zapier workflow that has a Wufoo form submission creating a line in a Google Spreadsheet.

These simple drag ‘n’ drop, point ‘n’ click workflow builders can help you fulfill some of your integration needs without harassing an engineer or learning to code.

You just select the apps you want to integrate from a dropdown menu, select your triggering events and the action you want to occur, and you’re off to the races.

Eureka! Problem Solved! End post.

Not so fast!

It’s true that an IaaS solution is a huge improvement over having your developers manage integrations for most teams.

But:

These general IaaS platforms don’t care whether you’re integrating a sales stack, a marketing stack, a developer stack, or just some one-off admin tasks that are manual and repetitive.

They don’t care that you’re a sales pro, within a sales team, with sales problems, that require a solution focused on your sales process.

They don’t treat you like the unique snowflake that you are.

If one or more of the following points hit home, you may want to continue your search for the optimal sales stack solution:

1. Your moving of data throughout your sales stack is complex. For example, I only want demos auto-scheduled for my top closer if the lead is a software company that has more than $25 Million in annual revenue. Not so straight forward.
2. You want all of the workflows in your team’s sales stack to live in one place. Zapier and IFTTT do not enable each member of your sales team to have their own username attached to a company account. Either everyone’s workflows operate independently, or everyone shares a username and password. This can get messy.
3. Related to the above, there are no permission level controls. So, if you need certain team members to have restrictions on their access or functionality to sales workflows, you’€™re out of luck.
4. If you want any reporting around the data that is passing through Zapier and IFTTT from your other tools, you’ll have to look elsewhere. These platforms are bridges for your data – they aren’t interested in helping your data meet up and mingle in one place.
5. You feel more comfortable investing in a solution that is vertically focused on sales problems and not horizontally focused on integration problems.

If you can’t relate to the above, then a general IaaS platform could be a great fit. Because these tools are use case agnostic, other team members and departments may find them equally useful if they too aren’€™t needing a specialized solution.

3. A product that focuses 100% on helping sales pros save time and smash quotas

There’s a thought.

And a bit of a question.

Those pesky sales activities – have you been able to automate everything that is “computerly” possible (word borrowed from Loren Padelford, our mentor and Head Sales Scientist at Shopify). Is your sales stack helping you to destroy sales activity quotas to the point that they need to be reset?

And don’t underestimate what is “computerly” possible.

Many don’t even have the basics on lockdown. I’m talking capturing leads in the myriad of ways that you do (or should), automatically enriching that data so you’ve got detailed lead data to work with, and then getting that data to the two places it absolutely has to be – your CRM and email marketing apps.

Don’t worry, I’m not pointing fingers.

This is the other side of the double-edged sword that is a sales stack composed of many tools that are the best at the one thing they do. It’s hard to make them work together.

So, what’€™s keeping you from enjoying the benefits of a sales stack made of today’s best apps without the drawbacks of fragmented workflows?

How do you plan on solving this problem? If you’re already trying – what’s been working or not working so far?

Is the answer as simple as a killer CRM? Or, do you still find yourself doing a lot of work that isn’€™t a sales activity just like HubSpot’€™s article said?

These questions aren’t rhetorical – I want to know.

And this is where you, fellow Sales Hackers, come in…

I can’t think of a better place than Sales Hacker to discuss the victories and problems associated with the modern day sales stack. There may or may not be larger sales communities out there, but Sales Hacker is a community of forward looking pros.

Here’s what I’d love to discuss in the comments below:

1. Have you eliminated most of the manual work in your sales process that isn’t a sales activity? If so, how’d you do it? If not, what are your biggest challenges?
2. Any experience with general IaaS platforms? What was amazing about it? What left you wanting more?
3. What’s your dream sales stack solution do? What annoying work could you get off your plate for good? What would it help you do better?
4. Anything else on the topic of sales apps, stacks, and automation would be great.

Let’s rant and brainstorm in the comments!

And, if anyone wants to go in-depth on this stuff one on one, send me an email at josh.g@blitzen.com.

The post Stop Wasting Time Integrating Your Sales Stack appeared first on Sales Hacker.

You have a pile of leads and a group of sales development reps. Your reps are going to make opportunities out of those leads. To do that, they need to know which leads are theirs to work.

But, the moment you have more than one rep, you have a question: How do you divvy up the leads?

The question comes up in both inbound and outbound contexts.  With inbound leads – like website sign-ups – the team needs to assign each lead as it comes in. With outbound leads, where the reps are prospecting new leads, there needs to be a way of breaking up the world so two reps aren’t chasing the same new target.

Here’s a run down of the common methods of lead assignment rules. Each has advantages, disadvantages and costs.  Our goal here is to give you lots of ideas to brainstorm with, rather than collapse similar rules into a single category or give a single recommendation.

How do you choose?

There is no one-size-fits-all rule. The size of the company, maturity of the product, lead volume and team size all matter. We’d recommend looking at three considerations:

• Specialization matters. Dividing your inbound and outbound work can make both more effective perhaps by as much as 28 percent, according to Kristina McMillan of Five9, via TOPO. And specializing by industry or named account specialization may yield even more, according to Kevin O’Malley of Catavolt (again, via TOPO).
• Speed matters. Getting back to inbound leads as fast as possible makes a huge difference, with one widely quoted study, showing that cutting response times to under an hour doubling conversion rates.
• Simplicity is a constraint – but one you can manage. You can’t increase speed and specialization if your team and tools are not ready for more complex processes. But that’s one of the reasons there are new sales development tools. If you want to do better lead assignment, you might want to invest in a new tool that hides that complexity from your team.

Inbound assignment rules

These rules apply to incoming leads, but they can be combined with outbound approaches as well.

Round robin. Very simple. Like shuffling cards, when the next lead comes in, the next rep gets it. It has the advantage of fairness – and of extreme simplicity. It gets leads to reps quickly – if you get a surge of reps in a single industry or territory, they won’t get stuck in a long line, waiting for the rep for that category. On the disadvantage side, round robin doesn’t allow reps to specialize in a particular pitch, isn’t super-optimized for speed, and can’t maximize alignment with field sales.

First come, first serve. This approach is all about speed: when a rep is free, he or she grabs the next lead in the queue. Since there is only one queue, and all reps are emptying that one queue, it’s the fastest model for responding back to leads in the shortest time. Like round robin, however, there’s no specialization or field alignment in this model, which we’ll see in the next couple of approaches.

Snooze you lose. Some tools allow you to assign inbound leads to a rep, but then reassign it quickly if they haven’t responded within, say, 60 minutes. This helps slash the time required to respond. The vendors who make these tools claim major conversion benefits by getting back to leads in minutes, not hours.

Outbound (and/or inbound) assignment rules

Most of the following rules can be used to assign both inbound and outbound, or you can use a combination: such as using round-robin for inbound and one of the rules below for outbound.

Industry. Different industries often use different jargon, have different business priorities, and thus require very different messaging. A simple mistake in jargon can cancel out all of your rep’s credibility. So training reps by industry can prevent costly missteps. Industry specialization becomes more important if your solution is used for different things by different businesses. If you were selling a file-sharing app to ad agencies, “sharing assets and deliverables” would be a good pitch, for example, but would mean nothing to doctors. One challenge to this rule is allocation – it’s tricky to know how many reps to assign to each group.

Customer segment. Like the industry rule, you can divide your team up the way you divide up your customers – by team size or customer size, for example. This has the same advantages as the industry rule: by segmenting your team by the audience they reach, they can hone their messages better. The more different your segments, the better this rule will work. This rule also works best if your segments are based on clear customer traits, such as customer size. Not surprisingly, this rule won’t work well for you if single companies can fall into multiple segments.

Personas. It’s not uncommon to have different pitches for the different personas you sell to, such as a ROI pitch for business managers and a feature comparison pitch for technical managers. The industry and segment assignment rules map your reps to the audience. But dividing up reps by persona appears to be a step too far in B2B sales. Since you would expect the different personas to appear within one customer firm, conversations starting in one arena will lead to the other.  (If you have a way of making this work, we’d love to hear about it!) In fact, splitting up personas goes in the opposite direction of “canvassing the account” – having a single plan to reach everyone in the account, which brings us to . . .

Named accounts. One of the simplest rules to understand is assignment by account list. It’s simple, and sets success at each account to be the goal, rather than just “churn and burn.” If your account lists are divided by industry/segment, you also get the value of better messaging, as described above. This rule can be easy to size and allocate, as you can try different accounts-per-rep ratios to see what works. Account lists can also achieve good alignment with your sales field, which is important enough it gets its own category . . .

Field alignment. In this model, the sales development team uses the same territory/industry/size rules as the field sales team. If you have split your field sales team up by industry, it’s probably because the messages and tactics are different by industry – which applies to sales development as well as it does to sales. (That said, if you break your sales team up into physical sales territories, that saves on field sales travel time and cost, but that doesn’t really apply to your inside team.) In all cases, however, the territory approach has the great advantage of creating a relationship between the two teams. And a great AE-SDR relationship can have a big impact. It is natural that the sales team in the territory gives “their” sales development more feedback, helping them improve their game. The territory approach, however, is not optimized for speedy response times for inbound leads or special projects. If you have leads from a trade show and you want to contact them all in a day, for example, you’d get through the list faster by spreading it out across the whole team.

When you’re ready to change . . .

One final note: When you’re ready to make a change in how you organize your sales development team, it’s also a good time to look at your stable of sales tools. Next generation tools simplify your ability to implement more complicated segmentation strategies. Ideally, rolling out a new tool and a new way to work makes both more successful.

And if you didn’t see your way of working here,  and let us know what’s working for you!

I recently came across LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator lead generation tool and was most impressed with their video production promoting the app.

Simply put, this is how it’s done. LinkedIn was able to bring the human element to their corporate videos by being empathetic (bringing out the emotion) and real (always having the viewers perspective in mind).

How can you do the same? By developing a video production strategy that humanizes your brand. Keyword being strategy.

First and foremost, LinkedIn produced four videos which allows them to spread out the storyline and simplify the benefits of their app. These four videos amount to just over five and a half minutes of video content. That’s pretty sweet.

Too often businesses think they only need one video so they cram everything together which, makes it too long, too confusing, and too familiar because your competitors are doing the same thing.

Second, LinkedIn created a story of how their main character, Martin, uses the app to build and contact new leads. This is very powerful because I can relate to Martin, put myself in his shoes and see our company doing the same thing.

Third, these are simple, clean, easy to understand videos. As you can see on the Sales Navigator page, the first video is an introduction to Martin and the app. The remaining videos show Martin engaging in specific tasks and the benefits they are bringing.

HOW TO DIFFERENTIATE YOURSELF

Too often companies are producing corporate videos before taking the time to properly strategize how to best leverage their video content and budget.

Strategic video production will yield the best results. It’s wise not to assume or guess what type of video is best suited for your business, product, or service. It’s more prudent going into production knowing.

Ask your video production company or in-house producer why they are recommending a certain approach to a video project and how this will accelerate business growth. What type of strategy are they bringing to the table that supports their ideas? If they can’t reveal concrete reasons, then perhaps you need to reconsider the investment.

It’s best to measure twice, and cut once.

Most principles used in B2B selling today have been in place since the late nineteenth century and coincide with the rise of large mass manufacturing firms. National Cash Register, Westinghouse Electric and others created large, organized sales forces and with them, standardized sales and sales management techniques. It was innovation in technology that drove innovation in sales.

History is now repeating itself.  Developments in Analytics technology is driving genuine innovation in the form of predictive sales analytics – a move that is shifting the new normal of what the B2B sales process looks like.

Predictive analytics is an estimated $5 billion market that has seen $1.2 billion in VC funding specific to sales analytics. Startups are sprouting like mushrooms after a fresh rain with “why didn’t I think of that?” applications. The reason? There’s a strong economic case for deploying predictive sales analytics.

Even Salesforce got into the market when they introduced their Wave analytics platform last year. At the time, it was pitched as a platform for large companies to build custom apps that would take data from various sources (not just Salesforce CRM). Last week, they announced Sales Wave Analytics which is a ready-made app that doesn’t require users to develop customized apps on their own.

Here’s the thing though, Sales Wave Analytics, unlike custom apps developed on the Wave analytics platform or many 3rd party, ready-made apps, relies on the data found within your CRM. Solutions that incorporate outside data along with CRM data should provide more accurate insights.

That’s because analytics that rely on your CRM data alone won’t likely give you the full picture and can actually provide misleading insight as a result.

Salesforce users will want to consider 3rd party solutions that take advantage of the Wave analytics platform and apply their own unique data science across a number of sources.

Here are 5 new areas where predictive sales analytics are propelling the industry well into the 21st century.

1)  Predictive Forecasting.  Forecasts are what drive business planning yet forecast accuracy is a persistent problem. Even with a CRM in place, companies lose significant time creating and rolling-up company-wide sales forecasts.  Compounding the problem is that forecasts are based on human judgment—instead of what the data tells us is predictable—resulting in inaccuracies. You can’t optimize operational results if you’re basing decisions on judgment and assumption.

Aviso applies predictive analysis to sales data making it possible to roll-up sales forecasts across an entire organization in minutes. Executives and front-line sales can make better decisions based on hard data.

Clari is also tackling this problem with their own data science and machine learning algorithms that analyze deal activity and changes to CRM to validate forecasted opportunities and identify deals at risk. Clari also analyzes important non-CRM data like emails and calendar activity. That’s important because emails and calendars are a better source of ‘truth’ than is CRM that relies on consistent manual activity logging.

2) Sales Enablement. One benefit of sales analytics technology is that it can facilitate the alignment of sales and marketing (another age-old problem) and fulfill the promise of Sales Enablement. For example, Highspot offers what they call Content Genomics™ a proprietary technology that analyzes the DNA of sales content across the organization. The end result is that marketing has the insight needed to produce content that drives engagement and revenue.

FirstRain was one of the first companies to ride the Salesforce Wave when they introduced Personal Business Analytics for Salesforce1^tm. Their solution provides a continuous injection of information that could impact your accounts and deals (opportunities and risks) fine-tuned to your products and services, end markets, and the industries you sell to.

3). Predictive Lead Scoring. Companies in this category aim to identify high-quality, hidden prospects—those that share characteristics of your best customers. This is done by of analyzing a combination of CRM data, campaign results, opportunities won and lost, and Internet data mining.

SalesPredict solutions uncover insights that simply wouldn’t be possible without data analytics.  The system purports to show sales managers who will buy, who will buy more, and who will churn. Using that information, teams can prioritize sales calls based on which leads are most likely to close and improve conversion rates throughout the entire customer lifecycle.

4) Sales Performance Monitoring.  Having had a 25 year career in sales, I know that moment all too well when sales projections are submitted and the question is asked, “Are you confident you can get it done?”  Of course managers respond with a resolved “YES” even while wondering if they can really make it happen.

Qstream has an interesting approach to the issue of “keeping it real” when assessing true sales capabilities.  The company does this by engaging salespeople in fun, scenario-based challenges delivered to their mobile devices. A sophisticated analytics engine takes it from there, providing insights that are specifically actionable, and in turn, helping managers identify knowledge gaps and respond before revenue forecasts are negatively impacted. Gaps in knowledge are closed with tailored coaching and by the system pushing out new challenges fast and efficiently. The platform helps managers proactively identify and adapt to changing market conditions, competitive threats and opportunities.

5) Pricing.  What if you can lose fewer deals due to uncompetitive pricing and win more deals at profitable pricing; you’d get bigger revenue and bigger profits. If you have thousands (or millions) of products and as many customers, it’s tough to consistently win more profitable deals. Predictive data and pricing analytics like the one from PROS provide pricing guidance for every deal and reduce the need for “exception approvals” which slow deal momentum.

The above are just a few examples of predictive sales analytics use-cases. The number of solution providers, as I said, is mushrooming and money is pouring in to fertilize the market. GainSight, alone has raised over $50M, while 6sense has received more than $30M in funding. When a market gets crowded you can expect to see consolidation. Indeed, just this month, C9 was scooped up by InsideSales (another predictive analytics company aimed at, you guessed it, inside sales).

The bottom-line is that sales managers need to strip away outdated processes and welcome analytics technology as a way to achieve efficiencies and performance gains. The good news is the sales tech industry is providing a wide range of innovative options. It’s only a matter of time before predictive sales analytics is the new norm.

I received some interesting news on Monday that should perk up anyone in Social Selling. LinkedIn has taken away the ability to directly search for connections from your 1st-degree connections’ Profiles.

For me, this used to be a pretty big feature. I trained and coached my clients to use it for locating appropriate contacts for their specific goals—networking, sales leads, allied-referral partners and so on. Because you could conduct it directly from a 1st-degree connection’s profile, it was very simple to do.

After you found that particular person or list of people, you would then ask your 1st-degree connection for a referral or introduction (assuming you’ve built a proper, tight relationship with that 1st degree’r, of course).

It’s actually a pretty big deal for anyone using LinkedIn either as a part of a broader Social Selling strategy, or as a big tool in their overall sales toolkit. After all, those who are “in the know” about LinkedIn utilize their relationships to expand their businesses in one form or another, right? If not, they certainly should.

Here’s a Solution

We have designed a way to largely replace this function. It’s not foolproof, but you should be able to utilize it a majority of the time. To fully use it, you’ll need to have some kind of paid membership to LinkedIn. Free members, though, can use much of the technique in this “new way” of doing things.

Rather than detail how to do it with a lot of text and many, many graphics, we’ve produced this video on how to do it:

The biggest take-away from all of this is to make sure you have good relationships with your own 1st-degree connections. Otherwise, this just won’t work for you.

This article first appeared on LinkedIn.