Rnordman

The way retailers choose to position their brand often justifies different price points.

These three brands are proof of that.

Read more...

The Asus Chromebit, announced by Google today, packs a lot of computing power into a little itty bitty form factor and a sub-$100 price point: Plug this stick into any display with an HDMI port, like most big-screen TVs nowadays have, and suddenly you have a Google Chrome desktop at your disposal. 

It has uses limited only by your imagination. Like:

• Upgrade an existing PC by plugging this into the monitor.
• Use it for art projects or to build interactive displays using cheap TVs.
• Google cites the example of a retail store that can use it to manage all of their digital signs, changing a sale on shorts to a sale on umbrellas instantly once it starts to rain.

It has a swivel head so it'll fit into more nooks and crannies, and you can use it with Bluetooth mice and keyboards. It uses a super-small ARM processor of the kind you normally find in a cell phone, so it doesn't really heat up. It has 2GB of memory and 16GB of storage, like most other Google Chrome devices. It even comes in multiple colors, for the style-conscious.

The big caveat, depending on how you use it, is that it uses Google's Chrome OS, which is basically just a web browser. So while it'll run apps like Spotify, Netflix, and Microsoft Office 365 over the web, and will soon run some Android apps too, you won't be playing Call of Duty on it any time soon. 

The whole computer-on-a-stick thing has been done before, but never really well. The Dell Wyse Cloud Connect is a $129 Android stick that does roughly the same thing, but it's explicitly for business users and unavailable on the direct market. Similarly, the Dell Cast is an Android stick that costs only $80, but will only work in conjunction with a Dell tablet — it's more more Chromecast than Chromebit. 

Intel's soon-to-arrive $149 Compute Stick is going to be the most direct competitor to Chromebits, running Windows 8.1. Google's pitch has always been that the browser-based Chrome OS devices is the better, faster and simpler for low-horsepower computers like these sticks, and Windows can't keep up. Not to mention that the Asus Chromebit will be at least (they haven't announced final pricing yet) $50 cheaper.

Either way, the squeeze is on. Whoever can do more computing with less computer at the cheaper price point is poised to win this brewing tiny device war, and the Asus Chromebit is, at the very least, a shot across Microsoft's bow.

SEE ALSO: Google is finally squishing its two operating systems closer together

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: It's dangerously easy to record Snapchats without the other person knowing

In Landing Page Fundamentals part 1, we covered the anatomy of a successful landing page and in part 2 we discussed how to boost conversions on your landing with great copy and compelling offers. We’ll now conclude this three-part series by showing you how to test and optimize your landing pages.

Based on what you learned in part 1 and 2 of the series, you built your new landing page, fine-tuned the copy, crafted a compelling offer, and created the perfect form. Now it’s time to go on to the next project, right? Wrong.

Testing and optimizing your landing page should be a regular part of your campaign process. You’ll be surprised once in a while, and as you test you’ll understand incrementally more about your audience and what they respond to. More important, even small improvements can mean exponential change when we’re talking about conversions.

To get started, let’s talk a little bit about how you should perform the tests. Then, we’ll discuss different elements to test on your landing page. We’ll also include a few Act-On landing page examples along the way.

How to Test

There are two primary testing methodologies.

A/B Testing

This approach tests one landing page against another landing page. The only difference between the two pages is one single element, such as the color of a download button. This test shows conclusively whether changing that sole element impacts your conversion rate.

Pros: This is the easiest test to perform and requires fewer resources. It allows you to get insight on how your audience responds to a specific element on your page. In the example above, you would be able to determine if changing the color of your download button increases conversions.

Cons: Since you are testing only one element, A/B testing will not reveal any information about interaction between variables on a single page.

Multivariate Testing

This method is much more complex than A/B testing. It involves testing multiple elements on a landing page in various combinations.

Pros: It can reveal more about how the various elements interact with each other on a landing page. By testing multiple variations, you can determine the best combination of elements on a landing page. In the example above, you would be able to determine which combination of button color and form type creates the best conversion.

Cons: These tests take more resources, as you have to build as many landing page combinations as you want to test. In addition, it requires a larger sample size in order to get enough conversions to determine the outcome.

Testing Tool

You’ll need a testing tool to carry out your landing page tests. Here a list of the criteria you should be looking for when choosing a testing tool. The right technology should allow you to:

• Easily set up control (A) and alternative (B) landing pages
• Choose your method of testing
• Define testing periods
• Show results and report them

What to Test

Here’s where the fun begins. You can test almost any element on a page. Here are just a few ideas to start with:

Design elements

1. Buttons: There are several changes you can make to your current button. Test the size, shape, color, and he placement on the landing page.
2. Images: Try testing different types of photos. Does your audience respond better to photos or illustrations? People or product photos? Animated images or static images? Black and white or color? Test a landing page with and without an image. Test video vs.a photo. Test an animated vs. a static GIF.
3. Page layout: Move the different elements on the page around to determine if specific layouts create better conversions. Is a form placed on the left or right-hand side better? Should the CTA button be at the top or bottom of the page? Or both?

Copy elements

1. Headline: Test different headline copy. Try changing the font size or color. Test using personalization in the headline.
2. Body copy: You can test body copy length (in-depth vs. concise) and tone (fun/friendly vs. business/expert.) You can also test different benefit statements to determine which benefits your audience finds valuable.
3. Call to Action: Test different types of CTAs. Get creative! Instead of “Download Now”, how about trying “Get Your eBook”? “Watch Video” vs. “Take a Tour.” “Free Trial” vs. “Try Me Now.” “Access Toolkit” vs. “Download Toolkit.” Add an exclamation point, or take one away. There are many variations to your current CTAs that might generate more conversions. So take a look and see what alternatives you could test.

   

Forms

1. Number of fields: Test different numbers of submission fields to determine the right amount of fields you need for your forms. The perfect amount will help you reduce “friction” but still allow you to get enough data for your sales team.
2. Type of forms: There are many different form types and some may convert better than others. Try testing forms with a drop down list instead of a check boxes. Multiple choice vs. fill-in forms. Radio buttons vs. check boxes. We’ve found that drop down lists are much easier to submit on mobile, so if your audience is mostly mobile try this type of form.

Offers

Since the offer is often the key determinant of whether the page will convert, this is a prime variable you should test. Testing offers will allow you to determine what your audience finds valuable. If your offer is for a content piece, test to see if your audience prefers eBooks or white papers. If it’s a pricing offer, test whether a percentage discount performs better than a free shipping offer.

Ready, Set, Go!

We’ve covered the main components of a successful landing page and you’ve learned how to write great copy, create compelling offers, and test your landing pages. Now it’s time to have some fun. Remember, creating, testing and then optimizing your landing page should be an ongoing process. So…get ready, set, go!

If you want to learn more about testing both email and landing pages, check out our webinar, “The ABCs of A/B Testing.”

Trick #1: Extending your Reach with Google+ Shares

Google Plus permits five kinds of updates: text by itself, text along with a photo, videos, events or links. Unlike Facebook, Google Plus is a more serious, business related platform. It’s somewhere to share knowledge, not silly jokes or inane comments.

This helps to establish your business as the go to expert in your field. This can also help to earn your business the trust and loyalty of customers, potential clients and fellow business owners.

It’s simple to use the Google Plus Share feature. Just click onto the Google Plus share button, which then opens a new window, and gives you the option of sharing the page that is opened.

When sharing, you can chose to share to the general public, or to selected circles in your Google Plus account. It all depends on the type of information and why you are sharing it. Sharing is seen by the Google algorithm and can also help win you points in the fight to becoming high ranked in your niche on the search engine queries.

Items best shared include relevant articles, videos, and pictures. Some of the questions to ask when determining if something is worth sharing:

• Does it meet the needs of your customers?
• Does it answer questions commonly asked about specifics of your products or niche?
• Can it solve existing issues popping up in your niche?
• Is it interesting, new or exciting and applies to your niche?

This type of Internet Marketing strategy causes your business brand to be connected with being a helpful source in your niche. It’s a less costly and much more effective method for many reasons. Google Plus Share can involve sharing:

Trick #2: Growing your Brand with Communities

Google Plus communities are groups of people or other businesses that join together for a common reason. They have three user levels, owner, moderator and member. The proper use of Google Plus communities is a great way for businesses to gain exposure.

To join-interact in a Google Plus community, you chose the profile or page desired, and then hunt for a community in your niche.

Once approved to join a chosen community, you are allowed to post in it. This can be used to promote your brand by allowing you to post your own links in the communities you are a part of. Be sure to post regularly in your communities.

You can also create your own Google Plus community by clicking onto the blue Create Community button located on the communities’ page. A community can be public or private. You can also set up sub-topics within a community, which is a great method to pare down and organize the posts into specific needs.

Trick #3: Get your business notice with effective posting

Just like in a business website, content is a vital part of getting your business noticed through the use of Google Plus. All postings need to be no less than 400 words so that they can be indexed by Google or other search engines. Your business will become known for having the best and most up-to-date content as long as you pay attention to what you post and share on your pages.

Gain more followers by encouraging interaction instead of just posting non-interactive data. These new followers help your brand power to improve, which in turn generates more traffic to your websites or blogs and gets your business more sales and profits.

Always use relevant hash tags along with your posted content. This makes it more user-friendly and searchable. Be sure your posts are always consistent, as this sets expectations and will encourage people to return to your pages. It’s also a good idea to use proper formatting to show your posts in the best light such as bolding and italics, and create compelling headlines to attract readers.

The vital thing is to make your content current, engaging and worthwhile to your readers. Target some of it to your Circles and communities, as well as to the general public for best results.

Trick #4: Promote your Google+ Page through website and email

Email and websites are also great ways to promote your Google Plus pages. Listing your Google posts in an email campaign can help you to gain followers and customers.

Be sure to cross post any important Google Plus shares through links onto your business website and vice versa. This gets your information shared in several ways and gets you a lot more exposure for the search engines as well as for potential clients.

Email marketing has always been a prime way of getting out the word on what’s going on in your business, offering deals or coupons, and making announcements.

Trick #5: Build Authority with Google Authorship

Google Authorship is yet another tip to remember for using Google Plus to your best advantage. Making Google aware of you as the author of a piece of content gives you much more credibility in your niche.

It all starts with a selection of HTML markup code called rel=author. This dramatically changes how your content shows up in a Google search engine query. This bit of coding is added to an anchor tag to show that you are the author of the content on that page. You can even add a photo of yourself to get the content noticed faster by connecting your photo on your Google profile.

The catch to having these author tags show up is to be actually logged into your Google account when doing a search. This gets your page more interaction and notice by potential and existing clients.

Trick #6: Expand your business “Hanging out” in Google+

Another unique feature in Google Plus is the hangout. Hangouts are live video chats that you can use for meetings, interviews, webinars, Q&A sessions, etc. These can all be recorded for future use. Hangouts are free for anyone with a Google Plus account and you can upload your recordings to YouTube.

Hangouts can be found by looking on the right-hand side of your Google Plus page. There you will be able to see all of the Hangouts you accessed recently, as well as anyone you emailed in connection with these hangouts.

Besides making Hangouts, you can also participate in other people’s hangouts. This helps you to get to know others in your niche. To create a hangout you will click onto the “+ New Hangout” field at the top of the Hangouts list. Then you will see a list of contacts and Circles and can add who you wish to the hangout. You can then pick either chat or video format. You can even use emoticons if desired, as well as share documents, photos, videos, etc.

Hangouts are starting to become very popular and are seen as competition for other similar venues such as Skype.

Trick #7: Join the Right Business Circles

Google Circles lets Google Plus users form their contacts into different “circles.” You could, for instance, put your coworkers into a circle, or family members, or everyone that likes a particular topic, etc. These makes it an improvement over Facebook, as you can narrow down what is seen and who sees it and keep out the people you don’t want to see the info.

Finding the right circles to join or engage in will make a difference in the value of your Google Plus pages. You need to find the right audiences by discovering your customer’s interests, issues and problems.

You can do this by asking questions and doing surveys and then putting the appropriate people into specific circles. You can put people into more than one circle if desired, but only people in a specific circle can see whatever is posted in that circle.

This gives you the advantage of sharing specific information with specific audiences.

---

Slack today announced that it has rolled out some potentially helpful new features for the channels within its team-communication app. Now Slack users can “pin” specific statements to the rail summarizing a channel.

“Need to pin a file or a message to the channel so people can access it quickly and easily? No problem!” Slack said in a blog post on the new feature today. “You can pin multiple things! Just click the cog next to a message or file (or long hold on mobile) to pin it to the channel.”

Slack has also made it easier to see a description of each channel front and center when you click the little “i” to the left of the search bar. And to the right of the search bar, you can see your recent mentions (the at sign), as well as the items you starred (the star).

It’s a bit of good news for users following last week’s disclosure of a hack of Slack, which hit the company back in February. In announcing the hack, Slack also said two-factor authentication was now available for the app.

Today’s update also makes it possible to see which users of a given channel are currently online. For instance, in one internal VentureBeat Slack channel, I can now see that two of five “members” are online. If I don’t care to see the full list of all five members, I can now hit an upside-down triangle and collapse it. Or I can collapse the new Pinned Items section — or the channel description.

Slack is growing quickly. Two weeks ago, the company brought its app to Windows. And according to a report last week, the company was nearly finished raising a $160 million round at a $2.76 billion valuation.

I recently came across a forum post asking the question: “How effective are agile methodologies for creative projects, specifically for marketing initiatives?” Can agile help marketing teams be more effective? My answer? Yes, definitely.

Over the past few years agile has gained popularity outside the software development fraternity and has become a popular approach for improving the way businesses execute and deliver just about everything – from marketing initiatives, to operations, to boardroom strategy.

While agile has the potential to make teams more effective, the mistake these teams often make is that they become too bogged down in the detail of agile; after all, isn’t the whole idea to make the company more agile?

A clear sign that a company is bogged down in agile theory is when the Agile Manifesto – a document written by 17 really clever software people more than a decade ago – is plastered all over the office walls. Or when the manifesto wording has been altered slightly to fit the domain, resulting in something like: “The Agile Manifesto for Marketing”.

What’s wrong with trying to adapt it to your domain? Simple, you’re getting stuck inside the mental confines of the Agile Manifesto.

The business landscape has changed in the past 14 years, customer delight has become the new bottom line, favouring outcomes over output. A value like “working software over comprehensive documentation” is not enough anymore.

Customers don’t just want a piece of working software, they want a positive outcome. In marketing particularly, it is no different, customers expect positive, measurable outcomes.

It’s not about getting an eBook or white paper done, it’s about improving website traffic, improving lead conversion rates, and improving customer conversion rates. Essentially, customer delight has become the new definition of done in scrum, regardless of what you are delivering.

At Emerge, our sole purpose is to help business owners create great businesses and, along the way, discover the freedom they sought when they became entrepreneurs. To do this, we have to be insanely focused on positive outcomes, while having the agility to quickly adapt to changes in our customers’ business environment.

To this end, we use our own version of agile. One that fits our culture, our purpose, our distributed structure, and, above all, helps us deliver positive outcomes for our customers.

Part of our culture is the idea that we are Digital Distillers, blending elements of digital marketing (content, social media, SEO etc.) to create remarkable marketing cocktails for our customers.

As one would expect we have a distillation process, and yes, it’s agile:

1. Create a Distillation Plan

When starting a new project or customer engagement, our first objective is to be clear on the business goals – the outcomes of the engagement. Once we have these down, we can create an outcomes-based marketing plan – typically a 6 to 12 months plan.

2. Find a Domain Expert

We identify a domain expert, a person our team will work intimately with to ensure we have the depth of knowledge required to deliver the outcomes expected.

3. Create Outcomes

In our marketing plan we define Rocks, quarterly outcomes based priorities, that our entire team is geared toward achieving. We took the idea from the Entrepreneurial Operating System – a great system for helping your team execute better.

Here are some examples of Rocks:

• Increase website traffic from 1,200 visits a month to 3,000 visits per month in the next 90 days.
• Drive visitor to contact conversions from 45 to 80 contacts per month in the next 90 days.
• Improve the Marketing Qualified Lead ratio to 1:3 in the next 90 days.

Based on these outcomes for the quarter we start planning our sprints – or distills in our case.

4. The Distill Team

Our Distillation Team (scrum team) consists of 4 to 5 people – a master distiller, a social media expert, a content strategist, a designer and a content writer. The output of each distill is tightly aligned with that quarters Rocks and measured during a weekly huddle.

5. Distill (Sprint)

Our sprints even have their own flavour, distills – we’re marketers at heart, what can I say? We use Trello to manage sprint tasks creating a card task. Distill cards look something like this:

6. Distill Planning

The length of our sprints depends on the team, the urgency of the engagement, our domain knowledge. Sometimes we run weekly distills, other times we work on 2 weekly distills.

At the end of a distill we review our progress, identify what needs more work and then plan the next distill. With a team distributed across time zones and continents, we prefer to hold fewer meetings, making those we do have as productive as possible.

7. Stand-up

The same way software delivery teams have a stand-up every morning, our geographically distributed team holds a daily Skype-up, a 15 minute review of the previous days’ progress, identifying any blockers and reviewing the tasks for the day ahead.

Probably the most important thing for our team is consistency. Instead of getting bogged down in the rigors of agile, we use what works for us, after all, we’re agile.

Want to keep learning about our adventures in agile and other great tips for creating a great business?

Join hundreds of people who receive our marketing tips and advice monthly!

Every new medicine, technology, or treatment approach we rely on today stems from one collective source: research. It is essential to our ultimate health and well-being. Whether it’s learning more about how the body works or finding new ways to combat devastating diseases, research is at the heart of it all.

Unfortunately, there are people both inside and outside the Washington beltway who question the value of medical research or, more to the point, the return on that investment. Funding has never been in greater jeopardy, with continued slashes to the NIH budget and the effects of sequestration inflicting additional damage. As David Firestone noted in his NYT article, it is indeed a “dark time for science.”

An increasing number of talented investigators are therefore competing for dwindling federal funds, putting at risk the next big discovery that could revolutionize healthcare. So it becomes necessary to aggressively seek other sources of support. And those sources center on philanthropy.

Appealing to potential donors requires you to explain research in a different way than you would to peers in the scientific community who review NIH proposals. In essence, you need to migrate from the nitty-gritty details of science and toward more compelling vision stories that show your projects are big, difficult, audacious, and important.

Crafting compelling stories about research is a challenging task, requiring you to shift your mindset on what potential donors need to know to not only get them excited about your work but to throw their financial support behind it as well.

Here are seven tips on crafting compelling vision stories to potential donors.

1. Remember It’s All About Tomorrow. People don’t invest in what has been or what is right now, but rather what will be. This is the chance to share your “big dreams,” if you will. Donors often get excited by these big dreams and visions – even those that seem less like science and more like science fiction. As the multitudes of medical and technological breakthroughs in our history show, with support those dreams and visions are indeed achievable.

2. Know Who You’re Talking To. While they tend to be savvy and insightful, don’t lose sight of the fact that philanthropists may not understand science to the depths that you do. Get to know the people you are talking to, their stories and motivations. Magic can happen when a donor’s personal story, life experience, or interests directly connect with a philanthropic opportunity, so tailor your message to strike the right chord. You might not hit the target the first time but with time and care you’ll be to hone in on that bull’s-eye.

3. Bring On The WOW! Factor. Getting people excited about your research is often a matter of “getting to wow.” Make your Wow! factor results-oriented, far-reaching, optimistic, compelling, unifying and – most importantly – focused on the potential benefit to people and society. As personal as your research is, in the end it’s not about you and certainly not about your institution – it’s about others. So describe the potential impact – Why are you doing this? Why does it matter? Why should people care?

4. Inspire Through Examples And Common Metaphors. Take any examples you have about your research and make them as relevant as possible to the person you’re talking to. And don’t forget that examples that are personal lend credibility and meaning to your vision story. Share your own experiences and motivations for what you do, and be willing to make yourself vulnerable. Use common metaphors when describing your research – metaphors pack a greater wallop than the more detailed, nitty-gritty scientific concepts. So use real-world examples that are easy to potential donors to visualize. Here’s a great example from a Newsweek article about how cancer therapy has worked to kill “good” cancer cells while leaving “bad” ones behind:

The standard practice of giving the maximum tolerated dose of chemo would clear out the sensitive cells, leaving behind a tough nugget of impervious cells, the al-Qaida rebels of the bunch. These previously dormant cells would now pour out of their caves, suddenly finding both space and nourishment to grow. And grow they would, with the barrier of the sensitive cells gone.

5. Include Strong Visual Components. Photos, videos, and other compelling images or graphics tend to pull people in and get them interested. Professional-caliber video and photographic production is not required. Short videos, slide presentations, etc. can have just a strong impact provided the messaging is on target.

6. KISS – Keep It Simple, Succinct: Strip your research down to its core and let that core shine through. Get rid of the jargon, the tangential, the unimportant. Philanthropists don’t have the same level of education, experience, or knowledge in your area of research and your pitch is not the time to embark on a mission to bring them to where you are. It’s more information than they need, so make it simple. Simplifying research isn’t about “dumbing down”; it’s about prioritization and organization. And keep it brief – if your overview goes more than 4-5 minutes, head back to the drawing board and simplify some more.

7. Let Passion And Enthusiasm Become Infectious: There’s a reason you do what you do, day in and day out. Let your motivation and excitement for your research show when speaking with prospective donors. It’s a unique opportunity to show your excitement and passion for your work and its potential impact, to get them excited and passionate about it as well.

In the end, philanthropists approach supporting research with care and consideration, and rightly so. That’s why your stories need to have the greatest impact and influence, and these steps can help you get there.

So…ready to tell your story?

When it comes to starting a tech business, it’s not enough to have a great idea for a product or service. The end product may be outstanding but without the proper business to back it up, it will fail to make profit or get the recognition it deserves. Compare this to an analogy between McDonald’s and a fancy steakhouse. Because of its business model, the fast food giant obviously has more in terms of sales even though its food items are inferior to a steakhouse in terms of quality. In this case, it’s not just about the product – it’s also about the business.

According to Steve Blank, co-author of the book The Startup Owner’s Manual, “Having a technology idea is not the same as having a company,” Blank says. “There’s often a disconnect between engineers and scientists and what commerce and capitalism is about. These people are often the smartest but you don’t get paid for being the smartest in the world in a start-up. You get paid for being the one who put it together the right way.”

Dealing with Intense Competition

Putting it together the right way certainly becomes harder when you consider the level of competition you’ll be facing. Tech start-ups are hot right now and you’ll have to do everything right to get a heads up on the competition. The idea of dealing with competitors can be a drag especially when you’re still figuring out how to introduce your business to the industry. We’ve been led to believe that the chances of thriving in a business are greater if there is less competition.

But there’s research that tells us otherwise – competition in the early stages of business actually helps its prospects in long-term survival. Working in a challenging environment requires start-up businesses to have laser-like focus on customer service and satisfaction. They are also forced to lower costs in order to compete with the others. Smart managers need to use these challenges to their advantage in order to avoid the usual pitfalls of a young business.

Coming Up with a Unique Idea

According to this infographic, there are 23 million small businesses in America, and 543,000 more are started every month. Imagine the need for start-ups to come up with something unique to make them stand out. What it takes is a unique business model that has unique value proposition, diverse revenue streams, and tons of creativity.

It could be a platform for learning about just about anything, like the one Skillshare came up with. It could be like Handybook’s mobile app that can book on-demand home services like cleaning and repairs. Or it could be multiple revenue streams from content created by Popsugar, which covers beauty, fashion, fitness, and entertainment. These business models have changed the marketplace by using alternative approaches to revenue and creating great value that will benefit the seller and the customer.

Making Branding Work for You

Branding is like the luscious icing on your cake. It makes your product look appealing and has the capability to entice your customer to try it. Smart tech owners know that branding is a valuable business asset, equal to the quality of the product or service. Your brand is your reputation and your visibility. You have to make sure people talk good stuff about you even behind your back and that you are well-recognized in your target market.

A good brand should be associated with the ability to solve your customers’ problems. A company with a strong brand can easily win new customers, command higher fees, and retain the very best people in the business. In order to achieve this, you need to create an effective brand strategy that can improve your reputation, increase your relevance, and increase your visibility to your target market. Here are the top tips in developing a brand strategy that can elevate your start-up’s status:

Use content marketing

You need to create useful information that can prove useful to potential clients. You need to produce content that is more educational than promotional. The content marketing techniques that you will use should improve your start-up’s visibility, reputation, and relevance. When these are addressed, clients will recognize you as a reliable company that they can trust. If they have problems, you will the first name on their list. Content marketing is all about offering something of value to potential clients, which is a more effective way to win them compared to hard selling.

Establish strong social media presence

If you can name a business that isn’t on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or YouTube, chances are you’re looking at a company that is doomed to fail sometime in the future. Since practically all businesses are using social media, you have to think of ways to establish a dominant presence. While face-to-face interaction with customers is still important, online approach can save you a lot of time and money in terms of product or service promotion. In this business landscape, a strong presence in social media is already a requirement, not just an option.

Try Crowdsourcing

Don’t underestimate the wisdom of crowds. Why do that when you can tap into their knowledge to come up with great ideas for your start-up? If you’ve hit a snag and unable to come up with something new or better, an outsider’s perspective may be just the thing you need. This is where crowdsourcing comes in. With thousands of creative freelancers around the world brimming with ideas, you’re sure to get a concept or two that you can develop into something groundbreaking. Ideas here are not free but the rates are definitely lower than the ones you’ll pay for non-freelance professionals.

Maintaining Your Unique Business Model

So you’ve come up with a business model that made your start-up a hit among customers. You also established a strong presence for your brand. Now you need to make sure to maintain the process that you’ve mastered. For a lot of managers, this is the hardest task of them all. Make sure to avoid the trap of getting bored. If keeping the business in place is a challenge for you as the owner of the business, create an excellent backup by hiring people who can do the job for you.

Although e-commerce heats up like chestnuts on an open fire during the holiday season, online shopping is active all year long. In fact, holidays and observances in every season are a fantastic way for retailers to keep their brands top-of-mind and spark sales.

Spring is here, and with it a few special dates and observances. Mark these on your calendar and think ahead if you could do any promotions around them. We’ve included some fun ideas below for adding some seasonal creativity to your online marketing!

April

April 1^st – April Fool’s Day

April 5^th – Easter

April 22^nd – Earth Day

April 24^th – Arbor Day and Administrative Professionals Day

Autism Awareness Month

National Poetry Month

Prevention of Animal Cruelty Month

Stress Awareness Month

May

May 4^th –Star Wars Day

May 5^th – Cinco de Mayo

May 5^th – Teacher’s Day

May 10^th – Mother’s Day

May 16^th – Armed Forces Day

May 25^th – Memorial Day

Arthritis Awareness Month

Graduation

Healthy Vision Month

Mediterranean Diet Month

Mental Health Awareness Month

National BBQ Month

National Bike Month

National Physical Fitness and Sports

Teacher Appreciation Week (First week of May)

June

June 8^th – World Oceans Day

June 14^th – Flag Day

June 21^st – Father’s Day

June 23rd – National Pink Day

Black Music Month

Men’s Health Month

National Safety Month

Spring Marketing Ideas

• Easter – Consider offering a special promo deal on certain products for the weekend of Easter (e.g. 40 percent off our Easter collection or 20 percent off XYZ products Easter weekend only!).
• Mother’s Day/ Father’s Day – Create a Pinterest board with products devoted to mom or dad (e.g. “Gifts All Father’s Will Love,” or “30 percent off jewelry with code MOM30”).
• Create a “Deal of the Day,” “Deal of the Week,” or “Deal of the Month” that correlates with that holiday or observance (e.g. “Deal of the Week” on all things Red, White, or Blue for the week leading up to Memorial Day).
• If a holiday or observance is associated with a color, consider providing deals on items in that color and creating banners that go out to affiliates in that color. For example, June 23^rd is National Pink Day. You could create pink deal banners and offer a percentage off all pink products throughout the month, and then provide a bigger discount on the actual day.

Maximize Your Efforts With Multi-Channel Marketing

While these spring holiday marketing ideas are well-suited for emails and blog posts, announcing them on social media and other online channels allows you to simultaneously deepen and expand your reach.

In addition to other value-added content, post the holiday deal on Facebook and Twitter once a day leading up to the promotion.

Consider leveraging remarketing in order to connect with visitors to your website who did not make an immediate purchase or inquiry. This approach allows you to position targeted ads in front of them as they browse elsewhere on the internet.

There are so many ways you can incorporate spring holidays and observances into your affiliate marketing. The above tips can help plant the seeds, but your unique ideas and effort will make them bloom.

Sales tools are becoming “must-have” components in the selling equation. The ROI Insider on www.searchCIO.com stated that, “more than 80 percent of IT buyers now rely on vendors to help them quantify the value proposition of solutions.” In fact, many CIO’s now elevate the ability of a vendor to proactively justify their solutions to one of the top five most important selection criteria. There are several key concepts to using sales tools in the new selling equation.

Preemptive strike – A preemptive strike is where you (the sales professional) first do your homework. You need to gain an understanding of the prospect before ever making the first call. Many think a cursory look at the website is enough… IT ISN’T. Do a quick Google search for news articles or management changes. If they are a public company, look at their Annual Report. The more you know the better off you are when dealing with a new prospect. Use tools like, Inside View, Google Alerts, or Hoovers.

Value hypothesis – This exercise is one where you are able to anticipate a prospects issues, pains or goals by looking at your current customer base. Select customer’s that are close in size to the prospect and complete a value hypothesis before your first call. Use this document to discuss potential value and economic impact you will have on your prospects financial health. A value hypothesis is simply a Business Case before you do your discovery. You are hypothesizing your value based on your history of success with similar customers.

The right questions for the right decision maker – Too often when a salesperson gets an opportunity to meet with a decision-maker he or she doesn’t have a logical, relevant, and consistent set of questions to discuss. Therefore the salesperson ends up gathering data that is inconsistent, irrelevant or not pertinent. Come prepared with questions and data that will enhance the conversation, not delay the opportunity. You should be able to use your current customers to better understand the questions you need to ask. Create a Value Inventory (See my book ROI Selling on Amazon.com) and create the appropriate questions before you walk in the door. Bottom line: You must respect the decision-makers time by being prepared!

The longer a sale takes the less chance you have of winning the opportunity – Sales process research consistently shows the longer a sale takes to close, the greater the risk of losing the sale to a competitor, or worse to “no decision.” By utilizing economic impact analysis tools you can capture cost and calculate decision delay or cost of no decision. These calculations are very effective in the sales process.

 Quality of ROI model separates winners from losers – An objective and credible economic impact model separates lightweight ROI marketing ploys from substantive sales tools. By utilizing a value justification tool during the sale and an economic impact assessment program after the sale, you are setting the tone for a paradigm shift from vendor to partner. Brian Sommer, former VP at Aberdeen told me once, “everyone will figure out the spreadsheet ROI, but no one will put a post contract program in place and measure the milestones.” It is critical to a successful sales team to follow-up and measure the value delivered.

 Documented decision making – Some products, especially intangibles like software, are subject to scope-creep after the sale. As one vendor put it, “The customer buys based on an 80% fit to their needs, and then quickly focuses on the 20% that they knew wasn’t there when they bought.” The point is, a consistent selling method, a well-documented proposal, an economic impact study going into the sale, and a value assessment measurement program after the sale, can keep the implementation project focused on the key requirements. It ensures the benefits that originally drove the purchase decision are met. It also results in happier customers and more quality case studies for use on the next opportunity.

Change the paradigm –Ted Matwijec of Rockwell Automation said it best, “Using sales tools in the sales process has changed the paradigm between salesperson and vendor. We are now subject matter experts and can clearly articulate to our customers that we have their best interests at heart. Economic impact sales tools have turned the vendor / customer relationship into a partnership relationship.”

 ROI does not eliminate risk – ROI models, custom training programs and expert proposals do not eliminate risk. With low-risk projects there is less need for an economic impact study. However, when risk becomes real and important, economic impact is used to mitigate the risk by offering several metrics for financial comparison. These metrics must be credible, believable and objective. I believe there are over a dozen C-Suite metrics that assist an economic buyer in making an informed decision (see The Key to the C-Suite on Amazon.co m). It is crucial you understand your value (economic impact) as it relates to these metrics: Net and Gross profit, Earnings, Operating costs, ROA, ROE, DSO’s, Payroll as a percent of revenue, Cash flow and Debt to Equity.

Educate the buyer – A credible economic impact analysis will help educate your buyer. Through a detailed questioning process you are telling a story that explains outcomes customers can expect as a result of using your products features. The best salespeople in the world learn early in their careers… the art of the question. The ability to ask a question that elicits the information you need and educates the buyer at the same time is the difference between the best and mediocrity.

 Value justification vs. Cost justification – These two concepts, value and cost justification, although they may seem like the same thing, are very different. Separating value justification from cost justification is a question of attitude and timing. When you are selling value you take a positive and proactive approach to selling by presenting the value early in the sales process. When you are cost justifying, you are taking a reactive approach of “defending” your price and may have already lost the opportunity. It is philosophical, you must position your product for value and take a proactive approach. It is a mindset you need to have when selling value. If you don’t know the value your products and services are bringing to the prospect, then you are incapable of value justifying the sale.

There is a difference between knowing your product and knowing the value you are capable of delivering. You must understand the difference between product features and customer value to effectively utilize economic impact selling in your sales process. Keep in mind you are not talking to the decision- maker (Stakeholder) when he or she focuses on how much your solution costs as opposed to value that will be received from their investment.

 After the sales is just as important – Each component described above is equally important to a successful selling campaign. Further, it is critical to not only utilize economic impact during the sales process and proposal creation. Rather, you must be prepared to assess the value you will have delivered after the sale. You can count on your customer doing it. Certainly most organizations will “estimate” economic impact prior to purchase as part of the buying process. But equally important, many will run the same economic impact analysis after the purchase and for the life of the project.

Use tools and technology as an advantage in the sales process. Develop economic impact analysis tools to be more effective during discovery, presentation and proposal phases of a sale. Sales tools are now becoming a differentiator is the decision making process and a key to the C-Suite.

 

The post Sales Tools You Need to Succeed appeared first on ROI4Sales.com.

The sales funnel (variously referred to as the consideration cycle, or buyer’s journey) is a familiar way of understanding how your customers may come to buy your product or service, from just beginning to learn about your brand’s offerings through making the purchase.

It is possible to break the sales funnel down into several stages, depending on your business; At its simplest, however, the sales funnel can be described in the following steps:

• Awareness: leads are just learning about your product or service, or have identified a need that your business can address
• Consideration: leads are actively weighing how your product or service might fulfill their need, or if you are the best provider for that solution
• Conversion: leads are at the point of making a purchase

How Lead Nurture Drives the Sales Funnel

A smart content marketer understands the journey that their customers take and creates content that encourages them forward along that path. However, not every person who reads a blog post or attends a webinar is ready to take the next step. That’s where lead nurture comes in: creating ongoing opportunities to present engaging content until leads — in their own time — are ready to move forward.

In short: use content to move leads forward, and lead nurture to bring them back to the table.

Considerations for Lead Nurture at Each Stage of the Funnel

For each of the following stages, we will take a look at audience needs, content recommendations, and the lead nurture approaches that pull them together.

Awareness

Individuals in the awareness stage are just beginning their buyer’s journey. They have a need or interest, but are still early in their decision making process. Content for the Awareness stage involves explaining your product or service and answering common questions or objections, such as:

• How much will it cost?
• Do I need it right now?
• What options should I be looking at?

Content should focus on educating consumers about your industry, and giving them the confidence they need to feel they’re making an informed decision.

Depending on your business, prospects at the top of the funnel may take a good amount of time before they’re ready to actively consider who they want to purchase from. They key during this period is to provide a way to keep providing those prospects valuable content while presenting them opportunities to move further with you toward a sale.

Blog Updates

As a great source for fresh, educational content, blog updates delivered via email or RSS feed reader are the perfect non-interruptive way to keep your brand on the mind of consumers. In particular, the ability to cover a range of topics means over time you can eventually find the angle that resonates with a given audience.

Be sure that blog posts have relevant links to more service or product-focused pages so that interested readers are only a click away from taking the next step.

Newsletter

A regular newsletter — be it monthly, weekly or every few days — provides the consistency of a blog update with the additional benefit of custom formatting and incorporation of non-blog content. Unlike RSS feeds, you have the opportunity to curate which content you feature and have clear calls to action (CTAs).

It is important to remember to deliver email newsletters consistently enough to be expected, but not so frequently as to be annoying. Again, having a solid mix of content topics and considerations helps ensure you are engaging a range of prospects to click through and learn more.

Social Media

Often overlooked as a lead nurture tool, social media channels are a fantastic way to keep top-of-funnel audiences in the mix until they move forward to the Consideration stage. Like email marketing, social media allows you to put your content under the noses of those who have opted to be a follower.

In particular, consider ways that social platforms allow you to segment and promote to specific demographics. For example, if you know homeowners are more likely to purchase your interior design services, you can target them in social when sharing relevant content and promotions.

Finally, be sure to add social media follow links to your email marketing. The more channels you can create for lead nurture, the more likely you are to be in front of the right prospect at the right time.

Consideration

In the Consideration stage, leads are sure enough in their need that they are at least tentatively looking to brands who can deliver on that need. In particular, they’re asking “why you, and not the next guy?”

Content for the Consideration stage involves building on the trust you’ve developed earlier in the funnel. This more active engagement requires providing a deeper dive on subject matter knowledge, while offering a clear path to conversion for those ready to act.

Free Guides and Whitepapers

These downloadable guides are a perfect opportunity to showcase a more extensive expertise in your field, while identifying leads who are more actively considering their purchase.

The value of these kinds of content pieces are such that they often merit their own email marketing campaign. For example, if you provide a guide on dishwasher repair, a smart follow-up would be a limited series of emails providing additional resources around that topic, as well as calls to action to the repair service or new dishwasher that your brand offers.

Timing here will be key. If a week with your free guide and a broken dishwasher doesn’t produce the desired results, a lead will be looking for additional assistance.In short, help first but provide a timely offer on your product or service as a Plan B. Be sure to pace any email follow-ups to the expected process that a prospect will be following. Don’t try to sell them while they’re likely still trying to go the DIY route.

Webinar and Event Updates

Live events, such as webinars and presentations, are a great opportunity to interact with engaged leads. Such events showcase both your expertise around a subject area, as well as field specific questions from real-world prospects.

• First: lead nurture to get them there. I’ll admit, despite my good intentions, I attend about 25% of the webinars I sign up for. My attendance record is directly proportional to how well the webinar host emails me reminders.
• Second: find other avenues to get the information to those that didn’t attend. Customers are busy, but providing a follow-up email with a link to the presentation video or slide deck allows them to still enjoy the insights on their own time.
• Remember, if someone is willing to invest their time to attend a virtual or in-person presentation, that is a stronger signal of intent than any form field you can capture.

Conversion

The Conversion stage is the “dare me to say no” part of the process. By this point, the lead understands their need, and feels your business is the best provider of a solution.

Demos and Free Trials

For service providers, a no-risk trial or preview can be the hands-on validation that a prospect needs to feel comfortable purchasing from you. Whether you’re offering software on a freemium model, have a live demo they can explore, or have a no-cost trial period, featuring it in lead nurture is a fantastic way to keep leads moving toward a conversion. However, be sure to continue to answer questions they may have, and have a follow-up campaign planned if they don’t move forward with a paid engagement.

Promotions and Discounts

If price is the ultimate decider here, offer a smart financial incentive to make it happen. This is where understanding your audience will be key. Too many brands throw out discounts and coupons to customer segments that are likely to use them anyway. At that point, they are merely subsidizing their customer base.

By analyzing email marketing metrics around cost-focused lead nurture campaigns, brands can identify the leads that are truly price-minded and create strategic segments solely around those individuals.

Guarantees and Warranties

It is amazing how much commerce is driven by (or stifled by) fear. We as consumers fear what we don’t know that we don’t know. While useful, informative content in the earlier funnel stages can mitigate that doubt, so can assurances that making a purchase is not signing away your life. Be sure to explain to leads any return, cancellation or exchange policies in emails.

Measurement and Next Steps

The addendum to any recommendation is always “… and measure it to make sure it works.” While the above sales funnel is broadly applicable to most brands, there will always be particular quirks to how a company or audience behaves.

As such, it’s important to measure how your lead nurture performs with your audience. Is it behaving better or worse than expected? What is the open and click-through rate of emails to different segments? Are onsite conversions increasing in the way you’d expect?

With any sales funnel, improvements in one stage should feed the next. Therefore it’s important to note that positive engagement higher up in the cycle ultimately drives more conversions. By continually thinking of offsite ways to drive leads back to onsite engagement and movement down that funnel, your content marketing campaign can build a sustainable model of growth and ROI.

Running a successful crowdfunding campaign feels a bit like winning the lottery. The results are all over the board: instant successes, slow and steady fundraisers, unfunded flops, and underdogs that rise to the challenge just in the knick of time. But all of these campaigns have one thing in common: Success or failure, they were learning experiences

Here, five experienced crowdfunders share what they learned from running both successful and unsuccessful campaigns on Kickstarter and Indiegogo

1. Get the word out before the campaign launches

Entrepreneurs should share a product idea soon after inspiration strikes, according to Janielle Denier, COO and head of strategy at Rain Factory. She’s helped Indiegogo campaigns like Jibo raise more than $2 million. Read more...

More about Indiegogo, Fundraising, Crowdfunding, Kickstarter, and Business

Targets. Initiatives. Objectives. Analysis. Risks. Operations. Industry. Priorities. KPI. Success. Entry. Barriers. Products. Triggers. Requirements. Solutions. Markets. Criteria. Process. Profile.

What do these words have in common?

They are words you are most likely to see in corporate and company documents related to strategies or tactics of a corporation or private company. They are often found in the confusing array of marketing or sales strategy and planning language. Whereby strategy, planning, objectives and targets somehow get melded into one in the same without any real distinction.

Confusion: Company Profile Vs. Buyer Persona

One mistaken method related to buyer personas has to do with the confusion, which exists between company or customer profiling and buyer personas. Even calling a profile a buyer persona profile amounts to more confusion. Slipping the word, persona, in between buyer and profile does not make it a buyer persona.

Such confusion can lead organizations down the wrong path when it comes to their search for a deeper understanding of customers. Pre-constructing the type of information you seek and the format by which it is presented oftentimes can pre-shape the information before you even start. For instance, you can wind up with an overt emphasis on products, solutions, or requirements in your profiles. But never really tap into the deeper sentiments related to fulfilling goals and making choices.

The Corporate Talking Machine

Without true immersive qualitative buyer research, you can end up with a corporate talking machine representing your buyer persona. A fictional profile is created versus an archetype representative of goal-directed buying behaviors. For example, in one buyer persona review I was engaged in recently, due to a lack of results, I found plenty of “corporatese” language. The language was loaded with reference to product requirements and corporate references to objectives. In other word, revealing very little about the personalized and human-centered behaviors on why or why not decision choices are made.

Unintended Consequence: A Contradiction

One of the unintended consequences of falling into this trap of corporate jargon-filled profiling is it can take organizations further away from their customers as opposed to closer. Setting in a false belief that the organization knows its customers. And, there is a contradiction in this dilemma as well.

The contradiction is buyer personas are intended to help us not only understand customers deeply, but to also inform on how to personalize our efforts to help customers fulfill their goals. Buyer personas amounting to company or corporate profiling does little to help us personalize or to make our marketing human-centered.

There is another contradiction alluded to above. It has to do with a profound mistake made where a profile, incorrectly labeled a buyer persona, is producing the exact opposite of what buyer personas are intended to prevent. The profiles become very product-centric! Focusing in on product criteria and product requirements. Which is an indication there is a lack of adequate and properly conducted buyer research. The research is, in essence, very product-centric as well.

The Right Path

An essential purpose of the qualitative buyer persona research method is to focus in on the contextual buying behaviors of customers. To understand the situational behaviors and goals, often unarticulated and unstated in corporate plans, which drive decisions and choices. Providing the right type of insights, which help inform marketing innovation. And, allowing for human-centeredness in an organization’s customer strategy.

Where you begin in your customer research sets you down a path. The important choice for organizations, today, is to choose the right path, which leads you to deeper insights needed to understand what drives the choices being made by customers today in the volatile changing digital age. It may be a harder path to take, whereby the alternate profiling path is flatter with the comfort of product marketing oriented “corporatese”, but the rewards for finishing will be much greater.

Making the right choice prevents you from taking the profiling path ending in a robotic version of a corporate talking machine.

(The following is a creative video parody about “corporatese” produced by high school student, Jeremy Ann Catunao, last September. It is fun yet straight to the point. Enjoy.)

Asian buyers have for some time been putting pressure on Vancouver’s stock of detached homes. Now China’s development industry is showing interest in the region’s commercial properties. It is part of a cross-Canada trend, says Colliers International in a report issued earlier this month: “Canadian property owners have traditionally been the incumbent buyers of real estate assets, but a growing mix of international property investors, specifically Chinese developers, are seeking to park their capital in stable markets like Canada.”

NEW YORK, N.Y. – IBM says it is investing $3 billion over the next four years to create an “Internet of Things” business unit that will collect and analyze data from smartphones, tablets and other connected devices so that businesses can use it in their operations.

IBM estimates that 90 per cent of all data generated by mobile devices, connected vehicles and appliances is never analyzed. The company hopes to change that by creating partnerships with companies such as Twitter and the Weather Co., and developing cloud-based data services and tools for developers.

“Internet of Things” refers to the growing number of Internet-connected, smart devices in our homes, pockets and around us.

The post IBM to invest $3 billion in new ‘Internet of Things’ unit to scoop, crunch data on devices appeared first on Canadian Business.

You’d think Josh came straight from central casting. Josh was our first Lyft driver on a recent trip to L.A. By day, we learned, he was a tech entrepreneur and surfed whenever he could (naturally). Josh was somehow exactly who we’d expected: the American ride-sharing brand’s laid-back, cloyingly friendly personality incarnate. The same was true for Brad, whose apartment we rented on Airbnb. Brad’s winsome smile beamed out at us from the company’s cheerful website like a long-lost friend. Although we never actually met Brad, his earnest story and keen use of exclamation marks convinced us we weren’t going to be murdered in our sleep. Lately, it seems, everybody with something to sell adopts a variation on this same chipper persona. Welcome to the age of the micro-brand.

It was both inevitable and amazing how naturally people in the peer-to-peer economy mastered the tools of branding to make themselves seem more trustworthy and interesting, but the strategy is not confined to the “sharing economy.” Think about how reassured you were by the avuncular handyman who helped you find toilet parts at Home Depot or the emo-haired barista who conspiratorially called you “man” when handing you your skinny latte at Starbucks, and it becomes clear that there is something more fundamental at work here. For marketers, the role of service people is evolving way past being cogs in a business model. Now, like it or not, they’re affirmations of your brand.

That may seem like a lot to ask of a surfing tech entrepreneur or a grizzled Mr. Fixit, but for many marketers this dependency is becoming unavoidable. To understand why, consider just how fragile brands have become in recent years. For one thing, consumers are now more likely to have figured out a brand by piecing together scraps of evidence they gathered on their own than to have learned about it from advertising. That means they’ve only surmised what you stand for and are warily seeking confirmation. For another, meaningful product differences have become tiny and fleeting in a lot of categories. In many cases, brands aren’t promises of performance anymore—they’re consensual fantasies. And they’re most delicate in that all-important moment just before the money changes hands.

For any business in which a human is the final point of contact before a transaction, this means marketing and HR need to be very close friends. Much has been written about the connection between corporate culture and branding, and it should be thunderingly obvious by now that hiring people who don’t share a company’s values is, in the long run, a recipe for disaster. It’s hard to imagine a more brand-damaging moment than glimpsing behind the bouncy, happy mask of marketing to find a surly wage slave counting the minutes until his next smoke break (I’m looking at you, airlines).

But the time may have come to let front-line people be more than that. We used to think all we needed from those on the parapets was to be efficient and not screw up our brilliant marketing; now their own personalities might very well be significant marketing assets. Consumers are becoming sophisticated enough to understand that hiring interesting people says good things about a company. And letting those people be themselves only enriches and authenticates the experience of the brand—provided the company hired the right sort of people in the first place. I’m mostly unmoved by the “we appreciate your business” bromides droning from the cockpit. But it made my day when the Genius who replaced my iPhone battery said, “Whoa, dude, this phone is in sweet shape. Is all your stuff this nice?”

That’s because I wasn’t just there to solve a problem. Whether either of us realized it, I also wanted to be right. I wanted to not feel like a fool now that they had my money. That’s all anybody wants from a brand, in the end. And sometimes no amount of corporate rhetoric can come close to the comfort of being called “dude,” especially if it’s unscripted.

MORE ABOUT MARKETING & BRANDING:

• Search and social marketing is useless without brand awareness
• Can Canada Goose avoid the popularity trap that brought down UGGs?
• The Weather Network’s next forecast: your shopping habits
• Good causes or not, charities use some of the worst marketing tactics
• Dear Canadian businesses: time to get it together on Internet commerce

The post Why human resources is the future of marketing appeared first on Canadian Business.

---

Dyson first made a name for itself with bagless vacuum cleaners more than 20 years ago, and has since launched everything from fan heaters and air multipliers to hand dryers and washing machines. Today, Dyson is lifting the lid on the next product category to emerge from its vaults: air purifiers.

The U.K-headquartered company quietly unveiled the Dyson Pure Cool in Japan a couple of weeks back, but it won’t be available to purchase there until April 7. Today, however, represents the product’s first official launch, kicking off in China, a country that has long been plagued by pollution, with an estimated 1.2 million premature deaths attributed to bad air according to a 2010 Global Burden of Disease study. There is a similar situation in Japan too.

While air pollution is one of the main reasons behind Dyson’s launch market strategy, we’re told that other countries around the world will be able to buy the product in the future, including the U.S., which isn’t impervious to air pollutants either.

The Dyson Pure Cool uses a 360-degree glass high-efficiency particulate arrestance (HEPA) filter, which it claims removes “99.95% of harmful ultrafine particles from household air.” It uses the same technology from the Dyson Air Multiplier fans to help circulate the resulting clean air around a given space.

Some studies suggest that ultrafine particles (UFPs) — that is, particles of 100 nanometers (NM) or less in size — emitted from the likes of car exhausts can lead to heart disease and other ailments. So those living near traffic congestion, in particular, are the key target market for Dyson here.

“There is more in the air than meets the eye – the really harmful pollutants are those we can’t see,” explains James Dyson, founder and chief engineer at Dyson. “Throughout the development of Dyson Pure Cool, Dyson engineers focused on capturing the ultrafine particles that can travel deep into your lungs – developing a machine which captures particles as small as 0.1 microns.”

In terms of pricing — well, the Dyson Pure Cool isn’t cheap. VentureBeat has been given two prices for the contraption, one in Japanese yen (¥69,984) and one in Chinese yuan (RMB 5,190), but when converted into U.S. dollars, the prices range widely, from $580 to $830 respectively. Still, this gives us an idea of what to expect when it launches in other markets — it’s safe to assume that it will be somewhere in the $500-$700 price range.

While the company’s decision to launch in Asia first is partly down to the inherent air pollution problems, there is more to it than that — the Dyson brand is big in Asia. In Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong, Dyson claims that it’s now the leader in the floor-care market. China too is growing. A spokesperson tells VentureBeat:

Growth in China in particular is strong — at current growth rates, China can soon become Dyson’s bestselling market — we tripled the size of our business there in 2014. In Taiwan, January sales were up 250 percent compared to the year before. We hope that this new Dyson technology will accelerate this growth.

Two weeks back, Dyson revealed a $15 million investment in solid-state battery company Sakti3, representing one of the first investments to emerge from the $2.3 billion fund it set aside to invest in “future technologies,” this includes $1.5bn specifically for research and development around new product categories.

We were all lied to.

Growing up, we were sold the dream of following the traditional career path of working 50-hour weeks to receive our stable paycheck.

Get in the office early, stay late, and even come in on weekends — then maybe, just maybe we’ll get a raise one day.

Hopefully, if we worked “long” enough, we’ll save enough money to retire at the age of 65.

Who the hell invented that?

Since when was there a rule that we have to trade our time for money?

It’s one of the biggest misconceptions in our society. Time is our most important commodity, and all the money in the world cannot replace time.

Your income is limited

When you’re trading time for money, your income will always be limited.

The first reason is — there’s only 24 hours in a day.

Most of us need 8 hours to sleep, 2 hours to commute to and from work, 2 to 4 hours to cook, eat, wash up, relax, and spend time with friends/family.

That leaves us with 10 to 12 hours to trade our time in for income. That’s it.

No matter how much your time is worth to your organization: $20, $30, $50, there will always be a limit. Your time.

Here’s another question.
How many of us can simply ask for more because we want to? Not many.

We have to wait years before asking for a promotion to increase our income, and there’s a fair chance that we may not get that promotion.

The second reason is — the more more we make, the more we’ll lose.

Employee tax is the most heavily taxed income there is, and the more income we earn, the more tax we’ll face. Which means, when someone goes from making $60,000 to $100,000 due to a promotion, they’re not actually making $40,000 more.

Your impact is limited

When we’re continuously trading time for money throughout our lives, our time is limited to pursue the things we’re passionate about.

This could be a hobby you love, giving back to the community, or building something that could have a real impact in the world.

Simply put, with limited time comes limited impact.

The question is, how do we stop trading time for money?

Note: There are other methods that will give you passive income, but this is one clear, sustainable pathway to help you make the transition.

7 Steps to Stop Trading Time for Money

1. Change Your Mindset

The first thing we must do is change our beliefs. When we rid our mindset of believing that in order to make money, we have to trade it for time — our mind opens up to the possibilities.

There’s no rule for everyone that in order to make X dollars, we have to work X hours. Get that out of your head. In this situation, it’s more important to spend time “un-learning” the old than “learning” the new.

Think about trading value for money, not time.
Think about what value you can create for other people, and how you can deliver that value.

What assets, skills, knowledge, connections, or ideas do you have that people value?
Recognize your strengths and competency, then go all-in.

2. Build your expertise and authority

Now that we understand the strengths and value we can bring to others, we need to build expertise around it. Developing expertise translates into larger value creation for yourself and others, because we can now solve problems that very few people can solve.

However, being recognized as an expert takes time and work, which is why building authority is just as important.

Building authority around your expertise is what will help people discover your expertise in the first place. You could be the best in the world at something, but if no one has heard about you, then it doesn’t matter.

Authority has many factors to it, but the most effective are testimonials, press & media, influencer association, and case studies. Give people the confidence to realize that you know what you’re talking about.

Developing expertise & authority will immediately increase the value of your time, and will allow opportunities to come to you.

3. 10x the Value of Your Time

Not all of us can leap into entrepreneurship in the blink of an eye.

This is why if you’re freelancing or providing professional services for your time — 10x the value of your time.

Instead of working with 10 clients that are going to pay you $2/month, find 2 clients that will pay you $20/month — then drop the rest. This is easier said than done of course, but the logic here is to be focused on the few that deliver the most results.

Now, you’re working fewer hours for the same, if not more income.

Which gives you more time to…

4. Focus on creating a product

In order to stop trading time for money, we need to create an offer that we can sell and deliver without us having to be there.

A powerful way to do this is to create an online product — ebook, training program, membership program, software apps, etc. You could also sell physical products online, but you’ll have to find someone who can manufacture and deliver the product to your customers (through dropshippping).

The reason why creating an online product is powerful is because you can create it once, then focus the rest of your time on selling it. Yes, you’ll have to improve and optimize the product, but it’ll be on your own time.

This means you could be on vacation, spending time with friends, or sleeping, and have the ability for customers to purchase your offerings.

5. Automate everything

Figure out a way to automate and systemize everything you can in your business. From how you acquire customers, how you deliver your products, how you drive traffic — everything you can.

Whether it’s your content calendar, automated email series, webinars, social media posts, facebook ads, etc.

The more you can systemize, the more time you’ll have to focus on the business, not in the business. Your time should be spent on long-term strategy, building relationships, and growing the business — the drivers that will make your business thrive.

Now we can’t automate and systemize everything in the business.

So what do we do?

6. Hire Someone

Eventually, it just makes sense to hire someone to help you in certain areas of the business.

How do we know which areas? Create your 3 Lists to Freedom.

This list designed by Chris Ducker, will change the way you look at your time.

Here’s how it works.

Create 3 columns with the titles:

1. HATE doing
2. SHOULDN’T do
3. CAN’T do

Hire an employee (assistant, intern, etc.) and get them to start doing the tasks you HATE doing first.

Getting someone to do what you hate doing will not only help you appreciate the value of outsourcing tasks, but it will maximize the strengths you already have, rather than focusing on your weaknesses.

7. Build your next offering

You’ve built authority, your product, and figured out a way to automate and hire someone to grow your business.

What’s next?

Often, it’s not enough to have one offering out there in the market. The biggest businesses expand into different products/services they offer, or they find a way to upsell their current customers.

Is there a product idea that your customers have been nagging you about? Or a set of features that you can add to provide a premium pricing package?

Understand what your current customers are looking for and figure out a way to deliver it using the systems and resources you already have in place.

Reward yourself

The final step is to reward ourselves.

What’s the point of having more time, if we’re not able to enjoy it?

Spend time with your loved ones, learn something new, or travel the world.

We must be able to visualize and reward the results we have achieved in order to associate the notion of having more time as a positive result.

Take the time to recharge, reconnect, and do more of what you love.

Time is only worth having, if you spend its worth.

“At the end of your life, you will never regret not having passed one more test, not winning one more verdict or not closing one more deal. You will regret time not spent with a husband, a friend, a child, or a parent.”
— Barbara Bush

Have you ever wondered why, in spite of your best intentions, you just can’t resist a clickbait headline on Buzzfeed?

What was it about #TheDress that got everyone up in arms? And what is it about Malcolm Gladwell that makes his work so interesting?

Is it possible to replicate this kind of remarkability, or is it entirely unpredictable?

The truth is there is compelling science behind the success of shareable content. The stuff that gets people talking isn’t quite as random as you might think. From a marketing perspective, understanding what makes for compelling content and what does not could be the difference between seeing your message succeed or fail.

As marketing expert Seth Godin says, “Ideas that spread, win.” And what he might as well have said after that is this: Ideas that don’t spread, die. So if you have something to share — a message, a product, even a cause — then you have a responsibility to get that idea to spread. And if you don’t, we just might never hear about it.

The interesting index

Getting an idea to spread is not something that should be left to chance. Of course, there are those instances when somebody has a world-changing idea and just doesn’t realize it. And in spite of the author’s intention, the idea somehow succeeds.

But those instances are few and far between.

The truth is interesting books and articles tend to follow a tried-and-true formula for creating content that we just can’t help but share. Incidentally, this is the same formula that makes some books bestsellers, catches a person’s attention in the grocery checkout, and creates breakthrough momentum in a crowded market.

As it turns out, getting people to talk is not just a roll of the dice. There are some practical things you can do to make your message spread, and it begins with the message itself.

In a paper titled “That’s Interesting!,” researcher Murray Davis lists 12 characteristics that make a theory or idea interesting (hat tip to Adam Grant for first pointing this out).

So let’s look at five of them.

1.Organization: When chaos has a hidden order

When something looks disorganized but has a hidden organization to it, that’s interesting.

That’s what the scientific journal PLOS ONE uncovered as it studied selection bias in the NHL draft.

The study discovered that, compared to those born in the first quarter (i.e., January–March), those born in the third and fourth quarters were drafted more than 40 slots later than their productivity warranted, and they were roughly twice as likely to reach career benchmarks, such as 400 games played or 200 points scored.

A more recent phenomenon is #thedress—the mysterious garment half the Internet says is one color while the other half swears it is the opposite. That in itself, looks random, but when you view it through the lens of science, understanding why some people see one color and some see another, suddenly it becomes compelling.

Wired asked its photo and design team to work with #thedress image in Photoshop, to uncover the actual red-green-blue composition of a few pixels.

2. Generalization: What appears to local is actually global

So when you look at the random guesses of an uneducated crowd and realize they were more accurate than individual experts and then apply that to Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, you have something more than an interesting anecdote. You have a phenomenon.

James Surowiecki explores this in his book, The Wisdom of Crowds, in which he demonstrates time and time again that the more people you gather, the more the collective intelligence tends to increase.

Condorcet’s theory, explored in “The Wisdom of Crowds,” says that the probability that the majority of individuals are correct correlates with the size of the group.

When something that looks like an isolated incident is, in fact, part of the greater whole—that’s interesting.

3. Evaluation: What seems bad is actually good (or vice versa)

When you attack a commonly-held belief, like the idea that fat is bad for you or that being strong is better than being weak, then expose why such an idea is wrong or not always right, you have something people will talk about.

This what we see in Tim Ferriss’ Slow Carb Diet from his best-selling book, The 4-Hour Body. Whereas most diets have you counting calories, Ferriss says you can eat as much as you want, four times a day, but only of a certain kind of food.

But that’s not all. Tim takes it one step further and gives you a “cheat day” in which he dares you to gorge yourself on thousands of calories in ice cream and pizza and whatever you want in a single day. And he claims it actually increases your weight loss.

Can you imagine how people might respond to such a claim? First, they reject it. Then they explore it. And finally, as many of Ferriss’s fans have done, they rave about it. That’s the power of turning a common belief on its head.

4. Function: When failure leads to success

When what’s commonly thought of as an ineffective means of accomplishing a goal turns out to be effective, that’s interesting.

At the end of the movie Moneyball, Jonah Hill shows Brad Pitt a video of a baseball player who has never run to second base. He only hits singles. Then one day, he decides he’s going to go for a double, but as he’s rounding first, he wipes out. Crawling back to first base, ashamed, he notices all the players shouting at him.

“Run!” the players from the other team cry. “Run! You hit a homerun!”

The player, who had been so used to failure, didn’t realize that he was actually succeeding.

It’s similar to the old Looney Tunes version of “The Tortoise and the Hare” fable, in which the tortoise outruns Bugs in spite of the bunny’s blistering pace.

Of course, what we find at the end is that there are hundreds of lookalike tortoises who are all running the race, but the point is this is what catches our attention—things that seem one way and are, in fact, another.

5. Composition: When individual is holistic

When you have a remarkable individual achievement or some sort of outlier experience and it ends up proving to be the norm, that’s interesting.

Malcolm Gladwell’s treatment of “the 10,000-hour rule” is a treatment of this technique. First, he identifies the story of the Beatles, then Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and countless others, until you as the reader are convinced that this is more than coincidence.

An illustration of gradual increase in expert performance from K. Anders Ericsson’s research

(Note: Many researches have called into question some of Gladwell’s treatment of K. Anders Ericcson’s study of deliberate practice, from which he extrapolates the 10,000-hour rule. Regardless of whether you agree with the science behind this, the point is that the way he presented the data made it incredibly compelling.)

The importance of counterintuition

Why do these techniques and strategies work? What is it that actually makes such statements interesting?

“It has long been thought that a theorist is considered great because his theories are true,” Murray Davis wrote, “but this is false. A theorist is considered great, not because his theories are true, but because they are interesting.”

All interesting theories, he claimed, are “an attack on the taken-for-granted world of their audience.” We tend to accept beliefs that align with our biases, but according to Murray, we reject the value of these findings. Why? Because they don’t teach us anything new.

In order to grab the attention of an audience, you must make a proposition that negates an accepted one. In other words, we all had some subtle suspicion that things are not exactly what they seem. This is the root of all suspense in any great story, philosophy, or message.

Let’s apply this to what you do

So what does this look like? How can you apply this to your blog, business, or cause? It’s all about finding an idea worthy of being spread, but how?

First, do your research:

Don’t go in search of the phenomenon. Just consume a lot of content.

Ira Glass, host of NPR’s “This American Life,” has said the hardest part of telling a good story is finding one worth telling. Read articles, academic studies, and books about a certain subject. Become an expert in a specific domain.

Second, look for trends:

What feels a counterintuitive idea you might explore in your own field? Consider any commonly held beliefs those in your industry tend to have, or entrenched ways of doing things that might be ripe for disruption.

• Are there things that at first looked chaotic but now appear to have some kind of hidden order?
• Have you found something that initially looked like a local phenomenon, something particular to your context, but is actually more universal?
• Is there something you initially thought was bad but realized later was good? Or vice versa?

Third, put it all together:

In popular science writing, it’s typical for authors to follow a story-study-lesson methodology in how they form their arguments. This looks something like the following:

1. Tell a compelling story.
2. Introduce the reader to a new piece of research or an interesting anecdote that illuminates a hidden truth.
3. Apply the lesson from the research to a broader context.

This was precisely the process I went through in writing my latest book, The Art of Work. After reading tons of biographies and hearing hundreds of people share their stories on how they found meaningful work, I wanted to counterintuitively attack the idea that “you just know” what you’re supposed to do with your life.

Of course, this kind of writing takes practice, and I’m sure I made lots of mistakes. But I’ve already started hearing from readers who told me how “interesting” or “compelling” the stories in the book are. Apparently, this stuff works.

That’s how you write like Gladwell and grab someone’s attention like Buzzfeed. It’s how you take something as simple as a dress and break the Internet with it.

Do any of these “theories of interestingness” resonate particularly with you? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!

Have you ever been so excited about your latest project that you just wanted to scream about it from the rooftops? Well, consider broadcast emails your business’s megaphone.

Broadcasts are perfect for delivering your company’s news, whether you’re announcing a new product, promoting a limited-time sale, or keeping readers in-the-know with your latest email newsletter.

That’s the big difference between broadcast and follow up emails. A follow up email series contains evergreen content that you send to people at any time of the year, but broadcasts are for time-sensitive information that you want to get out the door today.

The content possibilities for broadcast emails are nearly endless, but we’ve narrowed down three types of emails along with some useful tips for writing each.

Newsletters

Many businesses send weekly, bi-weekly or monthly newsletters to their subscribers to update them on company-wide news and events. These are among the most commonly used broadcasts, probably because they’re so versatile. Sometimes it’s tough to come up with new content for your subscribers on a regular basis, so here are a few ideas for your upcoming email newsletters.

Company culture

Is your business active in the local community? Give your readers a glimpse into your company’s latest community outreach to help humanize your brand.

Customer of the month

Have a rockstar customer? Show them off in a short case study that explains how they use your service or product to help solve their biggest challenges.

Team member of the month

This is an opportunity to show your team’s passion for what you do. Why did you start your business? What makes your team special? Putting a face (or faces) to your brand can help create a deeper connection with your customers.

Industry news

You’re already tuned into your industry, so why not give your readers a personalized news feed full of useful, relevant articles?

New ways to use your product or service

Is there a way your customers can stretch their budget by using your services? Can your product help simplify their lives? Is there a way of using your product that your customers may not know about? Give your readers useful tips to keep them coming back for more.

Upcoming events

Use your newsletter to promote and remind your subscribers about upcoming special events, whether it’s an in-store only sale, an open mic night or a special menu at your restaurant.

When it comes to the timing and frequency of your newsletter broadcasts, you should experiment with your own audience to find what works best for you. For example, if you’re a music venue with multiple events each week, it might make sense to send a weekly newsletter to your subscribers.

New Product Releases and Updates

Any time you launch something new or make updates to a product or service, it provides an opportunity for you to reach out to your subscribers. Create a release plan in the months leading up to your big announcement to get on your subscribers’ radar early. This will also help you put together the bigger picture of your release and identify other areas where you can promote it, like on social media and your blog.

Your email’s message should create buzz. You’re excited about your new offerings, so you want your readers to get excited, too. What’s so great about it? What problems does it solve? How can people make a purchase? When is it available? If it’s an update, what kinds of improvements can people expect to see? You message should clearly communicate the value of your new products or services.

If your product is visual (think clothing, crafts, etc.), you can simply show it off in your email, like in the example below.

As always, make your call to action prominent so your readers can easily find more information or purchase your latest offering.

Limited-Time Sales and Promotions

Create a sense of urgency in your emails, and you could see a surge in open and click-through rates. Sales and promotions with an expiration date are perfect for this because they prompt your subscribers to open your email now. If you’re looking to get results fast, limited-time sales are the way to go.

Here’s your content checklist for promotional emails:

• A clear timeframe and/or expiration date in your subject and email message
• Exactly what they’ll get if they act now
• A call to action that helps them place an order

When it comes to promotions, timing is the name of the game. The message itself doesn’t have to be long – your subscribers should be able to scan your email and find what they need quickly. Nutrisystem does a good job of this in the example below.

Broadcast emails are a great opportunity to connect with your customers by showing off your business’s latest offerings. Put some of these tips to work in your next broadcast and see what your audience responds to best.

Which types of broadcasts do you send? Tell us in the comments!

If you haven’t built a team of highly qualified and skilled sales professionals, don’t waste your time and money investing in sales processes, training, compensation plans, technology, marketing support, or strong products and services.

Depending on the industry, somewhere between 20 and 33 percent of salespeople aren’t capable of being successful at their jobs. It’s a frightening statistic, but scarier still is understanding that a bad hire—a salesperson who lasts less than a year—can cost your company anywhere from $250K to $800K (or more), including lost business opportunity.

In today’s hyper-competitive buyers’ market, “mis-hiring” has become an epidemic, forcing sales leaders to rethink their approach to hiring. They have learned, all too painfully, that yesterday’s hiring methods no longer apply. These lessons include:

• A salesperson with a past record of stellar performance won’t automatically perform in the future.

• Accuracy in salespeople’s resumes has declined, so rigorous reference checking is required.

• A candidate who interviews well enough to get the job may not be good enough to deliver the numbers after they are hired.

To change the mis-hiring paradigm, many sales leaders are casting aside their informal, gut-instinct approach and building high-performance sales teams by implementing a formal hiring process.

A formal process provides an objective assessment of each candidate, which is one of the most critical success factors in hiring.

Key elements of an effective sales hiring process include:

1. Forming an internal hiring team comprised of multiple stakeholders. For a small company, those stakeholders might include the CEO, VP of sales, and VP of marketing. A larger company might enlist the regional VP of sales, HR representative, and local sales manager.

2. Stakeholder agreement on how the position and company will be described to the candidate. Hiring is a balance between buying (candidates selling themselves) and selling (convincing the candidate to join your team). Highly qualified candidates are more likely to join your team if everyone they meet articulates a consistent story.

3. Establishing a benchmark against which the process will be measured. Data points might include the average salesperson’s performance against quota, their average tenure, the time to first sale, etc.

4. Building a profile for each unique sales position that defines the critical skills and traits required for success. Each skill and trait should be prioritized and scaled to measure the degree of candidate compliance. The profile for a sales “hunter,” for example, is quite different than the profile for a “farmer.” In the example below, stakeholders have determined that a reasonably high level of business knowledge is required for this particular position. A full profile usually contains 12-20 skills and 6-12 traits.

 

5. Writing an accurate job description. Don’t include profile details in the job description because a candidate could potentially identify what the interviewer is looking for and prepare “perfect” answers.

6. Providing recruiters and HR staff with a simple document that filters out “fatally flawed” candidates. For example, if a candidate must have at least five years of sales success in your industry, anyone who does not meet that criterion is eliminated. Screening against specific criteria allows internal hiring team members to dedicate their time to more qualified candidates. Technology solutions that perform much of this screening are readily available.

7. Engineering a set of first-round interview questions. Used as directed, these questions will enable internal team members to probe for required skills and traits based on the profile. Interviewer observations as well as the candidate’s answers are recorded and analyzed later.

8. Training the hiring team on how to perform structured interviews. It is essential that interviewers follow the questions, which have been specifically designed to generate responses that reveal whether the candidate possesses the traits and skills required for job success.

9. Educating interviewers about the importance of objectivity. Structured interviewing reduces the natural tendency to view a candidate subjectively, which could lead to overlooking weaknesses.

10. Devising a set of second round interview questions to facilitate further exploration for critical skills and traits, and to enable the interviewer to identify and quantify weaknesses uncovered in the previous interview.

11. Validating the candidate’s claims and uncovering inconsistencies through a rigorous reference checking procedure. Effective reference checking requires persistence and skill, because many companies are reluctant to provide information about former employees. The best reference checks are conducted with people not provided by the candidate. Sales leaders with a wide network can often find “blind” references who will offer an honest appraisal of a candidate, if they are confident that the discussion remains between them and the person doing the hiring.

12. Requiring sales position candidates to substantiate assertions about their past performance with tax or other formal documentation. If they claim they made $500k a year for the past five years, they should be able to prove it.

13. Requiring final candidates to participate in sales call and presentation simulations. Evaluate the candidates against required skills and personality traits derived from the profile.

14. Implementing psychometric testing and background checking. These tests rarely lead to hiring someone you have no enthusiasm for and often “expose” candidates who have managed to hide deficiencies through the interview process.

15. Engineering individual ramp-up or on-boarding plans to ensure that the gaps between the profile and the candidate’s proven skill set are closed during the first thirty to ninety days of employment.

16. Implementing a continuous improvement component. In order for this process to continue working into the future, there must be a mechanism that provides stakeholders with feedback and includes the flexibility to make adjustments.

You may initially think that this kind of formal process will “take too much time,” but you’ll quickly discover that the number of candidates who make it to the final stages is limited. The process works like a sales funnel; candidates “qualify out” all along the way. As a result, the hiring team has time to focus only on the most qualified candidates. Additionally, candidates get impression that your company is serious and well-managed. Finally, both candidate and company become aware of the gaps between the candidate’s capabilities and what’s required to get the job done, as well as how those gaps will be filled.

Dave Stein is an internationally-recognized expert in B2B sales performance. Read his blog at davestein.biz and follow him on Twitter: @davestei

Image courtesy of Tim Caynes.

The post Hiring Salespeople: A Core Process You Must Perfect appeared first on Peak Sales Recruiting.

What's the key to long-term sales success? Short-term sales success. Research by DDI shows that it's important to see significant progress within three months - or else you'll get discouraged and start a downward spiral.

That's why I've always focused on quick start strategies. Knowing how to ramp quickly totally changes the game - whether you're in a new sales position, introducing new products, or targeting new buyers. 

That’s why I thought I’d share Kyle Smith’s story with you — in his own words. You’ll discover how he used Agile Selling as sales training to significantly shorten his own ramp time.

P.S. His boss says he's doing great -- and in a ridiculously short time!  

For mid-sized marketers and agencies, the ability to run a big ad campaign can often seem out of reach and too expensive.

And while many marketers and agencies would love to target consumers with engaging, well-designed ads, they're often intimidated by the money and expertise they think they'll need to do it.

Fortunately, marketing technology has evolved to the point that mid-sized agencies don't need huge budgets or teams of experts anymore to make sure their ads are seen by the right people at the right time. In fact, running a visible campaign that includes highly targeted ad placements is much, much easier — and more cost-effective — than you might think it is.

For instance, many agencies these days are benefitting from programmatic advertising, the technology that lets marketers target their audience by buying digital ads automatically across a wide range of websites.

Instead of having to call or email a salesperson and negotiate a deal to place ads on a single site, programmatic buyers can say they want to target a group of New York-based males between the ages of 18 and 35 across an entire network of publications. This cuts down on the waste that occurs when companies spend a bunch of money to advertise on a single website, whose users might not fit the brand’s target demographic.

Rather than being subject to prices set by a salesperson, marketers who buy programmatically can rest easily knowing their ad buys were cost-efficient and targeted.

While this all might sound pretty complicated, there are tech platforms that allow marketers to carry out these types of campaigns, end-to-end, with just a few clicks of a button.

For example, using a self-serve platform like Adadyn, a single member of a retailer’s agency or marketing department can choose to show ads to people who were looking at, say, corduroy pants on the store’s website the night before. Then, the marketer can plug in how much money he or she would like to spend on the campaign, and — voila! — the platform will automatically distribute the ads to potential buyers of corduroy pants on websites across the internet.

Of course, distribution is only half the battle. Even if you’re able to show your ads to your target audience, you still need a group of graphic designers and web developers to create those ads in the first place, right? Wrong.

Self-serve ad-buying platforms such as Adadyn actually provide marketers with easy-to-use design tools that allow them to create their own ads. Using Adadyn, agencies can even make a different set of ads for prospective customers based on what time of day they’re surfing the web, or what sweater most interests them based on their online browsing. Then, the platform will place the ads accordingly for maximum impact.

This way, if you think you have the perfect ad for people who might like to buy a sweater on a Saturday afternoon, that’s exactly who you’ll reach.

The best part? You're in control, and all it takes is one person, a little bit of time, and a budget you're comfortable with. Visit Adadyn’s website now to get started.

Download the infographic here.

This post is sponsored by Adadyn.

Find out more about Sponsored Content.

Join the conversation about this story »

 

Salespeople can make or break an organization. Do you have the next big idea? Great. But if you don’t have someone on your team who can sell it, your idea might be dead in the water.

New research from Steve W. Martin, founder of Heavy Hitter Sales, examined the personalities and habits of over 1,000 salespeople to suss out what separates quota busters from those who miss the mark.

According to the study, everything from a salesperson’s communication skills to their level of pessimism -- even whether or not they were an athlete in high school -- can play a role in their success.

The study found that while organizational factors can positively impact a salesperson’s performance, top salespeople possess certain traits that help them stand out anywhere.

“Sales performance is more likely dependent on the attributes of the individual and sales environment characteristics over company-related influences,” Martin wrote in a Harvard Business Review article.

Verbal Acuity

Whether it’s walking potential customers through specific features or talking through their prospects’ pain points, a huge part of a salesperson’s day involves communication -- and being able to do it well.

Using the Flesch-Kincaid test -- a score representing how readable a selection of text is -- the study determined that high-performing salespeople communicated at the 11th to 13th grade levels, while underperformers averaged around 8th or 9th grade.

“[Establishing] credibility requires that messages be conveyed at the recipient's communication level, not too far below the level of the words that the customer uses,” Martin wrote in an HBR article.

You can test what educational level you communicate at using the online tool Readability Score.

Achievement Orientation

Only two things in life are certain -- death and taxes. Salespeople can add a third thing to that list: quota.

According to Martin, 84% of top-performing salespeople are able to consistently crush their sales goals because they rank highly on achievement orientation. These reps are focused on attaining their goals and vigilant about tracking their progress.

This same proportion of top performers played a sport in high school, an experience that Martin predicted makes them “well-equipped to function in competitive environments where self-discipline is a necessity.”

The most successful reps also make sure to use the resources available to them. The study found that more than half are “power users” of the CRM and other internal systems, compared to less than a third of underperforming reps.

Inward Pessimism

Almost all the salespeople in the study described themselves as optimists. However, the research revealed that almost two-thirds of high-performing sales reps actually fell on the pessimistic side of the spectrum.

“Inward pessimism drives a salesperson to question the viability of the deal and credibility of the buyer,” Martin wrote.

High performers use their natural skepticism to qualify leads more thoroughly, according to the research. They’re also more likely to reach out to decision makers directly rather than pursue conversations with contacts who may or may not have influence over purchase decisions.

Sales Management Influence

When it comes to manager-rep relationships, the study reveals that the amount of facetime salespeople clock with their managers has less impact on a salesperson’s success than what they’re meeting about. Around half of all respondents said their managers are invaluable to helping them achieve quota, and that they speak to their managers throughout the day.

But when asked what makes a great sales manager, high and underperformers’ found different aspects of their managers' expertise helpful. Here are the top three traits high and low performers valued in their managers:

• High-performing salespeople: “leadership and management skills,” “practical experience and sales intuition,” and “communication and coaching skills”
• Underperformers: “industry expertise and product knowledge,” “communication and coaching skills,” and “fights for the team”

While the best salespeople utilize their managers’ experience to improve their own sales strategies and develop their professional skills, underperformers “tend to use their managers to make up for the product and industry knowledge they lack,” Martin wrote.

Sales Organization Influence

High-performing reps were more likely to rate their sales organization’s morale and standards of accountability higher than underperformers. Almost two-fifths of high performers strongly agreed that their organization’s sales reps were held accountable against their quotas. Slightly less than one-fourth of underperforming salespeople said this was the case at their organizations.

Team morale also plays a role in sales reps’ success. When asked to compare their organizations to sales teams at other companies, more than half of high performers rated their team morale as above average. Less than 40% of underperforming salespeople said the same about their teams.

Interestingly, individual success had no correlation with company growth rate. The study included reps from companies with 20% or more annual growth, 5% to 20% annual growth, no growth, or decreasing revenue. Across all four cohorts, the percentage of high-performing salespeople stayed consistent.

The conclusion? Salespeople who work in organizations with high morale or take advantage of their managers’ experience in sales and strategic knowledge can certainly benefit from these organizational factors. But at the end of the day, it’s who you are that matters for sales success.

What personality traits do you think the best salespeople have in common? Tell us in the comments.

Amid all the marketing and communications tools meant to make the process of finding and converting leads faster and more efficient, your sales team might be missing one particularly tactical weapon, and with it, opportunities to drive more sales through the funnel.

Relationship capital, or the web of connections that accomplished professionals cultivate throughout their careers, is an asset to be mined like any other for leads, warm introductions, and sales. And unlike data know-how or product expertise, it's not limited to one department or team within your organization.

Unfortunately, many salespeople fail to maximize the connections that already exist between their colleagues and potential clients. But by formalizing an internal network-mining process, your organization can:

• Expand the pool of prospective clients by accessing networks outside of your traditional sphere.
• Generate warm introductions through mutual connections.
• Maintain a more robust pipeline.
• Shorten your sales cycle by starting with warmer leads.
• Increase organization-wide engagement among both sales and non-sales employees.

So why don't more sales executives integrate relationship mining into their strategies?

The first roadblock is often the mistaken idea that business development is the job of sales departments and no one else. In reality, all members of an organization, leadership included, are not only responsible for revenue generation, but can have a significant impact by way of their business networks.

Second, sales teams that do reach out to non-sales staff for leads often rely on ineffective methods; for example, shooting out a mass email asking whether anyone knows someone at Firm X. Aside from the white noise factor, these emails fail to extend to your colleagues' secondary network -- the people who their first-degree contacts know. This pool is often where critical introductions come from, and email blasts won't get you access to it.

An easy way to resolve the outreach issue is by investing in systems that not only mine secondary networks but also identify paths between individuals you might not be able to unearth on your own, boosting both leads and conversion rates. Yes, it's another piece of tech in an already increasing stack, and yes, there is an upfront cost, but the return -- in leads, time saved, and revenue -- is significant.

Finally, an effective network mining campaign requires activating a relationship capital culture at your organization. That means, first and foremost, open communication across all departments and up and down the hierarchy. This can be tough when divisions, departments, and teams are siloed, and leadership is separated from the broader employee base. This is perhaps the roadblock that requires the most effort to get past.

But it is possible to break down these barriers. A few strategies that might help:

1. Job shadowing programs that ask workers to temporarily take on the tasks of a colleague on a different team.
2. Cross-departmental brainstorming sessions to increase engagement and buy in across your organization.
3. More stringent email policies that force employees to interact face to face.

Once the siloes come tumbling down, it's critical to give employees agency over their networks even as you ask to mine them. Team members must remain the gatekeepers of their relationships, controlling which they'll share, who can be contacted, and how. For those still reluctant to open up their rolodexes, consider incentive programs in the vein of commissions -- monetary or otherwise.

Sales teams that are not focused on finding and mining relationships within their firms are at a critical disadvantage when it comes to lead and revenue generation. To activate your company's network and see leads and conversions soar, start by breaking down the walls that separate teams and creating an open culture of communication where employees feel comfortable sharing connections. Sales might see the uptick, but the entire organization will feel the impact.

Can you run a successful inbound marketing strategy without any direct mail, offline events, or other forms of outbound marketing? Can you grow your company on outbound marketing alone without any inbound marketing efforts?

It may come as a serious disappointment to you, but the answer is both “not really” and “it really depends.”

As always, there are always edge cases where a business can thrive using exclusively old-fashioned or new-fangled marketing efforts. However, for the vast majority of us, a sense of balance is absolutely crucial. And here’s why:

What is the Difference Between Inbound vs. Outbound Marketing?

Outbound marketing? You may know it better as interruption marketing, disruption marketing, or even non-permissive marketing. We’re talking about the types of disruptive marketing that may ruin your day. Television advertisements, radio ads, trade show booths, or other forms of highly disruptive marketing. Is it necessary? Well, that’s complicated.

According to John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing, over half of marketers identify outbound marketing as their primary lead source. This means half of your marketing peers are relying on factors like phone calls and magazine ad responses – as opposed to web form conversions – to bring new business in for their organizations. Is this effective, or does it simply feel like the path of least resistance?

HubSpot reports that over 12 million searches per web are performed in the US alone each month. Even more staggeringly, 54% more leads are generated through inbound marketing methods, like blogs, social media, and whitepapers, than outbound marketing methods alone. Inbound marketing produces more leads at a lower cost per lead than traditional advertising methodologies. So what gives? Why are so many of your peers focusing their efforts and budget on outbound marketing methodologies? Is it because outbound marketing is more effective, and even cheaper? Unlikely!

The Truth About Outbound Marketing

What is the absolute truth about outbound marketing? Are television commercials, radio advertisements, and magazine advertorials a completely worthless way to market your organization? Not quite. The short answer is “not quite,” and the long answer is “it depends on the sophistication of your ideal customer.”

In essence, outbound marketing can be an extreme compliment to your inbound marketing strategy. Content Marketing Institute, citing VentureBeat’s commentary on the “rise of the content economy” reports that offline events remain a highly effective way for sophisticated marketers to generate leads,win new customers, and maintain high satisfaction among existing client bases. Could this marketing methodology see extreme success without inbound marketing? Unlikely.

Between Eventbrite and Meetup, the web remains a highly popular way for modern professionals to connect with event opportunities and networking events. Without social media, it would be far more challenging for news to travel far among professionals within any given industry. The truth is, even given well-established industry events that are primarily focused on outbound marketing such as trade shows, you simply can’t deny the role of inbound marketing.

Outbound marketing isn’t useless. There’s no question that it’s still got a role; especially in conservative niches, industries, and regions. However, there are very, very few specialties where inbound marketing, from email marketing to white papers to social media, hasn’t played some role. The point? Inbound marketing is absolutely the future. However, anyone who plays the role of a purist and tells you that all outbound marketing methodologies are dead is almost certainly mistaken. In an ideal world (and marketing strategy, if we’re being honest), inbound marketing and outbound marketing would peacefully coexist. Does that sound challenging or even impossible? Well, I promise you that it simply isn’t.

How Can Inbound and Outbound Marketing Coexist?

At the end of the day, here is the absolute truth about marketing as a science, methodology, and practice.

“A happy customer is an informed customer,” as marketing expert Chris Goward puts it.

Anyone who’s spent much of their career in either marketing or sales can attest to the significant risk that surround customers who’ve been either oversold or undersold. Customers who haven’t been educated on the true value of the product or service they’re about to receive could run the risk of being underappreciative. Customers who are oversold are a major risk for disappointment; which can lead to short-term disappointment and low customer satisfaction; and long term risks for customer retention, and even worse, some serious damage to word-of-mouth referrals. What gives?

Inbound Marketing = Informed Customers

Inbound marketing is an education tool. Pure and simple. It’s the most effective marketing methodology available to today’s business development professionals, but it’s also a major education tool. Today’s consumers have every bit of information they could ever want or need just a few clicks away, via their laptop, tablet or smartphone. If your organization has the savvy to position themselves as an industry resource via best-of-class content marketing; they’ll position themselves as a resource for curious researchers who are Googling related search terms to their industry. If you’re being honest and approaching your content marketing strategy correctly, the stars will align perfectly and you’ll generate extraordinarily well-qualified leads for your organization.

Is Modern Marketing Really as Simple as High Quality Content Creation?

Sorry to say it, but not quite. The speed and velocity at which your organization will generate high-quality, ready-to-purchase leads depends on quite a few factors. Your product or service, the sophistication and authority of your buyer personas, and factors like price point and competition can all have a major effect on your Marketing (sales and marketing) funnel that channel leads into customers for your brand. There are no simple answers, but effective research on your customer base can reveal the answers for you.

In essence, the right combination of inbound and outbound marketing methodologies are most likely the perfect answer for your organization. Using inbound marketing methodologies, including educational content resources and well-optimized landing pages, can prepare your business to make the most of limited use of outbound marketing methodologies, such as print advertisement and offline events. If your ideal customers tend towards the young and highly tech-savvy, minimal outbound marketing is probably correct for you. If your typical buyers have been attending trade shows and reading industry publications for the duration of their careers, a marketing strategy which relies more heavily on outbound methodologies will more likely yield optimal results.

While there is simply no easy or correct answer to the whole outbound vs. inbound marketing methodology debate, it’s crucial for you to realize the following: marketing is the science of compelling and convincing humans. No individual would ever attempt to argue the truism that humans are a remarkably complex species. While we can’t answer the debacle of inbound vs. outbound for your organization without additional customer insights or data, the most likely answer is “mostly inbound, but don’t ignore outbound!” Purism is rarely the answer, and the world’s most intelligent marketers realize the value of nuance.

Are you marketing your business using purely inbound or outbound marketing methodologies? Why or why not?

header image credit: afireinwinter/flickr

Event marketing is currently a very expensive and sloppy process in most firms because the relevant information is fragmented, difficult to assemble, and the “database” is often a pile of business cards. But it needn’t be that way. The means for more careful thinking about the big money you may already be spending is at your fingertips.

According to a report by the Convention Industry Council, about 225 million people attend more than 1.8 million events sponsored by companies and associations, including 270,000 conventions and 11,000 trade shows per year. In 2012, even in the midst of an anemic global economy and budget tightening at firms, the amount spent on these events worldwide was an estimated $565 billion. Hosting, attending, and exhibiting at events comprise a whopping 21% of corporate marketing budgets, and one analysis indicates that these meetings “contribute more to the [U.S.] GDP than the air transportation, motion picture, sound-recording, performing arts and spectator sport industries.”

But it’s far from moneyball when it comes to event marketing. Three of five marketers use no tools to measure event ROI, and most companies plan and execute events without specific business objectives. Yet, after sales force costs, events are the biggest line item in many marketing budgets, especially for B2B firms.

So consider what more productive event spending means for the bottom line. Technology to do this exists, and it has implications for what managers can do before, during, and after the events they sponsor or attend.

Before. There’s not just one rationale for events. Goals can range from lead generation or gaining access to decision makers to actually selling products or services — measured against the expense and opportunity cost of that event. But if you don’t know where you’re going or why, no road will take you there. No technology can help managers who are unable or unwilling to set goals.

Once goals are set, however, there are tools to track ROI milestones that are currently dark holes in most marketing budgets. Pre-event registration systems like Cvent or Eventbrite help organizers sell tickets, promote the event, and measure responses beyond the number of registrations. They provide data, like campaign impressions and email opens, which can track the relative effectiveness of various event promotion activities.

The technology will also help you make a a core decision: is attending, sponsoring, or exhibiting at this event worth it?

Salesforce addresses this question with potential attendees at Dreamforce, its annual event. The Dreamforce 2014 homepage had a calculator that provided users with the projected ROI that their respective companies would gain from their presence at the conference. It also had a template letter with relevant data that prospective attendees could send with the data to their supervisors, justifying the expense, and, in the process, establishing accountable metrics for follow-up evaluation.

During. At the event, new technologies provide cost-reduction and revenue opportunities for all stakeholders. Mobile platforms accessed by apps on smart phones or tablets replace paper agenda, venue maps, and other standard documents, saving on printing and personnel costs while enhancing sponsorship opportunities. Trade groups such as the Georgia Economic Developers Association use an app that lowers the cost and distribution hassle of print material while generating enough incremental sponsorship revenue to pay for the app entirely.

The apps also make real the often-cited but rarely-delivered promise of “engagement” via social media. Attendees, speakers, and event managers can communicate, participate in surveys, polls, and contests, share reactions and insights, and broaden the event’s reach by allowing people to link with others they might not otherwise have met. Beacon (location based) technology allows exhibitors or sponsors to direct interested attendees to their product or booth. Software from firms like Glisser or sli.do create more interaction in sessions and enable ongoing dialogue beyond the meeting room.

These services help oft-distracted attendees participate via a smart phone or tablet. They also you to create  communications and content that reflect the spirit of the event and your attendees, which is far better than generic materials prepared at headquarters.

Marketers can also quantify many traditionally amorphous goals. Networking can be done and tabulated via the app, allowing exhibitors to connect with prospects in a more targeted way. Lead generation is now more efficient and scalable with apps that provide an all-in-one lead scanner and note-taking platform which can be seamlessly uploaded to a CRM system for follow-up.

Remember that, when it comes to signaling interest in the topic of the event, attendees have already voted with their feet. So this is often more sales-ready data about buyers and their key concerns than the broad demographic data currently resident in most CRM systems.

After. The most common metrics for evaluating an event are the “smile sheets” distributed after a session or the ad hoc perceptions of people in the exhibitor’s booth. New technology goes further. Did the keynote speaker deliver? Find out based on the number of bookmarks, views, and comments as well as session ratings. Did sponsors get the level of exposure they hoped for? Impressions, click-throughs, and interaction with their content are relevant to this assessment. Did attendees find the event a good use of their time? That’s an important customer-satisfaction issue, and comments in the activity feed are often a better way to gauge that than polite comments during the cocktail reception.

Data also helps to close the loop. Event goals depend upon your objectives with current or potential customers. With current customers, your primary goal may be to maintain relationships, meet other decision makers or influencers, stimulate add-on sales, or get feedback about prototypes. With potential customers, your goal may involve making initial contact, establishing a brand presence, gathering competitive intelligence, or getting follow-up calls with relevant prospects. These goals have inherently different evaluation criteria. For account maintenance and enhancement, for example, cost per contact is less relevant than it is for acquiring new leads or post-event meetings with prospects.

Some companies are already using this type of event data to boost business. SAP, the global software firm, generates 60% of its revenues from events and uses app data to inform sales reps of prospects’ interests. In turn, this data allows the reps to tailor their conversations to those prospects’ interests and focus on the most appropriate bundle of products and services. SAP credits this approach with increasing sales by as much as 25% where it has been used.

The benefits of event marketing are undeniable. But too many firms tend to mismanage their business-development expenditures, treat their events like de facto perks, and they refuse to change their ways because “that’s the way they’ve always done it.” It’s shame, really. Because with current technologies, there’s little excuse for that.