From writing exams to taking a game-winning shot, virtually everyone will be confronted by a pressure moment, but a Canadian performance coach says there are strategies to put the squeeze on stress and thrive in tough challenges.

WASHINGTON – For a glimpse into the future of the Canada-U.S. border, talk to Randy Powell.

He’s seen some of the new ways travellers might soon be clearing customs under a binational agreement announced this week.

That’s because some of these new methods are being tested on his trains. His luxury tour company has worked with customs officials on different possibilities for simplifying travel.

He likes method No. 3 the most – that’s the latest one.

In the first experiment, U.S. customs agents would board trains at the B.C.-Washington State border and process passengers aboard, instead of forcing them off. The second saw his Vancouver-based company, Rocky Mountaineer, turn a train car into a customs booth and passengers filed through it.

In the latest one, passengers barely need to budge. U.S. customs agents hop aboard and scan everyone’s passport with a little gizmo that looks like a smartphone. They do this nowhere near the border. There’s no need to empty the train, no need to deal with that border, and definitely no queuing up at customs.

“So when we’re done, they get off the train and away you go,” Powell said.

He got involved in testing five years ago as his tour company planned to add a Vancouver-Seattle route. The countries were already working on plans for a next-generation border. And the U.S. Department of Homeland Security saw his small, luxury line as an ideal subject for one of its pilot projects.

Fast-forward to Monday. Powell was in Washington to celebrate the signing of a new customs arrangement that could revamp the way Canadians and Americans cross the border.

If it’s ratified by each country, it would allow customs agents to perform pre-clearance duties in the neighbouring country for travel by car, bus, train and ship.

The system already exists for air travel at eight Canadian airports. Passengers pass customs in Toronto or Ottawa and avoid potentially longer lines in New York and Washington.

The result of all this would be a virtual customs zone.

Suddenly, customs could be cleared anywhere – on a train; a highway rest area; a bus station; or countless other spots beyond that same old string of checkpoints prone to bottlenecks and delays.

The future of the border might feel a little less like a simple horizontal line, and a little more like a statistical regression analysis – with a bunch of points sprinkled in clusters along an axis.

“It’s fabulous. We’re thrilled,” said the Rocky Mountaineer president.

“We’ve been working on this file for the last five years. They’ve been working on this far longer than me.”

The Greyhound bus company wants some of what that train company is testing.

It would probably require a different model for buses, given the scores of trips per day in different directions. A possible scenario would see Canada and U.S. set up customs offices in bus stations.

Greyhound longs for the day when passengers can skip the border. As of now, buses pull over at the border, line up, and wait for their turn. Eventually, passengers clear out and line up in the customs building.

Stuart Kendrick said that process averages 45 minutes and can last up to three hours on the busiest days at the busiest spot, the Ontario-New York Peace Bridge.

Kendrick wasn’t at the Washington announcement but he applauded it from afar.

“This is really exciting, good news for us,” said the Greyhound Canada vice-president.

“You’re just going to whip right through (customs). That’s a big attraction to us, and it would be an even bigger attraction to the customer.”

Another possibility for buses is to pull off the road, and process passengers near the border. That’s a bit more like one option envisioned for passenger vehicles.

Passenger vehicles represent the most complex challenge, said a U.S. cabinet secretary. He said different spots will probably wind up with different models.

“Site by site, there’s going to be some negotiation,” said Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson.

“There’s going to be a fair amount of negotiation that goes into each site.”

If ratified by lawmakers, negotiations could then begin with subnational governments and private-sector companies, like Greyhound and the bus-station authorities.

Kendrick said he hasn’t been given a timeframe for when all of this could be in place.

He said he hopes it’s soon.

The post A glimpse into the future with a bendable Canada U.S. border appeared first on Macleans.ca.

NEW YORK, N.Y. – Adobe, the company behind the ubiquitous PDF format for documents, is touting electronic-signature and mobile capabilities in a new subscription package aimed at helping individuals and businesses manage their documents.

Tuesday’s announcement of Acrobat DC and Adobe Document Cloud comes as people have more options for creating their own PDF documents. Besides free or cheap software available from third parties, many browsers including Google’s Chrome now come with that capability built-in.

Before, people had to buy Adobe’s Acrobat software for hundreds of dollars. (The company’s Acrobat Reader is free, but can be used only to read PDF documents, not create them.)

Adobe, which is based in San Jose, California, said the new tools go beyond the basic features available elsewhere.

Its e-signature features will, for instance, let parents easily fill out school permission slips. One app lets people photograph a paper form with a mobile device. The app converts that to Adobe’s Portable Document Format and lets the user fill out and sign the form electronically. Adobe said small businesses will be able sign contracts without needing to print and mail documents.

New mobile apps will let people create and edit PDF documents on the go, and online storage will be available so people can access the latest versions wherever they are. The desktop app is also getting an update, including e-signature features formerly sold separately as EchoSign.

The new tools are expected to launch within the next month. Prices are expected to start at about $13 a month. People will be able to buy Acrobat DC for a one-time fee that’s expected to start at $299 ($139 for upgrades), but that excludes online storage and some of the mobile features.

The post E-signature, mobile tools touted in Adobe’s new PDF subscription service appeared first on Canadian Business.

Transformation isn’t about plotting a meeting point for your brand with the predicted future. It’s not about getting to where the puck will be, to paraphrase Wayne Gretzky. Because depending on the arrival of the next big thing or that breaking wave, that hot new trend, the long-awaited demographic or anything else for that matter is conjecture.

Banking on it is simply speculation.

To evolve successfully, brands and the marketers that manage them must grow out of what they have become into what they need to be. They cannot shape the future. They can only shape their future.

A Shaping Force

At The Un-Conference: 360 Degrees of Brand Strategy for a Changing World, we are working with senior B2C and B2B marketers through the lens of brand leadership. The Blake Project’s annual, fun, ‘Competitive-Learning’ event is about taking a deep dive into the best practices that result in strong brands. It is designed to help you develop strategies that will propel your brand to a leadership position or to assist you to maintain the leadership position you have worked so hard to achieve.

No Attendees. Only Participants.

The best pathway for learning is through participation, not observation. The Un-Conference: 360 Degrees of Brand Strategy for a Changing World will challenge your thinking about brands and brand management. To do that, we’ll put you in a team of 10 and offer you opportunities to compete, lead and learn alongside other marketers from around the world in a unique environment. The challenges you’ll tackle are based on actual issues that participants are facing.

As unique as the format itself is our venue. We’ll be at The Versace Mansion on South Beach, Florida May 18 – 20. Once again we have partnered with professional baseball’s Miami Marlins for a private team-building dinner as well as a game. It’s all included in your registration.

Who should participate?
We have reserved these two days (and a kickoff mixer on the 18th) for 40 senior B2C and B2B marketers who see leadership as a way of life and who seek a learning experience superior to last century’s format of marketing conferences:

-Marketing oriented leaders;
-Marketing professionals (brand managers, product managers, directors, vice presidents, CMO’s, brand strategists etc.);
-Advertising agency professionals (account executives, planners, agency heads)
-Marketers facing brand strategy issues;
-Professionals in charge of brand building and brand management;
-Marketers who prefer participation over observation and action over reaction; and
-Marketers who don’t believe that last century’s format of marketing conferences advances them as leaders.

“Your future depends on many things, but mostly on you.” ~ Frank Tyger

To secure your spot at The Un-Conference: 360 Degrees of Brand Strategy for a Changing World call me directly in Los Angeles at 813-842-2260. Or simply email me.

Special pricing for MENG / Marketing Executives Group and American Marketing Association Members.

I do hope you can join us.

Sincerely,

Derrick Daye
Managing Partner
The Blake Project

A great and reliable sales force is difficult to build. It can take years to find the right mix of professionals that will serve you and your customers. But all of the time spent building your sales force, can be destroyed in a matter of moments.

Most of you might argue that sales people are a dime a dozen, and they are, but great sales people are not. The sales people that go above and beyond for you, your company, and the customer, are sometimes irreplaceable, because of the relationships they’ve built with their (your) clients.

But rest assured if you’re taking part in any of these foolish actions you are wrecking your sales force.

1. Set unattainable sales quotas for your sales force.

Everyone knows that your sales force has to hit sales goals or sales quota in order to increase the revenue coming in the front door. However, problems begin to arise when the quotas are not being hit by anyone in the sales force. But what really burns your sales force is when at yearly review or yearly meeting; management says something along the lines of “the goals we are setting this year are much more realistic.” The first thing that pops into any intelligent sales person’s head is “I missed my bonuses last year and it wasn’t because I failed to perform it was because the sales quota that was I given was unrealistic.”

I’m guessing you have a lot of intelligent sales people on your sales force. Now take the time to ask yourself the following question. “Was the extra money my company saved last year on bonus or commission payouts worth the loss of employee morale or even key employee’s?”

2. Promise them a huge bonus when they hit their sales quota, but then fail to pay them.

What I’m referring to isn’t a Christmas Bonus, it’s when your sales force is promised the moon if they hit their sales quota for specific period of time. However, after the sales quota or sales goal is hit, the company fails to payout.

Your sales force brings up the failure of payment a couple of times in the following weeks or months, but management comes up with some sort of excuse about the budget. Soon, your sales stops asking and management thinks they got away with it. Well, I’ve got news for you, your sales force hasn’t forgotten; they just lost all trust in you, the company, and its management team.

3. Treat them like mushrooms.

Mushroom Management is best described as keeping your sales force in the dark, feeding them crap, and hoping they grow.

Many companies fall victim to this sort of management, because management doesn’t believe in open lines of communications. Oh yeah, they may talk about it, but they don’t practice it.

If decisions are being made that are affecting your sales force and customer service they should be communicated to them. Information hoarding isn’t good for anyone, anywhere in your organization.

4. Manage by fear.

This and number 3 can go hand and hand, but I thought I would separate them for you, because you can still manage by fear and not treat your employees like mushrooms.

Some examples of managing by fear are:

1. All management cares about and talks about is numbers, numbers, numbers and not solutions for ongoing problems.
2. All decisions regarding sales are made in secret and not openly discussed.
3. The sales force doesn’t trust any of their fellow employees anymore.
4. People who are getting promoted or recognized (yes men) are usually the least qualified or knowledgeable.
5. Questions are encouraged, but are never answered.

5. Tell your sales force they are the best, but pay them less.

Unemployment is at all times highs in most major metropolitan areas and the overall economy is sputtering at the moment. So, some companies are taking advantage of their sales force’s compensation packages. Management knows the job market is tough and no one in the industry is hiring at the moment. Knowing the sales force doesn’t have an opportunity to get a job with the competitors; management takes advantage of them and pays them less.

6. Everything is ‘not’ the sales force’s fault.

Sales people make poor decisions all the time and somewhere along the line, those decisions may come back to bite them or the company in the ass. I’m not here to pontificate to you that sales people aren’t at fault for some of those decisions. The issue that I have is when leadership or management blames everything on the sales force, because somehow, no one else can be at fault.

There are legitimate issues with a product or service that a sales force cannot control; quality, marketing, delivery, pricing, and a host of other things. Sales are critical to the survival of almost any organization, but so is having a product or service that sells. If you fail at the marketing aspect of your product, don’t blame your sales force for your shortcomings.

All of the above actions may work in the short term, but be prepared for lack of employee moral and a mass exodus of your great sales people when other employment opportunities present themselves.

What are some of the actions that you have seen or taken part of that have contributed to the destruction of a sales force?

Photo credit: x-ray delta one

Original article can be viewed: here

Have you ever been driven crazy by a coworker’s persistent questioning of what the team is doing, and why, and whether things could be done more efficiently—or have you been driven crazy by a colleague’s refusal to address those crucial questions?

Have you ever worked with someone who met deadlines and followed through for the team, but for some reason, couldn’t move forward on the goals they set for themselves? Or perhaps does that description fit you?

In researching and writing Better than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives, I realized that all of us differ dramatically in our attitude towards habits, and our aptitude for forming them. From my observation, I began to realize that just about everyone falls into one of four distinct groups: Upholders, Questioners, Obligers, and Rebels.

The key question is: How do you respond to an expectation? We all face two kinds of expectations:

• Outer expectations: meet a work deadline, observe traffic regulations
• Inner expectations: stop snacking, start running

Upholders respond readily to both outer expectations and inner expectations. They’re self-directed and have little trouble meeting commit­ments, keeping resolutions, or meeting deadlines (in fact, they often finish early). They really want to understand and meet expectations—including their expectations of themselves. This creates a strong instinct for self-preservation, which serves as a counter-weight to others’ expectations.

However, Upholders may struggle in situations where expecta­tions aren’t clear. They may feel com­pelled to meet expectations, even ones that seem pointless. They may feel uneasy when they know they’re breaking the rules, even unnec­essary rules, unless they work out a powerful justification to do so. I know this tendency well; I’m an Upholder myself.

Questioners question all expectations, and will meet an expecta­tion only if they believe it’s justified—they’re motivated by reason, logic, and fairness. They decide for themselves whether a course of action is a good idea, and they resist doing anything that seems arbitrary or lacks sound purpose. Essentially, they turn all expectations into inner expectations.

Because Questioners like to make well-considered decisions and come to their own conclusions, they’re very intellectually engaged, and they’re often willing to do exhaustive research. If they decide there’s sufficient basis for an expectation, they’ll follow it; if not, they won’t.

However, the Questioner’s appetite for information and justifica­tion can become tiresome. Questioners themselves sometimes wish they could accept expec­tations without probing them so relentlessly. A Questioner told me ruefully, “I suffer from analysis paralysis. I always want to have one more piece of information.”

Obligers respond readily to outer expectations but struggle to meet inner expectations. Obligers excel at meeting external demands and deadlines, so they make terrific colleagues, family members, and friends.

They don’t let others down, but they may let themselves down. Because Obligers resist inner expectations, it’s difficult for them to self-motivate—to work on a PhD thesis, say, or attend networking events. A journalist who has no trouble meeting his weekly deadlines, but can’t ever seem to find time to work on his own book, is a classic Obliger.

Obligers depend on external accountability, with consequences such as deadlines, late fees, or the fear of disappointing someone, in order to meet an expectation. This is worth repeating: If an Obliger is having trouble meeting an expectation, the solution is external accountability.

The weight of outer expectations can make Obligers susceptible to burn-out, because they have trouble telling people “no.” An Obliger explained, “I drop everything to proofread my colleagues’ reports, but I’m terrible about making time to work on my own priorities.”

Obligers, in fact, may reach a point of Obliger-rebellion, a striking pattern in which they abruptly refuse to meet an expectation. At a certain point, the weight of expectation becomes too great, and they suddenly “snap.”

Rebels resist all expectations, outer and inner alike. They choose to act from a sense of choice, of freedom. They resist control, even self-control, and enjoy flouting rules and expectations.

Rebels work toward their own goals, in their own way, and while they refuse to do what they’re “supposed” to do, they can accomplish their own aims.

Rebels place a high value on authenticity and self-determination, and bring an unshackled spirit to what they do. At times, the Rebel resistance to authority is enormously valuable to society—but Rebels often frustrate others because they can’t be asked or told to do anything. They don’t care if “people are counting on you,” “you agreed to do it,” “it’s against the rules,” “this is the deadline,” or “it’s rude.”

In fact, asking or tell­ing Rebels to do something often makes them do just the opposite. People around Rebels must guard against accidentally ignit­ing their spirit of opposition. At the same time, Rebels are often strongly motivated by the idea “I’ll show you”. For instance, tell a Rebel, “I don’t think you can get that draft ready for review by Friday” and he may turn it in on Thursday just to prove you wrong.

Rebels sometimes frustrate even themselves, because they can’t tell themselves what to do.

Many people recognize themselves just from these descriptions, but if you’d like to learn your tendency, take this quiz.

These tendencies are hardwired, but with greater experience and wisdom, we can learn to counterbalance our tendency’s negative aspects. As an Upholder, for instance, I’ve learned to resist my inclination automatically to meet an expecta­tion, and to ask, “Why am I agreeing to this, anyway?”

And the fact is, when trying to persuade other people to act, you’ll have more success if you consider their tendency, whether you’re a boss trying to help an employee meet her deadlines; or a health-care provider trying to prod a patient to take his medication; or a consultant, coach, trainer, or therapist trying to help clients achieve their aims.

For example, a Questioner may present an Obliger with sound rea­sons for taking an action, but those logical arguments don’t matter nearly as much to an Obliger as external accountability. And telling a Rebel, “It’s the rule that you have to do this” might actually make the Rebel less likely to comply.

From what I’ve observed, most people, by a huge margin, are Questioners or Obligers. Very few are Rebels, and, to my astonishment, very few are Up­holders. Because Upholders and Rebels are such small populations, people who try to shape people’s behavior on a large scale—employers, device manufacturers, insurance companies, instructors—do better to focus on solutions that help Questioners, by providing sound reasons, and Obligers, by providing accountability.

The happiest and most successful people are those who have figured out ways to exploit their tendency to their benefit and, just as important, ways to offset its limitations. By understanding ourselves and others better, we help ourselves to build happier, healthier, and more productive lives.

There is a massive credit card fraud problem in the US. Fraud cost US retailers approximately $32 billion in 2014, up from $23 billion just one year earlier. Much of the fraud problem is the result of the relatively weak security of credit and debit cards.

To solve this problem, a new type of credit card with a microchip, called EMV, is being implemented — but EMV won't be a panacea. It will cause fraud to migrate to other weaker points within the payments ecosystem.

To solve the card fraud problem across in-store, online and mobile payments, payment companies and merchants are implementing new payment protocols that could finally help mitigate fraud.

In a report from BI Intelligence, we look at how the dynamics of fraud are shifting across in-store and online channels and explain the top new types of security that are gaining traction across each of these channels, including on Apple Pay. 

Access the Full Report By Signing Up For A Risk-Free Trial Membership Today >>

Here are some of the key takeaways:

• EMV cards are being rolled out with an embedded microchip for added security. The microchip carries out real-time risk assessments on a person's card purchase activity based on the card user's profile. The chip also generates dynamic cryptograms when the card is inserted into a payment terminal. Because these cryptograms change with every purchase, it makes it difficult for fraudsters to make counterfeit cards that can be used for in-store transactions.
• To bolster security throughout the payments chain encryption of payments data is being widely implemented. Encryption degrades valuable data by using an algorithm to translate card numbers into new values. This makes it difficult for fraudsters to harvest the payments data for use in future transactions.
  
• Point-to-point encryption is the most tightly defined form of payments encryption. In this scheme, sensitive payment data is encrypted from the point of capture at the payments terminal all the way through to the gateway or acquirer. This makes it much more difficult for fraudsters to harvest usable data from transactions in stores and online. 
  
• Tokenization increases the security of transactions made online and in stores. Tokenization schemes assign a random value to payment data, making it effectively impossible for hackers to access the sensitive data from the token itself. Tokens are often "multiuse," meaning merchants don't have to force consumers to re-enter their payment details. Apple Pay uses an emerging form of tokenization. 
• 3D Secure is an imperfect answer to user authentication online. One difficulty in fighting online fraud is that it is hard to tell whether the person using card data is actually the cardholder. 3D Secure adds a level of user authentication by requiring the customer to enter a passcode or biometric data in addition to payment data to complete a transaction online. Merchants who implement 3D Secure risk higher shopping-cart abandonment.

In full, the report:

• Assesses the fraud cost to US retailers and how that fraud is expected to shift in coming years
• Provides 5 high-level explanations of the top payment security protocols
• Includes 7 infographics illustrating what the transaction flow looks like when each type of security is implemented. 
• Analyzes the strengths and weakness of each payment security protocol and the reasons why particular protocols are being put in place at different types of merchants.

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

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: 14 things you didn't know your iPhone headphones could do

Digital buyers in China are most likely to purchase apparel online, followed by skincare or cosmetics products. While travel products are less common among the country's digital buyers, the category leads in average annual spending, with apparel coming in second.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: What the Chinese saying 'The ugly wife is a treasure at home' actually means

Content distribution is a critical aspect of marketing campaigns.

No matter how compelling your content, if you’re not delivering it in the right way to the right people, it won’t drive any results.

But planning a distribution strategy isn’t easy. And many marketers fall into the same traps. Here are the three most common content distribution mistakes—and tips for avoiding them.

1. Bad Timing

Most marketers rely on their robust databases to drive the traffic, leads, and revenue for major assets. Sending an email at the wrong time can botch your entire campaign. 23.63% of all emails are opened within the first hour—and that number drops off precipitously as the hours tick by.

What can you do to avoid timing mistakes?

Start by researching the time of day that typically sees the most engagement, then iterate based on your results. Here are some optimal delivery times across email and social media.

Email

MailChimp has some great benchmark data. As the graph below shoes, the peak time to send emails across MailChimp’s system is at 10AM in the recipients’ own time zones.

Unless you have good reason, avoid sending emails much earlier, or later, than that window at first. Then test your own database to see what the results are. Iterate based on the data you collect.

Social

You generally want to post on social media during the times of day that users are most likely to be idle, for example, taking a break from work, commuting, or waiting in line at the post office. This infographic from FastCompany reveals the best and worst times to post across Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn:

Use these benchmark email and social data points to start planning your content distribution.

2. Inappropriate Targeting

Targeting your content to the wrong people will foster lackluster engagement, and high unsubscribe rates. Irrelevance is the number one reason buyers don’t read content.

Unfortunately, most marketers have no idea who they’re even supposed to be targeting in the first place. Out of the 93% of B2B marketers who have adopted content-driven marketing, only 23% are focusing on buyer personas.

The first step to being great at targeting is to develop buyer personas based on your current customers and prospects. Identify their pain points, their motivations, and their questions. And understand what kind of content they need at each stage in their buying journey—from awareness through post-sale.

Once you build personas, segment and target based on the data you’ve collected. This is where marketing technology comes in. Marketing automation solutions like Marketo, and social listening platforms like Hootsuite, are essential resources for most marketing teams. But beware: investing in too many tools presents problems of its own. Here are three key things to consider before investing in marketing technology.

3. Inconsistent Messaging

In a frenzy to feed the ever-expanding list of distribution channels—social, blog, email, webinar, video, paid—marketers forgo strategy in favor of volume. They’re creating content in an ad-hoc manner, and failing to provide the consistent brand experience buyers expect across various channels and devices.

And they’re paying the price. According to SiriusDecisions, up to 70% of B2B marketing content goes unused. It doesn’t have to be this way.

By slowing down, taking a step back, and putting more time and effort in content strategy planning, marketers can create a high quantity of high-quality assets with fewer resources—and headaches.

At Kapost, we champion the “content pillar” approach to content creation and distribution. Here’s how it works: stakeholders from across the organization identify key themes and customer pain points they feel should be addressed with content. Then, marketing creates one meaty content asset like an eBook or whitepaper to tackle that theme head-on. From that asset, many other assets are derived, including social posts, blog posts, nurture emails, videos, presentations, landing pages, and much more.

Below is a real life example of one of our very own content pillars, The Content Marketing Hiring Handbook:

If you’re interested in implementing a content pillar within your team, check out this digital workbook, The Multi-Channel Content Distribution Guide. It contains step-by-step instructions for planning, executing, distributing, and optimizing your own.

In an age of increasing buyer independence, excellent branded content experiences have become less of a luxury and more of a requirement. If you’re not delivering the right content in the right place, your readers and prospects and customers may abandon you altogether. Avoid these common mistakes, and you’ll be on the right path.

Organizations have paid the price long enough for the weak processes between marketing and sales. According to Aberdeen Group, the biggest gap between sales performers and under-achievers lies in integrating sales intelligence with sales and marketing systems. And Sirius Decisions says only a miniscule 8% of B2B companies report good alignment between marketing and sales teams.

Marketing and sales – you are the weakest link!

Take a look at the well-known British game show for a few criteria that determine the statistical weakest link:

• Most money lost for the team by answering questions of high values incorrectly
• Number of incorrect answers in the round
• Time spent/wasted on answering a particular question

Put into context for marketing and sales:

• With inaccurate and incomplete customer profiles, sales opportunities can be missed – losing money for the team
• Without insight into what happens to leads after they’re passed to sales, lead nurturing and prospect qualification can be incorrect
• Without streamlined and automated processes between marketing and sales, valuable selling time can be spent/wasted

Strengthening the Link with Shared Insights

By integrating marketing automation with new, real-time sales engagement analytics, organizations can remove this misalignment. With more synchronized teams and integration of systems across business groups, organizations can streamline and improve internal communications to increase productivity.

Real-time engagement analytics that are available today deliver more complete customer profiles than ever before. By sharing this data across marketing teams and front-line reps, organizations can break down the silos and benefit from a more accurate and consistent view of customers.

Marketing: Bank on Better Lead Scoring and Prospect Qualification

By monitoring sales efforts in real time to see what interests prospects, marketing can provide more value to sales teams through more consistent messaging. With increased customer insight, marketing can also quickly change messages to bring more value to the organization. By integrating marketing and sales systems, these changes can be made throughout the whole buying process – versus just at the beginning.

Additionally, integration between marketing automation and sales engagement systems can generate new leads for marketing – faster. When sales documents are re-shared with additional contacts, those leads become automatically shared and synchronized with existing systems, so everyone – including marketing – has a unified, real-time view and can quickly see any new stakeholders.

This capability is particularly useful for large, complex deals that involve many decision-makers – so that other players can be identified and nurtured through the process.

Sales: Bank on Real-time Visibility for Customized Engagement

Without the same access to digital insights as marketing, sales teams have been operating blindly. Today, that’s changing – driven in part by a sales environment that has been transformed by more informed consumers and exploding inside sales.

New sales engagement tools are now available that show how prospects interact with sales content on a very deep level. Sales reps can see precisely when a prospect opens a sales proposal and how long they view each page. By seeing how actively engaged a prospect is, sales reps can quickly and accurately rank top prospects.

They can get instant alerts when a prospect forwards a document – and immediately see the profile information for the recipient of the forwarded document. No more surprises when a new stakeholder you’ve never heard of shows up at the close of a deal!

For maximum value, these tools must integrate with existing marketing automation. By integrating emerging sales analytics tools with marketing automation, sales gets the most visibility – seeing what engages prospects very early on – so they can better understand when and how to reach out to prospects.

Personalization has become critical. According to research, 47% of best-in-class companies prioritize the importance of personalization of customer conversations. By tailoring and timing follow-up based on prospect engagement with content, sales teams can deliver more tailored and timely follow-up that’s been shown to close deals faster.

Raising the Jackpot with Integrated Marketing and Sales

With an aligned effort and access to the most complete insights, sales and marketing can work more closely to create a better customer profile, cultivate new opportunities, and drive revenue for the business.

Avoid the walk of shame.

Increase the insight that you need to be successful. Get all the high-value questions answered. And bank the most money for the team.

This blog also appeared here. 

Every A-player sales rep knows that to be at the top of their game, they must combine the art of sales with some science. Reps need to have a handle on leading indicators so they can build their own personal scalable, repeatable, and predictable sales processes that help them consistently hit and even exceed quota. This is why it’s important all reps have access to a weekly (as well as a monthly and quarterly) dashboard that tracks their personal performance metrics.

But what should be on this dashboard? How many metrics are too many, too few, or just right? A complete dashboard should include three main categories of metrics/KPIs that each rep tracks and analyzes:

1. Sales activity metrics
2. Pipeline metrics
3. Sales results metrics

While some inside sales teams are divided into prospectors (commonly referred to as sales or business development reps) and closers (commonly called account executives), let’s assume for the sake of this article that we are dealing with a rep responsible for the entire sales process -- from cold outreach or inbound follow-up to close. For reps, these metrics can be applied to an individual sales dashboard, and for sales leaders, to a team dashboard.

Let’s dig into each of these three categories to flesh out the specific metrics and add color to our dashboard.  

Sales Activity Metrics

Without activity, there are no results. But here's the rub -- most sales managers and reps focus only on results.

Keep in mind that reps can't directly control their results. A rep can only control their activities, which in turn affect results. I co-wrote a free ebook about this particular topic with Jason Jordan -- you can find it here.

With that lens in place, here are some metrics that should appear under the activity category of a rep’s dashboard:

• Number of Dials: The number of phone calls the rep makes per day.
• Number of Call Connects: The number of calls that result in a live conversation. 
• Number of Emails: The number of emails the rep sends per day.
• Number of Email Responses: The number of emails that generate a response.
• Number of Leads or SQLs. The number of “sales qualified leads” garnered from the connect calls that may become qualified opportunities down the road. To calculate this correctly, the definition of an SQL needs to be defined clearly within your sales process.
• Number of Opportunities: The number of prospects who pass an “exit criterion” to be converted from a lead into an opportunity in your CRM system.

By tracking conversations and responses, reps can calculate their connect rate percentage. Generally, a 10% connect rate is fairly standard for B2B tech companies, but this could be higher or lower depending on the type of sale, industry, and sales process. However, connect rates that are extremely high or low across an entire team signifies a problem with the lead handoff or sales process, and sales leaders should investigate. 

Tracking the Dial : SQL : Opportunity downstream conversion rate means that reps and leaders can understand whether sales activities are actually producing opportunities. Additionally, reps and sales managers can use these conversion rates to understand internal benchmarks and ensure they don't confuse busy-ness with business.

By the way, you don’t have to -- and shouldn't -- stop at Dial : SQL : Opportunity rate. You ultimately want to measure the conversion rate all the way from dials to deals. However, I recommend tracking the “Opportunity : Deal” rate separately because this calculation takes into account pipeline metrics, which differ from activity metrics. 

Pipeline Metrics

Pipeline is a funnel of qualified opportunities that a sales rep is working at any given time. Each opportunity is in a specific stage of the funnel.

A few data points critical to track in this area are:

• Number of Open Opportunities: The number of opportunities a rep is currently working. Typically, working approximately 25-30 opportunities at any given time is a good benchmark. If the number of opportunities worked is significantly higher, reps become unfocused. If it’s significantly lower, reps will not make quota. But of course, all this depends on your specific sales situation, quota, win rate, and average deal size. 
• Number of Opportunities Per Stage: The number of opportunities in each stage of the sales funnel (qualification, discovery, evaluation, fulfillment, etc.). I'll give an example to illustrate why tracking this metric is important. If a rep with a win rate of 10% has 30 open opportunities, but they are all in the first stage, the rep is likely to miss quota that month. However, if a rep with a win rate of 90% has the same number of open opportunities all in the final stage, then that rep is in great shape for the month.
• Number of Won Deals: The number of closed-won deals that resulted from opportunities worked in one month or quarter, and the resulting Win Rate Percentage (see the following section). 
• Inflow and Outflow: The number of opportunities created in a given timeframe, and the number of closed opportunities in a given timeframe (either closed-won or closed-lost). While the number of opportunities represents merely a static snapshot, inflow and outflow give reps a sense of changing trends over time. I recommend that you measure inflow and outflow in units instead of dollars to keep things simple because dollar amounts could be all over the place due to future discounting, incorrect pricing estimation, etc.
• Forecast: Both the number of deals and the associated dollar amounts of those deals forecasted to close during a selling period. 

Results Metrics

Results metrics are what most reps, managers, and leaders think of first when they create their dashboards. But keep in mind that results metrics hinge on the first two categories. You’ll need several months of data in order to see any significant performance trends.

Here are some results metrics to keep an eye on:

• Win Rate Percentage: For instance, if a rep worked 30 opportunities during a sales cycle and won six deals, their win rate would be 20%. Average win rate among a team will fluctuate based on the selling circumstances. However, individual and team win rate should remain fairly constant within a somewhat narrow range. If your company has a solid sales process in place, win rates shouldn’t jump around wildly. Figure out what a sales rep’s benchmark win rate is, how that number aligns with the company’s benchmark, and take baby steps to improve it each year (yes, in the real world it takes longer than a quarter or a few quarters to get tangibly better in sales). 
• Average Sales Cycle: This is the number of days it takes a rep on average to usher a deal from the opportunity stage to closed (not to be confused with Marketing Cycle -- the time between when a Lead is created and when it converts to an opportunity). This should also remain relatively consistent. If your sales cycle is jumping around arbitrarily and there hasn’t been a significant change in the sales process, that's a red flag. 
• Average Deal Size (Dollars): How much is your typical deal worth in terms of dollars? Note that it’s important to isolate this metric by deal type, industry, target customer, etc. For example, if you have a sales team selling to large enterprises, their Average Deal Size should be computed separately from the SMB team's Average Deal Size. 

There is more data that sales teams could add to their dashboards, but I’d recommend starting here, and making adjustments as necessary to tailor analytics to your sales process. These metrics provide ample insight for reps, managers, and leaders alike. 

If you are looking for a sales dashboard tool for your team, I'd suggest checking out InsightSquared. For full disclosure, I ran Sales and Marketing at InsightSquared before I started my own company, but the reason I recommend the product is because it works great and helps sales teams succeed.

With current data at hand, reps don’t have to wait until the end of a month or quarter to shift gears on a strategy that isn’t working. Empower them with dashboards, and watch results climb.

There’s a problem in the way B2B companies engage customers today. Marketers in many organizations are intently focused on building awareness and acquiring new customers, which makes sense – it comes with the job description. But while this strategy does a great job generating new leads and keeping the sales pipeline full, it’s missing out on several vital parts of the engagement lifecycle.

Gleanster and Act-On surveyed 750 mid-size B2B companies to learn why the most successful organizations are taking a holistic approach to the customer engagement. The report, Rethinking the Role of Marketing, reveals that top performing marketing teams are taking full control of the customer journey – beginning with awareness and customer acquisition, and also encompassing the more lucrative customer retention and expansion stages.

The results of the survey are a rallying cry for marketing leaders to stand up and seize the opportunity to own the customer lifecycle. What are some of the key insights from the report?

Here are the top ten takeaways in tweetable format:

1. #B2Bmarketers fail to manage end-to-end customer engagement. 90% spend 2/3 of time & budget on acquisition efforts #RethinkMarketing
2. 8 out of 10 average #B2B firms generate 60% of revenue from new customers #B2BMarketers #RethinkMarketing
3. The average #B2B marketer estimates just 68% of customers are satisfied & ~30% of revenue comes from existing customers #MarketingFail
4. Marketers don’t jump at chance to own #customerlifecycle – accountability & compensation aren’t in line w/ responsibility #RethinkMarketing
5. Managing the #customerlifecycle is broken–it’s fragmented between departments & systems. The #CMO can change that #CMO #RethinkMarketing
6. Successful #B2B firms use full potential of #MarketingAutomaton by personalizing campaigns by stage in the buying cycle & prospect behavior
7. Top performers are 2x likely to map #Mktg objectives to the entire #CustomerLifecycle via metrics that relate to revenue #MarketingMetrics
8. Top performing #B2B companies invest 52% of marketing budget on customer retention & expansion vs. 44% for the avg. firm #B2BMarketing
9. Marketing is the only function w/technology infrastructure to transform the concept of #CRM into actionable customer engagement #CustExp
10. The #CustomerLifecycle needs a leader! Marketing is only function that supports customer engagement across lifecycle #CRM #RethinkMarketing

Read the full report from Gleanster and Act-On to learn more about what’s changing for businesses today, and to discover why so many marketers think customers are happier than they really are. Plus, get success strategies from top performing organizations: Learn what sets them apart from average companies, and learn how to use their strategies gain a significant competitive edge.

Marketing’s Role in the Transformation

The results of the survey clearly demonstrate that the world is shifting to a customer-centric focus. And that means that companies must treat the entire end-to-end customer lifecycle of engagement as a continuum, not a series of handoffs. Marketing automation technology is the key to sharing customer intelligence among all customer-facing functions. This in turn makes it possible to manage the entire customer relationship lifecycle is a holistic way.

In the course of analyzing survey results and developing the Rethinking the Role of Marketing report, it became obvious that Top Performers were making better use of certain tactics than Average companies. Which teams are guiding the customer journey? Who is ensuring satisfaction during every stage of the lifecycle? What does it take retain lasting, profitable relationships with customers? Average performers are having trouble coming up with the answers to these questions.

This new Act-On eBook, Marketing: The New Stewards of the Customer Relationship, serves as a companion piece to the Gleanster/Act-On report. Read it to discover success strategies from top performing organizations, and get four concise recommendations for improving customer engagement and re-defining marketing’s role in CRM:

• Create a customer journey map and assign accountability
• Pay more attention to how you engage with existing customers
• Partner with an agency to create ongoing customer engagement
• Segment, so you can target and personalize communications

Read it to get the tips, tools, and real-world tactics from Act-On customers for managing change and transforming marketing’s approach to the customer lifecycle.

This is a guest contribution from Brian Casel.

If there’s one common thread among many of those who build successful businesses online, it’s this: They’ve been able to build an audience, which has helped them gain traction and spread value with a farther reach.

But what if you have no audience yet? Zero subscribers. Little to no traffic. How can you get started, when nobody knows who you are?

I was there about 18 months ago. My blog received less than 20 visitors a day. My newsletter did not exist. I had been blogging for years, but couldn’t connect with an audience, let alone create a product they might buy.

Since then, I’ve turned it around by embracing a three-step strategy I’ll share with you today. As of this writing, my newsletter is up to 5000 subscribers, the blog receives hundreds of visitors per day, and my course has sold multiple five-figures since it launched four months ago.

These aren’t groundbreaking numbers. But to me, they represent the difference between blogging as a hobby (where I was at a few years ago), and meaningful part of my business today.

Now—I’m sure you already know the mechanics of building an audience: Blog posts. Landing Pages. Email lists. Autoresponders. Yadda Yadda. Those are the tools and tech, and there plenty of resources where you can find the right ones for you.

But those things won’t actually get people to stop, take notice, and give you their email address because they want more.

So how do you do that, when you’re still unknown?

Let me break it down with four important concepts:

• Your “Who”
• Their “Why”
• Resonate
• Exposure

Your “Who”

The most important thing in building an audience, or marketing a product, is to know who you’re writing (or selling) to. The more you know your audience, the easier it is to resonate with them. (tweet that)

But how can you possibly know who your target audience is when you don’t have an audience yet?

A lot of advice out there tells you to hunt for your audience. Do keyword research… Analyze buzz trends on social media… capitalize on current news headlines. They’re telling you to spot a herd of people and catch that wave.

To me, this always seemed like a monotonous and uninspiring way to create content. So I never followed this advice.

In fact, I’m pretty sure none of the folks that I subscribe to — who happen to have very large audiences — never followed this advice either. Probably for similar reasons. They just didn’t want to.

This brings me to my first point: You get to choose your who.

Your who is the person you care about and the person you genuinely want to help. They’re probably a lot like you. Maybe you’re further along in your journey, or maybe they’re further than you. Either way, you guys are probably on the same path.

Do this:

Give some thought to who you want as your readers / listeners / subscribers. This part is totally up to you. At the end of the day, if you don’t care about the people you’re writing for, then you won’t be able to help them, which means you won’t get very far anyway.

In my case, I was a freelance web designer, and I transitioned to a products business. So I decided the my who are my peers — freelancers and consultants who work on the web and want to transition to a products business.

By the way, lots of different people will stumble across your site over time. The vast majority of them won’t be your who. Only a small slice of those new visitors are. Those are the ones you want as subscribers and they’re the ones who you want to see again. So focus your attention on them.

Their “Why”

Finding your who is up to you. But creating content that resonates with them is not.

Now you need to reconcile your who with their why.

Everyone is on a journey. Everyone wants to get to a destination that is different and better than where they’re currently at. This is always changing. For everyone.

If you asked me 10 years ago where I wanted to go, I would have said I wanted to find my career path, and meet a girl.

Five years ago? I wanted to get more clients, and find a home for my wife and I to settle down.

Today? I want to build my products business so my growing family can live comfortably and travel.

Next year? Who knows…

How would your people answer that question? What is their why?

Do this:

Set up a welcome email autoresponder sent to every person who joins your email newsletter. Here’s a screenshot of the email I send to every new subscriber who joins my newsletter:

Keep that welcome email short and to the point, which is: Ask your new subscriber, “where they want to be one year from now?” I recommend adding, “What’s your biggest hurdle holding you back?”

In the beginning, you won’t have many responses. That’s OK. You’ll get plenty of replies over the course of year.

The fun part is to watch how your audience’s why changes over time. Your understanding of it will change too. The more in touch are you are, the easier it is to write things that help them get ahead, and the more likely your posts will resonate.

Writing stuff that resonates

So you know who you want to be reading your blog, and you’re in touch with the journey they’re on (their why). Now how do you actually speak to that, and create content that truly resonates?

I found a very simple method: Just answer questions.

Every blog post / podcast episode / video / whatever you create should be your answer to a question that your people are seeking an answer to. They have a very specific problem, and your post is the solution. In fact, it’s the best solution they’ve come across in a very long time.

That’s what it takes for a blog post to resonate.

Do this…

Start every new blog post with a question. Have you noticed that the first few paragraphs of this article contained several questions? The idea for this article literally came from a question that one of my subscribers asked me a few weeks ago.

Here are some places I go to identify questions that I could answer in new articles:

• Questions people ask me when replying to my newsletter.
• Questions people ask me when I’m out at a conference.
• Questions that come up in forums and communities that I hang out in—particularly the ones that I feel eager to hop in and answer.
• Questions found on Quora and Reddit, and similar question/answer sites.

Spend an hour and come up with a list of 5 (or more) questions that your people are asking. Make sure they’re questions that you’re eager to answer. I’m sure there are many that fit this criteria for you.

Exposure

Now I don’t want to give the impression that if you simply write great content that could resonate with the right people, then it will.

It probably won’t.

Unless… you get exposure in places where your people are already hanging out.

Here are the common “tactics” that most people focus on. These have never worked for me:

• Cold email a popular blogger and cleverly include a link to your new post, in hopes they might tweet it. I tried it. Sometimes it gets that tweet. Great… For a minute. I stopped doing this because I hate the idea of “pushing” my stuff on someone who didn’t ask for it. Plus, they’re super busy and I want to respect their time.
• “Go viral” on Hacker News, Reddit, Digg.com. I have submitted posts to these a handful of times. Maybe twice my hit the front-page for a while and brought a spike in traffic. Almost none of those folks ever subscribe and return.
• SEO Keyword Optimize my posts. Have some of my posts done well in search engines? Sure. Do I know how or why that happened? Not really. My goal when I write is to help my people get ahead, and hopefully get them to subscribe so they’ll come back again. SEO traffic typically doesn’t play out this way. The channels I’ll list below do.

So here’s what has worked for me, and what I think you should focus on when you’re just getting started:

Answer questions in forums

I suggest focusing on just one or two online communities that you personally feel connected to.

Find a question you’re eager to answer and post the best response you can possibly fit in the reply box. Then finish by including a link over to your blog post on that same topic.

Don’t simply reply by saying “Good question, I wrote a whole article on it: LINK”. You should actually answer the question right there in the forum, then provide the link for more. Build credibility and earn their trust with your thoughtful reply, then invite them to your site for more.

Case Studies

Readers love hearing about real-world examples of a problem being solved. You still want to be sure you’re answering a question, but your answer (or solution) can come in the form of a case study.

I found that these types of posts tend to get shared and passed around a lot. One of my post popular articles from last year on my System For Selling, where I covered how we set up Trello as our CRM, and our process for handling inbound sales leads. This continues to get passed around, and even wound up getting mentioned on Trello’s blog!

Podcasting

While you won’t get thousands of listeners overnight, podcasts are much less competitive and easier to reach people than a new blog. There simply aren’t as many podcasts as there are blogs.

I also found that podcasts seem to build a more intimate relationship with your audience than readers of a blog. Plus, it’s fun!

Paid acquisition

I wouldn’t recommend this if you’ve never managed an ad campaign before. But if you know you’re way around Facebook ads or Twitter ads, then you might try it as a way to jump-start your email list. Point this traffic at a landing page for a free, educational resource, that is highly relevant to the people you want to reach, and the topics you write about.

I’ve had better success with Retargeting ads, since those are seen by folks who have already found you through organic channels first, but maybe didn’t opt-in to your list on their first visit.

Related: Tips and Tricks to Nail Facebook Advertising With Jon Loomer
The Lowdown on Facebook Advertising, and What We’ve Found Works Really Well

Return Visitors

Now, to be clear: The ideas I just listed above won’t bring in tidal waves of traffic. They’ll be more like drops and splashes. That’s OK for now. They’re only intended to get things going.

What will really move the needle are getting those first visitors to return and to share your content. That’s where your email list comes in.

Here are some ways I found work well attracting those first subscribers to your email list:

• Offer a free resource, like an email course, highly relevant to your people’s why.

• Point everything to the free resource: Bylines on your guest blog posts, link to it from your Twitter profile, mention it when you go on podcasts, this is your “gift” that you’re proud to share with anyone who might benefit from it. So promote it.

• Include bonus content on some of your posts. For example, in my System For Selling post, I offer the exact setup instructions for anyone to download when they subscribe to my list.

The small breaks

As I’m sure you can tell, none of this audience-building stuff happens overnight.

The reality is it’s a long series of “small breaks”. A high profile Retweet. A guest post opportunity. An invitation to be on someone’s podcast. All of these add up and build exposure over time.

Some might see these as “lucky” breaks. But I see them as inevitable opportunities that arise when you repeatedly put yourself out there, serve your audience, and stick with it!

Brian Casel was a freelancer who turned productized business owner. Today he writes his newsletter and blog to help you do the same. Get Brian’s free email crash course on Productizing Your Service.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger


Building Your Audience From Zero to Traction

Here's a guest post from Patrick McKenzie. He published this epic piece on how to move upmarket from a low-touch sales SaaS into a more rigorous sales process back in December to his subscribers. We're sharing it with you because it's filled with smart ideas and because it shows one way of unleaching the power of our sales software for solopreneurs and small teams. If you're a developer, you should also check out Starfighter (more details below)!

Hiya guys!

Patrick McKenzie (patio11) here. You’re getting this email because you asked for my occasional thoughts on making and selling software. Today we’ll be making software to sell software — fun stuff! The goal is giving you some actionable ideas for getting the tooling and process needed to do medium touch sales, in a way which won’t make you feel like you’re hawking used cars.

[Edit: Alright, strictly speaking, you might not have ever gotten an email from me. Somebody might have just given you the link to this page, which is an online archive of an email that I sent to folks who had asked for it. If you'd like to get articles like this in your inbox, totally free, about once a week or two, give me your email address.]

2014 has been a wonderful and occasionally trying year for my family and our business. One of the reasons is that we celebrated the birth of our daughter recently, so I haven’t had quite as many cycles as usual. The other is that a few processes I was using ran up against a brick wall of scaling problems.

For example, I’ve been working on increasing the MRR of Appointment Reminder, a SaaS product historically sold on the low-touch model. While I have done occasional enterprise sales, the beating heart of the business has always been low-touch scalable approaches like email marketing, free trials, automated onboarding, and the like. Folks occasionally ask me “What is your sales process?”

I had no sales process. Occasionally, by grace of God (and Google), potential customers expressed interest in possibly considering our software. These occasional emails hit my inbox, along with several hundred other emails a week. On those occasions where I was feeling very energetic and organized, I successfully sold those clients in an ad-hoc fashion — basically, making up presentations, collateral, arguments, and paperwork as I was going along.

Most frequently, though, I just dropped the ball. For example, here’s a fairly typical email:

Hiya,

We’re interested in using your service for our office. Please quote us for 1,000 appointments a month.

Regards,

Cindy the Office Manager of Dr. Generic

I’d write back:

Hiya Cindy,

Thanks much for the email. Sure thing. Let me know if you need this a little more formally, but we’d be willing to provide HIPAA-compliant services for your office at $1,000 per month on a month-to-month contract or $10,000 if you would like to do it on an annual contract.

Regards,

Patrick McKenzie, Founder

There is a lot wrong with this.

One thing, which I just learned from Predictable Revenue: rather than giving Cindy the quote which she asked for, I should have asked Cindy to hop on a quick call with me to discuss how they were planning to use Appointment Reminder. This would have given me the opportunity to make sure they didn’t have any requirements which would blow up the deal later, like e.g. “It needs to integrate with software which you can’t integrate with” or “Whoops, my understanding of this was that you’d do all the data entry for us. What do you mean you’re a software company? What’s the difference?” (You won't believe how many times I thought I was in late-stage negotiations with someone when the actual state of the deal was "This will never happen.")

The bigger thing, which has bitten me more times than I can count in the last four years, is that I often drop the ball on follow-up.

I tend to keep my to-do list in my head, and allow my inbox to add stuff to it. On a good day, I can remember four priorities about as complicated as “Sell Cindy on using Appointment Reminder.” Given that most of the time a sale of this complexity would take a few weeks to resolve, it would be highly likely that something would come up in the business between the time I sent this email and the time the sale would theoretically close, and I’d cache evict any memory of having been in correspondence with Cindy. Sometimes, Cindy would write back and say “OK, we want to go forward with this. What do we need to do?”, but more frequently Cindy would go silent at this point, I would not take any action (because Cindy, being silent, was not in my inbox pushing additional work at me), and that sale would die.

Why would Cindy go silent? Presumably, she occasionally gets busy just like I occasionally get busy, and while she had the declared intention of buying Appointment Reminder, the daily grind or uncertainty about the next steps made her forget about it prior to bringing that to conclusion. This happens all the time. It isn’t a rejection, but we introverted engineers often misread it as one.

What I should have done is summoned up my founder gumption and, taking a play from Steli Efti, continued pinging Cindy every few days until we got to the next step or she said “Actually, we’ve decided against going with you.” That’s what Cindy actually wants to happen, because nobody emails the CEO of a company called Appointment Reminder and asks for a quote for services just because they’re lonely, but I failed at providing a good customer experience to several dozen Cindys over the years.

Putting In Place A Sales Process

So I decided to create a process for “medium-touch” sales like this, with a goal of

• getting our sales activity out of my inbox, both to decrease my stress level and to make sure it got the attention it deserved
• get some visibility into what our sales pipeline looked like and what our close rates were (I have a really good understanding of conversion funnels for every business I’m in but if you asked me what my close rate for quotes was I’d scratch my head and maybe guesstimate 5~10%), so that I could start iterating those upwards
• get this systemized such that someone who was not me could do it successfully

This is strikingly similar to how I went about firing myself from Bingo Card Creator customer support last year.

1. Move it out of the inbox.
2. Write process documents to cover the 80 of the 80/20.
3. Find someone who can execute on those processes and help evolve them over time.
4. Build a bit of supporting software into our dashboards to make that person as efficient as they can possibly be (and decrease the percentage of time where they need to escalate to me to fix something manually in the Rails console or make consequential decisions).

What A Medium Touch Process Looks Like

Mine is still very much a work in progress, but given that even at our modest scale I had too many leads to give them an adequate amount of attention, I decided to start with just doing a bit more active selling of inbound leads rather than e.g. trying to implement the Predictable Revenue model with outbound prospecting, qualification calls made by dedicated specialists, and lots of high-touch sales. We’re still going to close the overwhelming majority of our accounts with the low-touch self-service signup, and we’re still going to get leads in a totally inbound fashion, we’re just going to dial up the amount of human contact those folks get where that make sense.

My tried-and-true low-touch sales model has someone sign up for a free trial of the Small Business ($79 a month) plan, get ~5 lifecycle emails from us, and either choose to continue as a customer or fall out of our funnel. A few of those lifecycle emails ask them to talk to me, but I don’t do pro-active outreach except via cron job. We’re not replacing this, we’re just improving it by e.g. having a human ready to do onboarding (as a supplement to our automated onboarding infrastructure), keep tabs on where folks are in trials, reach out proactively if they seem stuck, and the like.

On the slightly-bigger-but-still-not-Enterprise-enterprise ends of the scale, we’re just going to take the happiest interaction I’ve ever had when ad-hoc selling an enterprise system, write down what steps happened, and try to re-trace those steps again.

Step 1: Getting Sales Out Of My Inbox

While Appointment Reminder does not exactly drown in leads (on the order of 50 to 100 a month), we’re waaaaay past the point where I could keep track of them in my head, and while I could probably have done something with Trello or a spreadsheet, those aren’t quite as scriptable as I’d like. That will become important for reasons we’ll discuss in a minute. So we needed a CRM.

(Memo to devs: a “lead” is someone on the spectrum between “prospect” and “customer.” Where exactly that line is drawn depends on the company. At Appointment Reminder, you’re a lead if you’ve either requested we contact you about AR or signed up for the free trial. Someone who is merely passively consuming copy on the website is not a lead yet.)

CRMs are funny duck, software-wise. Every software company I’ve ever worked with either scratch-builds their own or creates an integrated FrankenCRM which is tied at the hip to their admin interface. I’m not afraid of duct tape and bubble gum, and that meant I’d be spending relatively little time building it out (relative to tweaking procedures for actually using it), which seems like a good tradeoff for me. Plus, since using an existing CRM gets you 90% of the way there for simple needs, that meant I could do customization/integration stuff in the month before my daughter was due and just stop whenever I needed to stop.

There exist many options for CRM software. I have experience through client work with two of them: Salesforce and Close.io. Of the two, Close.io feels much more my speed as a small business. (It doesn’t hurt that I know the founders and they are great guys.)

I wanted all of our leads and trials to show up automatically in Close.io, and for as much sales-related communication with them as possible to be reflected in it (thinking forward to when someone who is not me will be doing it, the more it is somewhere central rather than in an individual’s inbox, the less likely we are to have a failure to communicate important state regarding our discussions with a lead).

Where do leads come from? In our business, they’re all inbound:

• Someone signs up for a free trial.
• Someone emails us or uses our contact form to request information or a quote.
• Someone uses our online demo call and also asks for a human to follow-up with them.

I wanted there to be zero bookkeeping work required to get leads into Close.io, because I don’t even successfully do bookkeeping when it involves actual money rather than probabilistic access to notional future revenues. So I looked at their integration options.

There exists a way to integrate Close.io with one’s email account, but that is a non-starter for me for many reasons (HIPAA compliance being required for more than zero emails sent to me being an easy and obvious disqualifier — granted, if there is HIPAA-sensitive in my inbox someone is already breaking the law, but I don’t want to exacerbate it by forwarding that to another non-compliant system).

Instead, I used Close.io’s API to sync trial information between the AR system and Close.io. I then reconfigured our contact form to forward to an alias that Close.io provides which creates new leads from emails forwarded to it. These two things catch roughly 95% of our leads without any intervention from me. (The exception is when someone emails me directly to ask a question, which meets the business definition of lead but isn’t automatically exposed to code which creates a lead. I then enter them manually.)

The really fun thing with the API is that you can sync a lot of things which go beyond mere contact details. Let me show you a screen shot (if it doesn’t display in your email client, you can see it here).

  Some of the stuff we pull in:

• We synchronize our trial status with Close.io’s notion of an “opportunity”, which lets Close.io function as a birds-eye view of our existing low-touch pipeline. (We have an admin screen for that, but this is sliceable and diceable in a way that screen isn’t built to be. For example, it keeps historical reports.)
• We put a link to our admin dashboard for an account on the Close.io page corresponding to them, allowing our sales reps to do things like e.g. see whether their account is “healthy” or not (we pull out non-sensitive data like e.g. appointment count, how many reminders we sent last week, their performance relative to our average successful users, etc)
• We automatically pull in lifecycle emails we’ve sent, so that sales reps are on the same page with the Patrick-As-A-Cron-Job that might have already emailed someone today.
• We score trials (in code, on our end, using a very simple heuristic which takes a 5 line case statement) and assign confidence level for whether we’re likely to win that account at the end of the month or not. This lets our sales reps triage who they spend most of their time with (ideally, accounts in the inverse Goldilocks zone — not too definitely won, not too definitely lost).
• We do true synching of trial statuses, so that e.g. Close.io automatically reflects if someone becomes a customer or if their account lapses.

Sidenote: How long did this take to build? Approximately three half-days where I was non-productive due to the stress of impending fatherhood. Their API does a lot of stuff right. It isn’t quite Twilio or Stripe but it is head and tails above most sales/marketing software (which I am, regrettably, professionally obligated to be familiar with integrating).

Anyhow: now the state of a lead is in Close.io. What does that let us do?

Step Two: Plan And Execute A Process

At many SaaS companies, Sales and Customer Success (pro-active customer support which is designed to actively sell accounts by making sure people have a happy experience early — basically, an enterprisey way to say “concierge on boarding”) are run as separate fiefdoms, but that doesn’t make sense for our scale.

We do have one relevant distinction, though: publicly available plans (the ones on our pricing page) versus custom plans. That includes everything from (at the moment) a single doctor with 100 appointments a month (our publicly available plans don’t include HIPAA compliance, which they need) up to “we’re a state’s parole system — what would it cost to send every felon in the state a reminder to check in with their parole officer twice a month?”

For publicly available plans, we’re just doing bog-standard concierge onboarding and reach out. There’s very little particular cleverness involved at the moment.

Concierge Onboarding

1. Ask someone with a new free trial, if they’re at a plan level where the economics make sense, whether they’d prefer to save themselves some work by having us handle setup for them.
2. Schedule a call to do that.
3. Work through a lightly scripted series of questions on the call while introducing them to the software.
4. If they ask for X or Y or Z, which are things we can do but which can’t be done in the interface, open a ticket about it. (An example for Appointment Reminder is “Have us hire a voice actress to narrate a custom message for you, as opposed to having you record it or having a computer narrate it.” This delights people — I should do more of it. We use Voicebunny these days but when I got started I literally did it on Fiverr.)

Proactive Outreach During The Trial

This is one of those cases where having a proper CRM really shines. You just define a few heuristics that suggest someone is having a not-terribly-successful experience with the trial, make a saved search for trials meeting that heuristic in the CRM, and tell the CS team that when they start work for the day they should look to see if that saved search returns any results and, if so, reach out and help the customer.

Again, this isn’t rocket science.

Hiya Cindy,

This is Patrick from Appointment Reminder. I was just taking a look today at folks who got started with the free trial recently, and noticed that you don’t have your client data in the system yet. Can I help you take care of that? You can either email me a CSV/Excel file from your existing scheduling system or, if you tell me how you presently do appointments, I’ll help you get the client data into the system so that you don’t have to retype anything.

Let me know if I can help with this, or anything else.

Regards,

$FRIENDLY_CUSTOMER_SUCCESS_REP

Notice that this is very similar to a lifecycle email, which would probably be triggered by the same symptom but instead ask them to do the work. That can be done with a cron job and doesn’t require a CRM. The difference here is we’re involving actual humans to help out with the concierge work.

An added benefit: folks speaking to customers about data exports typically couldn’t crack open the code and add a new lifecycle email without assistance, but they can use a CRM to put together a saved search or report without needing it to be coded, and then do delivery of services against clients in that group without needing support from an engineer. For example, if the CS team comes up with the idea one day “Hey, I bet folks are a lot more likely to succeed if they have caller ID enabled”, then they can get a list of everyone who doesn’t have caller ID enabled and start sending emails through the magic of copy and paste. If that works after doing it for a week, great, it can be automated or turned into a more formal process. If not, no worries, experimentation is what we do — simply stop copy/pasting the “Hey, wouldn’t it be great for your customers if they saw your number on their caller ID? Let’s get you started with that.” email.

A Defined Sales Process For Our Enterprise Offerings

I went back over my notes for the last few years, figured out which of our enterprise sales processes seemed to work out with the least stress for me and the least amount of “Why kind of crazy request is that?” from our prospective customers, and just wrote down the steps.

Those steps were, briefly:

1. A lead qualifies themselves as deserving the higher touch sales process. For our company, at present, this means any combination of “We’re a medical provider” or “We have thousands of appointments a month.”
2. We schedule a scoping call to talk about their requirements and make a go or no-go decision on whether our software would work for them
3. If it would work, we send them a quote and then schedule a stakeholder and technical team (if required) call to talk about implementation details
4. We continue working outstanding quotes until we get either a verbal yes or a hard no.
5. If yes, we start delivery of services: hit them immediately with our contract, invoice them, and do provisioning in parallel on our end. As soon as the ink is dry on the contract, they’re officially a customer, and we start doing an appropriate level of onboarding work, which ranges from emailing them their login details up to more meetings to discuss enterprise integration.

We’re open to changing this for particular customers, and it will probably change over time, but just the discipline of committing the happy path to paper means that I shouldn’t be scratching my head anymore about where Happy Teeth Dental is in the pipeline. They’re now at a defined stage: Quote Outstanding, and that makes it clear to me what I have to do this week in regards to them (get in touch and ask if they’re ready to move forward yet), and it makes it really clear that I shouldn’t be mentally scoring them as “We’re almost certain to get a check from them” yet.

In addition to visibility into individual deals, this gives a bit of visibility into the whole pipeline’s aggregate health. I used to have nothing other than an untutored suspicion “How are we doing right now? Umm, not so great? The Happy Teeth deal is stalled and I’m not sure where I am with that municipal department and I have a vague feeling of insufficiency with regards to how many deals I’m working right now.”, but now there will be a clear, visible number of how many deals are actually making forward progress, how many are weeks away from actually closing, etc.

Breaking it into stages allows us to finally start with a bit of specialization of labor, too. I resisted bringing in help for enterprise sales because of shadow objections like “I can’t have someone negotiate contractual terms” or “I’m the only person qualified to make a decision on whether an integration is viable as an engineering matter.” Now that the process is in stages, I’m not a blocker to some of the key ones. My sales rep doesn’t need authority to bind the company to contracts to get a verbal “Yes, we want it.” from her customers.

She’ll get the “Yes” and I’ll get the handoff to execute contracts, which both decreases the amount of work I have to do and also lets me deal from a position of “Hiya, procurement officer: your end user has already promised my people that this is happening, so lets not have silly paperwork issues from either of us inconvenience your user” rather than treating that discussion as a negotiation.

Step Three: Find Someone Else To Execute For You

I’ve always waited too long to ask for help with things — I answered all BCC support email for 8 years (six years too long) and considered myself indispensable for doing AR sales until quite recently. That’s not a business — that’s a job… a job I’d never actively seek out, which I happen to suck at, and which I was actually failing at due to having too many things going on in life to execute consistently.

So I’m firing myself, again. Or, well, putting on my businessman pants and hiring somebody who actually enjoys sales work to execute on our (nascent, weeks-old) sales process. It is certainly a work in progress.

I don’t know to hire sales folks, to be honest. Luckily, I don’t need a team of hundreds of them, I just needed one to get started. I happened to run into a friend of a friend who felt comfortable talking on the phone (she previously ran a business which required lots of that), was reasonably software savvy, and had already had the experience of doing customer success style work for a software company. We were having dinner with our mutual friend one night and, after hearing the one sentence description of what Appointment Reminder does, she immediately said “That would be perfect for my dentist because…” and followed with exactly the two things I would say to sell AR to a dentist.

I offered her a job on the spot.

It took a few months for us to mutually be in the right place for it (infrastructure needed to get built out, childbirth happened, etc), but she’s currently ramping up.

“Ramping up” is a very important thing for you to understand if this is your first rodeo. It takes a while for a sales rep to learn your product, your sales process, and what works and doesn’t work with your customer base. Even very smart people don’t hit peak efficiency for a few months.

Even if you could wave a magic wand and make them peak efficient on day one, they would still be cash-flow negative.

Why? Well, say for the sake of argument that my sales rep (who is very, very part-time) has on-plan total compensation of $2,500.

OK, wait, back up — what does that actually mean?

“On-plan” implies that there is an existence of a defined sales goal, called a quota. Most sales reps are compensated on a commission basis, such that they earn more money if they exceed their quota. If you’re smart as a business owner, the sky is the limit for them.

Anyhow, “on-plan” typically means that someone has not merely scraped by and hit the bare minimum quota to stay employed, but they’ve produced a target you’re happy with.

I’m going to elide the actual details of our commission structure, partially for privacy and partially because it’s literally weeks old and I have no clue whether it is effective yet. I don’t want anyone out there to wholesale copy it if it turns out to be catastrophically bad. Let’s say, hypothetically, that on-plan performance for Appointment Reminder corresponds to adding $1,000 of MRR in a month.

If it costs $2.5k of total compensation (base salary, commission, and all of the assorted taxes/perks/etc) to hit the on-plan performance of adding $1,000 of MRR, then the business loses $2.5k on the sales rep in month 1, $1.5k in month 2, and $0.5k in month three, for a cumulative loss of $4.5k. (I’m ignoring churn to keep the math easy.)

Why do it, then? Because in month 4, the rep is finally cash-flow positive (for $0.5k). The $4.5k loss is repaid in month 6. And then the magic of calculus happens and the business starts to make a lot of money.

This early cash flow crunch is why SaaS companies, despite having very little costs to get going these days, choose to raise outside investment. You hire dozens of sales reps in parallel, wash out the ones who don’t successfully hit quota consistently, buy very nice cars for the ones who do, and reinvest the revenue they bring in into more marketing spend to buy more leads to keep more sales reps busy on their phones. (Many SaaS companies you’re aware of have floors upon floors of sales reps. A company which raises an A round has basically committed itself to hiring dozens to start, scaling up to hundreds on the way to IPO.)

Reasonable people can disagree on whether that model is sustainable as executed (and S-1 filings of SaaS companies trying to IPO are, to many people, hilarious for this reason), but at my scale, I’m less looking for explosive growth and more for continuing to run the business in a way which makes sense for us and our customers. So we’d self-fund the ramp-up period and reinvest profits in a fashion similar to the way we have for years.

Building Things To Make Sales Pros More Effective

I’m a software guy, and when I think improving processes I think “Whee, time to write some code!” (Sometimes to a degree which is detrimental to the business.)

The deep integration between our CRM and our application has been a major win. I discussed that already. What else have I been writing to make sales more effective?

Internal opportunities tooling: Selling to your existing customers is orders of magnitude easier than selling to new customers. We’ve never really strictly enforced the quotas differentiating our tiers from each other, so I had poor visibility into how many people were over quota, but it turns out that it is almost 10% of the user base. I built out capability in our billing system to upgrade a user’s account without forcing them to log in and initiate it themselves. Then I built a screen in our admin dashboard which shows all the accounts that are over quota and links them to their contact details in the CRM.

Now our sales rep can just go dialing for dollars.

Hiya Miriam, this is $PERSON with Appointment Reminder. Got a minute?

So you guys have been really successful with growing your business in the last two years — hats off — and you’re up to about 800 appointments a month. The plan you’re on is only really for businesses with up to 300 appointments a month.

No, don’t worry, you’re not in trouble, we’re just calling to make sure that it is OK to step you up to the Office plan, which is more appropriate for your needs. It will be $199 a month. Is that OK?

Great. Would you like to save $199 by pre-paying for a year of service in advance? We’ll charge you for 11 months and give you the 12th month free. Is that OK?

Sure, it works out to $2,189. Is that OK?

Great! OK, you’re all set — we’ll send you a receipt to your email. Thanks for your business, Miriam — we really appreciate it. You have a great day now.

(Notice the upsell thrown in as long as they were on the phone? This is one of those things that I have an intellectual appreciation for, as it has to work at scale, but would probably not bring myself to do every time. Folks more constitutionally prepared to be doing sales, luckily, don't tie themselves in knots about just throwing an extra sentence into the conversation.)

This works a lot better than any interaction which forces Miriam to go to a computer, sign in, fire up her browser, go to our website, sign in (using a password that she may not have used in two years, given that Miriam is often not one of the people using the system daily), navigate to the payments screen, and upgrade her account by herself. It’s a huge win-win: Miriam gets to go right back to doing her work, we get to collect the revenue we’re entitled to for providing services, and it costs us virtually no administrative work at the margin.

Chat integration:

There are presently three people working on Appointment Reminder at any given time: myself, our sales rep, and my VA, who is helping out with tier one customer support. (Ask me if you’re curious about going into depth on that — I might write an essay about it in the new year.)

I was going to keep us all on the same page via email, but that puts more work into my inbox and results in crippling levels of stress, so instead I took Jason Winder’s advice and set up a Slack instance for the company.

We made a few private groups — basically, a channel representing a function of the company that the boss can force-subscribe a user to — and assigned people as required. If you’ve just got a quick question about how to answer a sales objection like “I’m not sure I see ROI in that”, you can just drop it into the sales chat rather than having to do the higher-friction “Craft a letter to my boss asking him to instruct me how to do my job better.”, and I or the other team members can reply to that at a leisurely pace in the slack periods (Slack periods?) of our workday.

I’ve used similar systems with many client engagements, and they’re great for keeping teams, particularly remote teams, on the same page. Also, having a virtual water cooler makes the work feel less cripplingly isolating.

So what can you build with Slack? Integrations between your other systems and the channels relevant to them. (I cheated and used Zapier rather than figuring out the Slack API.)

For example, when we get a new lead, we historically announced that fact with email and an SMS to the sales manager (that’s one line of Twilio code, BTW). These days, all we have to do is tie “New Lead in Close.io” to “Send a message to the sales channel in Slack.” That lets people get notifications relevant to them through the Slack desktop or mobile apps, and only get them when they should be working.

Sidenote: I’m philosophically against interrupting people outside of core hours unless it is an emergency, and if it is an emergency, the person interrupted should usually be me because responsibility flows uphill.

This also allows low-friction collaboration around those messages, which is a beautiful thing to see when it happens.

bot: New AR lead: Cindy (cindy@example.com) Close.io: linkylinky. Dashboard: linkylinky.

sales rep: @patrick Isn’t that Cindy from Happy Teeth? I thought we had a quote out to them?

patrick: Yeah, ignore that, she’s just doing a quick demo for the office.

sales rep: Great! BTW, was just about to make a round of upgrade calls.

bot: Bugs B Gone Exterminators has upgraded their account from Small Business to Office (Annual). Revenue: $2,189.

bot: If It Ain’t Broke We Can’t Fix It has upgraded their account from Professional to Small Business. MRR increase: $50.

va: High five @salesrep! Make it rain!

patrick: You’re awesome!

In-app messaging: There is an old saw about every application eventually expanding to include a half-hearted implementation of email. We have a really simple system which lets us drop messages directly on the in-app dashboards of our customers, which is useful for less digitally inclined customers who don’t check their emails often but are in the app every day.  (You could probably do this with Intercom or what have you, too.)

This is another thing that we can sync directly with the CRM, by the way, though that isn’t actually done at the moment. Hmm, that’s silly. Writes two lines of code. OK, now it is done.

Tracking “presence”: What’s a good time to call up the office manager at a dental practice? Well, to a first approximation, if she’s sitting down at her computer, but not actively doing anything with it, now is probably a good time. We have a really simple heuristic that can tell whether a user is logged into their account but not presently in the middle of a task.

With just a little more work, you can do something similar to pub/sub for your sales reps, letting them subscribe to updates about e.g. Cindy’s presence if they’re actively trying to get in touch with Cindy, and unsubscribe later. They’ll do that for each of the N people they’ve tried unsuccessfully to contact (a fact which, n.b., can get pulled out of the CRM without the sales rep having to do anything, which means this is scriptable up the wazoo).

Since we have messaging in the app, we could drop a quick notification in an unintrusive fashion saying “Hiya Cindy, This is Patrick. (Yep, I’m totally a human.) I’ve been trying to get in touch for a while. Is now a good time for me to call you?” and, if yes, start the call.

My first instinct was to put this on a page in the dashboard, but as long as we’ve got Slack, why not push work at people rather than having them have to remember to pull work from our database?

bot: FYI @salesrep, Cindy at Happy Teeth, who you’ve been trying to reach, may be available for a call. Respond “ask” to have us ask if now is good for a call or “squelch” to not get told about her availability.

salesrep: ask

bot: Great! We dropped a message on her dashboard. Wait a moment while she replies.

bot: Cindy says she’d appreciate a call. Her number is (555) 555-5555 or respond “connect” and you’ll be automatically bridged.

salesrep: connect

salesrep: Had a great discussion with Cindy. They’re still working on things internally. Follow-up scheduled for next week.

patrick: You’re awesome!

So How Is It Working?

Way too early to know! I put in place a lot of the technical infrastructure right before my daughter was born, then disappeared for a few months. We’re onboarding our first sales rep as of literally a week or two ago, so between holidays and ramp-up time, it will be months before we know whether things worked out.

I’ll keep you posted. If there is anything you’d like to hear about in more detail, drop me a line.

Regards,

Patrick McKenzie

P.S. Progress update on the conversion optimization course: still working on it! The baby has been keeping my wife and I rather busy, but I’ll let you know when it is ready.

Check out Patrick's free advice on how to sell software. And if you're a developer, or you want to hire developers, check out Starfighter. 

Starfighter makes CTFs (games you play by programming). It will be the most fun you've had coding in ages. Early levels will be accessible to anyone, but it will offer plenty of challenges to experts. 

Becoming a top Starfighter player is a direct path to receiving lucrative job offers from the best tech companies in the world, because you'll have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that you can do the work these companies need done. Check out starfighters.io!

You want to be one of those email marketers who sends out email that no one reads? Well, good news: It doesn’t take much effort to land your email in the dark abyss of the Archive or Spam folders.

If you’re ready to cast away any possibility that your email will drive new traffic, leads and customers for your business, here are 10 ways to make those marketing emails extremely ineffective.

1. Write an extremely boring or irrelevant subject line. This will prevent your emails from even being opened in the first place.

But if you do want…your readers to, you know, read the email you wrote to them, try creating a subject line that is engaging and relevant. Make it clear what your readers will get by opening your email.

2. Send your email from a reply@ or info@ mailing address. There’s nothing that screams cold and impersonal like an email from a robot.

But if you do want…to build a trusting relationship with your email recipients, send the emails from a real person. They’ll be more likely to open the email you just sent and any emails you send going forward. In other words, put a face to your brand.

3. Don’t use any of the information you have about your subscribers. Nope, not even their first name when saying “Hello!” Instead go for a greeting that will make them feel like one tiny email address on a list of millions.

But if you do want…to catch your readers’ attention, go ahead and use the data you have about them to create a much warmer, more personalized email experience for them. 

4. Blast out one big email to your entire email list. Avoid subscriber data at all costs. Don’t worry about whether your message or offer is even slightly relevant to half the people you’re sending it to. If your goal is to be terrible at email marketing, just cast your readers’ needs and interests aside.

But if you do want…readers to find your emails relevant and helpful, take the time to segment your list based on the data you have about your subscribers and send them emails that cater specifically to those segments.

5. Write boring and useless information – all in one huge paragraph, of course. People don’t have very long attention spans these days. If you want to guarantee that no one will read your email, sprinkle it with unnecessary extra words and make it impossible to scan quickly.

But if you do want…your emails to be effective at getting your message across clearly, keep them short and to the point. Use formatting devices like bullets, bolding, headers and line breaks to make your emails visually pleasing and easy to consume.

6. Make lots of spelling and grammatical errors. There’s nothing that says “Don’t bother reading any further” like obvious spelling mistakes. If you don’t want to gain reader respect or trust, just type quickly, don’t bother checking for errors and hit that “Send” button.

But if you do want… to keep your readers away from the unsubscribe button, keep your writing tidy and double check it – or ask a coworker to look it over.

7. Don’t include a call-to-action. A sign of an effective, conversion-optimized email is a strong call-to-action. If you want to design a terrible email that definitely won’t convert your subscribers into leads (or your leads into customers), make it extremely unclear what you’d like your readers to do.

But if you do want…to have a real conversation with your readers, include an obvious and clear call-to-action that will get your readers to take that next step.

8. Leave out the social sharing buttons. Asking your subscribers to share or forward your content would only stand to get you more subscribers. If that’s not what you’re after, you might as well leave these out.

But if you do want…to grow your email list, attract more readers to your content and gain site traffic, take that extra step of asking email recipients to share your blog on social media or forward to a friend.

9. Don’t include an Unsubscribe link. Double whammy on this one: Not only will you be violating CAN-SPAM laws, you’ll frustrate everyone who’d prefer to not be on your email list.

But if you do want…to follow email best practices (and, you know, the law), place a simple unsubscribe option at the bottom.

10. Don’t optimize your emails for mobile devices. Since a large percentage of your subscribers will view your emails on a mobile device, it’ll really piss them off to learn that you only format your emails for desktop. They definitely won’t take the time to zoom in or scroll wildly to find out what your email is about.

But if you do want…to capture the attention of your mobile readers and have any chance at converting them, create an optimized mobile experience for every email you send.

If you follow these steps, there’s no chance you’ll manage to leverage your email marketing as an audience engagement and conversion tool. Instead, go ahead and delete that awful email before you even consider sending it – and get working on one that will actually help you achieve your marketing and business goals.

At Bubble, we like to spend a lot of time writing up advice and tips for you when it comes to answering common interview questions, as well as some that you might not expect to be asked.

The “What have you learned from your past jobs?” question certainly falls into the latter category, but it is one that tends to come up during interviews.

If you are asked this during a job interview, it’s important that you realise that the employer isn’t asking you what you did in your previous jobs, but more how you developed during your time in the roles, and how what you’ve learned can be applied to this job – should you be successful.

With that in mind, here are five tips on how to answer the “What have you learned from your past jobs?” interview question.

1) Keep It Relevant

When answering this question, it’s a good idea to keep it relevant to the job that you’re applying for. It’s no use saying that in your old job you learned how to use SEO analytics tools if the role you’re applying for is graphic design-related.

Think about the skills that the job requires and tailor your answer towards that. It’s important that you consider what the employer wants to hear, but make sure what you’re saying is the truth.

For example, if you’re going from an SEO role to one with more focus on paid search, perhaps explain that you didn’t have the strongest knowledge of PPC when you started, but took the Google AdWords course while you were at your previous company, and now you’re proficient and comfortable working on PPC campaigns.

2) Mix Up The Answer

Another to consider when answering this question, is to vary the examples that you give to the interviewer. While it’s great to give an answer that showcases how much you’ve developed technically, it’s also useful to show how you’ve grown as a person, as personality fit is one of the most important things an employer will look at when it comes to hiring for a new position.

Think about what sort of “life lessons” you’ve learned in your previous roles, and apply this to your answer.

Give one technical example, like previous one, but also include more general lessons. For example, persistence, be more independent, believe in own ability, etc. If was given more responsibility and left to own devices, say how you learned to have faith in your own ideas and be more independent.

3) Turn Negatives Into Positives

If the places you’ve had jobs at in the past have been very difficult places to work, then use this question as a chance to turn those negative experiences into positive ones.

For example, if you previously worked somewhere where you didn’t receive any guidance or assistance, then perhaps use this as a chance to explain that you were expected to work independently and this encouraged you to use your own initiative and trust your own ideas and judgement.

This will show the employer that you aren’t fazed by negative experiences, and use them as a learning curve, which is a really good trait for any prospective employee to have.

4) Avoid Moaning About Your Previous Job

Following on from the previous point, if your previous roles were a bit of a nightmare and you were treated badly, this isn’t the time to start ranting about it.

While this question could very easily turn into a negative discussion about your old employers, this should be actively avoided as no recruiter wants to hear you slagging off your previous bosses – it’s unprofessional and makes you seem like a moaner.

If your experiences were truly awful and you aren’t sure how to describe it, saying something like “It was quite a challenging environment, but it made me grow as a person and develop my professional skills” is less negative and shows that you were still thankful of the time you spent at your old company.

5) Align Answer With Company Ethos

Finally, when you’re considering how to answer this question, think about what the company’s values are and what its ethos is, and use this to form part of your answer.

You can normally find out more about a company’s culture, ethos and values on their own website or via their social media channels.

For example, if the company places a high emphasis on teamwork, then use this answer as a chance to say that in your previous jobs, you’ve learned how to work as part of a team and collaborate with people whose ideas may be different to your own.

So there we go, some tips on how to answer the “What have you learned from your past jobs?” interview question. Do you agree with these tips or have any of your own?

Let me know in the comments below!

A couple weeks back I contributed to a Forbes CMO network in an article about the traits of successful marketing leaders. It’s an important topic, so I decided to expand on it here.

The marketing function is becoming more complex, more strategic and more interesting. More complex because today marketers need to take advantage of more tools and technologies available to us: from marketing automation to big data to social media.

More strategic because companies are recognizing the deep relationship between marketing and business strategy and CEOs have a better understanding of the value of marketing and its potential as a source of competitive advantage. More interesting because all these tools and channels are opening many new possibilities as areas like psychology intersect with marketing creating behavioral economics – an area that is both fascinating and fundamental to every marketer.

In this broader context of marketing, how do we marketing leaders need to grow? What are the most important traits we need to develop? There are four at the top of the list:

1. Revenue ownership and accountability.

Yes, metrics are important, but modern marketers can no longer claim success measuring their contribution to the business based on ambiguous metrics like followers, brand value, impressions, or clicks. We need to show how marketing directly impacts the business, we need to connect marketing activities result in growth. And we need to make sure every member of the marketing team is focused on business value, and not only metrics, every single day.

Revenue orientation is important, but we need to take it a step further: marketing leaders must be accountable for revenue growth. A shared accountability on revenue with sales leaders will drive collaboration acting as a common goal.

2. Smart adaptability.

Marketers and marketing must evolve at the same rate as customers change and the tools to interact with them evolve. This is why I called my blog The Adaptive Marketer. New generations have different behaviors and tools to talk, to share and to advocate. Social media online and mobile devices are only about 15 years old. Newspapers are going away. TV is in the middle of a (real) paradigm shift.

The risk is that we marketers are known for chasing shiny objects. This is why we need smart adaptability, which is defined as being smart to distinguish buzzwords (like big data) from real trends and to make the right investments in these new areas that allow for experimentation and learning. It’s not all black and white: data driven marketing, for example, carries some risks (read my post on The Mirage of Data) but also significant opportunity.

3. Customer Centricity.

The source of value of marketers to the organization is not creativity, it’s not metrics orientation and it’s not the ability to come up with clever marketing campaigns. The source of value is our understanding of the customer. Knowing who is your customer (and who is not), what problems they want solve, how they want them solved, how they look for solutions, who they trust, what alternatives they consider, how they want to buy, and how customers evolve over time is job#1 for marketers. If you don’t know your customers, markets, competitors and opportunities you can’t function as a marketer.

Peter Drucker wrote “The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well, the product or service fits him and sells itself”. One of Mike Markkula’s three principles for marketing at Apple is empathy, which he defined as “We will truly understand (customer) needs better than any other company.”

It is the role of marketing to champion the voice of the customer internally and to share market insights that lead the way for the organization company. No company can be truly customer-centric and market driven unless the marketing leader takes this role seriously. Marketing must lead the fundamental corporate strategy decisions (where to play and how to win) and be the evangelists that help everyone in the company understand market opportunities, customer expectations and how the company adds value to customers.

4. Team building and leadership.

We talked about how marketing is becoming broader, including disciplines like social, SEO/SEM, behavioral economics, market research, paid ads, pricing, and many more. It is impossible for a marketing leader to be an expert on all these areas. One of the hardest tasks for a marketing leader is to build a team of specialists that is highly competent, action oriented, customer centric and revenue accountable.

Hiring A players, for any job, takes discipline and hard work. It is tempting to hire a B player to get more hands on deck fast. It’s surprisingly hard to find quality marketing talent. The traditional interview process is very limited. I like doing practical tests in addition to interviews, but even those have flaws. Recruiting is an important aspect of a marketing leader.

After building the team comes leading. For marketing, focus is a key aspect of leadership. The marketing job never ends: there are always more channels, more opportunities and more activities than anyone can do. A marketing leader can be successful only if he or she focuses the team, and a team is only focused if everyone knows what not to do. What markets not to pursue, what customers to ignore, what activities to avoid.

---

There are many skills and qualities that are useful to highly desirable in any marketer – more than any blog post or book can cover. A marketing leader who demonstrates revenue accountability, smart adaptability, customer centricity and leadership is well on its way to success. How are you building and enhancing these super powers?

FA Insights is a daily newsletter from Business Insider that delivers the top news and commentary for financial advisors.

Advisors with more than $1 billion in assets are outperforming their peers (InvestmentNews)

"Twenty percent of registered investment advisers participating in InvestmentNews' annual benchmarking study of financial advisory firms managed $1 billion or more in assets last year. That number was 2.5% a decade ago." Advisers with more than $1 billion in assets outperformed their peers since the financial crisis. They have seen their revenues jump by more than 23% annually with their average client investing $2.74 million. This compares to advisors with less than $1 billion in assets who have seen revenue growth of just 15% and an average investment of close to one-third the size.  Having a $1 billion in assets under management has other benefits, including reduced rates on technology and more competitive pricing from vendors. “If you're at a billion, the goal should be how to get to $5 billion in assets and $25 million in revenue,” added Joe Duran, chief executive of United Capital, based in Newport Beach, California.

A financial adviser is suing a celebrity client he defrauded (Richmond Biz Sense)

Getty Andrew Rothenberg is suing Dave Matthews Band member Boyd Tinsley, a client he defrauded, for $10 million. Mr. Rothenberg claims Tinsley sabotaged his business, causing him to lose out on several high profile clients, and the potential of earning millions of dollars. Rothenberg pleaded guilty to one count of felony wire fraud and was forced to pay $1.25 million in restitution after stealing millions of dollars from Tinsley while serving as his advisor. Rothenberg served nine months in prison and remains under house arrest, but has filed suit against Tinsley, saying, "I want to be financially compensated for the business he cost me."     

5 tax deductions for the self-employed (Think Advisor)

The April 15 tax deadline is rapidly approaching. With that in mind Think Advisor decided to share five tax deductions every self-employed worker should make sure they include when filing. Home office expenses, health insurance premiums, self-employment tax, retirement tax shelters, and depreciation of equipment deductions are vital for reducing the tax bill of those who are self-employed. 

Men save more than women for retirement (Financial Advisor)

BlackRock’s annual Global Investor Pulse Survey found only 53% of women are saving for retirement, well below the 65% of men. The late start by women means the average woman aged 55-64 has $81,300 in retirement savings while a man of that age has put away $118,400, on average. Financial Advisor notes, "This gap is particularly troubling given that women live longer than men—at birth, the life expectancy for U.S. women is about 79 compared to 72 for men, according to the report."

When to invest in high-yield bond funds (Financial Planning)

High yield bond funds have seen a tremendous amount of interest as a result of the Fed's low interest rate environment. The group is yielding almost 400 basis points above Treasuries while seeing a historically low default rate of 1%. While that rate is still expected to climb to 1.5% to 2% by the end of the year, it would still be well below the historical norm. Mark Hudoff, portfolio manager of Hotchkis & Wiley High Yield in Corona del Mar, California noted while he still likes the space, "High-yield bonds aren’t 100% immune from interest-rate risk,” and expects weakness as the Fed begins to move off the zero bound. 

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: A lawyer in Florida has come up with an ingenious way for drivers to evade drunken-driving checkpoints

For gaining more engagement, clicks, retweets, and replies, Twitter images work.

It’s why we created Pablo—a simple way to create social media images in under 30 seconds—and it’s why we love sharing all the tips we can about creating great visuals for social media.

Our own research has helped us see the value of Twitter images as being eminently click-worthy and shareworthy. There are a whole host of different ways to add these engaging images to your tweets. I’d love to round up a list of 10 favorite ways that we’ve tried with Twitter visuals (plus hear any ideas you’ve got as well!)

The Data Behind Shareworthy Twitter Images

Our early research into Twitter visuals for the @buffer Twitter account, back in November 2013, showed that tweets with photos earned 150 percent more retweets and 18 percent more clicks.

Additional research, from Twitter’s data team even, confirms the power of images.

Here’s a brief overview of what Twitter found to be the most influential factors in being retweeted.

The study looked at a set of thousands of verified users in the United States, analyzing over 2 million tweets. The final verdict from Twitter:

• Photos average a 35% boost in Retweets
• Videos get a 28% boost
• Quotes get a 19% boost in Retweets
• Including a number receives a 17% bump in Retweets
• Hashtags receive a 16% boost

In reviewing this data, Clark Wimberly noticed the high numbers for photos and quotes—two areas that can be smushed together into one visual (see more ideas on this below). His takeaway:

The logical conclusion? Any brand that’s tweeting should likely be tweeting images and quotes. Now, that isn’t law, but if it’s in the data, it’s worth experimenting with to see how it fits your own brand (or a brand you manage).

There’s more evidence, too, that Twitter visuals are key for social media marketers.

The Sotrender blog analyzed the 500 most-followed brand profiles on Twitter over a six week period in late 2013. They looked specifically for the effect of pic.twitter.com links, Vine videos, twitpic.com links, and Facebook and Instagram links.

• Tweets with a pic.twitter.com link and photo had 141% more retweets
• Tweets with a Facebook link or an Instagram link received 19% and 52% fewer retweets, respectively
• Tweets with a Vine video or twitpic.com link showed no significant effect.

And finally, Dan Zarella analyzed more than 400,000 random tweets to see the effect of Twitter visuals on retweets. His findings:

• Tweets with pic.twitter.com – 94% more likely to be RTed
• Tweets with Facebook or Instagram links – 47% and 42% less likely to be RTs, respectively

From Dan:

Tweets with images uploaded to pic.Twitter.com were nearly twice as likely to be retweeted while the use of Twitpic increased the odds by just over 60%. On the other hand Tweets that used Facebook or Instagram links were less likely to be retweeted.

How to Create and Share an Image on Twitter

We did a bit of research into the ideal image sizes for Twitter images to find the best sizes for sharing in the Twitter stream.

On desktops, Twitter images appear in the timeline at 506 pixels wide by 253 pixels tall.

This size works out to an aspect ratio of 2:1, meaning that for every two pixels wide, your image is one pixel as tall. If you create images at 800 x 400 or 1,000 x 500—any size within the 2:1 ratio—the image will appear fully in tact in the Twitter stream.

(Note: Uploading an image that is smaller than 506 pixels x 253 pixels will result in whitespace to the right of the image.)

The default Twitter image size we use at Buffer is 1,024 pixels wide by 512 pixels tall.

If the dimensions fall outside the 2:1 aspect ratio, Twitter crops the image to fit, and the full size can be viewed only by clicking the image.

Twitter crops these images from the top and bottom, leaving the middle of the image as-is.

10 Types of Shareworthy Twitter Visuals and How to Create Them

1. Watermark your images with Pablo

Vox media—home of some of the leading blogs on the web like Vox, the Verge, SB Nation, etc.—built an internal tool to help its social media team easily create Twitter visuals.

One of the keys to this tool was branding in the form of a watermark logo on each image.

There’s a really neat way to do this with Pablo, the free social media image tool we’ve launched here at Buffer.

1. Create your engaging image of a quote, headline, question, etc. Add a cool background photo.
2. Click on the “Add an icon” button. Upload your logo—a GIF or PNG with a transparent background works best, and you can even set some transparency on the logo itself by editing with a tool like PicMonkey.

Voila!

2. Share an Instagram photo or Facebook photo

As mentioned above, Twitter visuals from Instagram or Facebook links may lead to less engagement than tweets with no images at all.

This is a tricky one because Instagram and Facebook visuals do not show up natively in Twitter. A user would need to click the Instagram/Facebook link in the tweet to see the image over at Instagram or Facebook, a fact that likely affects the ease of retweeting, favoriting, etc.

Is there any way around this? Can you manage to get full Instagram pics into your Twitter stream?

There seem to be some ways to post Instagram pics directly, using an IFTTT recipe.

This one, for instance, pulls in any images from Instagram that you tag with “#tw”, sharing the image caption as the tweet text and the image URL as the tweeted image.

3.Create a visual from a template in Canva

Some of the most beautiful images I’ve seen on Twitter are rich templates with cool text, textures, filters, backgrounds, etc. And the good news, it’s quite easy to create these images in Canva—whether you’re a design pro or not.

When you start up Canva, choose the Twitter image design from the list at the top.

You’ll then see a full list of different pre-built template options that you can customize.

4. Create a collage

You can add up to four photos within a single tweet. Ad Age had a great way of explaining the benefit of collages for marketers:

Photo collages have the potential to let them do more storytelling with the space they have and go well beyond the former 140-character boundary. … Share more photos — which appear in a collage format underneath the text of a tweet — and effectively pack their tweets with more content.

Here’s a really cool example from General Electric of a way they combined the photo collage with additional text.

To create a collage in Twitter,

1. Compose a new tweet.
2. Click to Add Photo, and choose a photo to add.
3. Then click the Add More button and continue adding photos, up to four total.

Note: Multiple images in tweets is something we’d be keen to explore further for the Buffer app. If you’ve got any ideas, we’d love to hear from you in our UserVoice forum!

5. Tag other people in the photos you create

When sharing natively from Twitter, you can tag other users in your photos, which then gives them a notification on their account.

The tagging is similar to how Facebook tagging works. And marketers have found some useful ways to tag relevant people and brands in posts and photos that reference them. It could be a strategic way to get the attention of the people you’re talking about and hoping to engage with.

(It’s likely best to only tag those who are relevant to your tweet, otherwise it can feel a bit off-putting and spammy.)

To tag someone in a Twitter photo,

1. Add a photo to a tweet.
2. Click on the Who’s In This Photo? link to the right of the attached photo.
3. Start typing a username or full name into the search box, and select the user you wish to tag. You can tag up to 10 people.

The people you tag will receive a notification, alongside their @-mentions and favorites.

5. Vines

Vines are the super-short, 6-second videos that users create and share on Twitter. The videos loop, creating a GIF-like impression, albeit with audio.

Since Vine is a creation of Twitter’s, the Vine videos appear natively in the Twitter timeline. You don’t have to click anything to see the Vine right away.

Though the statistics mentioned above seem to point to Vines not having much of an effect on overall engagement, they could still be worth experimenting. Brands have done some cool things with Vines already, and they’re a novel visual medium that could help get your message across in a new way.

You can create and share a Vine using the Vine app for iOS, Android, and Windows devices.

6. Buffer this image

With the Buffer browser extension installed, you can share any image from any website directly to your Twitter feed. This comes in quite handy when sharing a link to an article: You can write out the title, the link to the article, and add an engaging image straight from the story itself.

To Buffer an image from any web page, right-click the image you wish to share and select Buffer This Image from the drop-down menu.

One of the ways we’ve found to be most useful with sharing Twitter visuals in this way is to look for images that are self-explanatory. In our experience, clear and descriptive images have a higher impact on engagement than abstract images do.

For example:

(And that being said, the research as a whole makes little distinction between which type of image works best. It seems that any Twitter visual will have a positive effect, whether detailed, abstract, or otherwise.)

7. Pablo and quotes

As noticed in the Twitter research above, photos and quotes are two of the biggest factors in getting more retweets. So why not smush them together?

There are lots of great tools out there to help make engaging image quotes—Canva and Spruce come to mind immediately. We’ve noticed people getting lots of great use out of Pablo for creating image quotes as well.

To create a Pablo quote,

1. Go to bufferapp.com/pablo
2. Enter your quote and source into the text box.
3. Choose an image from the options below (courtesy of UnSplash), or upload your own.
4. Add any photo effects or text styles to further customize the image.
5. Click to share straight to Facebook, Twitter, or Buffer. Or click to download to your computer.

If you’re looking for some inspiration on where to find great quotes, here are a few of our favorite places:

• Goodreads popular quotes
• Your Kindle highlights
• WikiQuote
• Pinterest search for quotes
• Fortune’s list of 100 inspiring quotes
• Inc’s list of 100 inspiring quotes

8. Screengrabs

I’m so grateful for picking up this tip from our co-founder Leo and startup founder Hiten Shah. It’s so simple and works great.

Take a screengrab of text on an article—perhaps a bullet point list or a quote or a heading—and add the screengrab to your tweet.

The visual is eye-catching in the Twitter stream because the text stands out from the standard tweet text. And it’s a great way to add even more space to tell more of a story—a cool hack to get beyond the 140-character limit of a tweet and to share bigger thoughts, ideas, quotes, and questions.

I tried this recently with a question from one of our blog posts, and I saw great engagement—15 replies, which is way up from average for me.

9. Animated GIF

GIFs in Twitter can be a cool way to add some variety to your Twitter images. The GIFs do not play automatically; rather, they appear as standard, inline images with a play button over the image. Click the play button, and the GIF begins to play and loop.

Here’s a pro tip for getting around this. You can pin a tweet to the top of your profile page, and the animated GIF will play automatically.

(See this live.)

One way we’ve found animated GIF visuals to be of great use is in tweet replies, either from a marketing perspective (making people feel good for engaging with you) or from a customer support view (making customers feel great for getting in touch).

The Giphy.com browser extension is a fun way to add animated GIFs easily to tweets.

10. Soundcloud, Vimeo, YouTube, SlideShare, and more

Twitter has partnered with a huge variety of different media sites to provide native support (and some pretty cool visual effects) when you share links from these sites.

Here’s a list of some of the major ones that look great on profile pages. (This media appears as links in the main Twitter timeline.)

• Soundcloud
• Vimeo
• YouTube
• SlideShare

(Here’s a SlideShare example.)

Twitter cards are another branch of rich media that you can use as Twitter visuals. Courtney did a great job of covering all the 9 different options for Twitter cards in her complete guide blog post. If you’re interested in setting up Twitter cards, I’d highly recommend reading her simple-to-use instructions and overview.

Summary

I hope this helps with some new ideas for how to share Twitter visuals. There’s quite a lot of neat ways to try things. Some of our best ones for the Buffer account include:

• Buffer This Image
• Screengrabs of blog post content
• Pablo images and quotes

Which ones work best for you?

I’d love to hear about your experience. Feel free to leave a note in the comments, and I’ll be so happy to reply!

Image sources: Pablo, IconFinder, Dan Zarella, Twitter, UnSplash

Employee retention is incredibly important, especially in tough times. Companies need to be constantly looking for ways to improve their retention rates.

There are massive costs to employee turnover, which I’ll discuss more later in this post, both emotional and financial, that can have major effects on employee engagement. This is why it’s important to take retention so seriously.

If you go through all of the trouble of onboarding an employee, integrating them into the team, training them, assuming that they’re a good fit, then it’s in your best interest to keep them in the company.

Consider the costs of losing an employee:

• Costs of hiring (posting a job and conducting interviews)
• Costs of onboarding (time spent by manager training)
• Learning curve (a new employee will take months before they’re as good as the old employee)
• Emotional costs (lower productivity from the rest of the team)

It’s also important for managers to understand that employees are what’s known as an “appreciating asset”, meaning that they appreciate in value over time. The longer someone stays at a company, the more productive and valuable they are.

Many studies show that the costs of replacing an employee range anywhere from 20-200% of their annual salary. Either way, it’s crazy expensive.

Employee Retention Formula

Employee retention and employee turnover go hand in hand, but it’s important to measure them separately. Many companies make the mistake of measuring turnover, and then assuming that the retention rate is just the opposite number, but that’s not always an accurate way of measuring.

Calculating employee retention is actually very easy.

The only thing you need to decide is the time period in which you want to calculate your retention. Sometimes this can be measured monthly, quarterly, or annually. It’s completely up to you which ever one works best for your business.

The number of employees who remain at the end of the calculation period divided by the number of employees you had at the beginning of your calculation period, times 100.

For example, If you have 100 employees starting the first day of the quarter, and 80 employees at the end of the month, you have lost 20 of employees. Your retention rate is 80 percent.

Officevibe has an employee engagement ROI calculator that you should check out. You can find out what your company could be saving in terms of investing in retention. The numbers, depending on your company size, can be pretty shocking, and will probably convince you that investing in this is worthwhile.

Simple Employee Retention Ideas

If you’ve been a regular reader of the Officevibe blog, then you should have plenty of ideas for retaining your employees.

A point I always make is that most of the things you need to do to retain employees doesn’t cost any money. It’s more about being genuine and actually caring about the person. The most important thing by far is just being there for employees, and acting authentically.

Here are a few simple ideas that you can use to increase employee retention.

1. Offer Amazing Perks

Compensation is a very tricky issue, because most managers don’t have the authority to give employees a raise, even if they wanted to. But it’s not all about salary.

As I’ve written about before, research shows over and over that money isn’t the most important thing. Instead of offering more money or more expensive benefits like retirement-savings plans, you can be creative and offer things like unlimited vacations or telecommuting. More than anything, it shows employees that you trust them, and are willing to be flexible to help them.

2. Help With Career Development

According to a recent Linkedin survey that asked people why they recently left their job, the number one answer was to have “greater opportunities for advancement.” Keep employees at your company by clearly mapping out what their future looks like. You can ask them and get feedback into what they would want from you in order to achieve this.

Providing employees with a clear path for growth is the best thing you can do for retention

For example, in Officevibe’s survey software, one of the questions we ask employees is:

Are there clear opportunities for growth at your company?

If the employee responds negatively to that question, we immediately ask them a qualitative follow up question:

What could {Company} do to help you grow even more in your career? (ex: training, mentorship, vision, autonomy, etc.)

This type of insight is crucial to employee retention.

3. Start With Why

Inspired by one of my favorite TED talks of all time, focusing on the purpose and mission of your company can help inspire employees to keep them around.

I’m referring to Simon Sinek’s “How Great Leaders Inspire Action” where he talks about how the common theme in great leaders that inspire is that they communicate their vision.

He talks about the golden circle, and explains that if you want to inspire, you need to focus on why you’re doing it, and not what you’re doing.

In the talk, Simon explains that communicating this way is deeply-rooted in biology. At around the six-minute mark, he says:

If you look at a cross-section of the human brain, looking from the top down, what you see is the human brain is actually broken into three major components that correlate perfectly with the golden circle. Our newest brain, our Homo sapien brain, our neocortex, corresponds with the “what” level. The neocortex is responsible for all of our rational and analytical thought and language. The middle two sections make up our limbic brains, and our limbic brains are responsible for all of our feelings, like trust and loyalty.

When we communicate from the outside in, yes, people can understand vast amounts of complicated information like features and benefits and facts and figures. It just doesn’t drive behavior. When we can communicate from the inside out, we’re talking directly to the part of the brain that controls behavior, and then we allow people to rationalize it with the tangible things we say and do.

The question you need to explain to employees is why are you doing what you’re doing. What’s the bigger purpose?

4. Conduct Stay Interviews

While exit interviews are great for understanding why employees leave, an even better source of learning is understanding what makes employees want to stay?

Ask questions like:

• What makes you stay at this company?
• What would make you leave?
• What would you change about your job role if you could?
• Is there anything you would change about your managers?

Many managers are scared of conducting stay interviews because of what they might hear during them. This is a natural thing to be afraid of, but the information you can get in there is gold.

Managers also might worry about the issue of salary coming up in a stay interview. Like I mentioned earlier, sometimes a raise is out of a manager’s control, so there’s nothing they can do even if they wanted to.

The best piece of advice I can give for this, is be honest. Let employees know that there’s nothing you can do about that, but tell them that there might be something you can do within your power.

Should You Offer An Employee Retention Bonus?

Short answer: Definitely not.

What’s interesting, is that according to a recent WorldAtWork survey, the use of employee retention bonuses is at an all-time high. But companies need to stop doing this, it’s a waste of their money.

Like I mentioned before, money isn’t the main motivator. Most people that quit their jobs quit because of a bad manager, or they’re not a good fit in the team. You can correct these issues before offering more money.

Also, even if you give employees more money, they might still leave anyways. True story, I’ve done this in the past. While I appreciated the gesture from my boss, I was already mentally checked-out, I had plans to leave regardless, and money wasn’t the issue. In fact, I actually took a salary cut at the new job, simply to be in a better environment.

Even if money were to motivate an employee to stay, that would wear off very quickly, because the core issues like a bad manager, lack of career development, etc. would still be a problem.

Also, it’s not a good sign if that’s what is motivating an employee. You want your employees to be motivated by the amazing work you’re doing. If the employee is motivated by money alone, it might actually be better if they left.

Another reason why I’m against retention bonuses is that it might have a negative effect on everyone else. Their coworkers might wonder why they haven’t received any extra money, which in turn will hurt overall morale and productivity.

In 30 years, I have yet to see a retention bonus retain, let alone motivate, anyone. – Kate DCamp, former VP of HR at Cisco

Employee Retention Best Practices

Hopefully, by now you’re convinced of the importance of employee retention, but here are a few best practices to keep in mind to improve your retention.

1. Improve The Hiring Process

You need to start with the basics, and focus on improving the hiring process so that employees fit in well at the company and the job.

A mistake I’ve seen many companies make is that their job descriptions are vague, and they don’t tell you the full story during the interview process. If you can be more transparent and honest with the candidates, you’ll have a much higher employee retention rate. I’ve written before about how to write a good job description that doesn’t use buzzwords and explains things clearly.

Want more engaged employees?

Get our weekly tips on how you can keep your employees engaged.

Send Me TipsSend Me Tips

Don’t worry, you can unsubscribe anytime.

2. Develop Managers

It’s not for nothing that we keep mentioning and hearing that people leave companies because of bad managers. This seems to be at the root of the problem, and core to what needs to be fixed.

Managers need to be taught, to take it upon themselves to learn, how to help develop their employees. I don’t have all of the answers, but the research clearly shows that career development matters to employees. Have managers focus on that, and retention should start to improve.

3. Create A Culture Of Recognition

According to research by Deloitte, companies that scored in the top 20% for building a “recognition-rich culture” had 31% lower voluntary turnover rates. Their research also showed that it’s more important to receive recognition from peers than it is from managers, so set up a way for employees to praise and recognize each other.

Frequent praise is important, because of the way dopamine levels work in our brain, so every week, take some time to recognize the hard work of everyone on the team.

What Do You Think About The Importance Of Employee Retention?

As you can see, the importance of employee retention is hard to ignore. What are some ways that your company keeps employee retention high? Let me know on Twitter @JacobShriar.

CEOs have a lot to worry about, but what are their greatest concerns? What keeps them awake at night? We interviewed 24 CEOs and asked them to name the biggest challenges facing their organizations. (Please note that titles used here reflect the positions the individuals held in 2013, when we conducted the interviews for a separate article). Their concerns fell into three broad categories: talent, operating in a global marketplace, and regulation and legislation. Given that CEOs set the tone and priorities for their organizations, it is important to understand what they interpret as the major challenges and opportunities.

Talent Management

Talent-related issues were the top concern, mentioned by 16 of the CEOs. They had a range of concerns, beginning with finding the right talent. This was especially daunting during periods of change or growth in which companies needed to hire in large numbers. AT&T, for example, had to switch its focus from traditional telecom services to wireless services, and this shift required employees with different skill sets. Randall Stephenson of AT&T explained, “We had 270,000 people we employed around the globe. The lion’s share of these people were out building and installing high-tech infrastructure and doing home installs that were suddenly far more complex than they’d ever been. We’d been hiring a number of people, and finding good, technical people to fill these jobs proved to be very difficult. If we wanted to hire somebody to go install IP services in a home, we interviewed eleven people to find one qualified candidate.”

Once companies hired new talent, new challenges arose, such as how these employees represented the company. Enrique Santacana of ABB North America, a power and automation-technology firm, voiced his concern this way: “An overarching issue was the exposure we had as a company,” Santacana explained, “For example, how information was being used or may be used in a way that was not conducive to good business practices. Having 150,000 employees around the world, once in a while we got a bad apple here and there, and we got problems. The speed at which those problems happened was exponentially increased because of the ability of people to communicate through social media.”

CEOs also worried about whether their high potential employees were being properly developed. One area that proved especially challenging was mobility. Ken Powell of U.S. food processor General Mills, noting that his company was quickly expanding internationally, said, “One of our challenges was how to develop a truly globally mobile culture. That didn’t mean that everybody in the company needed to have that kind of flexibility—it just became more and more important for us that we had a cadre or a group of employees who were willing to pull up their stakes and go to lots of different places.” The challenge then was to foster global mindsets and cultural competencies.

Talent pipelines were also a concern. Woods Staton of Arcos Dorados, the largest operator of McDonald’s restaurants in Latin America, explained, “The big challenge that we had was making sure that we had the right pipeline with good people, making sure that what had made us successful so far with our group of people was being reproduced down the line.” Other talent management concerns that were mentioned once include: motivating people through hard times, retention and development, and managing diversity and cultural differences.

Operating in a Global Marketplace

Eight of the CEOs pointed to the challenges of operating in a fast-paced global marketplace. For Paul Block of Merisant, which makes artificial sweeteners, one problem was currency. “We had currency issues because the global economies had been somewhat volatile. So, you had currencies going up and down, and we crossed currencies because we sold in over 90 countries and manufactured in over five or six countries. Currency really had a big effect.”

Staton identified the challenge of managing a global brand: “We had the McDonald’s brand, and in each country our market share and the product life cycle were in different stages. You had some countries in which we were mature or very, very strong and very, very good, like Brazil. Others, like Mexico, offered more of a challenge to us. We had more competition, be it from our own direct competitors or from street vendors and food stalls. So the challenge was to have the broad marketing strategies with local adaptations.”

Some CEOs worried about setting direction and tone for the company across regions. “I would say the biggest challenge that I faced was making sure the organization stayed very focused, thinking about the trends that were shaping the world and what we were going to need to do organizationally to win in the long-term,” said Jim Turley of accounting firm Ernst & Young. “It was very much about capital shifts and demographic shifts that were taking place in the world. We wanted to keep those two things in the forefront of our thinking and driving our strategy and execution. That was something that I spent a lot of time thinking about.”

Another challenge was to establish and maintain a consistent company culture across different regions. Tim Solso, of the engine manufacturer Cummins, spoke for many when he said, “I think an issue we had was that we were a good multinational company that was headquartered in the United States. We were not a global company yet. How did we make sure that our policies and processes reflected the world we lived in, not just where our headquarters were?”

Regulation and Legislation

Finally, five CEOs cited the challenges of leading a company amid shifting regulation and legislation. For example, David Thodey at Australian telecom Telstra explained, “The telecommunications industry was heavily regulated around the world and we had been going through a series of negotiations with the Australian government. The government was going to pass $11 billion to migrate customers off the copper network to a fiber network over seven to eight years. We were seeing just enormous change in how we needed to act, and behave, and how we needed to drive cost out of the business.”

Healthcare industry chiefs were particularly vexed by changes in legislation and regulation. Ken Frazier of the pharmaceutical firm Merck, put it this way: “The biggest challenges that we faced in our organization was that healthcare in general was undergoing huge, huge pivotal change. As a pharmaceutical company, we obviously were part of that whole ecosystem. Many of the established ways of creating value in this industry were no longer as viable as they used to be. The biggest challenge we faced as an organization was change.” Angela Braly of the managed-care firm Wellpoint spoke about how healthcare reform was changing the focus of her business: “We were really working to transform ourselves as an organization and to help transform healthcare in the United States from a system that had in many respects been business to business. Most of our customers historically were employers, and there was a big transition we were anticipating partly as a result of healthcare reform, but we thought it should be our driving force in any event, to be a truly consumer-focused company.”

Change and new challenges are inevitable, so CEOs must be skilled at taking on a wide range of both internal and external challenges facing their companies, including setting priorities and setting others up for success. As David Thodey put it, “Leadership was pretty important. People observed what I did and what I spent my time on. As a CEO, how you spent your time became more and more important as you went along.”

As a leader in your organization, what keeps you awake at night?

No one wants friction in their products. Everyone works to reduce it. Yet it sneaks in everywhere. We collectively praise a service, app, or design that masterfully reduces friction. We also appreciate minimalism. We love when products are artfully distilled down to their essence. How do we achieve these broadly appreciated design goals?

Frictionless and minimalism are related but not necessarily the same. Often they are conflated which can lead to design debates that are difficult to resolve.

A design can be minimal but still have a great deal of friction. The Linux command line interface is a great example of minimal design with high friction. You can do everything through a single prompt, as long as you know what to type and when. The minimalism is wonderful, but the ability to get going comes with high friction. The Unix philosophy of small cooperating tools is wonderfully minimal (every tool does a small number of things and does them well), but the learning and skills required are high friction.

• Minimalist design is about reducing the surface area of an experience.
• Frictionless design is about reducing the energy required by an experience.

When debating a design choice, feature addition, or product direction it can help to clarify whether a point of view originates from a perspective of keeping things minimal or reducing friction. If people discussing a decision start from this common understanding, I bet a decision will be reached sooner. Essentially, is the debate about adding a step or experience fork, or is it about adding something at all?

Product managers need to choose features to add. That is what makes all of this so difficult. As great as it is to stay pure and within original intent, if you and the team don’t enhance the capabilities of your product then someone will do what you do, but with a couple of more things or a different factoring and you’ll be left in the dust.

Therefore the real design challenge is not simply maintaining minimalism, but enhancing a product without adding more friction. Let’s assume you built a product that does something very exciting and has a very low friction to usage and does so with a minimal feature set. The next efforts are not about just watching your product, but about deciding how to address shortcoming, enhance, or otherwise improve the product to grow users, revenue, and popularity. The risk with every change is not simply failing to maintain minimalism, but introducing friction that becomes counterproductive to your goals.

When you look back you will be amazed at how the surface area of the product has expanded and how your view of minimalism has changed. Finding the right expression of new features such that you can maintain a minimalist approach is a big part of the design challenge as well.

There’s an additional design challenge. The first people who use your product will likely be the most enthusiastic, often the most technical, and in general the most desirous of features that introduce friction. In other words you will get the most positive feedback by adding features that ultimately will result in a product with a lot more friction.

Product managers and designers need to find the right balance as the extremes of doing nothing (staying minimal) and listening to customers (adding features) will only accelerate your path to replacement either by a product with more features or a product with less friction.

Low-Friction Design Patterns

Assuming you’re adding features to a product, the following are six design patterns to follow, each essentially reducing friction in your product. They cause the need to learn, consider, futz, or otherwise not race through the product to get something done.

• Decide on a default rather than options
• Create one path to a feature or task
• Offer personalization rather than customization
• Stick with changes you make
• Build features, not futzers
• Guess correctly all the time

Decide on a default rather than options. Everything is a choice. Any choice can be A/B tested or debated as to whether it works or not. The more testing you do the more likely you are to find a cohorts of people who prefer different approaches. The natural tendency will be to add an option or setting to allow people to choose their preference or worse you might interrupt their flow to ask preference. Make a choice. Take a stand. Every option is friction in the system (and code to maintain). When we added the wheel to the mouse in Office 97 there was a split in the team over whether the wheel should scroll down or whether it should zoom in/out. From the very first release there was an option to appease the part of the team that felt zoom was more natural. Even worse, the Word team went and did a ton of work to make zoom performant since it was fairly unnatural at the time.

Create one path to a feature or task. You add a new feature all is good—you’re in X in your product and then you can do Z. Then someone points out that there are times when you are doing Y in your product and you also want to do Z. Where there was once one path to get to a feature you now think about adding a second path. Maybe that sounds easy enough. Then a few iterations down the road and you have 5 different ways to get to Z. This whole design process leads to shortcuts, floating buttons, context menus, and more. Again all of which are favored by your early adopters and add friction for everyone else, and also add code. Pick the flow and sequence and stick with it. The most famous debate of all between Windows and Mac was over right click and it still rages. But the design energy to populate context menus and the cognitive load over knowing what you can or cannot do from there is real. How many people have right clicked on a file in the Windows desktop and clicked “Send” only to be launched into some Outlook configuration dialog when it would have been frictionless to always know that insert attachment in mail works and nothing will fail.

Offer personalization rather than customization. Early adopters of a product love to customize and tweak. That’s the nature of being a tech enthusiast. The theory is that customization makes a product easier to use because every use case is different enough that the time and effort saved by customization is worth it and important. In managing a product over time, customization becomes an engineering impossibility to maintain. When you want to change behavior or add a feature but it isn’t there or moved you introduce an engineering impossibility. The ability in Office to reorganize all the toolbars and menus seemed super cool at the time. Then we wanted to introduce a new scaleable structure that would work across resolutions and input devices (the ribbon). The problem was not just the upgrade but the reality that the friction introduced in using Office by never knowing where the menus might be (at the extreme, one could open a document that would rearrange the UX) was so high the product was unusable. Enterprise customers were rearranging the product such that people couldn’t take courses or buy books on how to use Office. The constraint led to the addition of a single place for personalization (Quick Access Toolbar) which ultimately allowed for a much lower friction design overall by enabling personalized efficiency without tweaking the whole experience.

Stick with changes you make. The ultimate design choice is when you change how a feature used by lots of customers works. You are choosing to deliberately upend their flow and add friction. At the same time the job of designing a product is moving it forward to new scenarios and capabilities and sometimes that means revisiting a design choice perhaps one that is the standard. It takes guts to do this, especially because you’re not always right. Often the path is to introduce a “compatibility mode” or a way to turn your new product into the old and comfortable product. This introduces three problems. First, you have to decide what the default will be (see the first rule above). Second, you have to decide if/how to enhance the old way of doing things while you’re also adding new things. Third, you have to decide when down the road you remove the old way, but in reality that will be never because you already told customers you value it enough to keep it around. But adding compatibility mode seems so easy and customer friendly! Ultimately you’re creating a technical debt that you can never dig out of. At the same time, failing to make big changes like this almost certainly means your product will be surpassed in the marketplace. See this HBS case on the Office 2007 Ribbon design http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=34113 ($).

Build features, not futzers. Tools for creativity are well-known to have elaborate palettes for formatting, effects, and other composition controls. Often these are built on amazing “engines” that manage shapes, text, or image data. Historically, tools of creativity have prided themselves on exposing the full range of capabilities enabled by these engines. These vast palettes of features and capabilities came to define how products and compete in the marketplace. In today’s world of mobility, touch interfaces, and timely/continuous productivity people do not necessarily want to spend time futzing with all the knobs and dials and seek to minimize time from idea to presentation—call this the Instagram effect. Yet even today we see too many tools that are about debugging your work, which is vastly different than getting work done. When a person needs a chart, a table, a diagram or an image how can you enable them to build that out of high-level concepts rather than the primitives that your engine supports? I was recently talking to the founder of an analytics company struggling with customer input on tweaking visualization which was adding complexity and taking engineering time away from adding whole new classes of visualization (like maps or donut charts). You’ll receive a lot of input from early customers to enable slightly different options or adjustments which will both challenge minimalism and add friction to your product without growing the breadth of scenarios your product enables. Staying focused on delivering features will enable your product to do more.

Guess correctly all the time. Many of the latest features, especially those based on machine learning or statistical models involve taking action based on guessing what comes next. These types of features are magical, when they work. The challenge is they don’t always work and that drives a friction-filled user experience. As you expand your product to these areas you’re going to want to find the right balance of how much to add and when, and patience with guessing too much too soon is a good practice. For better or worse, customers tend to love features that guess right 100% of the time and even if you’re wrong only 1% of the time, that 1% feels like a much higher error rate. Since we know we’re going to be learning and iterating in this regard, a best practice is to consider how frictionless you can make incorrect guesses. In other words, how much energy is required to skip a suggestion, undo an action, or otherwise keep the flow going and not stop to correct what the software thought was right but wasn’t. Let’s just call this, lessons from “bullets and numbering” in Word :-)

Finally, a word of caution on what happens as you expand your customer base when it comes to adding features. Anything you want to do in a product can be “obvious” either from usage data or from customer input. The challenge in product management is to create a core set of principles or beliefs about how you want to move the product forward that allow you to maintain the essential nature of your product while adding new features. The tension between maintaining existing customers via stability or incremental improvements versus keeping pace with where the marketplace is heading is the classic design challenge in technology products.

It shouldn’t be much of a surprise, but a great deal of product bloat comes from adding the obvious feature or directly listening to customers, or by failing to stick with design patterns. Ironically, efforts to enhance products for today’s customers are often the very features that add friction, reduce minimalism, and lead to overall bloat.

Bauhaus to Bloatware

This march from Bauhaus to Bloatware is well-known in our industry. It is part of a cycle that is very difficult to avoid. It is not without irony that your best and most engaged customers are often those pushing you to move faster down this path. Most every product in every segment starts minimal and adds features over time. At each juncture in the evolution of the product there is a tension over whether additions are the right marketplace response or simply bloat.

This march (and tension) continues until some complete rethinking introduces a new minimal product addressing most of the same need but from a different perspective. The cycle then starts again. Operating systems, databases, instruction sets, peripheral connection, laptops, interfaces, word processors, and anything you can name has gone through this cycle.

This re-evolution or reimagination of a product is key to the long term viability of any technology.

By adhering to a set of design principles you are able to expand the breadth of use cases your product serves while working to avoid simply adding more friction to the core use cases.

—Steven Sinofsky (@stevesi)

After publication three typos were fixed and the example of personalization clarified. 

John Bartram had what had to be one of the most unusual jobs in 1700s colonial America. At a time when most of his fellow Quakers were farming, Bartram—who had become interested in botany from a young age—traveled the colonies collecting seeds from various plants. He'd then build boxes, barrels and crates, load them up with the seeds, and ship them off to eager European buyers interested in growing North American plants. "Bartram's Boxes" became famous among European botanists, and by all accounts his business was booming.

In addition to indirectly altering the landscape of Europe, the box-making botanist left behind Bartram's Garden, an eight-acre botanical garden outside of Philadelphia that is still standing today. Sadly, in 2010 a storm ripped through the Garden, toppling more than 50 trees belonging to 13 different species of wood.

Bartram's Garden subsequently wanted to find something meaningful to do with the fallen trees, and they found it by collaborating with the nearby Center for Art in Wood. The two organizations have teamed up to create an unusual exhibition called "Bartram's Boxes Remix." Three dozen artists from around the country were invited to create reinterpretations of Bartram's boxes, using the fallen trees as the raw material.

Unfortunately the Center for Art in Wood's web presentation of the pieces is quite poor; there are no artist's statements next to their work, leaving us with no information as to what their concept was beyond what we can see. But perhaps the on-site presentation is better, and since the show will begin traveling the country this June, some of you may get to see it in person. Click that link above to see the schedule.

Every stage of the B2B buyer’s lifecycle is unique – not only to them but also to the type of business you’re engaged in. Your prospects and customers have their particular goals for what they’re trying to get during each step in the journey, and as a marketer, you’ve got your own idea of the best possible outcomes. That’s why identifying and tracking the metrics that matter most, throughout every stage of the journey, is so important to your success.

In Rethinking the Role of Marketing, the recent report from Gleanster and Act-On, the results of the survey of B2B marketers highlighted a huge difference in the way top performing organizations meet the needs of their customers. The report found that the most successful marketing teams are taking full control of the customer lifecycle throughout every phase of the relationship, from initial awareness and acquisition to retention and expansion. Marketers at average firms, on the other hand, tended to focus on acquiring new leads and converting them into customers.

Read the full report from Gleanster and Act-On to learn more about what separates leading organizations from the rest, and find out how top companies are taking control of the full customer lifecycle with new metrics, technology, and a refined focus.

Clearly, the job of B2B marketers today is to not only understand every step in the buyer’s journey but also to gain visibility into how marketing, sales, and service teams are helping to move the prospect along, stage by stage, to purchase and beyond. In order to be successful at tracking and managing this journey, you need to find the right metrics for your business. With this reporting in place, you can identify the key drivers that move the process toward a sale – and a profitable lifetime relationship. You can focus your resources on what’s working and adjust or eliminate what’s not. And you can continually refine your approach to improve results over time.

In this series of blog posts, we’ll take a look at the five stages of the customer lifecycle in depth: attract, capture, nurture, convert, and expand, and determine the metrics you need to measure in each one.

Measuring Your Magnetism

In part one of this series, we’ll focus on the analytics of attraction, because that’s where the relationship begins. You only get one chance to make a great first impression. Whether you’re making a new friend or trying to find new B2B customers, the attraction stage is key to success. It’s one of the reasons speed dating is so popular. Sometimes, the first minute you meet someone can tell you everything you need to know. And so it is with B2B marketers as they try to win the awareness of their prospects. That first moment, when you get them to take a look, is often the deciding factor as to whether or not you’ll be able to hook them, then reel them in.

Of course, there are many ways a new potential customer could find you – or that you can use to find them, wherever they may be. It’s important to understand the most likely channels so you can deliver the right content in each one at the perfect time. You need to have a good idea of what your customer is like, which type and size of company they work for, the kinds of problems they need to solve, why they might buy from you, and where they’ll search to get information. With this level of insight, you’ll be able to create a strong content creation and marketing plan.

How many people visit your site? How engaging is your content? How popular is your brand­? These are the important questions you’ll need to answer when examining this stage of the customer lifecycle.

Attraction Metrics

Now let’s take a look at the metrics you can measure during the attraction phase. Keep in mind, you shouldn’t (and probably couldn’t) measure every single one. Choose a primary metric to focus on and a couple of secondary metrics to track. Otherwise, you’ll be overloaded with information. And remember, you don’t want to just report and analyze trends, you’ll want to make sure the analysis is actionable.

• People visiting your website: Track the number of individuals visiting your website during the month. Take note of any trends in the demographics of your visitors, such as the sudden rise in traffic from a certain geographic location, for example.
• Bounce rate: The percentage of visitors who enter your site and exit it on the same page – “bounce” – without visiting any other pages. This metric can be ambiguous, however. A high bounce rate could mean people found what they wanted quickly and left. Or it might mean they were looking for something else. User experience testing and surveys can supplement this information.
• Social media followers: For this metric, select a group of social media sites you are actively participating in and sum up the number of followers. Stick to the same sites as you track over time. Track how engaged these followers are with your brand.
• Social shares: Understand the number of shares in a given tracking period for each social media site you track.
• Content on your site: Look at how people engage with your blog posts, web pages, white papers, webinar descriptions and registration forms, data sheets, and so on. Track the number of downloads, views, and leads generated by each one.
• Media visibility: Understand the number of press releases that your PR department creates and distributes, as well as the number of stories picked up by blogs and media outlets.
• Number of events, webinars, and meetings: Note how many events your company has an active presence in during the time period; these could be virtual or real-world. Track how many leads you get from them.
• Google ranking: This is the most visible result of all your online activities. Pick a keyword or phrase that is most relevant to your business. Type that phrase into Google and see where your site ranks. If your SEO and content efforts are consistent and more successful than your competitor’s, your company’s position will probably rise over time.
• Search volume for brand: Use Google Trends to check the trend in searches for your brand, performed by people directly in the search engine. This can give you a general idea of your online brand awareness. Note that the values shown in Google Trends are dynamic; therefore, the individual values for a given month will keep changing, requiring historical updates.

When it comes to attracting attention and creating awareness, the key is to measure every activity that’s intended to increase your visibility and share of audience. What metrics do you track to measure the success of your awareness campaigns? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Be sure to download the eBook, The New Marketing Metrics for B2B, to get the customer lifecycle metrics for every stage of the journey, as well as a five-step plan to help you analyze your business process and continually improve the results of your marketing.

Let this be a wake-up call for business leaders: The employees with the longest tenures in your company are also the least likely to be engaged.

Somewhere along the way, most workers lose some of their motivation to make a difference and create value for their employers. Many grow apathetic over time and spend each day doing the minimum to get by. Some nurse grudges for years and even undermine the company when they get the chance.

 

It might be tempting to say this is their problem, but in fact it’s yours. In today’s knowledge-based economy, companies and products are intricately specialized and experience counts for a lot. Retaining long-tenured, highly capable employees might be challenging, but minimizing their turnover is more practical than churning through new hires who, even after costly training, might or might not turn out to be a fit for the complex requirements of a role.

More positively, the typical inverse relationship between tenure and engagement points to an important untapped opportunity for most organizations: the dramatic performance gains that can be made by thwarting it, and keeping long-tenured employees engaged.

Gallup’s data suggest that the highest performing individuals in companies have three things going for them: (1) they have tenures of a decade or more in their organizations; (2) they are engaged in their work; and (3) they are in roles where the expectations of the job align well their natural talents. Each variable affects outcomes on its own, but the highest performance comes from the combination.

But here’s the unfortunate fact: in the typical company among the hundreds we’ve studied, this combination exists in just 5% of individual contributors.

Tenure matters not only because years of work in a given profession yield deep specialist knowledge. Those years also cultivate a nuanced understanding of how a company operates and how to maneuver through organizational channels and get things done with a minimum of friction. Through countless hours of collaboration with the same coworkers and teams, veteran employees gain tacit knowledge that allows them to predict how colleagues will behave and anticipate how they will respond to everyday situations. This sort of in-depth knowledge is immensely useful to employers, but prospective employees can’t obtain it in business school or replicate it by working in a similar company or role.

Indeed, numerous academic studies have found that individuals with longer organizational tenures tend to achieve higher levels of performance. Their improvement trajectory, likely a mix of their growing capabilities and the growing importance of the jobs they hold, might become less steep over time, yet it continues upward year after year. Experience is such a strong driver of performance that it allows long-tenured employees to outperform the average even despite being less engaged than their colleagues.  Still, to count on tenure alone to deliver competitive levels of performance would be folly.

Engagement also makes a big difference. Gallup gathered the evidence that this is true in the course of working with hundreds of organizations trying to increase their employees’ engagement. The effect is pronounced even in employees of under two year’s tenure – perhaps because greater engagement makes them more likely to interpret and use their early experiences productively.  The effect of engagement on performance continues throughout the employee life cycle to employees of long-term tenures (10 years or more).

What kind of managerial interventions can increase engagement? Here’s a strong hint. Our past research shows clearly that employees have the best chance of being engaged (and staying with their companies) when they also report that their managers understand them and give them the chance to do what they do best every day. Managers can help employees find ways to do more of what they’re good at.

This brings us to the question of natural talents, and the importance of matching people well with roles. Success starts with hiring employees with the right talents for jobs in the first place – or failing that, being quick to reposition them in jobs that fit them better. Perhaps not surprisingly, people’s natural talents matter a great deal to how well they do their jobs. This shows up in hard data: of tenure, engagement and talent, Gallup finds the latter to be the strongest predictor of performance.

To put a finer point on that, our analysis shows that talented employees with longer tenures in their jobs can achieve above-average performance even in work environments that are not very engaging. Alternatively, talented and engaged employees can achieve above-average performance even with less than two years of tenure. The effect of talent is only minimized to below-average performance when a talented person has less than ten years of tenure and is actively disengaged at work.

To understand the combined effect of tenure, engagement and talent on performance, my colleagues and I launched a large-scale study. This study included recent data from 20 studies across seven organizations and more than 7,000 individual contributors in various roles, including customer service, call centers, financial consultants, sales representatives, nurses, support staff and clinical staff.

Our finding that just 5% of employees are in the proverbial “sweet spot” — engaged at work, in roles that are the right fit for them and at their company for 10 years or more —likely indicates that few organizations are examining their workforce to understand where their people fit in this configuration. Yet our results suggest there’s much they can gain by doing so.

Employees who hit the trifecta of tenure, engagement, and talent perform 18% higher than the average employee and 35% higher than a worker who goes zero for three. For skilled, production, and support staff, this equates to a financial impact of $6 million and $12 million, respectively, per 1,000 employees. For highly educated professionals, the economic impact essentially doubles from $12 to $23 million per 1,000 workers.

In many companies, it may seem unrealistic to have a surplus of workers with ten or more years of tenure. Even among workers who have less tenure and are engaged and highly talented for their role, their performance is 9 percent better than average and 24 percent higher than someone with low talent who is actively disengaged.

The most important thing that companies must do to get the most from their workforce is to align their talent, engagement and tenure strategies. Using scientific predictive analytics to hire people with the right talents for their role gives them a better shot at becoming engaged because they have more opportunity to do what they do best. And pairing talented employees with great managers helps to boost and sustain engagement, increasing the likelihood of retention. This leads to a longer, more meaningful tenure for employees and, ultimately, a more productive and valuable workforce poised to support high organizational performance. The three parts of the configuration inherently support one another. Organizations need to combine them in a more strategic way.

How important is face-to-face networking to sales, relationships, career, and success?

I asked my commercial insurance agent, John Cantrell, to give me a synopsis of his networking strategies. John has been a friend, client, and vendor for the past 22 years. Here are two important facts about John:

1. His insurance business has exploded with growth over the past 22 years.

2. He is a MAJOR business networker in Charlotte.

I wonder if these two facts are connected? (Hint: THEY ARE!)

I asked John to tell me what networking has meant to him and his business over the last 20 years. His immediate answer was, “It has been the foundation of my most valuable clients, friends, suppliers, and relationships!”

Here’s the background of how to succeed as a local business networker from arguably the toughest sales category on the planet: insurance.

Here is John’s story and tips in his own words:

When I started in the insurance business, the first things I did was join the Charlotte Chamber.  I started in the insurance business in 1993 as a fresh graduate from East Carolina with a finance degree. My dad gave me an opportunity, a desk, a chair, and a salary with a declining scale. He wasn't going to throw me into the 10 foot deep water immediately, but he did make the impact known that I had to learn how to eat what I kill.

Shortly after joining the Chamber, I was a little discouraged. One of my best friends, Richard Herd, and I were talking one day about me not continuing to participate in the Chamber. It was about six months after my joining and he said, "just stick it out, get involved, get on some committees, and see what happens after a year. If you don't like it, I'll pay for your membership.”

Little did I know that 20 years later some of the people that I met then would be my best friends and longest term clients.  People like Richard Herd, Jeffrey Gitomer, Michael Meehan, Eileen Covington.

Here is John’s networking and leadership history in the Charlotte Chamber:

1. Business Growth Network. Served on committees welcoming new members and meeting other small business owners.
2. Entrepreneur of the Year Awards. Committee Member and Chair for three years. Involved in selecting, interviewing, and running the event held at the Convention Center.
3. Charlotte Chamber Business Owner Peer Group. For five years he met monthly with non-competing business owners to discuss business problems. How to hire, fire, train, and market business.
4. Chamber New Member Orientation. For two years he chaired and led a monthly meeting to explain how the Chamber works for new members.
5. Charlotte Area Councils. John has been involved in this for ten years and he’s still active at the monthly lunch meetings where they bring in a speaker and offer time to network.
6. Business After Hours. Cocktails after work with other business professionals at different venues around town. Great way to keep friendships current.
7. Charlotte Chamber Board of Advisor. A higher level membership that attracts more of the high-level business owners and managers.

John says, “It's about the developing core networking places and participating, getting involved, and establishing a leadership position. But, everyone is different. Some people are morning people, and some are night owls. Work at your best system and process that lets you get the most done in the time that you dedicate to networking.”

Here are John’s other core networking groups described in his own words:  

Rotary. I have been in Rotary clubs since 1997, where I was the founder of Mecklenburg South Rotary. Rotary has been a great organization to participate in. It is not a sales networking organization. It is a service club that gives you the opportunity to meet and network with others.

Leads groups. I have been in numerous different groups that have differing levels of success. One of the best things that you can do in those is use it as opportunities to build relationships with people that you trust and value and work in similar circles as you do.

NOTE FROM JOHN TO NEWCOMERS: When you are brand-new in the sales world, you don't have a lot of things filling your calendar. Fill it with networking events and Chamber events. Fill it with opportunities to meet and build your network of people. The best strategy is to help them achieve the things they're trying to achieve. Pay it forward and you’ll always get paid back.

NOTE FROM JEFFREY: Thank you John for providing your personal achievements. You are a model networker. I hope many other salespeople and businesspeople will follow your path.

In business today there is an emphasis on leveraging big data analytics in order to improve customer service. There is much to derive about consumer behavior and market trends that can all be found in the stacks of incoming data received by customer service industries such as contact centers, for example. So, how is open source software relevant to the customer service industry?  As of late, many organizations are opting for open source solutions, rather than proprietary software, to augment customer service data analysis.

Recently, HP developed Haven Predictive Analysis which uses the Distributed R open source project- based on the original R language. Incorporating open source into the organization’s newest data management system boasts the scale to which open source additions are entering even proprietary creations. HP’s predictive analysis tool offers business leaders in the customer service industry actionable data that once put into action and deciphered by analysts-will better illustrate customer trends, behavior and preferences.

Besides HP’s break-out contribution to leveraging big data, let’s look into a few more open source CRM tools poised to improve business intelligence in the future:

• Sugar: This open source contribution from SugarCRM allows customer service businesses to function with higher efficiency. The technology offers assistance in tracking leads, contract management, reporting and sales-force automation, as well as other advantageous marketing tools.
• Zurmo: Creative innovation shines through in this particular open source CRM platform. This software provides businesses with similar functions as Sugar, but set up in a game format. Each time Zurmo tools are deployed the user receives positive reinforcement, making it a beneficial and fun addition to individuals in the customer service industry.

As we forge ahead into the future of business intelligence and big data management, organizations are sure to find the benefits of adopting open source CRM tools in favor of inflexible proprietary software. Interested in using open source CRM in your own business? Make sure you look into the do’s and don’ts of open source license compliance before you begin.

*Editors Note: This is a guest post by Sean Kester, Head of Sales Development at SalesLoft and Anthony Zhang, Director of Sales at SalesLoft. SalesLoft is an end to end solution for sales development prospecting, emails, phone calls, and other activity.

Sales Development is not a new concept, but it is finally coming out of the shadows and into the spotlight.

High growth companies have used this form of professional appointment setting as the main driving force in their customer acquisition machine.

The Sales Development team works alongside the sales organization to set qualified demos and appointments and therefore must form an agreement. An SLA (Service Level Agreement) outlines the “code of conduct” between the two departments. The goal is a documented set of rules, guidelines, and expectations between the two parties to remove gray area and leave as much black and white as possible.

---

Every Sales and Sales Development Team needs a Service Level Agreement! Here’s @SalesLoft’s
Click To Tweet

---

The key to success is having the heads of both departments in the same room to hammer out the compromise. Open dialogue and transparent communication is integral to ensuring the needs of both parties are met and and buy in from both sides is achieved.

SalesLoft’s Head of Sales Development, Sean Kester, and Director of Sales, Anthony Zhang, collaborated to create their internal SLA.

1. Lead Qualification

• Sales Development Responsibility: SDRs qualify prospects based on the first two sets of the ANUM model, Authority and Need. If the prospect does not have Authority (Can they sign? Were they asked to look into this solution by their manager? Do they hold the credit card?), or Need (Do their prospects exist on LinkedIn? Do they have a sales team? Do they actively prospect to discover new leads?), then the Sales Development Rep will not receive credit or commission for the demo.
  • Outbound: Outbound SDRs agree that they will identify and prospect only into the ideal customer profile:
    • Titles: VP’s, Manager’s, Directors of Sales, Marketing, Inside Sales, Business Development, Sales Development, Market Development, etc.
    • Departments: Sales, Sales Development, Marketing, Marketing Development, etc.
    • Company Sizes: SMB, Enterprise, etc.
    • Industries: ex. Software, Marketing, IT, Finance, etc.
    • Function: Lead generation and new business development
  • Inbound: Inbound SDRs will respond to marketing generated leads and inquiries to identify whether the marketing generated lead falls under the Authority and Need qualifiers before they pass to the Sales Executive.
• Sales Executive Responsibility: The Sales Executive will assume that the prospect / lead falls under the first two sets of the ANUM model, Authority and Need. The Sales Executive will dig further into the prospects’ situation with specific questions to identify problems and gaps in their prospecting strategies, and create a sense of Urgency. Once Urgency is created through various questions, pricing is presented and budget is identified.

2. Lead Passing:

• Sales Development Responsibility: Once the lead has been qualified, the SDR will access the Lead Pass Sheet and pass the lead out in a Round-Robin fashion. If the Sales Executive that is next in line is not available for the demo at the proposed time, the SDR may skip that particular Sales Executive and move to the next one in order to get the demo in place. However, the SDR agrees to make the previous Sales Executive their priority, and pass the lead to them when the next demo has been scheduled.
• Sales Executive Responsibility: The Sales Executive understands that a “perfect” Round-Robin lead pass system is not always feasible because of conflicting times, calendars, and other priorities. The Sales Executive will trust the Sales Development Team and Process in receiving a fair and equal amount of demos.

3. Lead Ownership:

• Sales Development Responsibility: The SDR will assume full ownership and responsibility over the prospect until the prospect has completed a demo with the Sales Executive. In cases of Demo Missed, Demo Rescheduled, Demo Cancelled, and No Shows, the SDR is required to reschedule the meeting back onto the Sales Executive’s calendar.
  The Sales Development Rep will not receive any commission until the demo has been completed.
  It is in the SDRs’ best interest to send a reminder email the night before or morning of the meeting to ensure the best chance of the prospect showing up.
• Sales Executive Responsibility:
  • Post Demo: The Sales Executive will assume full ownership and responsibility over the prospect once the demo has been completed. This includes Follow-Up Demos, meeting with additional members from the team, and coordinating next steps.
  • Prospect Running Late: The Sales Executive will have a “small window of ownership” if the prospect is running late. The Sales Executive may send an email to the prospect 5-7 minutes after the proposed meeting time to confirm the meeting and send a reminder to the prospect. After 11-13 minutes, the Sales Executive must chat, call, or email the SDR to notify them that the prospect was a No-Show.
  • Giving Up Ownership: If the prospect becomes disengaged and “goes dark,” it is the Sales Executives’ responsibility to either continue to re-engage, or pass it back to the SDR lead pool to prospect into with the understanding that the prospect will fall back into Round-Robin rotation.
  • Failure to Show: If the Sales Executive, in a case of emergency, cannot run the demo that has been scheduled, they must immediately notify the SDR and work with them to find a substitute Sales Executive that can run the meeting. The Sales Executive will also forfeit their demo to the other Sales Executive. It will not count against the Sales Executive that takes the demo, and Sales Executive will not be backfilled for their forfeited demo. If a Sales Executive does not show up (or is late) for a demo that is scheduled on their calendar, punitive measures may be taken.

4. Google Calendar:

• Sales Development Responsibility: The SDR should not schedule any meetings over the Sales Executives’ existing events. The SDR understands that if an open slot is available on the Sales Executives’ calendar, then it is safe to assume that the Sales Executive is available at that time. If a Sales Development Rep schedules a meeting on top of an existing event on the Sales Executives’ calendar, it is the Sales Development Reps’ responsibility to reschedule that meeting for the Sales Executive.
• Sales Executive Responsibility: The Sales Executive is responsible for keeping their Google calendar updated at all times. They must block off all “busy times” on their calendar, which includes holidays, vacations, lunches, doctors’ appointments, phone calls, meetings, and other times at which they may not be available to run a demo. The calendar must be visible and clear in order for the SDR to schedule a demo. The Sales Executive agrees to forfeit the demo if they fail to mark an existing event on a calendar, and a demo is scheduled over it. In essence, they will be skipped on the Lead Pass Sheet.

5. Marking Demos in CRM and SDR Compensation:

• Sales Development Responsibility: Once the demo has been scheduled, the SDR will create a specific Open Task for the Sales Executive in Salesforce (i.e. BDR Demo 1) for the Sales Executive to close after the demo has been completed. The SDR understands that they are paid based on Demos Completed by the Sales Executive team. The SDR will not actively close any Sales Executive assigned tasks. If this occurs, it is considered fraud by the company (paying themselves) and punitive steps may be taken.
• Sales Executive Responsibility: The Sales Executive understands that the SDR is paid based on their number of Demos Completed on a monthly basis, and are reported on on a weekly basis. The Sales Executive agrees to close the Open Task assigned from the SDR as early as possible, preferably right after the demo has been completed, but at the latest End of Business that day.

6. Trust and Respect Amongst The Teams:

• Sales Development Responsibility: The SDR will assume that the Sales Executive is operating under the best interest of the company, and will do their best to close the deal. The SDR understands that the Sales Executive will, to their fullest potential, understand the situation, needs, and pains of the prospect, and will not “unqualify too early” to “give up too soon.”
• Sales Executive Responsibility: The Sales Executive will assume that all leads passed over qualified to the best of the SDRs’ ability, and were not passed “unscreened.” The Sales Executive will not treat the SDR as a “lesser” person or a personal assistant. The Sales Executive understands that the SDR has one of the hardest jobs at the company, and will at every opportunity, show appreciation and support. They are, after all, lining the Sales Executives’ pockets.

 

The post SalesLoft’s SLA Template for Sales Development appeared first on Sales Hacker.