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Why hacking a Tesla battery may foreshadow an energy revolution
Revolutions that start in the garage are nothing new. The one-car shed in which David Packard and William Hewlett began the partnership that would grow into Hewlett- Packard Co. is known as the birthplace of Silicon Valley.
So Jason Hughes may be on to something.
In a cluttered four-car garage in suburban Deptford, New Jersey, Hughes spent the better part of last year hacking a 1,400-pound battery recovered from a wrecked Tesla Model S and reworking it into a stacked array that can store energy from his solar-power system. His battery tinkering resolves the issue of intermittency since his green power will be available whenever he needs it, night or day, rain or shine.
A day trader by profession, the 31-year-old doesn’t want to save the world. He just wants to get off the grid. He did his homework and concluded that off-the-shelf batteries just don’t yet have the heft he required to achieve that.
The mattress-sized Tesla battery did — it’s elephantine as lithium-ion batteries go — even if it cost him US$20,000 and hundreds of hours of tinkering to make it work. “This is going to be my electric company,” he says.
In his battery obsession and ambition, Hughes turns out to be emblematic of something much grander. Afoot is an unprecedented worldwide effort — equivalent to a kind of a tech-age version of the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb — to amp up, transform and reinvent the humble battery into an element that could profoundly change the global energy paradigm.
Big Players
Consider the crash effort at the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research in suburban Chicago. Within five years, researchers want to create one or more battery types that can “store at least five times more energy than today’s batteries at one-fifth the cost,” according to George Crabtree, an agreeable silver-haired scientist who runs the U.S. Energy Department-backed battery-research skunk works.
Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, leading-edge technology companies like Elon Musk’s Tesla Motors Inc. and scads of startups are getting into the act. Some are seeking to double the capacity and dramatically cut the costs of the lithium-ion battery, the standard in iPhones and electric vehicles. Others are working on mega-scale battery systems using novel chemistries that could cheaply store enough energy to help power entire cities.
Battery entrepreneurs have begun to even talk like revolutionaries. “The ability for a battery company to change the dynamics of the world is what has got us excited,” says Bill Watkins, chief executive officer of Imergy Power Systems Inc., a Fremont, California, startup working on utility-scale batteries. “We can actually make a big difference here. I call it democratizing energy.”
As the former CEO of Seagate Technology Plc, the Silicon Valley digital storage maker, Watkins can speak from experience about tectonic technology shifts. In 1980, a Seagate five-megabyte hard drive that rendered floppy disks obsolete was a US$1,500 PC add on. These days, drives holding two terabytes of data — equivalent to two million megabytes — can be had for a retail price of under US$200.
What’s primarily driving the battery revolution is the phenomenal growth of rooftop and other forms of solar energy and an awakening by renewable energy advocates that storage is the lagging piece of the transformative puzzle. Solar now powers the equivalent of 3.5 million American homes and accounted for 34 percent of all newly installed electricity capacity last year. Wind supplies enough electricity for the equivalent of about 14.7 million U.S. homes, about the same as 52 coal-powered generating plants, according to the Wind Energy Foundation.
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An exponential breakthrough in battery capacity and cost would bulldoze the limitations to adopting renewable energy on a massive scale, be a potent weapon to fight climate change by lowering carbon emissions and potentially bring billions of dollars in profits, never mind fame, to the winners. The knock on renewables is that while fossil fuels keep the power on all the time, solar fades when the sun doesn’t shine and wind power fizzles when the wind doesn’t blow – unless you have a way to store the excess for when you need it.
“What’s holding back solar and wind isn’t their availability but the fact that the technology to generate renewable energy has lept far ahead of the capacity to store and deploy it round the clock as needed,” says Crabtree of the Joint Center project, which is run out of the federal Argonne National Laboratory.
Prophesies of energy revolutions always come with caveats, of course, and some researchers note that an exponential breakthrough in battery storage and cost has been forecast for more than a decade and still hasn’t arrived. “Of all these other battery technologies people promote, how many of them are real?” says Jeff Dahn, a professor at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia who continues to plug away at making stronger and cheaper lithium-ion batteries. “All that remains to be seen.”
And while hackers like Hughes capture the excitement around battery potential, their very existence demonstrates that cheap home batteries haven’t yet arrived at Home Depot.
That said, Tesla’s Musk in February announced the company will soon unveil a consumer battery that can be used for homes and businesses. Tesla sees the endeavor as a “multi-billion dollar per year one,” according to a job description for the company’s stationary storage unit posted on Tesla’s website.
Recall, too, that naysayers kept telling Texan George Mitchell, the father of the hydraulic fracturing revolution, that it was impossible to economically squeeze oil and natural gas out of tight shale formations. Fracking has upended the energy world. Remember also that people seeing the first briefcase-sized mobile phones scoffed that such a thing would ever be widely adopted. Now, most sixth graders in America have one.
Revolutionary Prospects
Simply doing the math on the ambitions of the Joint Center project — making batteries with five times the capacity at a fifth of the present cost — lays out the stakes and prospects. Electric vehicles would travel more than 400 miles (650 kilometers) on a charge instead of an average of 84 as a Nissan Leaf does now — better than many gasoline-powered vehicles.
Cheaper batteries also mean you could drive an EV off the lot for the same price as a bargain-basement gasoline model, making them truly mainstream. And with the option of charging them with solar power, owners will be able to motor past the local Exxon station without ever stopping — or even having to pay their utilities a dime. Who needs the grid, or the oil companies, then?
At the Geneva International Motor Show, no less than Aston Martin — the famed luxury British carmaker loved by James Bond — said it asked its engineers to produce what they considered “the future of luxury GT motoring.” What they introduced was an electric powered DBX Concept car to be powered by lithium- sulfur cells, no gasoline necessary.
Similarly, as Hughes’s Tesla hack is already demonstrating, homes and businesses will be battery frontiers of their own. The rollout of inexpensive, powerful, compact battery arrays could fundamentally change consumers’ relationship with electric utilities. Homeowners and companies linking solar to batteries could self-generate round the clock and, if they choose to do what Hughes wants to do — fire their power companies.
SolarCity Corp., the Musk-backed rooftop solar installer, has already started offering home rooftop solar systems paired with backup Tesla-made lithium-ion batteries. Solar-battery combinations are poised to become a big business, expected to grow into US$1 billion a year in sales by 2018, according to GTM Research.
Forward-looking utilities could even get into the act, building vast battery arrays that would remove barriers to their harvesting of solar and wind energy, since that energy could be stored and deployed at any time. Economics aside, think of the political windfall of utilities going willingly green.
All this may be coming to a head sooner than most people realize. “Electricity markets will be turned upside down within the next 10-20 years, driven by solar and batteries,” says an August 2014 report from investment bank UBS AG. So might the auto industry and the oil companies.
Shape-Shifting Moment
In the case of Jason Hughes’s Tesla hack, it feels like one of those shape-shifting moments: the fossil-fuel grid has been a marvel but its time has come and technologically savvy people — rapidly becoming the majority of us — are seeking to connect to the new thing. “I’m not going to drill for oil and refine gasoline in my basement,” says Hughes, “but I can hook up solar panels and run my car.”
Hughes has a kindred spirit in Trond Arvid Rosvik, who lives almost 3,800 miles across the Atlantic in Oslo, Norway. They’ve never met, but Rosvik found Hughes through an Internet forum where Tesla owners swap experiences on everything from finding charging stations to do-it-yourself repairs.
That forum is where Hughes documented his tinkering in exhaustive detail, after Rosvik had finished a project of his own. Tesla employees declined to give Hughes advice on his project though they thought it was “pretty cool,” he says.
Electric car sales in Norway are brisk — representing 18% of all models sold in January — because the oil-rich country also has some of Europe’s highest fuel prices, the result of steep taxes. Among the biggest perks for electric vehicle owners is the right to zip along in empty bus lanes while fossil-fuel powered cars sit in gridlock. Electric cars also avoid sales and registration taxes.
I’m not going to drill for oil and refine gasoline in my basement, but I can hook up solar panels and run my car
Teslas are also popular in Norway but Rosvik ended up with a power plant taken from a Nissan Leaf. It took him a weekend to hack the Leaf battery pack and connect it to a group of panels – – allowing him to use solar power 24 hours a day in summer months.
He estimates the whole system, incorporating batteries scavenged from crashed and discarded Leafs, cost him less than 60,000 kronor (US$7,732).
Rosvik, like Hughes, isn’t an engineer, even though he has technical training — he’s certified to repair televisions and electronics. He’s nonchalant about the challenges. “I wouldn’t say it’s sophisticated, really,” he says. “I have never worked with lithium batteries but with a little Google it wasn’t that difficult.”
Tesla said it will have more information about its storage products in the next few months. Nissan didn’t want to discuss hackers tinkering with its Leaf batteries, but a spokesman said the company has looked into the potential of a second life for those batteries and, in fact, has a solar array tied to Leaf battery packs outside of its Nissan USA office in Franklin, Tennessee.
While it may not be hard, a lot of the hackers’ tinkering falls squarely into the “do not try this at home” category. As the 2013 battery overheating issues aboard Boeing 787 jetliners demonstrated, powerful lithium batteries can be unstable even in the hands of professionals. In worst-case scenarios, high temperatures can lead to a “thermal runaway,” a self- sustaining reaction that can cause violent explosions.
Back in the U.S., Hughes is undaunted. He and his fiancé, Ashley, recently moved to a 4,550 square-foot house in Hickory, North Carolina. He is in the process of installing 36 solar panels on the roof and another 66 in the backyard. With a second Tesla battery, he thinks he can move the house entirely off the grid, with enough juice on tap for a week of backup power even with very little sunlight.
In all, it’s a large-scale, grown-up version of home experiments Hughes conducted with his dad when in the fifth grade, connecting rudimentary solar panels to charge car batteries that would then power their coffee maker, microwave and Sega Genesis video game console.
While neighbours may find the setup odd, Hughes is convinced his thinking will spread as high-performance batteries get cheaper. “I don’t see how it can’t,” he says. “What I’m working on now for myself, 20 years from now is going to be pretty commonplace.”
Or as Crabtree from the Joint Center battery project describes the transformation under way, “Homeowners will begin to say, ‘Hey, nothing is stopping me from putting a solar panel on the roof and a battery in the basement.’ And it will kind of get perfected and refined by doing, and it’ll be the citizen innovator that will make it happen.”
Whether garage tinkerers, think-tank scientists or highly evolved tech companies, a lot of time, money and energy is going into battery research. Here are the major types of batteries being worked on:
Lithium-sulfur batteries
Potential — Sulfur is cheap and research indicates lithium-sulfur batteries have a higher energy density and reduced weight, making them a possible more powerful, less- costly replacement for lithium-ion in products like iPhones, cars and airplanes. The goal is to ratchet them up to store utility-scale amounts of renewable energy.
How they work — Lithium-ion batteries employ positive and negative electrodes with an electrolyte in between. They charge or discharge by moving ions back and forth across the electrolyte. Introducing a sulfur-based electrode to the mix increases the potency of that basic concept and reduces the chances of nasty accidents from overheating.
Who’s working on them — In Oxfordshire, west of London, in a suburban business park next to a medieval village of thatched- roof cottages, startup Oxis Energy Ltd. is manufacturing lithium-sulfur batteries that it says can be nearly five times more powerful than lithium-ion.
Oxis’s pitch isn’t just cost but that incorporating sulfur boosts power from lithium and allows batteries to be charged and discharged completely without damage, improving their practical capacity. It’s signed up a slate of blue-chip partners including French chemical giant Arkema SA and Germany’s Bayer AG to further develop the technology for cars, renewable power and electronics.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a research arm of the U.S. Energy Department, has also been working on an all-solid lithium-sulfur variation. Meanwhile, the Joint Center on Energy Storage Research has two different lithium-sulfur prototype candidates in the works — one a “conventional concept with crystalline electrodes” and the other a “semi-flow battery with one fluid electrode.”
Lithium-sulfur batteries have had one high-profile success: The Zephyr solar-powered airplane, which has broken multiple flight records, relied on the technology.
Liquid-metal batteries
Potential — Large, inexpensive, easy-to-construct batteries that would allow unprecedented grid-scale storage. Their fluid nature means they avoid the failure mechanisms common to solid-state batteries. Laboratory results indicate they can last 15 years without losing performance.
How they work — Constructed in large, modular containers, the batteries’ positive and negative electrodes are melted down, separated by an electrolyte of molten salt. The elements all float in separate layers due to different densities. They charge and discharge by the direction of the movement of the electrons.
Who’s working on them — Cambridge, Massachusetts-based startup Ambri Inc. is working on liquid-metal batteries based on the research of Donald Sadoway, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientist who studies “extreme electrochemistry.”
Ambri’s attracted backers including Silicon Valley investor Khosla Ventures, Bill Gates and French oil producer Total SA, raising more than US$50 million in equity.
Because power can’t yet be stored for long periods at a large scale, the current electric grid “is the largest delivery system on the planet with zero inventory,” says Sadoway. “Imagine if every time you took a shower it had to be raining. That’s where we’re at with electricity.”
Ambri has built a modular battery system with a capacity of two megawatt-hours — enough to make a dent in utility-scale power requirements. The company is working to test a device with New York utility Consolidated Edison Inc.
Flow batteries
Potential — Like liquid metal batteries, they are being aimed at utilities and large-scale commercial and military power storage applications. Because they are constructed in large tanks, the size and storage capacity of the battery is only constrained by the size of the tank.
How they work — Electrolytes flow between connected tanks through an electrochemical cell that converts chemical energy to electricity. The battery charges or discharges depending on the direction of the flow. Prototype flow batteries have been shown to hold as much as eight hours or more of stored energy depending on the size of the electrolyte tanks.
Who’s working on them — At its battery skunk works in Fremont, California, Imergy Power Systems CEO Bill Watkins shows a visitor two SUV-sized boxes mounted on flatbed trailers. They are headed to a military installation in Southern California, where the U.S. Navy will use them for a pilot project to run their facilities independent of the grid.
One 30-kilowatt unit can hold enough electricity to power an apartment complex or a small village in India and can be endlessly charged and discharged, Watkins says. Imergy’s batteries employ a form of vanadium — a metallic chemical element — as a key ingredient that it recycles from industrial waste such as oil-field sludge and that it says is cheaper than other forms of vanadium used by competitors.
The company has deployed about 100 of its batteries, mostly in India. It announced a new product line in October and around the same time reached a deal with Foxsemicon Integrated Technology Inc. to build its batteries in China as orders pick up. Imergy is also joining with SunEdison Inc., an investor in the company, to sell solar and battery storage packages.
The Joint Research Center project is working on flow- battery research. Other flow battery companies include American Vanadium Corp., Enstorage Inc., EnerVault Corp., Primus Power Corp., UniEnergy Technologies, ViZn Energy Systems Inc. and ZBB Energy Corp.
Improved lithium-ion
Potential — It’s still the standard-bearer and lithium-ion proponents believe economies of scale and technological advances will keep the workhorse battery at the head of the pack for the foreseeable future.
How they work — They employ positive and negative electrodes with a liquid electrolyte in between. They charge or discharge by moving ions back and forth across the electrolyte.
Who’s working on them — Musk and Tesla Motors clearly believe in the technology. The 43-year-old co-founder and chief executive of Tesla is betting that a US$5-billion factory in the Nevada desert will help bring electric cars and energy storage to the masses.
Tesla’s so-called gigafactory, billed as the world’s largest, will eventually produce more lithium-ion batteries than were made worldwide in 2013. Instead of waiting for a technological breakthrough, Musk is looking to slash the cost of existing battery packs by at least 30 percent after the factory expects to start stamping out units in 2016.
Musk’s effort, in partnership with Panasonic, promises to reduce the cost of lithium-ion batteries to about US$150 a kilowatt hour by 2020, “significantly” below the expense of competing storage options, according to analysts with Morgan Stanley. Canada’s Dalhousie University and Argonne National Laboratory among others also continue to conduct lithium-ion research.
The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post have signed up with a startup that lets readers pay to read individual articles online for 20 cents each
Blendle, an exciting Dutch startup that has attracted 200,000 users in the region to a platform that lets readers make micropayments for individual newspaper and magazine articles rather than having to sign up to monthly digital subscriptions, has just got even more exciting.
The New York Times (which is also an investor in Blendle), The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal have signed up to the platform.
That's huge. Until now, only Dutch publishers had signed up to Blendle. The company had managed to convince pretty much all the major newspaper and magazine publishers in the Netherlands to come on board, but its chances of scale were limited at best because its content was restricted to the Dutch language.
But now, as Blendle's founder Alexander Klöpping states in a press release: "It's a great honor that three of the most important newspapers in the world will start working with us."
It also shows that major US newspapers are willing to experiment with how they charge readers to access their content online.
Earlier this week, at the Digital Media Strategies conference in London, Klöpping hinted that Blendle is looking to expand in France or Germany next. Blendle's press release announcing its new partners confirms the platform will be expanding internationally this year.
Here's how Blendle works: Users register for Blendle and put in their credit-card details just once at the beginning of the process in which they create a newsfeed of stories about the topics in which they are interested. When they click on a headline, the app/website takes a small payment. And — perhaps the most intriguing part of the whole offer — if readers don't like an article, they can get an instant refund if they provide feedback.
On average articles cost 20 cents each, according to Blendle. The pricing per article is set by the publisher. Blendle has not provided details on the revenue split.
SEE ALSO: This startup may have found the answer for getting people to pay for journalism online
Join the conversation about this story »
NOW WATCH: These children play instruments made out of garbage — and they sound unbelievably fantastic
What happens to oil prices when there’s no room left to store the stuff?
Oil prices continue to show signs of stabilizing, giving investors more confidence to boost their exposure to Canadian energy stocks. But there is still plenty of reason to be cautious even if the data seem to indicate a bottom for crude.
Brent prices are up more than 30% since bottoming in mid-January, but WTI has only risen about 10%, widening the gap between the two by about US$9.80 per barrel. Concerns about rising storage levels and available storage capacity are partly to blame.
Energy analysts at Raymond James in Calgary believe the current rate of injections could cause Cushing, Okla. — the most important storage hub in the world — to near full capacity within 11 weeks.
“What happens after that point is a much bigger question mark, but it would appear to us that the need for additional storage is not going to go away anytime soon,” the analysts said in a note to clients, adding that further volatility in WTI prices should be expected as Cushing approaches full capacity.
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On the positive side, several data points demonstrate an improving demand picture, including strong gains in the need for gasoline in several key markets in the past couple of months. The demand response to low oil prices in markets such as the U.S. and China marked a big surprise for Raymond James’ analysts, while the sharp decline in the rig count and plans to delay well completions among several North American producers mean the supply side of the equation is playing out in a manner that should support a bottoming in crude prices.
One way to play the encouraging signs emerging from global oil markets, without being overly exposed to another potential downdraft in WTI prices, is through integrated names such as Suncor Energy Inc., Cenovus Energy Inc., Imperial Oil Ltd. and Husky Energy Inc.
The analysts noted that these companies’ downstream operations should allow them to remain “largely agnostic” to pricing differentials in the near term, while also providing investors with relatively more Brent-linked exposure. They also pointed out that refined product pricing has shown signs of strength recently.
Will Commissioned Salespeople Disappear?
“Today’s customer can easily research an entire marketplace in minutes….They don’t need someone to connect them with products anymore. What they do need is to be engaged, surprised, and delighted on their own terms.”
The quote above is from Brian de Haaff, the CEO of a software startup who says he’ll never hire another salesperson. From his perspective, the “traditional sales role is endangered.”
The research backs him up. A new Forrester study predicts that of the 4.5 million B2B sales jobs in existence today, “one million jobs will be net displaced by 2020.”
No doubt, customers are changing — they’re farther into their decision-making process by the time they come into contact with sales. But does that mean salespeople are irrelevant?
I don’t think so. In fact, I believe this era of customer transformation is a unique opportunity. Great salespeople are actually more relevant and valuable than ever before. Consultative salespeople are finding ways to provide new information, offer additional value and help customers think differently about the future. They’re experts about their products, industries, competition and customers. And they are well-positioned to thrive in 2015.
Customers’ expectations around the sales experience are changing. They don’t need a middleman anymore, and any sales pro who isn’t actively delivering huge value might be out of a job sooner rather than later. We’re entering a period of time when average is officially over.
A short time ago, average effort could produce average results. Today, “average” can put you out of business.
How Salespeople Can Stay Relevant
To win in the era of the customer, you have to be remarkable consistently.
In every interaction with every prospect or customer, you should audit:
- How did I add value?
- How will I be remembered?
Your customer already knows as much about your industry, products and competition as you do. So, think about what you can contribute. If you’re not contributing additional insight and participating in the solution design, are you just getting in the way?
Customers are looking for expert partners who can help them evolve their own thinking. Those are high expectations. The only way salespeople can meet those expectations is to embrace continuous learning.
Are you a little bit better today than you were yesterday?
It’s worth considering. I credit most of my own success to my commitment to learning. Learning, studying, researching, evolving – it’s hard work. But it’s the work required to compete and win in 2015.
In this SlideShare, I outline the six things every sales leader needs to be doing to move their teams forward and stay relevant.
Leading Breakthrough Sales Performance: 6 Quick Tips for Every Sales Leader from Ryan Estis
Ryan Estis helps companies and individual contributors embrace change and achieve breakthrough performance. Each live event blends original research with compelling stories that move participants to take action. Ryan has 20 years of business experience working with the world’s best brands to initiate change, inspire innovation and deliver growth. Learn more about Ryan Estis.
Sun Life poised to return cash to shareholders
Sun Life Financial Inc. is poised to raise its dividend for the first time since the financial crisis and repurchase more than $200-million of its stock, says Peter Routledge, analyst at National Bank Financial.
“Sun Life possesses two franchises which are, for the first time since at least the mid-2000s, simultaneously throwing off excess cash at a fairly reliable clip,” he said in a note to clients.
“Not only does this give Sun Life the financial flexibility to consider adding to its franchises via acquisitions but also to repurchase common shares and increase its dividend.”
Mr. Routledge upgraded his recommendation on Sun Life shares to sector outperform from sector perform and raised his price target to $45 from $42.
The new price target represents potential upside of 15% based on the stock’s closing price of $39.09 on Wednesday.
The analyst said the greatest risk to his $45 target is the stability of Sun Life’s life insurance contract liabilities, but he believes there is a fair margin of safety in his rating.
The multiple that he used to value MFS, Sun Life’s U.S. asset manager, is still quite low relative to peers, he said, while the return on equity assumed for its Sun Life Assurance division remains conservative to reflect today’s low interest rate environment.
“If long-term interest rates rise and/or if the market gets more optimistic towards MFS’ prospects, we expect our $45 price target would be too low,” he said.
8 Features of Great Law Firm Web Design
Over the past eight years, NMC has designed and built dozens of websites for law firms and professional services firms. Along the way, we've identified a few features that not only make law firm websites stand out, but can lead directly to an increase in sitewide engagement and conversions. Whether you're a small two-person shop or a large firm with multiple locations and hundreds of attorneys, having some (or all!) of these features incorporated in your website's design can be the difference between having a good website and having a great online marketing tool for your firm.
1) Responsive web design
As Nathan mentioned in his post on Web Design and Development Trends for 2015, more and more people are using tablets and smartphones to access the web across the world. For some websites, as much as 50% (or more) of all traffic comes from mobile users. A responsive design ensures that you have a tailored experience for devices of all screen resolutions and that you’re not alienating mobile visitors with a site that is cumbersome to navigate on a phone (ie. No more pinching and panning.) Responsive web design means the site can scale to different resolutions from large screens all to way to mobile devices, and each size will reorder the content in an optimal way.
The benefits of responsive web design for a law firm are especially significant. Responsive design ensures that users on the go can get information about a specific attorney or practice area or 'click-to-call' the firm. Frustrating mobile experiences can lead users to navigate back to search engine results without spending time on your website. Responsive design also demonstrates to current and potential clients that your firm is on the cutting-edge of new technology, differentiating you from competitors that may have older websites. Finally, responsive design is good for SEO. Google not only recommends responsive design as the best way to target mobile users, but its algorithm also favors mobile-optimized sites when it generates search engines results for mobile devices.
2) Attorney search based on multiple criteria
One of the primary goals of website design for any industry is to connect people with the information they seek. Visitors on law firm websites might be looking up articles or learning more about a specific practice area, but more likely than not, they're looking for an attorney. Having a firm directory of your attorneys is helpful, but prospective clients appreciate the ability to easily search and drilldown results for attorneys in your firm based on multiple criteria like location or expertise. Particularly for a larger firm with 20+ attorneys, multiple practice areas and office locations like, we recommend implementing an easy-to-use tool on the website (like the Ward and Smith, P.A. Our Team Search) so site visitors can quickly find an attorney in their desired practice area and location. We have custom built attorney/practice area/location search tools for multiple sites that allow users to filter which attorneys practice in each area and in each office. Additionally, links to tagged attorneys will appear in the Practice Area page and Location page sidebars, and vice versa, giving the site and its pages complete interactivity.
3) Quick, convenient methods to contact
Law firm websites should always give users several ways to quickly get in touch with the firm. Some firms unintentionally hide this information on the website to help be clear that a contact form submission or email does not initiate an attorney-client relationship. Although the immediacy of need to contact varies by practice area (personal injury and family law clients may use this tool more frequently than real estate development clients,) it's important that users have options. Some tactics for accomplishing this well include a general inquiries Contact form, a phone number in the website's header so it appears on every page, and email addresses for individual attorneys listed on their profile pages.
4) Blog for content creation
Content marketing (creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content on your website) is a perfect fit for lawyers and law firms. Attorneys are great candidates to be successful at content marketing because they are good writers, they have information that others need and writing content shows off what they know about recent legislation or updates to the law. All great law firm websites have, and maintain, a blog. Content creation can be made a priority in your firm by incentivizing your Rainmakers to generate a post once a month, while encouraging other attorneys to think about ways to extend the life of their content.
Also keep in mind that indexed and useful posts on a law firm website contribute to the site ranking for a variety of terms in search engines. Take a look at our guide on tips for law firms blogging for more information.
5) Content linked to practice areas.
It's one thing to have a blog on your law firm's website, and most successful firm sites in 2014 have already implemented a blog. Great law firm websites make the content work double-duty for the site by aggregating relevant articles on practice area pages. Let's say you write a post about 5 Common Myths for the 2015 Tax Season in January, publish it on your blog and publicize it on social media. A few weeks later, that post may be difficult to find if its been 'pushed' to the second page of your blog.
For our clients, we recommend tagging blog content based on practice areas, then feed those posts to each practice area's page on the website. This keeps the practice area pages looking fresh, gives you another opportunity to get eyes in front of your content, and also demonstrates your team's knowledge about recent legislation or timely issues relating to that practice area.
6) Social media on attorney profiles
Although not all law firms or attorneys were early adopters of social media, social media usage for law firms is on the rise. Many attorneys now have their own professional social media channels (or, at the least, a LinkedIn profile) where they disseminate information and connect with clients. We recommend adding social media links on each attorney's own profile page. Including this information on attorney profiles gives your team members personality, builds their own brand and gives direct access to prospective clients.
If your firm engages with clients on its own social media properties (like Facebook,) links to those should definitely be included on the site. Learn more on our blog about some common mistakes law firms make with Facebook pages to make sure you're getting the most out of your firm's social media efforts!
7) Client testimonials
So much of a law firm's success in bringing in new business hinges on referrals and word-of-mouth. Why not capitalize on this centuries-old tactic by incorporating client testimonials on your website? Client testimonials (video, written, etc.) add personality, credibility and trusting to your firm's brand. Have a client who was especially pleased with your work? Ask them to leave you a review on your Google+ business page for a boost in your Local SEO ranking potential. 
8) Don't use stock photos.
Although web-savvy will range considerably amongst visitors to your website, it's always easy to spot stock photography. Since modern web design often includes large, high-resolution images, put a face to the firm and show off your offices by using your own team and locations for these images. Depending on the size of the firm, you don't necessarily need to hire a team of professional photographers to stage candid shots of attorneys huddled around the front desk, but you probably don't want to use iphone photos, either. Our client Batten Lee utilizes photographs of their own attorneys and office lobby on their website to create a warm, personal, engaging look and feel for the site. 
What are some other features that contribute to a great law firm website? I'd love to hear what I missed!
Interested in learning more about rebuilding your own law firm's website? We're here to help! Learn more about New Media Campaigns' law firm website design services.
Here's why everyone is suddenly obsessed with a rubber boot that's been around since 1911
You probably noticed a lot brown and tan rubber-bottomed foul weather shoes this season.
Most likely, it's L.L. Bean's Bean Boot, which has undergone a popularity spike.
But they're not trendy on purpose.
In fact, the boot has been in production — largely unmodified apart from slight changes for new technology — for more than 100 years. Their popularity has waxed and waned during this time, but they've always endured. They're the unofficial mascot of L.L. Bean.
But now, they're really thriving.
"They’re all over college campuses and high schools,” L.L. Bean spokesperson Carolyn Beem told Boston.com. “Without changing anything, they’re back in style.”
In fact, the boots are so popular they sell out every winter. In December, Boston.com reported that between 60,000 and 100,000 pairs were backordered.
"The number of boots we have sold over has grown steadily over the last several years," LL Bean spokesperson Mac McKeever told Business Insider. "Especially the last three years."
Bean sold approximately 450,000 boots this past winter — which is a new seasonal record.
Why are the 100-year old boots so popular now? A few reasons.
- "Legacy" products are incredibly trendy now. Consumers, especially millennial consumers can connect to with history and a bulletproof track record — both of which the Bean Boot has in spades. L.L. Bean's founder, Leon Leonwood Bean, started selling his Maine Hunting Shoe back in 1911 — which is where the Bean Boot comes from.
- Their slightly goofy aesthetic is back in style. The "normcore" Americana sensibility the boots give off, along with the aforementioned legacy, are both very "in" right now among a lot of demographics — especially young urbanites.
- The boots are an incredible value. The base model is only $79, and comes with LL Bean's unconditional satisfaction guarantee. Bean even lets you decide if you're satisfied, so you can bring back your boot any time you want for virtually any reason — no questions asked.
- Speaking of bulletproof, that's exactly what Bean Boots are. They're well-known to be completely flawless from a functionality perspective. They are truly "buy it for life," and many owners see the boots perform for decades without replacement.
Both how the boots are made and how they look has been essentially unchanged since they were first introduced as the Maine Hunting Shoe. Bean was an avid outdoorsman, and he designed the boot for fly fishing, hunting, etc. Most boots were all leather in the earliest model, but Bean had the idea to sew a rubber bottom to a leather top, for a dry, comfortable foot.
Apart from a few technological improvements, they're still made the same way they were 100 years ago: hand-stitched in Maine. According to McKeever, it can take several months to train someone to operate the old-fashioned stitching machines.
Since demand for Bean Boots has taken off, the company has purchased another rubber molding machine for about $1 million and added another shift at their boot factory in Lewiston, Maine — which is now running almost 24/7 — to try and meet demand.
As of March 11, however, the boots are still on back order until late spring or summer. If you go to the L.L. Bean website to place an order, this message greets you:
Our advice: order the boots now if you want a pair for next winter.
SEE ALSO: The 3 Kinds Of Boots Men Need For Winter
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NOW WATCH: 14 things you didn't know your iPhone headphones could do
What I learned from Jack Welch about sales recruitment
One of the most useful frameworks for assessing a potential sales hire is something I learned a long time ago from reading a book by Jack Welch, former CEO and chairman of GE.
CEOs of giant corporations like General Electric aren't usually much admired in the startup world, but ever since I've learned about this concept, it stuck with me, and has been a guiding principle in all my hiring decisions.
He had this quadrant in which he would place each of his hires, basically categorizing them by their skillset and attitude.
Let's look at each of these in more detail:
Capable and willing
These are the obvious rockstars. You want to have them in your organization, and they can really propel your company forward.
When you find one of these people, do the best you can to hire and empower them.
Incapable and unwilling
These are also easy - when someone doesn't bring the skillset to the table that's needed to get the job done, and they have a lousy attitude... you don't hire them. And if they're already part of your team, you fire them as quickly as possible.
Incapable and willing
If someone doesn't already possess the necessary skillset to create the results you need in your company, but they have a great attitude and are a perfect cultural fit... should you hire them?
This is a tough decision. Personally it's one of my weak spots, because I myself been in this quadrant for much of my professional life.
Why you should hire them:
If you provide them with the training and support they need to acquire the skills, and they learn fast enough, you've created a tremendous amount of value: for your company, for that person, and for society at large. These people will often also be the most dedicated employees to the success of your company.
Why you shouldn't hire them:
If they don't learn fast enough, or if the gap between their qualifications and what's needed is too large, they slow your company down.
If this happens, you need to intervene - otherwise it'll taint the performance culture in your startup. Others will see the leniency towards those who don't produce, and think: well, it's ok to not hit the numbers. That's not the kind of idea you want to spread among your employees.
If you're considering an incapable but willing person, consider these questions:
- How much training, time and money are you willing to invest to bring that person up to speed?
- How much training, time and money do you have to invest to bring that person up to speed?
- Do you already have a strategy in place develop his skills?
- Who will take responsibility for training him?
- How will you evaluate his performance and provide feedback to the hire?
You can't answer all these questions with 100% accuracy - it's impossible to know what's required to develop talent. But just take a couple of hours to think this through and then make your best guess.
Capable and unwilling
These are the toughest kind of hires you can encounter. They have what it takes to deliver the goods, and they can hit their numbers. They're high-performers and can make you a ton of money.
But, they're dickheads. They'll have a negative effect on your company culture and your team cohesiveness.
What do you do with these people?
If you're a small company, you might feel you can't afford to be finicky. It's tough to pass on smart and talented people.
A little voice in the back of your head that will tell you:
"Yeah, this guy might be a highly qualified douchebag, but we need someone with his skillset, and none of the other candidates has this.
Just hire him to drive growth. We can keep looking for someone with the same level of expertise and a better attitude."
Don't listen to that voice.
Don't bring someone who's a poor cultural fit on board, even if this looks like a bad move on a spreadsheet.
This is even more important in your early hiring decisions, where a single bad hire can have a strong impact on your overall culture.
7 ways how bad culture fit hires can screw up your startup:
- If you bring in someone who treats others disrespectfully, schemes against colleagues to rise up the ranks, lies and closes bad deals to earn commissions or get on top of the leaderboard... these misaligned behaviors will spread throughout your company because other team members will conclude they're are acceptable, even if you verbally condemn them.
- Office politics can lead to separate fractions that are divided from your core company culture.
- A highly-skilled person has plenty of career opportunities. If they're not aligned to your culture, they'll probably leave your company as soon as a better option pops up, and you're again faced with the task of recruiting someone for their position.
- A study conducted by LeaderShipIQ has shown that 46% of new hires fail within 18 months. 89% of these hiring failures were due to poor cultural fit.
-
Hiring mistakes cost tens of thousands of dollars (and when it comes to startups, sometimes even equity).
- They will demoralize your highly engaged and fully aligned employees.
- They can take away the joy you, the founder, gain from your own company. (Nowadays Tony Hsieh of Zappos is famous for his focus on workplace culture, but do you know why he made focus his number 1 priority? Because he had previously founded LinkExchange, a very successful company that grew to hundreds of employees and was worth hundreds of millions of dollars... but dreaded getting out of bed in the morning because the culture his own company made his stomach turn. He didn't want the same thing to happen with Zappos.)
There are plenty of other ways how hiring unwilling high-performers can cause havoc, but rather than making this into an endless list, let's focus on...
The benefits of a strong company culture
It's important to differentiate company culture from some mission statement or a written list of values that's never put into practice.
A strong company culture is incredibly valuable for a startup. It will inspire and motivate each team member to produce the best work they can, rather than just the required minimum. And its value increases exponentially when things go wrong (which they always do in startups).
A photo posted by Close.io (@startuphustler) on Mar 12, 2015 at 3:43am PDT
Think of all the time, money and resources you spend on recruiting and developing people. It's a huge investment, and its ROI increases the longer your employees stay at your company.
How to assess culture fit of a job candidate?
The first step is to have a clear understanding of your own culture. What do you value as a company, and how do you reward it? Then to elicit what your candidate values, and compare the two.
When you're interviewing keep in mind that job candidates project a persona which is not a 100% accurate reflection of who they really are in their day-to-day life. It's your job to break through the facade.
Let's say a sales rep tells you he cares about always creating win-wins. Ask him to share a specific situation where he could have earned a big commission, but advised a prospect not to buy. Ask for details and see if it's a credible story.
If a job candidate has a hard time coming up with a couple of examples where his values affected his behavior, then you should question whether that value is actually important for his. If you get a sense that it's just empty talk and a person isn't really emotionally connected to a value, challenge them to convince you of their sincerity.
Questions that get a candidate off script
Ask questions for which a candidate isn't prepared, rather than just the typical "job interview questions".
The Zappos hiring process includes a lot of these, for example:
- What is something weird that makes you happy?
- What's something you've always wanted to do but haven't? After you answer: Why haven't you done it?
- If you could be a super hero, what would you be and why?
- Which one of our 'core values' would be most difficult for you to uphold?
- What is your favorite curse word? Use it in a sentence about your last job.
- If you were given $500 to plan a company event what would it be and why?
- If you were a dessert, what would you be?
- Describe a time when you had to break the rule to get the job done.
- What question were you expecting us to ask that we didn’t?
- On a scale of 1 to 10, how weird are you?
"It’s not so much the number; it’s more seeing how candidates react to a question." explains Tony Hsieh, Zappo's CEO. It brings out the personality of a job candidate.
Hsieh also used to ask the limo driver who brought a job applicant to the office how he was treated.
Take every interview with a grain of salt
Every time I share advice on conducting job interviews, I add this disclaimer: there's only so much you can really learn from a job interview.
If someone seems to be a promising candidate, don't just hire them right away, but get to know each other in steps. I've outlined this in Hiring for startups: How to recruit the un-recruitable!
Have them visit the office, work on a small project together, and if it all seems promising, have them join your team on a trial basis for a number of weeks or months. Get to know them in different environments and situations before you make long-term commitments to each other.
And if you make a wrong hiring decision despite all the precautions... fire fast!
A photo posted by Close.io (@startuphustler) on Mar 12, 2015 at 5:44am PDT
Quebec made most of $2B Economic Action Plan infrastructure fund
More than half of the money the federal government set aside for a low-interest loans program as part of the Economic Action Plan went to municipalities in Quebec, documents obtained by the Citizen show.
And by far the biggest chunk of the money went to the city of Montreal.
Details of the loans, which were distributed through the $2-billion Municipal Infrastructure Loan Program (MILP) for infrastructure projects, are emerging as such government spending — made through arms-length agencies, in this case the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. — is under scrutiny.
The Parliamentary Budget Officer has raised concerns about the oversight of such loans, and pointed to the increasing amount of government spending that’s being done in this way.
While there’s nothing to indicate any wrongdoing in the latest data, the details do raise questions about how municipalities in one province were allowed to take so much of a national fund.
Related
The $2-billion program was part of the infrastructure spending under Canada’s Economic Action Plan. Between 2009 and 2012, the highly touted action plan provided a total of $5.53 billion in construction spending for infrastructure projects, including the MILP money plus various other programs.
Under the MILP, Montreal received $722.4 million in between 2009 and 2012. Quebec City, meanwhile, was granted $326 million in loans.
The two cities alone accounted for $1.05 billion of the $2 billion set aside for the program. As a whole, Quebec municipalities accounted for a total of $1.2 billion.
In comparison, Canada’s most populous city, Toronto, only received $113 million of the MILP funds. The City of Ottawa received $23.7 million for eight projects, including resurfacing roads and building new sidewalks and pathways.
A total of 272 projects received loans across the country.
Brad Duguid, Ontario’s minister of Economic Development, Employment and Infrastructure, said the disparity between Quebec’s level of uptake and that of Ontario municipalities showcases the uneven nature of federal infrastructure spending.
“This just reinforces the cries for a national infrastructure partnership that is transparent,” Duguid said. “There doesn’t appear to be any rhyme or reason. It’s a hodgepodge attempt to invest in infrastructure across the country. What we need is a well thought-out plan.”
Officials from the CMHC said the money was simply handed out as municipalities that met the criteria applied.
“Municipalities submitted loan applications which were approved on a first-come, first-served basis provided the application was complete when submitted and the project met the eligibility requirements,” said Karine LeBlanc, a spokeswoman for CMHC. “This continued until all available funds were committed.”
Of the 289 applications received, CMHC approved 272. No loans are currently in arrears, the corporation says. The terms of two loans — both in Ontario — have been renegotiated.
Meagan Murdoch, a spokeswoman for Pierre Poilievre, minister of Employment and Social Development, the department which is responsible for CMHC, said the corporation has assured her that all Canadian municipalities were given “equal access” to the program, and that CMHC is responsible for collecting loan payments from all the municipalities involved.
In Quebec, where all federal funding is disbursed by provincial agencies, the program was administered by Financement-Quebec and the Ministry of Municipal Affairs, Regions and Land Occupancy. A spokesman for Financement-Quebec said a main reason the province did so well in collecting money from the fund is because it had a provincial agency promoting the availability of the money.
The MILP gave out low-interest loans to municipalities on 15-year terms. The interest on the loans was calculated based on their risk and dollar value.
The funding was spent on a variety of projects “intended to encourage municipalities’ initiatives to fund their housing-related infrastructure projects,” according to the CMHC.
The City of Montreal received funding for a total of 12 projects, according to documents provided by CMHC. The money received by Montreal from CMHC was equal to about 50 per cent of its infrastructure spending in 2013.
Included among the city’s projects:
• $8 million for a new fire hall,
• $25.9 million for treating drinking water,
• $178.3 million for road construction,
• $58.5 million for “residential green space”
• $132.9 million for roads
Quebec City also received funding for a total of 12 projects, including:
• $83.5 million for new sewer systems and
• $58.1 million for road construction.
The Parliamentary Budget Officer has said members of Parliament and senators may not be fully aware of the magnitude of funding from these types of loans.
Between 2002 and 2003, supplementary estimates show loans accounted for about $40 billion of federal government spending, compared with the $161 billion that year in funding approved by Parliament.
By the 2013-14 fiscal year, that amount had risen to $211 billion, compared with the $239 billion in regular spending.
In other words, the amount issued in loans has skyrocketed since the financial crisis of 2008, peaking at more than $306 billion in 2009-10, and now sits at levels roughly equal to the value of Canada’s annual budget, according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer.
The total of the loans include spending from CMHC but also from other sources such as Export Development Canada, Farm Credit Corp. and the Business Development Bank of Canada, among other federal agencies.
While government votes to pass a loan package, the package typically isn’t revisited by Parliament to see where those loans went or for how much or whether they are being paid back.
“The magnitude of these non-budgetary transactions grew prodigiously over the past five years, as part of the Government’s response to the 2008 global fiscal crisis,” reads a recent report on the budget officer’s website, adding that ultra-low interest rates have made it easier for the government to borrow. As interest rates have fallen in recent years, the amount the government has to allocate for so-called debt spending decreases, making the payments seem more manageable.
The CMHC is facing scrutiny for one of the two MILP loans it has renegotiated.
Blind River secured a loan in 2010 for a large scale solar energy project, which was later cancelled by the Ontario Power Authority. The town moved forward with a number of smaller-scale solar developments, 71 in all, totalling about $25 million worth of investment. It invested the rest of the money in Plasco Energy Group, the beleaguered Ottawa waste-to-energy firm that is seeking protection from its creditors in court under the Companies Creditors Arrangement Act.
Questions have been asked about how Blind River qualified for the $49.5 million loan, given that it’s a town of only 3,500 people and has annual revenues of $8.8 million.
According to CMHC, municipalities are responsible for acquiring all necessary approvals to take out a loan. The municipality is also responsible for ensuring it meets the loan terms and conditions pertaining to spending.
Solar Electricity will generate $5 trillion of cumulative revenue by 2035 and break into industrial markets per Deutsch Bank
Deutsch Bank thinks solar has now become an investable sector and over the next 5-10 years, we expect new business models to generate a significant amount of economic and shareholder value.
Over the next 20 years, Deutsch Bank expects the electricity market to double to $4 trillion and expect the solar
industry to increase by a factor of 10. During this timeframe, the solar industry is expected to generate $5 trillion of cumulative revenue. By the year 2050, they expect global solar penetration rates to increase to 30%. They also see solar penetration rates increasing more rapidly in developing economies. India for example has recently announced targets to reach 100GW of solar capacity by 2022. Current installed generating capacity in India is ~280GW and the total installed generating capacity is estimated to reach 800GW by 2035. Assuming installed generating capacity reaches 400GW by 2022 timeframe, solar penetration would reach 25% of total capacity and nearly 60% of new installed capacity would be from solar sector. We believe the opportunity would be even bigger if companies start adding services to the solar PV offering and venture into adjacent markets such as wind and hydro. Over the next 20 years, they expect nearly 10% of global electricity production to come from solar.
Using an average 20% efficiency for rooftop photovoltaic (PV) panels, the Gigafactory's 10 million square foot roof would produce 850MWh of solar power daily. Lombardo estimates that the Gigafactory would have 85 wind turbines able to generate about 1,836 MWh of power daily.
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Invoice Payments: Handling the 4 Types of Late Paying Clients
We all have them, or know about them – the deadbeat client who won’t pay up. You’ve been bugging them and bugging them, and you’re about to throw your hands up in the air and send them a collection letter (if you haven’t already). Why won’t people just pay their bills? Here’s how to handle problem clients and get them to pay.
The Well-Intentioned Non-Payer
The well-intentioned non-payer is a company or individual who really means well, but is probably disorganized. This person isn’t trying to stuff you. They really do intend to pay. But, at the same time, they’re always having some kind of drama or problem in their business, making it impossible to count on them for on-time payments.
The Unhappy Client
The unhappy client is sometimes passive-aggressive about paying, but sometimes they just clam up and won’t return your emails or phone calls – bad. Unhappy pappies are tricky to win over because they’re taking the offensive – no communication (or poor communication) rather than an up-front stance, saying, “I’m unhappy with this work and I need this fixed before I make payment.”
Of course, some unhappy clients will let you know. This is easy to deal with.
The Chronically Late-Payer
The chronic late-payer steps outside the bounds of honest late-paying. They’re pretty much oblivious to their bills. They’ve left a trail of burned bridges and stiffed a lot of freelancers in the past. These types of clients are tough to spot because they know that they’re not going to pay, rationalize not paying, and are willing to be devious to gain your trust.
Some tip-offs in the early stages of the project include promising to pay you more than the fair market value for your services. This can be tough to spot, however, if you yourself have an inflated view of your own value. Be honest with yourself. Are you really worth $200 per hour or are you worth more like $100-to $150?
If the client offers to pay you an unexpected bonus, misses milestone payments and promises to make it up to you at the end of the project, keeps bugging you about completion dates when they haven’t paid anything yet, and hesitates at the idea of a retainer or some type of up-front payment, it’s time to rethink doing business with this client.
Big Business Lazy Payers
Believe it or not, big corporations don’t always pay their bills on time. You’d think they would, what will their billions. But, mega-corporations typically have a 90 or 120 day payment cycle. They will leave you hanging for months…because they can afford to. You need the money. They have it. They know it.
After 2008, some of these corporations’ accountants have actually advised their clients to put freelancers on a longer payment cycle, relegating them as quasi-vendors. It’s disrespectful, sure, but this is what you’re up against.
Getting Your Money, Stat!
This invoice template company can usually help you overcome the hurdle of honest late-payers by providing structure to your payment cycle. Most freelancers don’t have formality built into their business. They take on projects without a contract, and on an informal basis.
Using invoices is the first step to getting well-intentioned non-payers to pay. Sometimes, it’s a cash-flow problem on the part of the client though, so you’ll have to communicate with them up front about your needs and expectations and hammer out a payment date for future invoices.
Unhappy clients are actually simple to deal with. Fix the problem and you’ll usually get paid. Open the lines of communications, be civil, and ignore initial hostility. Kill them with kindness, and then be firm about payment when the job is done right.
Focus on meeting and exceeding customer expectations, nothing more. Don’t make it personal.
The serial non-payers – there’s nothing much you can do about them. Dump them ASAP and add them to your list of non-payers. Spread the information around to as many freelancers as possible. Hopefully, they will die off and go out of business.
For the mega-corporations, this is tricky. Some things that might work include establishing a firm – very firm – payment policy upfront. Specify a late fee for invoices, include a dispute resolution form with all of your contracts. Have contracts. Send all invoices promptly when you finish work for the client.
Finally, Use an online invoice tracking system and have some way to follow up with HR or accounting about your invoice. If all else fails, be ready to go to small claims court. Don’t be confrontational in your contract, but specify this as an option if payment is not received within a specified period of time.
Marketing and Sales: Good Fences Make Good Neighbors
The river between marketing and sales runs cold and deep. We can see each other’s camp on the opposite bank, just out of range. That we all work for the same corporation is often the irritant, yet I have seen how much success is generated when there is cooperation. Let me tell you how.
“Good fences make good neighbors,” Robert Frost concedes in his poem Mending Wall. He’s not entirely happy with the concept, but the sucker works, and it will work here. Building a strong fence will define the playing field (formerly battlefield).
I like good fences because they have to be built, and both sides must participate for them to be strong. I encourage you to build a fence that is well-planned and of the best materials. Marketers have to engage with sales and set the rules—the milestones, roles and responsibilities—that will govern our prospecting. If both marketing and sales participate, it will have integrity.
Each side understands “what’s in it for me” and agrees to their contribution. There must be provisions and a forum for continuous improvement.
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go
— From Mending Wall by Robert Frost
Tracy Staniland. Vice President of Corporate Marketing for Asigra, a backup and recovery software company, has established a productive, mutually supportive relationship with the sales team:
“We start with a Service Level Agreement. Sales stipulates the lead score criteria for when leads are sales-ready. Leads that need to be recycled are pushed to marketing in a timely manner. We regularly engage to review the challenges in the marketplace, and whether the lead criteria needs to be adjusted.”
The fence defines the turf that we will work together. It’s where marketing and sales will build our prospecting marketing plan, messaging, and communications with the goal of inviting our prospects in.
The foundation of success here is trust that we all share the same clear understanding of the prospect, on two levels:
- It’s not just one executive. We need to understand the buying center —who is in it and what is the contribution of each executive.
- These executives are not just functional titles, but people with often contradictory business and personal drivers and specific responsibilities to the buying center.
Without this clear understanding and agreement on our prospects, nothing will work. Let me tell you two stories that do. You may not know the names of these companies. They are the midsized challengers that must work smarter. Their accomplishments have earned them the right to high expectations.
Entering new markets, each relied on Prospect Personas to unify the vision of the prospects. These are archetypes or summaries based on voice of customer research, with real people in this position and about their wants and needs, information behaviors, attitudes, motivations, and goals. And personality.
A wise friend once said to me, the B2B sale is all about personalities. Thus, the prospects sits at the planning table, warts and all.
- Asigra, whom we met earlier, learned how messaging can have a huge effect. Looking to move from the SMB market to the enterprise, personas taught them that about 1/3 of the targeted CIOs, each crucial to the decision making process, were completely turned off by their tag line. They would not listen any further. Persona research helped them to refocus and rebrand to open CIOs’ ears to what is really important.
- Maxwell Technologies learned that just because their new ultra-capacitors are more powerful, smaller and cleaner than traditional industrial batteries, no one is waiting with open arms. The road to acceptance is, shall we say, circuitous. They learned how to talk, who to talk to, and what the specific circumstances for “crossing the chasm” into sales, implementation, and ultimately test cases were.
Building the fence is a personal thing. All of the points above have one thing in common—they are all about people and humanizing the process. There’s no software that can successfully automate this job. Your hands are going to get dirty, but the resulting flow of business will be clean and strong.
5 Content Strategy Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
Content marketing is all about developing trust with potential customers by offering them relevant and helpful (sometimes entertaining) information about your brand. There’s no perfect science to creating and distributing content, and it’s still a relatively new school of thought in the marketing world, so content strategy mistakes are bound to happen. The beauty of that is that failures are often our best opportunities to learn. The following content strategy fouls are commonly committed, but it’s reassuring to know they can be avoided with a little extra thought and practice.
1) Failure to Reach the Right Audience
This is the most commonly committed mistake. Great content with good information becomes ineffective if it is not made accessible to the right audience. Hence, audience analysis should be an integral part of every content marketing strategy and campaign. Here are a few ways targeting your audience could go wrong:
- The content is meaningful and unique but not presented in a suitable format for your target audience.
- The content is mismatched with the reading level of the audience.
- The content does not convey exactly what the audience is looking for.
Solutions:
- Research your target audience’s preferred format, style, tone and communication platforms to improve the user engagement ratio.
- Avoid creating mismatched content by knowing your audience and their intelligence level before tailoring for them.
- Include information in your content that is not only interesting, but also capable of addressing the specific needs of that audience.
2) Sharing Content Outside Your Sales and Marketing Funnel
Your content marketing strategy becomes unsuccessful once you implement it outside of your sales and marketing funnel. Always know the key performance indicator(s) of your content efforts and have well-defined goals. Writing unique, outstanding content with no call to action or direct tie to predetermined goals will be of no use to you.
- Record visitors’ journeys and experiences on your website and use that data to create content with CTAs that drive the experience you have envisioned for them.
- Research and collect data based on your previous leads and sales and incorporate those insights as you craft the perfect journey for your visitors.
- Enlist the help of influencers where your expertise stops and their specialization begins – but only if it’s addressing the core needs and desires of your target audience.
3) No Measurement or Evaluation of Content Effectiveness
If you don’t know how well your content is (or is not) performing, how can you possibly improve it? Figuring out what to measure and how to measure it is a challenge many marketers find perpetually perplexing. The good news is that a defined and documented content strategy has a huge impact on selecting and using the right metrics.
Set goals that you think will drive leads and sales. Establish metrics that gauge progress towards achieving that goal. Monitor these metrics and make isolated changes to keep improving performance.
4) Judging That Your Motivation is Unseen to Your Audience
Your audience is well aware of the fact that you are a business with the goal of generating profits and revenues. Hence, it is not required to conceal this fact from them. Honesty is always the best policy – in life and in marketing.
- Be clear and forward about your intentions, goals and what type of actions you want your audience to take.
- Disclose your motivation in the content; this develops trust and alleviates uncertainty.
- Don’t disguise products and services as something they’re not (e.g. the answer to all their problems). Instead, offer information to help them develop organic interest in your offerings.
5) Not Planning for Promotion and Distribution
If a marketer defines their goals, documents their strategy and creates great content but fails to plan for promotion and distribution, does anybody ever see it? Slim chance.
For proper distribution of your content among your target audiences, consider all the available channels for sharing such as email, guest blogging, social media, paid media and PR. Ensure that the sharing and distribution takes place regularly and in accordance with determined goals.
As a digital marketer, you know that successful content marketing is not a one-time investment, but a continuous commitment. By being mindful of these potential mistakes, you increase the likelihood of delivering consistent and high quality content that meets your goals.
The Best B2B Appointment Setting Technique — Ever
We hear so much these days about the customer-driven buyer’s journey and that more than half of the sales cycle occurs without prospective customers contacting a sales representative. The new buyer’s journey puts ever-increasing pressure on marketing departments to handle the pre-sales process.
Although marketing technology, with its lead scoring, data integration, and automated content delivery tools, can help marketers respond quickly to inquiries online and deliver targeted content, it’s often not enough. That’s why the best marketers still match high tech with the human touch—especially when their product line is complex, and the sales cycle is long.
It’s not enough to capture a lead, follow up, pass the lead to sales, and hope for the business. You need to turn requests into qualified leads and ideally sales-enabled leads. Marketing’s job is to get salespeople in front of prospective customers. And one of the best ways to do that is to work with a professional telemarketing service that specializes in B2B sales and develop a proven appointment-setting strategy.
First, Hire B2B Telemarketing Professionals
First, hire a qualified telemarketing firm that specializes in business-to-business tele-services. Because you will need telemarketing representatives who can follow your appointment-setting technique, you need people who will function as an extension of your business. Here are some of the criteria you should look for in a telemarketing firm:
- Solid understanding of your industry
- Willingness to commit dedicated agents to your campaigns
- Access to native-language speaking agents
- Agents with the education and experience to represent your business with the highest degree of professionalism
- Agents trained in telemarketing and sales
- Agents motivated to help you win business
But while your telemarketing agents are the raw talent you need to effect an appointment-setting strategy, they are only half of the equation. You must develop appointment-setting techniques that will connect with prospective customers emotionally and factually.
Second, Craft a Winning Message
Creating an effective appointment-setting technique requires you to know your target audience and keep their needs in mind as you craft your marketing message. The telemarketing call that effectively presents your value proposition, addresses competitive differences, and counters objections will instill confidence that a face-to-face meeting is what they need to make a buying decision. Here are several steps to help you refine your appointment-setting technique:
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Identify Your Target Audience
Know who your target audience is before you select who to call. Talk their language and prove that you understand them.
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Match Stages of the Buyers’ Journey
Buyers move through at least three phases: awareness, consideration, and decision. Shape your messaging to help your telemarketing agents converse effectively at each stage.
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Address Industry Trends and Insights
Customers need to know about trends and research in your industry that may impact their buying decisions. By working your unique insights into the messaging, you’ll give prospective buyers the confidence that you understand the industry and your products/services deserve consideration.
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Counter the Competition
The best defense is a good offense. Know what your competitors are saying about themselves and you. Build a positive response by positioning your products/services and emphasizing your value proposition.
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Handle Objections
Prospects will challenge telemarketers. So arm your agents with information and tactics for countering customer objections.
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Share Success Stories
Your customers have real-world insight into how your products/services can best be used. Use their successes to inspire prospects and help them to envision similar successes for themselves.
Third, Train Agents to Build Relationships
Nurturing is a way to build relationships successfully. Your appointment-setting technique should anticipate every stage of engagement. While most professional telemarketing agents won’t work from a script, you can outline the process that will help them get past gatekeepers and build an engaging conversation with prospects. Conversation is the operative word. Train your agents to build rapport, spark curiosity, and actively drive toward the objective—booking an appointment. A well-crafted appointment-setting technique in the hands of a professional telemarketer is a win for you and your prospects.
To learn more about B2B appointment setting, get our free guide: “Your Essential Guide to B2B Appointment Setting”.
How To Generate More Leads From Social Media
Generating leads from social media can be a challenge for many businesses. Many marketing teams and the C-Level executives that manage them don’t always see the value in allocating budget for social media. But with the explosion of mobile Internet usage and its impact on social media, it’s more important than ever for marketing teams to take their social lead generation strategy seriously – and that means allocating budget, time, and resources to these channels in 2015. According to Salesforce, 66 percent of marketers now rate social media as core to their business strategy in 2015 – up from 24 percent in 2014.
But what is most interesting about social media right now is the hold mobile devices have over it. Americans now officially spend more time on social media than they spend doing any other Internet activity (including email) and 60% of that social media activity takes place on smartphones and tablets (Business Insider). Social media and mobile go hand in hand, so optimizing all of your social marketing for mobile devices is the sure way to improve your lead generation strategy on the channel. (Can we have a lead-in here? “Here are some tips for…blah blah blah.”)
Build Mobile-Optimized Landing Pages
Since the goal of most of your social media posts is to drive traffic to your website, having mobile-optimized landing pages is the first thing you can do to improve lead conversion rates. Thirty-one percent of all website referral traffic is now driven by social media (Forbes) – so driving traffic from social posts to your website is primary. If you don’t have a mobile-specific or responsive website yet, most modern CMS enable you to build out mobile-specific landing pages. Mobile friendly landing pages will improve the mobile user experience and help keep visitors on your website longer.
Build Custom Landing Pages For Social Media
Building custom landing pages for each social media network you promote content on is another way to improve conversion rates and generate more leads. If you are promoting a white paper, eBook, or other piece of content, building a landing page specific to the social media platform you’re promoting on will also help convert users into leads.
This holds true especially for paid search on social media. If a user clicks on the Facebook ad you are running and the landing page content is specific to Facebook and the ad they saw – they are more likely to convert on that page.
Staff Social Media Managers On The Weekend
The Salesforce 2015 State of Marketing found that consumers are most engaged on social media on the weekends – yet Saturdays and Sundays are the days businesses are the least engaged on social channels. Staffing a social media manager (or more than one, depending on your engagement rates) is key to keeping lead flow steady. Not only should these managers post new content throughout the weekend, they should also engage with users who are liking, commenting, and engaging with your brand. This helps customers trust your brand while also helping them get the nurturing and support needed to complete a purchase.
Staffing social media managers to engage customers with your brand over the weekend also means staffing sales and customer support staff to handle inbound calls. Since social media activity is primarily mobile, users are more likely to call a business (whether it be to complete a purchase or to ask a support question) after being referred to their website from social media than filling out a form.
Spend More On Paid Social Media Advertising
A 2014 study by Kenshoo found that the more money advertisers spent on Facebook advertising, the more conversions they generated. In other words, the more you spend on social advertising, the more you get in return.
The first places to start spending more are Facebook and LinkedIn – they are the top two most popular social networks, with the highest number of active users and active mobile users. Facebook has more than 1 billion users accessing the site from mobile devices every month (eMarketer), and 47 percent of all LinkedIn visits are via mobile devices (DMR). The tip here is simple: optimize your paid social ads and landing pages for mobile, bid higher on clicks or impressions from those devices, see an increase in social media leads.
2015 really is the year for mobile marketing optimization – across all channels. Social need not be forgotten in the mix as it continues to drive more and more traffic to websites each year. To learn more about generating leads from social media, download this free webinar about boosting call conversions from Facebook and LinkedIn.
Improve Customer Engagement By Rethinking The Sales Funnel
For decades, marketers have used the traditional sales funnel as a way to illustrate the typical buying process.
Marketers attract potential buyers at the top of the funnel with advertising and promotional activities designed to engage them. Once they’ve converted on an offer—such as an opportunity to respond to an email or download a resource—they become leads. Some leads will become prospects, and marketers continue to push them further along in their decision-making process until they become customers.
This model reflects a world in which data was scarce and sales teams led the way. Before digital engagement platforms, sales representatives were the gatekeepers of information.
This has all changed as information has become more readily available online.
Buyers have more access to independent sources of information and opinions than ever before. In fact, about 80 percent of the sales cycle is over for them before they even pick up the phone.
This evolution of information means the sales cycle has evolved, as well. It also means customers don’t always enter into the decision-making process the same way nor do they follow down the same path.
That’s why marketers today need to rethink the traditional sales funnel to improve customer engagement. They need to think about the sales cycle as something that may be different for each type of buyer and treat those buyers accordingly. Here’s how.
Develop Buyer Journeys Mapped To Unique Personas
One problem with the traditional sales funnel model is that it looks at all buyers as basically the same person, with the same challenges and needs. It assumes all buyers will act in a similar, predictable manner. This just isn’t true.
If you take time to analyze your customers from the past year, you’ll probably notice you have one primary persona—the type of buyer who represents the majority of your sales, or the one who presents the most immediate opportunity—and a number of secondary personas. You may also have personas that differ by industry, role and company size.
Take the time to look back at the interactions you’ve had with each of those types of buyers and identify common themes. Is the sales cycle significantly longer for one persona compared to another? Does one tend to pick up the phone and call after receiving several emails, while another persona downloads multiple resources before there’s any interaction with someone from your sales staff?
If you’re using a customer relationship management system, such as HubSpot or Salesforce, you should have plenty of data to reference. Your findings will shape your buyer personas, or the generalized characters that represent the needs, goals and behaviors of your actual buyers.
It also helps to interview some of your customers to learn more about what influenced them at every stage, especially if you’re in the early stages of persona development. Once you have more detailed profiles of your customers, you’ll have a much better idea of their typical journeys, or decision-making processes.
You can then use this to determine how your team should interact with them at every stage, from the initial information they’ll want to see on your website to the type of content they prefer and, finally, when you’ll know they’re ready for a call from your sales staff.
Determine Where Your Buyers Are In the Journey
Work with your sales staff to determine what factors signify a potential buyer is an opportunity, and what additional factors demonstrate they’re ready for a conversation. You can then assign points for each activity and arrive at an overall score for each of the contacts in your database.
A good marketing automation software, such as HubSpot, allows you to set up custom lead scoring so you can automatically grade contacts as they come into your database. Remember it’s also important to disqualify leads that don’t fit your criteria, or assign negative points for actions that signify a lack of interest, such as unsubscribing to your emails.
Once you have a better understanding of where your buyers are in the sales cycle, you’ll be able to send them more targeted messages and information they actually want to see. The idea of qualifying leads isn’t new, but it has become more sophisticated and accurate as marketers have greater access to hard data about their potential buyers’ behavior. It now includes everything from website visits to social media interaction and considers each potential buyer’s readiness as an individual, rather than pushing them through as one large mass of prospects.
Change Your Terminology
Does your marketing team still talk about strategy in terms of TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU? That’s understandable because top of funnel, middle of funnel and bottom of funnel are familiar terms you’ve probably been using for years. However, it’s important to clearly communicate the more accurate concept of the buyer’s journey when you’re talking to stakeholders within your company, especially the sales staff. Here are are few terms you should be using instead:
- Instead of the top of the funnel, say the start of the buyer’s journey
- Instead of the middle of the funnel, say personalized engagement
- Instead of the bottom of the funnel, say the end of the buyer’s journey
Each part of the buyer’s journey requires multiple touch points from your sales and marketing staff.
During the start of the buyer’s journey, the focus should be on identifying the potential buyer’s challenge and providing useful information that points him or her toward a solution in general terms. If you’re selling recruiting software, for instance, your ideal buyer is probably someone who has difficulty keeping up with the hundreds of resumes that pass through his inbox each day.
You can attract his attention with information that talks about how to rank candidates, manage follow-up and ultimately assess their skills. Without hitting your potential buyer over the head with messages about your product, you should point to the benefits of using recruiting software.
The idea of the buyer’s journey offers a more personalized take on the traditional sales funnel, taking into account each potential buyer’s needs at every stage.
Structure Your Team Accordingly
As marketing and sales teams move more toward this model, it’s crucial that each person interacting with the customers or data understands his or her role in the process.
Your company should take the time to clarify the roles your sales representatives, marketing professionals and customer service staff will have in interacting with the potential buyers and the data you collect about them. It will become even more important to have someone who thoroughly understands marketing automation software and data and can devote the time it takes to set up meaningful lead scoring systems.
More companies are hiring marketing technologists to manage all this data, and the need for these professionals will continue to grow.
As the Information Age and the greater availability of data change the landscape of sales and marketing today, rethinking the traditional sales funnel is just one shift your company needs to make to stay competitive.
Marketing expert and futurist Mike Walsh discusses nine other predictions all Chief Marketing Officers need to be aware of to stay competitive in the coming years. To find out what they are, download this free eBook by Mike and Kuno Creative, The 21st Century CMO Playbook.
4 Ways to Lower the Cost of Making a Business Video
Having a video produced for your business can be a budget breaker, but for many businesses to stay competitive today, it is a necessity. In fact, according to Pew Research Center, digital video advertising is growing rapidly at 43.5% year over year.
I’m often asked this simple question: “How much will a 30 second commercial cost?”
My answer: “Anywhere from $1000 to millions of dollars.” I’m not kidding.
In fact, according to superbowlcommercial2015.com, Chrysler’s “Imported from Detroit” commercial in 2011 for the Super Bowl cost a whopping $12.4 million to make!
How much your video will cost depends on what’s included, such as:
- Where it will be shot.
- The number of actors.
- Any special effects.
- How large the crew is.
The list goes on, but ultimately, the cost of your video will be determined by your budget, your vision and your goals. I often work with my clients to reduce the cost of their videos. At the same time, the videos must still accomplish their goals!
Check out our very own video here at Business.com!
Here are some suggestions that can help you reduce your video production costs:
1. Use amateur talent (if it’s appropriate)
It’s less expensive, and sometimes significantly better than using professional talent. For example, if you’re demonstrating something that takes skill, utilizing your trained employee will be preferable to training an actor. However, sometimes it’s not the best choice. Read more about this in an article I wrote called Choosing Acting Talent: Professional vs. Amateur.
2. Write your own script
Do you have relatively decent writing skills? If so, give it a shot! It can save you thousands, and you know your business better than anyone. Non-professional script writers often have a tendency to include too much in the script, so check the length by reading it aloud at a pace that’s conversational.
Find a production company who will modify your script for video effectiveness. That’s far less expensive than having them write from scratch, and depending on the length and complexity of the script, we often include that as a complimentary service.
3. Use your own facility to shoot in
Although shooting in a studio can be more glamourous, if you have an office, a conference room or some other quiet space to shoot in, it doesn’t cost anything extra!
A studio is normally a room with high ceilings, four walls with lights and sound absorption material. Everything else must be added in, and you’ll be charged. For example, if you want an executive office setting, you’ll pay to have the furnishings brought in and the walls decorated.
Alternatively you can utilize your own space as your set, or have your production company bring a portable backdrop or a green screen. With green screen you can give the impression that you’re anywhere in the world; even in a far more luxurious office than you have!
4. PAY MORE to hire a production company that understands business video
Yes, sometimes paying more can actually save you money. There are plenty of very inexpensive videographers out there; and at first glance, you may think you’re effectively saving money by hiring one of them. For example, there are many wedding videographers who with exaggeration and self-promotion label themselves corporate videographers. Most of them don’t have significant and appropriate experience with business video.
I once saw a sign outside a barbershop that said:
“We fix bad haircuts”
It’s the same with video. It’s difficult and more expensive to repair a project gone wrong than to pay a little more up front to get quality and value. Don’t waste your money. Find a company with a credible client list that understands complex business concepts for video.
You’ll get it right the first time, save money in the long run and end up with a video that’s more likely to help you accomplish your goals.
Conclusion
You can slash your costs while still producing a fantastic video. It may take research to find the appropriate company to work with, but it’s worth the effort!
BADASS Book Review: The Content Code by Mark Schaefer
The Content Code: Six essential strategies to ignite your content, your marketing, and your business is the latest book from Mark Schaefer and like The Tao of Twitter and Social Media Explained, it’s a must read.
I’ve known and admired Mark for several years. He is a very generous person and that generosity extends to the knowledge he shares in the content and conversations he’s a part of.
Mark has a valuable ability to take the complexity out of marketing and draw attention to the things you really need to know – and in a way that just makes sense. Let’s face it: marketers are definitely living in an age of increased complexity and information overload. The sheer volume of content now being produced has no chance of being consumed, ala “Content Shock” and businesses are hard pressed to find ways to stand out.
In The Content Code, Mark outlines 6 factors that will that will help you move beyond the basics of content marketing, social media and SEO to “unlock” as he describes it, the strategies to ignite your marketing and grow your business.
Better quality content is no doubt, an imperative for modern marketers to succeed in 2015. But what good is amazing content without reach and engagement? The importance of connecting meaningful content with your target audience through content ignition is why The Content Code is so important.
To apply Mark’s principles for your own content ignition, there are the 6 elements outlined in the book:
- Brand Development
- Audience and Influencers
- Distribution, Advertising, Promotion, and SEO
- Authority
- Sharability embedded into each piece of content
- Social proof and social signals
That’s right, the acronym is BADASS.
For readers that have a background in SEO, the importance of ignition isn’t new. Search Marketers have been focused on igniting content by any means necessary for years. What most SEOs haven’t been focused on (until recently) is quality content.
At the same time, the rise in popularity of content marketing and the call to arms for better quality content has created a wave of information abundance. Standing out amongst a sea of brand publishers and consumers empowered to publish is one of the most important marketing challenges companies are facing right now. The solution? Most brands rely on paid amplification and distribution to ignite their content.
But ads are not enough. Neither are organic amplification efforts like SEO, enough.
Why not create content that has amplification and ignition built-in? This approach aligns well with what we do at TopRank Online Marketing: Co-create content with influencers, brand subject matter experts and community around topics that are keyword optimized, socialized and publicized.
Shifting from a “let’s make more content” model to a content ignition model is exactly what The Content Code will help you do.
Mark interviewed me for The Content Code and here’s an excerpt to give you a preview of the very generous mentions he gives in the book:
Mark: In your book Optimize you stated that, “Content is not just King, it’s the Kingdom.” Is your thinking evolving on that or is that statement still true to the same extent today?
Lee: Solving marketing problems in terms of the attraction, engagement and conversion is all still very centered around content and strategic content creation.
Search doesn’t exist without content. There’s not much sharing going on without content on the social web. I think the distinction today is that it is not about quantity, like maybe it once was. It’s about insight.
A lot of SEO still seems to focus on coming up with really clever ways of creating content, and then more content. They don’t ever mention the word customer, nothing about customer insight, nothing about the customer journey buying cycle and so forth. I think content is the kingdom but in order to function effectively it is not about more, it’s about quality, it’s about experience. It’s about providing the right information at the right time.
What’s the role of customer connection in this? A few years ago social media was small and quiet. You could really tune in and focus on individuals who were high probability customers or sales leads. Today, the noise is growing. The number of people using these tools is growing. Is connection still possible? Can you scale? Is it important to be human or is it really just kind of raw algorithms that make a difference today?
The people working for those SAS companies will tell you the algorithm is your answer, but I think, yes, it’s still possible to scale human connection. It’s harder to do. For many companies, customers are just a name in a database and we’ve tailored specific content based on their specific personas — behavioral, demographic, or whatever. We’re nurturing them along a sales cycle. I don’t think that can be a completely automated process by any means.
I think there’s got to be an inbound marketer who is overseeing marketing automation efforts and lead nurturing because you must have human insight. You have to look for opportunities as they surface in real-time.
I think human connection is more important than ever. Companies are going to have to work harder at being able to earn the attraction of buyers early on in that sales cycle by producing more remarkable and meaningful content.
Storytelling, for example … I know that’s a cliché, but talking as a real person, being more creative, I think that’s where a lot of inspiration for those connections can come into play. I think that’s how companies are differentiating themselves.
That’s very interesting. What you’re saying is that SEO today almost harkens back to traditional public relations. If you get positive exposure on other credible sites it could directly help you move your own content, because it sends a cumulative signal to Google?
Yes. In fact, you hit it right on the head. I’ve always had a high degree of value for public relations, because our agency started as a PR firm 15 years ago. PR, the media relations specifically and the ability to work with publications for that type of visibility is more important than ever for social reach, search and moving your content.
You can get The Content Code on Amazon as a paperback and in a few days on Kindle.
Disclosure: Mark and I have hired each other in the past for projects and he is part of the Dell Insight Partner Program that my agency TopRank Marketing manages for Dell’s Tech Page One.
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© Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®, 2015. | BADASS Book Review: The Content Code by Mark Schaefer | http://www.toprankblog.com
How to Create Awesome Content From Your Next Event Experience
Image via Flickr user richard.scott1952
This is a guest contribution from trade show expert Peter Symonds.
Over the last few years, content marketing has grown from a marketing tactic used to generate publicity and inform customers, into an essential strategy for promoting any startup, SME or large company online.
The basics of content marketing are fairly simple: publish great content that solves your audience’s most common problems, informs them of the latest developments in your industry or teaches them something new and helpful.
Coming up with the strategy is often straightforward. Coming up with the content, on the other hand, can be tougher. From startups to small businesses, many companies’ content marketing campaigns burn out due to a lack of ideas.
If your business exhibits at trade shows or appears at other events, you have a great opportunity to get new content ideas – as well as detailed interviews – from the attendees and influencers you interact with during the event.
In this guide, we’ll share four techniques that you can use to create amazing content for your company blog, YouTube channel, guest blogging campaign, or other content marketing strategy from your next event.
Learn your target audience’s biggest pain points
The most effective company blogs discuss their audience’s pain points. Pain points are issues that your target audience is struggling with – inefficiencies in production or marketing, for example, or problems collecting payments from their customers.
Understanding your audience’s pain points is the key to closing sales and, online, an essential element of creating engaging content that your readers don’t just scan and close, but truly connect with and share.
Use your next event as an opportunity to learn more about your audience’s top pain points by interviewing people who visit you, or the people you meet. Ask them what issues they currently face, what they’re struggling with and what they want to improve.
Prospects are usually eager to answer questions and engage in conversation, unlike online. A quick and simple interview performed on 50+ prospects at a trade show, conference, or networking event will give you greater insight into your audience’s pain points than a month-long online customer survey.
Once you understand your target audience’s pain points, you’ll have a deeper level of understanding about what they want to read, listen to and watch. Dedicate each new blog post to a different pain point and you’ll command attention online.
Take note of the 10 biggest pain points mentioned by your target audience. Break each point down into smaller, highly-focused topics to fill your editorial calendar for the next few months with engaging content.
Build a network of influencers and content promoters
Events can be great places to meet prospective clients and customers. They’re also great places to meet people in a similar situation to you – startup founders and marketers eager to grow their businesses, often through content marketing.
12 months ago, online helpdesk startup Groove had a company blog full of engaging, interesting content. They also had virtually no readers – a situation that many online businesses and startups can certainly relate to.
Groove now has one of the technology startup world’s most popular blogs, with over 1,000 shares on their average blog post and hundreds of thousands of readers. Their promotional strategy was simple: build a network of influencers and promoters.
Building an influencer list over email takes a lot of time. At a trade show, however, it takes only a few minutes of conversation to get to know someone within your niche or industry and discuss how you can work together to promote each other’s content.
Reach out to other marketers and entrepreneurs at your next event and build a list of influencers. Afterwards, invite everyone to a private Skype group, email list, or online community to promote each other’s content via social media.
It only takes a few retweets and status updates to give your next blog post the traction it needs to reach thousands of readers. Focus on building your network at your next trade show and you’ll never worry about content promotion again.
Ask your customers about their favourite blogs and websites
Knowing what your customers struggle with will help you discover new topics and trends to write about. Knowing what your customers already like to read will show you exactly where you should be promoting your content in the future.
From industry forums that attract your target audience to popular blogs that could be major marketing platforms for you, chat to your customers about what they like to read online and you’ll discover hundreds of content ideas and opportunities.
Over the last year, many technology companies have discovered that the “biggest” blogs and aggregators – places like TechCrunch and Hacker News – aren’t quite as valuable as they thought. They send lots of traffic, but rarely is it qualified.
Smaller blogs and communities, on the other hand, are often highly responsive to good content. While they don’t send as much traffic as the big names, the traffic is highly qualified, focused and genuinely interested in learning more.
Don’t just use your next trade show or conference as an opportunity to discover new content ideas for your business – use it to discover where your customers hang out online and the topics they like to read about.
Interview influencers and thought leaders in your industry
Connecting with influencers – entrepreneurs, scientists, columnists, authors and the other well-known people within your industry – is tough. They’re often too busy for the phone, unresponsive via email and surrounded by assistants and other people.
At a conference or networking event, however, many of your industry’s most recognisable names will be far less defensive. They’ll be interested in learning more about your brand and may even provide a short interview about themselves or trends in your industry.
Many marketers are scared to ask for an interview with an established person. The most common fear is that asking for an interview is too selfish and self-promotional – after all, it’s incredibly helpful for your brand’s reputation and credibility.
Most influencers benefit just as much from a video interview for your company blog or YouTube channel as you do. It gives them a new audience, new exposure and the publicity they need for their careers. It benefits both of you in the same way.
Before your next event, reach out to your industry’s influencers via Twitter or email (here’s a helpful guide to getting them to notice your emails) and try to set up an interview. You may be surprised by how many positive responses you receive.
More content ideas
- Invest in photography – you’ll be surprised how much you can use high-quality images from the event in company literature, on your website, on social media and even for link building
- Conduct a quick industry-relevant survey of visitors to your booth – use a prize draw as incentive to enter and use the findings to create a press release to promote awareness of your business.
- Create a time-lapse video of the traffic to your booth throughout the day to document your trade show experience
- Live blog or Tweet the events of the day as it unfolds using the official event hashtag, offering key tips to those who couldn’t make it
- Publish a round-up post of 10/25/100 key takeaways from the event and ask the organisers to promote it via social media
- Make your blog posts more visual and interactive by embedding Tweets, Instagram images and Facebook posts from the event
Are you getting the most from your event attendance?
Events are great opportunities to generate leads and close deals. However, if you think of them purely as sales-focused events, you could be missing out on blog and video content that could strengthen your brand and help your company grow.
Are you really getting the most from your attendance? Treat your next conference or trade show as a sales and content opportunity, and you’ll walk away with both a stack of names and business cards and enough great content ideas to last for the next 12 months.
Peter Symonds is a trade show marketing expert from Display Wizard. For more practical tips on how to increase the ROI of your trade show marketing, download the Display Wizard Guide to Exhibiting at a Trade Show.
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
How to Create Awesome Content From Your Next Event Experience
61 Key Social Media Metrics, Defined
Of all the hundreds of social media acronyms and abbreviations out there, I think “KPI” has confounded me the most.
I think it’s because the phrase “key performance indicator” always sounds like something you need to be wearing a suit in front of a Powerpoint presentation in order to say.
But when you get down to it, it’s really quite simple. KPI is just a way of saying “This is the stuff that’s important enough to me to focus on and measure.”
Basically, social media KPIs, or social media metrics, are whatever is most important for your business. These are the goals and benchmarks that help you determine how well your campaigns and strategies are performing.
Social media KPIs could be the amount of engagement or shares you’re receiving on your social media networks. You could also track clicks back to your website via social media, or conversions once visitors get there.
In fact, there are so many different KPIs that it can be tough to keep them straight sometimes. In this post, we’ll look at a variety of social media metrics you might choose to focus on, with a brief explanation of each and how to measure it.
First, a quick view of the social media funnel
Funnels probably deserve a post of their own, but for our purposes here it might help to keep an image in our eye of what a typical customer journey with a brand or product looks like (or one version of it, anyway).
There are measurement opportunities at every stage of this journey. These are the big sections we’ll focus on in this post (click on any section to go to those metrics directly):
- Activity: The output of your social team
- Reach: Your audience and potential audience
- Engagement: Interactions and interest in your brand
- Acquisition: Creating a relationship
- Conversion: Actions, sales and results
- Retention and advocacy: Happy customers and brand evangelists
Activity metrics: The output of your social team
These are the numbers that show what you’re doing, the basic output of your social media team — including posting, scheduling and optimizing content, answering questions and solving problems. These can appear quite simple but become important to measure as you experiment and try new things. It’s great to be able to say whether increases in your activities produces increase in some of the other metrics we’ll be mentioning later on.
Average response time: The average time it takes a team member or brand representative to respond to comments and inquiries from the brand’s social media audience.
Content rate: The number of pieces of content you produce per period. Depending on which types of content you focus on, you might want to content post rate apart, focusing on:
- Blog posts per period
- Presentations per period
- Videos per period
- E-books per period
- White papers per period
- Infographics per period
- Other types of content creation per period
Post rate: Number of social media posts per period. Depending on which networks you’re active on, you might want to break post rate apart, focusing on:
- Tweets per period
- Facebook posts per period
- LinkedIn updates per period
- Google+ updates per period
- Pins per period
- Instagram posts per period
- Forum posts per period
- and any other social media networks you frequent
Post topic mix: The percentage of posts to each social media network per period broken down by content topic (e.g. resources, special offers, blog posts, etc.)
Post type mix: The percentage of posts to each social media network per period broken down by type (e.g., image, link, video, text, poll, etc.).
Response rate: The percentage of questions, comments or problems from people talking about your brand that you respond to within a certain amount of time.
Social media marketing budget: The amount of money your team is spending per period
Reach metrics: Your audience and potential audience
These are the metrics that focus on your audience and potential audience’s size and growth rate—as well as how often and how well your messages are tapping into that audience. Many social media management tools (like Buffer!) provide a number of these kinds of metrics.
Audience growth rate: The rate at which a brand adds (or loses) audience members per channel, found by dividing new audience members by total audience members
Average position: The average position where a brand’s ad appeared on a search engine results page (with the top position on the page being 1)
Brand awareness: The overall number of mentions of your brand online per period
CPM: Cost per thousand ad impressions in paid advertising
Fans/followers: The total number of people in your various networks per period
Influence score: Influence scores, offered by providers like Klout and Kred, measure how influential a person or brand is on a particular social channel
Keyword frequency: The number of times that a particular keyword or phrase is found within a brand’s social graph
Post reach: The estimated number of people who see a specific piece of your content at least once during a time period
Potential impressions: The number of times a piece of content could be displayed, regardless of whether it is interacted with, during a time period
Potential reach: The potential number of people in a brand’s audience, compounded by friends of audience members or others in a community who could have the opportunity to see a piece content, during a period of time
Share of audience: The rough percentage of people a brand will reach as compared to its competitors
Share of engagement: How a brand’s engagement metrics compare to others in similar fields
Share of voice: How big a brand’s portion of the conversation is compared to others in their space
Sentiment: Percentage of overall brand mentions that are positive, neutral and/or negative in sentiment
Video views: Number of views your video content gets on channels like YouTube, Vimeo or Facebook
Engagement metrics: Interactions and interest in your brand
These figures focus on how people are interacting with, sharing and re-sharing your content on social networks.
Amplification rate: The number of shares on average for each post. Depending on which networks you’re active on, you might want to amplification rate apart, focusing on:
- Twitter retweets
- Facebook shares
- Google+ shares
- LinkedIn shares
- Pinterest repins
- Instagram regrams
Applause rate: The number of approval actions, or virtual “applause,” you get from your audience per period, including +1s, likes, thumbs-ups, favorites, etc.
Average engagement rate: The percentage of your total audience that has engaged with your content in any way on a social channel per reporting period.
Comment rate: The average number of comments your content gets per post
Conversation rate: The number of conversations going on per social media post. On Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Instagram, this will be comments. On Twitter, it’s replies
Engagement as a percentage of audience: Total engagement actions across all social networks divided by total audience
Engagement per fan/follower: Total engagement actions for one network divided by the number of fans (or followers) for that network
Virality: The rate at which a piece of content spreads across the social web. A good way to measure this one is total shares per piece of content
Acquisition metrics: Building a relationship
At this stage, those who were once simply chatting with your brand on Twitter or Facebook may begin to dive deeper, poking around your site to see what you have to offer. Acquisition metrics focus on their experience there—whether your audience matches up with your offering and what value you provide. An analytics provider like Google Analytics can offer many of these metrics.
Blog subscribers: Number of subscribers to your blog
Bounce rate: The percentage of visitors who only went to a single page of your site, bouncing back to the place they came from rather than clicking further into the site
Click-throughs: The number of clicks on a link within a post on a given social network
Click-through rate: The rate at which your audience clicks on a link within a post on a given social network, found by dividing the number of clicks on a post by the number of impressions for the post
CPC: Cost-per-click (for paid search or social advertising)
Email subscriptions: Number of subscribers to your email list
Leads: The number of potential sales contacts earned through social media per time period
Links: Number of pages linking to a specific page of content on your site
Micro-conversions: Any measureable activity that a brand’s users frequently engage in before a conversion
Pageviews: Number of pages viewed or clicked on a site during the given time
Percentage of social visits: The percentage of traffic to your site that is referred by a social media source
Rank per keyword: Average position your content earns in a search engine for a specific key word or phrase
Sessions (formerly unique visitors): A group of interactions that take place on your website within a given time frame (A single session can contain multiple screen or page views, events, or social interactions)
Session duration (formerly time on site): Total duration of all sessions (in seconds) / number of sessions
Traffic: Number of visits and visitors social media drives to your sites per period
Traffic ratio: Percentage of traffic from each of three main segments, including:
- Direct visitors – Those who visit your site by directly typing your url in their browser address bar,
- Search visitors – Those who visit your site based on a search query
- Referral visitors –Those who find your site through another blog or site.
Conversion metrics: Actions, sales and results
The ultimate goal you hope a visitor will achieve with your brand is the focus of conversion metrics. Your conversion might be a sale, a subscription, a download, a signup or many other things. Again, a tool like Google Analytics might be handy here.
Average purchase value/average order value: The average value of each purchase made by your customers
Average revenue per customer: How much the average customer spends with a brand, found by dividing yearly revenue by yearly customer count
Conversions: Number of conversions per time period (Conversions can be defined as the ultimate action you’d like users to take on your site. Examples might be: email subscriptions, downloads, registrations, installations widget or tool, etc)
Conversion rate: The percentage of users who take a desired conversion action, found by dividing number of conversions by total traffic per period
CPA (cost per acquisition or cost per action): Dollar amount of how much a brand pays in order to attain a lead
Cost per conversion: Dollar amount of how much a brand pays in order to attain a conversion
New visitor conversions: Number of conversions that occurred per time period by visitors new to a brand’s website
Return visitor conversions: Number of conversions that occurred per time period by visitors returning to a brand’s website
RPC (revenue per click): the average amount of revenue generated per click in paid advertising
Social media conversion rate: The percentage of total conversions that can be attributed to social media, found by dividing social media conversions by total conversions
ROI or return on investment: Revenue generated by social media efforts divided by all known social media expenses
Retention metrics: Happy customers and brand evangelists
These KPIs—many of which go beyond the traditional social media metrics and into general business metrics—cover the last and perhaps most crucial state of the customer journey. This is where we make and create happier customers who can go on to be a brand’s most important sales force—in other words, we turn the funnel upside down.
Brand evangelists: Number of customers your brand would consider evangelists based on their social media advocacy
Customer annual or lifetime value: A prediction of the net profit attributed to the entire future relationship with a customer
Customer retention rate: The percentage of the total number of customers retained in context to the customers that have cancelled.
Customer reviews/ratings: Number of positive or negative customer reviews or ratings received per period
Customer satisfaction: A measure of how products and services supplied by a company meet or surpass customer expectation
Customer satisfaction rate: A score expressed as a percentage between 0 and 100, with 100% representing complete customer satisfaction. This metric is most often determined by a single question in follow-up surveys along the lines of, How would you rate your overall satisfaction with the service you received?
Customer turnover rate/churn: A measure of the number of customers who leave over a specific period of time
Customer testimonials: Number of positive customer testimonials gathered per period
K-factor: The growth rate of websites, apps, or a customer base
Net Promoter Score: To calculate this one, customers answer the question, How likely is it that you would recommend [your company] to a friend or colleague? using a scale of 0-to-10 points.
Support cost per ticket: The total monthly operating expense of a support team divided by the monthly ticket volume
Don’t forget…
As you might have noticed from a quick scroll-through of this post, there are dozens of metrics you could analyze. But only you will know which ones that tell you whether your strategies are working.
Don’t forget that you’re the expert. Make sure your metrics are working for you, not the other way around.
More great reading on social media metrics
From Buffer:
- Which Stats Matter: The Definitive Guide to Tracking Social Media Metrics
- 10 Expert Tips on Tracking Social Media ROI
- So…Is That Good? The Complete Beginner’s Guide to Benchmarking on Social Media
The Moz Blog: Tracking the KPIs of Social Media
Share your metrics!
Which social media metrics did I miss? And which ones are the most important to you and your brand? I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments!
The First Rule of Sales Development: Don’t Talk About Sales Development
How is sales development like Fight Club?
You do not talk about sales development.
Or, more specifically, many members in the sales development club don’t talk about what is (and isn’t) working in sales development.
Why not? It’s the year of sales development. Sales development teams are refining the art of turning raw leads into sales meetings, quickly and at scale. Growth hacking is great, but in B2B markets, you need sales development to bridge the gap between marketing and sales.
So why not talk about it?
Because the sooner everyone is doing the same thing in sales development, the sooner it stops working.
Here’s a great example. The best performing email subject line in the Obama 2012 Campaign was: “Hey.” It was so incongruous to get “Hey” from the President of the United States that people just had to open it to see what it said.
It was an awesome idea.
And it totally doesn’t work anymore. Subject lines containing ‘hey’ now underperform.
Why? Because tons of salespeople and marketers started sending emails with just “hey” as the subject. And, of course, outright spammers copied it, too.
People have seen it enough times now that they subconsciously recognize it as a ploy.
And that’s the trouble. The next tactic that starts to work for salespeople breaking through the noise will also be copied and hijacked until customers begin to see it as just more noise.
This helps explain all of the seemingly contradictory advice about sales dev. Someone figures out that if you send an executive a request to be referred to the right person, that often works. So this idea starts making the rounds and showing up in blog posts.
But now, some senior execs tell us that they get more than one of these requests per day. So they ignore them all. Now, some recommend that SDRs look for mid-managers and ask for a referral up the chain, the exact opposite of teh other advice.
So, sales development is all about agility and context.
In fact, most sales development managers call their list of tactics a “playbook,” like in football. The analogy is apt, since once the other side figures out your plays, you need to start designing new ones.
This is why the best folks out there offer ideas for your playbook, but emphasize that sales development is not one-size-fits-all. Take a look at The Funnelholic, for example. (At Selligy, this is why we think sales development teams need better tools to figure out which plays are working, and when they begin to taper off.)
So, if you have something that works, don’t talk about it. It’s worth noting that the Obama campaign didn’t tell us that “Hey” worked until well after the election.
Why? Because the second rule of sales development is:
Don’t talk about sales development.
Want to make 2015 the year you close more deals than ever? Download the free e-book with 130 sales tips.
3 Powerful Tactics to Explode Your Email List Growth in 2015
As bloggers, we generally focus on 3 key ways to drive traffic to our blogs. They are: Search Social media Email However, if this traffic can’t eventually convert into revenue, it is useless. According to research from Monetate, email is the #1 source of traffic that converts into revenue (email converts at an average of […]
The post 3 Powerful Tactics to Explode Your Email List Growth in 2015 appeared first on Blogging Tips.
Google Targets Digital Signage With Chrome Updates
Google wants to make sure that embarrassing ‘blue-screen-of-breath’ in the shop window doesn’t have to be a thing anymore – it’s aiming squarely are replacing windows as a dominant platform in the digital signage industry, thanks to new updates that add to the Google browser’s single app kiosk mode. These include a new Chrome sign builder, an app builder… Read MoreBest Deals in Real Estate 2015: Canada’s top cities to buy in
New housing development in No. 6-ranked Winnipeg (Richard Gillard/Getty Images)
In a quest to find the best deals in Canadian real estate for 2015, Romana King and Mark Brown of MoneySense have ranked the country’s largest cities based on housing value, price momentum, economic strength and rental income potential. The result is a comprehensive list of the top cities in the county to buy and own real estate in now.
The post Best Deals in Real Estate 2015: Canada’s top cities to buy in appeared first on Macleans.ca.
How to Determine the Perfect Marketing Budget for Your Company
Metrics That Matter: Financial Reporting For Your Service Business
How much money does your business bring in each month? Considering that revenue is a metric that most business owners follow closely, chances are that you can answer this question within a few hundred dollars of the actual amount.
But what other numbers should you be tracking in your business? Suppose you own a service-based company such as a yoga studio or a CrossFit gym? Here are some important metrics, aside from revenue, that matter.
Financial Metrics
Without adequate incoming revenue, your business won’t be able to meet its expenses each month. Aside from seasonal peaks and valleys, revenue in a service business — in particular, a membership-based business — tends to be fairly consistent, ideally trending upward each month as new members are added.
Aside from monthly gross, here are some important ways to look at your revenue.
Revenue trends by month and by quarter
After several months of using a software platform to manage your business, you’ll have enough data in the system to see revenue trends, whether good or bad. This historical data gives some great context year after year.
Looking at revenue quarterly tells a bit of a different story than just looking at it by month. Perhaps July was slow, but August saw an unusually large number of sales because of folks returning from vacation, so you’ll notice a big difference in monthly revenue for July and August. Second and third quarter revenues, however, might not differ that greatly. By looking at your revenue both ways, you can better assess whether any underlying issues need to be addressed.
Revenue by category
Another way to look at your revenue is by breaking it down according to the different categories of services that you offer, like appointments and classes. This provides more insight into the service categories that generate the most revenue for your business. If you use accounting software to run your business, be sure to take the time to carefully assign your service offerings to revenue categories — it makes all the difference when you’re looking at your financial reports.
Average revenue per member
If you sell recurring memberships you’ll want to keep track of your average revenue per member — an important metric for projecting how both revenue and net profit will grow in your business. It can also help inform your pricing decisions for membership plan offerings. The greater this number, the fewer members you need in order to reach your revenue target.
You likely have a handful of membership plans with different price points and visit restrictions — perhaps an unlimited plan that you sell for $150 per month and a two-visits-per-week plan that you sell for $99 per month. For projection purposes you need to know what each member is paying on average — this will depend on how many members you have on the $150 per month plan versus the $99 per month plan.
Fortunately, it’s an easy number to get. You just need to take the total dollar value of membership revenue and divide by the total number of member: (total value of membership revenue)/(total number of members).
For example, let’s say that last month you had 134 members paying a total of $14,698 in membership plan sales. That means that last month your average revenue per member was $109.69. If in the following month you sell 10 additional memberships at $150 per month you’ll see this number rise.
Uncollected revenue
In most membership-based service businesses, clients often pay for the month upfront automatically with auto debit or EFT, and that tends to minimize account receivables. There are, however, many unforeseen circumstances; sometimes client credit cards expire or payments fail, so it’s important to be able to quickly see any unpaid invoices and collect that revenue.
Visit metrics
Tracking attendance and the number of visits to your business is critical in a yoga studio or CrossFit gym. Not only does diligent attendance tracking help ensure that all visits are paid for and that membership plans aren’t being abused, but tracking total visits gives you a greater sense of how your business is growing.
If total visits are trending upward, existing clients are probably coming frequently and you’re likely adding new clients, a great indicator that business is going well.
If total visits are trending downward, you might be experiencing some seasonal variation (perhaps it’s summertime or right before the holidays when many people go on vacation). Or, the downward trend could be a symptom of a bigger problem (unpopular staff are instructing during key hours, or clients are choosing a different studio with greater proximity to work, for example). You’ll want to do some digging and find out why people aren’t coming as often as before.
If you’ve been in business for a year or longer, you’ll be better equipped to see possible seasonality trends, be better able to prepare for your busiest months, and budget for those months when business slows down.
Busiest days
Knowing the busiest days of the week is great information to have. Send out an email letting clients with more flexible schedules know which days and times are a bit less crowded. Knowing the busiest days and times can also help you make decisions about which new classes to open and when. If you have data at your fingertips showing current demand for classes, you can make schedule changes with confidence.
More metrics that matter
Most profitable services
Do you know which of your services or service types are most profitable? If not, go through this exercise to calculate your gross margins on each of your services or service types. Knowing which services add more money to your business’ bottom line can help you decide how to best allocate space in your studio or gym.
For this, you need to measure the total earned revenue per service (revenue from sessions that were completed) and the total cost to provide the service (labor costs per service type for the same date range). Take the earned revenue and subtract the costs, and then divide that number by the earned revenue: (i.e. earned revenue – labor costs)/earned revenue.
Net profit
Net profit is the amount left over after you’ve paid labor on your services, as well as all of your operating expenses. A great indicator of the health of your business, net profit, shows how well you’re managing your expenses relative to revenue. If you’re able to keep your operating expenses fairly consistent month after month and if you’re able to grow revenue at a steady pace, you’ll see net profits increase as well.
Your business, your metrics
Depending on your business you’ll probably want to track several other metrics regularly. One of the benefits to using business management software with customizable reports is that you can view your business data exactly how you like.
If you aren’t yet using a cloud CRM application to manage your service business, I urge you to start (and to check out FrontDesk!). It’s incredibly valuable to have access to your data wherever you are and to have the ability to look back one year, two years, or even five years from now, see trends, and evaluate your business’s performance over time. Not only can you see how far you’ve come, you can plan for where you want to go next!
Bill Ackman explains everything you need to know about the basics of finance and investing
Bill Ackman is one of the top investors in the world, and he's said that he's aiming to have "one of the greatest investment track records of all time."
As the CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management, the hedge fund he founded, he oversees $19 billion in assets.
But before he became one of the elite, he learned the basics of investing in his early 20s.
He gave a Big Think presentation in late 2012 aimed at young professionals just starting out, as well as those who are more experienced but lack a financial background.
We've pulled some of the highlights from Ackman's 40-minute, computer-animated lecture "Everything You Need to Know About Finance and Investing in Under an Hour."
Ackman takes viewers through the founding of a lemonade stand to teach the basics, explaining how investors pay for equity, a word interchangeable with "stock." In the example, the owner starts with $750, with $250 of that coming from a loan.
Here's an income statement tracking the healthy growth of the lemonade business. By year five, the company has seven stands, supported by an increased margin on products, and makes a profit of $2,311 (earnings before tax).
A business owner can take money from a lender, who profits from interest on his loan, or an equity investor, who buys shares in the company. An equity investor stands to make much more money than a lender due to the level of risk involved — if the company doesn't make money, neither does the investor. 
For instance, an investor makes a small amount of interest from government bonds because the risk is low — the US government is more secure than any corporation. An investor makes a large amount of interest from loans to business owners because the risk is high.
Equity is a "residual claim" because debt must be paid off before investors can profit. Shareholders may make money from company profits called "dividends."
When a company has grown significantly, its owner can sell it for a typically large sum of money, in exchange for control of the business and a shot at future profits.
Instead of growing a business further, an owner can pay himself dividends to put cash in his pocket rather than in the company.
At a moment of strong growth, the business owner can either share profits with a private investor or go public.
When a business files for an initial public offering (IPO), its owners offer a portion of it to the general public, which raises cash, and the company gets listed on an exchange. It requires being transparent and, in the US, reporting to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Ackman's nine tips for successful investing are about minimizing risk.
Similarly, he recommends that you only begin investing when you pay off debt and set aside an emergency fund.
And when you do become an investor, Ackman says success requires developing a resistance to the human tendency of following the herd's reactions to short-term market fluctuations.
If you don't have the time or desire to invest in individual stocks, you can invest in mutual funds, large pools of funds managed by a professional investor.
You can also outsource your investing to a money manager.
Ackman says his presentation is just a brief introduction to the world of finance. For a next step, he recommends Benjamin Graham's classic "The Intelligent Investor"), which Ackman says changed his life dramatically after he read it in his early 20s.
Check out the full video below:
SEE ALSO: Billionaire hedge fund manager Ray Dalio explains how capitalism works
Join the conversation about this story »
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Let Your Customers Segment Themselves by What They’re Willing to Pay
The late Sir Colin Marshall, when he was CEO and chairman at British Airways (BA), knew that success in his business came down to superior value capture. In a 1995 interview with HBR, he summed up the opportunity brilliantly: “You’re always going to be faced with the fact that the great majority of people will buy on price. But even for a seeming commodity such as air travel, an element of the traveling public is willing to pay a slight premium for superior service …. In our case, we’re talking about an average of 5%. On our revenues of £5 billion, however, that 5% translates into an extra £250 million, or $400 million, a year.”
If you’re out to capture more value, one surefire tactic is to figure out a way to charge different prices to customers with different willingness-to-pay (WTP). Economists sometimes call this “price discrimination,” which sounds bad since discriminating against people is generally illegal, not to mention immoral. However, most of us encounter forms of price discrimination frequently that don’t bother us. For example, who begrudges the discounts afforded to senior citizens and students? (Well, all right, I have occasionally felt a tinge as I see my retired neighbors driving much more expensive cars than mine.)
But charging different customers different prices for the same or a similar product or service is tricky for reasons having nothing to do with ethics. First: it is not easy to identify and group customers according to their willingness to pay. Second: if you have different prices in the market for a similar product, there is no preventing your well-heeled customers from taking advantage of the lower prices, too. Often, a marketer will try to scoop up sales from more price-sensitive shoppers (without cutting margins for its best customers) by launching a second, lower-end “fighter brand.” But customers are smart, and this often invites another serious problem – indeed called by one of the scariest terms in the management vocabulary: cannibalization.
There is an elegant solution to this problem, which I call “self-segmented fencing.” It consists of two parts: (1) Customers reveal their willingness-to-pay through self-segmenting, which is to say they themselves choose either the high- or low-price offer; and (2) Arbitrage is then prevented through effective fencing – that is, customers with high willingness-to-pay are fenced off from the low-price offer.
A fabulous example of this strategy is couponing. Grocers could simply offer the same attractive price to everyone, but instead they invite customers to present coupons to cashiers in order to get discounts on certain products during certain time periods. Why is this beautiful? Because many shoppers can’t be bothered to search for, collect, and redeem coupons. Therefore, they effectively choose to pay full price. Frugal shoppers and families living on small budgets are more likely to make the opposite choice, self-selecting to participate in the lower-price offer by using coupons and even shopping specifically for products that are on sale. In this example, the coupon is the “fence” to identify the segments and discriminate the price.
Once you understand fencing, you see fences everywhere. Famous fashion and sporting goods brands, for example, fence premium buyers by putting 50 or 100 kilometers between their flagship stores in the city and the outlet strips where they sell previous and even current-season models for huge discounts. And, back to Sir Colin’s business, fencing goes on left and right with airplane seats. It’s hardly a random occurrence when a roundtrip price comes up much cheaper and there is a Sunday between the outgoing and incoming flight. That fences off the majority of business travelers, even (or especially) if they fly economy class. Another fencing mechanism is tickets with no flexibility for canceling and rescheduling flights. (If you are like some clever participants in seminars I’ve taught, the thought might be occurring to you that a fully refundable ticket is really a different offering than a nonrefundable ticket, and therefore, doesn’t constitute fencing but simply selling different products at different prices. It’s a valid point, but given that the price difference is sometimes over 400%, it is certainly not based on cost considerations. What the airlines want to do is fill underutilized planes with cheap tickets that are unattractive to high-paying customers.)
Once you begin to see the elegant workings of self-segmented fencing all around you, you might begin to see opportunities to use it in your business. If different customers are willing to pay different prices by choosing, for example, to pop into your flagship store or trek all the way out to the outlets, why not let them? However, because there is never a free lunch, this strategy requires a very good understanding of what customers really want and how segments differ from one another. The bigger picture here is, of course, that value-based pricing always requires a solid and sophisticated understanding of what customers value
Finally, remember that fences are most powerful if they give even as they take away. Premium customers should enjoy at least one important attribute that the low-price-seekers don’t get. The grass should never look much greener on the other side of the fence.
CEOs: Don’t Let this Happen to You!
By Rebecca Bell Ellis
You’re required by law to have a smoke alarm in your home. That’s because fires can and do spread quickly. Having an early warning system can make the difference between life and death. We have smoke detectors instead of fire detectors because smoke goes hand-in-hand with fire. Of course, that’s why we say, “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”
What if I told you that something dangerous is billowing up inside your organization and it’s also a killer—a revenue killer? You’d want some sort of warning so you could avoid disaster. Well, we have just such a revenue-killer “detector.” It’s free, and it takes just a minute to test for danger.
Read on (and take this test) to see how you can keep your profitable revenue from going up in smoke.
Revenue-killer detector test: |
YES |
NO |
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| In the hallway and informal gatherings, my Marketing and Sales team members exchange jokes and accolades; in other words, they get along and feel they’re part of the same team. | |||
| Both Marketing and Sales are rewarded when a joint revenue goal is met. It’s considered a win for all. |
If you answered YES to all 3 questions, consider yourself safe. If you answered NO to even one question, beware. We have detected clear signs of Sales and Marketing misalignment which can be potentially lethal to revenue.
If we’ve detected danger ahead, you should read on to assess the degree of danger and the urgency for change.
Why is “Alignment” an early warning system?
After many corporate consultations, Wheelhouse Advisors, a strategic marketing services company, recently declared, “The rivalry between Sales and Marketing teams is possibly the most uncalled for rift in the business world, for the simple fact that their goals are so similar! It doesn’t make any sense for these teams to be at loggerheads when their alignment has been proven, time and time again, to improve business processes. ” You can download an Infographic: How to Align…to Boost Revenue compiled and created by Wheelhouse Advisors to learn some startling facts on the topic.
A summary of the dangers
Lost sales productivity and wasted marketing budget are the costly results of misalignment.
Marketing budget becomes ineffective due to inefficiency. Misalignment causes Marketing and Sales teams to not understand each other’s needs. Instead of working together, they work single-handedly. As a result, the budget spent on generating wonderful marketing content is often ignored by Sales (if they can even find it), and salespeople are left to chase poorly qualified or cold leads without enough current information about new products, services, or promotions.
Low productivity: When Sales and Marketing teams don’t work in harmony with one another their productivity always suffers, even when they think it doesn’t. It may appear as though the marketing team is being super productive, however, the fact that they send leads directly to Sales without some form of scoring or qualification means leads are often not “Sales-ready,” and therefore not of value to Sales. In turn, Sales teams ignore most of the leads Marketing sends them because they don’t consider them to be of a high-enough quality.
Declining close rates: It’s kind of a catch twenty-two situation, because if Sales doesn’t offer feedback to Marketing on what’s working and what’s not, they will never get the right leads and productivity will be hampered, leading to decreased Sales close rates and ROI. Aligning the two teams would solve these problems instantly.
Lack of lead conversions. The main reason for this is lack of lead nurturing by marketing. Best practice is for Marketing to score the leads and determine their value as: a) qualified for sales, b) ready for nurturing or c) disqualified. When this qualification doesn’t happen, it’s because Marketing is eager to deliver leads and so they indiscriminately pass leads on to their sales team. The resulting outcome is that a high percentage of leads generated by Marketing receive minimal follow up and do not convert into sales. Obviously this scenario means that the time and effort spent on generating these leads is ultimately wasted. When Marketing and Sales agree upon lead scoring, conversion rates will improve.
How Can You Extinguish the Fire?
Unify and motivate your Sales and Marketing Leaders with shared KPIs.
Two simple, clear metrics will work. The first one is related to customers; the second one is related to profitable revenue.
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Create a Customer Lifecycle Accountability Matrix. This will crystalize your team’s mission through accountability. Share this example with your leaders, “Gleanster and Act-on report: Rethinking the Role of Marketing,” pg 21.
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Establish quality revenue measures for acquisition of new—versus existing—customers. New customers are often less profitable because there is a high-cost of acquisition. Conversely, retaining and expanding business with existing customers is often the most profitable type of revenue growth. Your CFO can work with your CMO and CRO to determine the mix and the corresponding, overall single KPI which will reflect the best composition. For more examples and explanation, check out the eBook co-written by Aaron Ross of Predictable Revenue Inc. and Zorian Rotenberg and Mike Baker of InsightSquared, “Key Metrics for Seeds, Nets and Spears” or “CEO’s Guide to Sales and Marketing KPIs,” by Zorian Rotenberg and Kim Lindquist.