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WPP, the world's largest advertising company, has just revealed Google is its biggest partner, in terms of where it plugs its clients' advertising money. And it's WPP's biggest media partner by quite some way.

Speaking on the company's fourth quarter earnings call, WPP chief executive Sir Martin Sorrell gave some interesting nuggets about the company's media outlay last year.

"Google has become our biggest media partner," he said. Last year WPP invested $2.9 billion of its $75 billion media bookings into Google ads.

That's massive. Put that another way, nearly 5% of the (as-yet unaudited, and not a direct apples-to-apples comparison as the two companies have different reporting periods) $59 billion in advertising revenue Google reported last year came from WPP.

As one mobile executive summarized to Business Insider on Twitter:

By comparison, here's where else WPP was spending the majority of its clients' digital advertising budgets this year:

• Facebook: $640 million
• Yahoo: $400 million
• Twitter: $150 million
• AOL: $100 million

And outside of the digital media landscape, WPP's spend with Fox and News Corp combined only totaled around $2.5 billion last year. Spend with other individual major traditional companies tops $1 billion, max.

Later on in the call, Sorrell spoke about the kind of things that keep him up at night in terms of their impact to WPP's business.

"The G-word has not receded, I still worry about disintermediation," he said. By "G-word," he means Google.

In the past Sorrell has referred to Google as a "frenemy": A company that is carving off chunks of its revenue, yet one it has no choice but to partner with given its scale and other benefits. To combat that threat, Sorrell said WPP is adjusting its business to be "digital everywhere" — which means adding digital expertise across its traditional businesses, but also partnering and investing in other digital companies like its $25 million investment in adtech company AppNexus earlier this year.

SEE ALSO: World's biggest advertising group WPP reports record £1.5 billion annual profit

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(Illustration by Peter Arkle)

“At the tone, please record your message. When you are finished, please hang up and send an email containing all the same information.” Those aren’t the voice mail instructions we’re used to hearing, but they should be. Electronic correspondence is the new staple of office communication, and leaving a recorded missive for someone is as obsolete as the Rolodex gathering dust in your drawer.

Coca-Cola got the message last December, dropping office voice mail in favour of a recording that instructs callers to use an alternative method of communication. In a company-wide memo, chief information officer Ed Steinike described the move as an effort “to simplify the way we work and increase productivity.”

Between answering work emails, thinking up ingenious emoji rejoinders to colleagues’ instant messages and reaching out to customers on social media, employees are already doing all the communicating they can possibly manage. The desktop phone is increasingly the last device we turn to: 30% of voice messages go unheard for three days or longer, according to data from uReach Technologies, while 20% of users who took the time to set up their voice mail rarely bother to check it. It’s as much a generational shift as a technological one. A study conducted by the Opinion Research Corporation for U.S. wireless provider Sprint found that 91% of people under 30 respond to texts within an hour.

Even when you do make the effort to check your messages, gleaning the necessary information from them can be a frustrating process. Few of us can write as fast as people speak, so transcribing names, phone numbers and other vital details requires replaying and fast-forwarding. The time you waste trying to decipher if your correspondent said “fork handles” or “four candles” would be better spent elsewhere. If you hold out long enough, the same details are bound to arrive in an email anyway.

But cutting voice mail isn’t enough. It’s the phone itself that can be a productivity killer. In a recent survey by business centre operator Regus, 19% of respondents listed inbound cold calls as the worst interruption to their workday. Conference calls were the primary source of disruption for another 13%, putting telephone-related disturbances higher than transport delays and just behind lengthy meetings in the ranking of productivity impediments.

There’s a financial argument for snipping your company’s landlines too, one that Carlos “Beto” Sicupira understands well. When his firm, 3G Capital, acquired Burger King in 2010 (which last summer purchased Tim Hortons), the new management abandoned all pre-Internet forms of communication. “Costs are like fingernails,” Sicupira says. “You have to cut them continuously.” So now managers have only mobile phones and laptops. Long-distance calls are made via Skype, and courier services are banned—important documents are scanned and emailed instead.

Detailing the minutiae of how your employees communicate might seem unnecessarily dictatorial, but the savings may make up for the micromanaging. “In a 100-person business, you might be looking at anywhere from 25 to 30 phone lines,” says Tim Rayl of Simple Business Solutions, a small-business consultancy focused on finding operational efficiencies. “You would be looking at anywhere from $600 to $800 a month in savings, on the low side.” That doesn’t even factor in the cost of using the phones, which can add up for a business with multiple locations. Just imagine what a company with thousands of employees across continents might save.

Better to cut the cord and communicate with people via email, text, instant message, social media or carrier pigeon. You’ve been ignoring your calls anyway.

MORE ABOUT EMAIL AND PRODUCTIVITY:

• Get more done by checking your email less
• Email isn’t the problem. The problem is us
• Overloaded by email, employees are taking to tools like Slack, with or without permission
• Stop wasting your time on junk productivity hacks
• Accomplish more by procrastinating better

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The post Forget voice mail. Just get rid of your desk phone altogether appeared first on Canadian Business.

Apple's trusted, high-end brand will give the smartwatch category immediate clout and help drive much more interest among consumers, not just among tech enthusiasts but also among those attracted to luxury goods.

The pricing, materials, and design on certain models will make the Apple Watch the first smartwatch to compete in the luxury-wristwatch category.

In a new report on the smartwatch market and the luxury wristwatch market, BI Intelligence takes a closer look at the opportunity for Apple's wearable device, how it might impact the market for luxury watches, and forecasts shipments for both Apple Watch and the broader luxury watch market over the next five years. We also examine the pricing and design strategy behind Apple Watch, the new retail distribution opportunities with this device, and the wider opportunity among tech-savvy consumers.

Access The Full Report And Data By Signing Up For A Risk-Free Trial Today >>

Here are some key points from the report:

• Smartwatches, and the Apple Watch in particular, will be the device category that drives overall growth in the wearables market over the next five years. Wearable computer shipments will grow 22% per year on average through 2020, to reach 235 million units shipped annually in that year.
• Smartwatches will grow 25% per year on average through 2020 and will make up 52% of total wearables shipments in that year.
• Fitness bands have more limited functionality and will cater to a more niche, health-focused audience.
• Apple Watch will compete not only with other smartwatches but in the traditional luxury-wristwatch category as well. We forecast 15 million Apple Watch shipments in 2015, and compound average growth of 24% per year through 2020.
• The three Apple Watch models will carry high prices compared to other smartwatches. We expect the Sport edition to cost $349. We predict the two higher-end Apple Watches — the Watch and the Watch Edition with a solid-gold body — will be priced at $549 and $2,499, respectively.
• The introduction of the Apple Watch will mark Apple's first opportunity to distribute a product through apparel and jewelry retailers, including department stores. Retail consumers will take to Apple Watch as a symbol of status and as a fashion-forward accessory, much like a traditional luxury wristwatch.
• By 2020, Apple Watch shipments will be equivalent to about two-fifths of the luxury-watch market. Assuming a lower-bound price of $350 for the luxury-watch category, and including Apple Watch in that category, traditional wristwatches would account for ~60% of total shipments in 2020, while Apple Watch would account for ~40%.

The report is full of charts and data that can be downloaded and put to use.

In full, the report:

• Forecasts the markets for wearables overall, smartwatches, and luxury wristwatches through 2020.
• Estimates Apple's tiered pricing strategy for its three Apple Watch models.
• Examines the opportunity for Apple Watch to resonate with consumers in the traditional luxury wristwatch market.
• Discusses the new retail distribution opportunities for Apple Watch through apparel and jewelry retailers, including department stores.
• Reviews proprietary consumer survey results that give insight into what consumers are looking for when choosing a smartwatch.

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

Business books are notorious for being loaded with MBA lard, trotting out "key takeaways" like "take risks," "build a great team," and "don't be afraid to fail." 

But the ones worth reading ditch the platitudes in favor of instructive anecdotes — which is why they so often come from execs who have lived through it. 

'The Hard Thing About Hard Things'

What is the hard thing about hard things? That they don't have a formula, says Ben Horowitz.

"Hard things are hard because there are no easy answers or recipes," he writes. "They are hard because your emotions are at odds with your logic. They are hard because you don’t know the answer and you cannot ask for help without showing weakness." 

Horowitz, now one of the most sought-after investors in the game, used to be CEO of software management company Opsware before it was acquired by HP for $1.6 billion. 

Buy it here >>

Disclosure: Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, is an investor in Business Insider.

'Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business'

In 2013, Whole Foods CEO John Mackey published his business manifesto, "Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business." 

It's as much about management as about philosophy. 

As in: 

This is what we know to be true: business is good because it creates value, it is ethical because it is based on voluntary exchange, it is noble because it can elevate our existence, and it is heroic because it lifts people out of poverty and creates prosperity.

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'The Promise of a Pencil'

In "The Promise of a Pencil," Adam Braun takes you on his journey from backpacker to consultant to founder of Pencils of Promise, the rapidly growing education nonprofit.

"I realized that I needed to live a life that reflected the themes of the stories I wanted to one day tell," Braun writes, "and when I veered off that path later on, it was time to make a change." 

He wants the reader to follow a similarly individual path. 

"Your life should be a story you are excited to tell," he writes.

Buy it here >>

Customer references and testimonials are arguably the most powerful form of publicity for any business. They are the ultimate differentiator. Your competitors may be able to match you in other areas, but your customer stories are unique to you and they provide the proof of the real benefits your products and services can bring. We all like a recommendation and there is nothing more convincing than getting somebody else to say something positive about what you do; it’s the essence of good PR. King among testimonials is the customer case study; the full story of your relationship with your client and the benefits they have gained as a result. Easily said, not so easy to do. Here are some useful hints and tips to putting effective customer stories together and getting the best value from them.

1. Treat the reader with respect

You should approach the case study as if you were writing for an independent publication – online or print. This means you should employ a skilled writer to interview your client and to write the story in the client’s own words. It should never be an overt promotional piece; if anybody in your organisation thinks it’s a good idea to mention your product in every sentence, or to pepper the story with platitudinous quotes, you’re wasting your time. The strength of a customer story is in its credibility as a genuine testimonial, so don’t treat the reader as a fool, they will soon spot puff. What’s more if you do intend to get the story independently published – which you should – you’ll be dead in the water if you have turned it into a sales pitch.

2. Don’t believe sales people

It’s difficult to get access to the client without the co-operation of the person in charge of the customer relationship but it is common for sales people and account managers to put up barriers. They quite rightly want to protect their relationship with the customer; they don’t want anybody else to compromise it and they may also be nervous about asking their client a favour and then being in their debt. A typical fob off is that now isn’t quite the right time; the client isn’t quite ready. This is almost always an excuse but their concerns are legitimate. It’s important the person you choose to write your case study is up to the job. As well as being suitably skilled as an interviewer and writer, they’ll need to get to know the subject before they speak to your client. Good people skills are essential and some commercial nous is useful too, which means journalists aren’t always necessarily the best choice.

3. It’s all in the brief

Before your writer interviews your client you will need to make sure they are thoroughly briefed; ideally to the extent they could almost write the story before they speak to your customer. Tell them what you are trying to get out of the story and where you hope to get it published. Give them as much detail about your customer as you can, warts ‘n’ all: how long you’ve been working together; what you’ve done for the client and importantly, which benefits the client has received as a result. It’s important to be specific about the benefits and provide facts and figures the client will be able to verify and approve for publication in the public domain. Phrases such as ‘a very significant increase, or ‘substantial growth’ with no point of reference, are meaningless and make for a weak story.

4. The customer’s customer is always right

Make sure your client knows exactly what to expect. It’s important the customer is comfortable so they will speak freely. Introduce the writer properly, and explain that you will be handing things over to them to manage the process. It is useful if the customer feels they are talking to somebody who is independent of your own organisation, since again, they are likely to be more open. This can also be an effective means of gaining genuine customer feedback. Tell the client what you are going to do with the story once it’s written and crucially that they will get to see the draft before it is published – even before you see it. Make it clear that once they have given sign off, the story will be in the public domain; if you are going to issue a press release and/or promote the story on social media, explain this to the client. You should also make it clear they are welcome to use the story for their own purposes – if the story is written from their perspective, as it should be, they are likely to be grateful for it. If the company has a communications department it is worth advising the client to check with them before the interview, so you or they don’t fall foul of any corporate policy after the case study is written or worse still, it is in the public domain.

5. A menu of options

Once you’ve written the case study you need to get it in front of the right audience. But don’t assume everybody is just dying to read it; until people are engaged with you and interested in what you have to offer, they are unlikely to have inclination to read the full story. The trick is to use the testimonial to influence prospects earlier than you perhaps otherwise would. Carve your story up into digestible chunks to suit the medium, bearing in mind that the objective is to attract the attention of the as yet uncommitted buyer. As well issuing a press release to the media (online and print), use the name of the client and the nature and scale of the benefits to increase your digital profile and engagement through social media. Use extracts for your website and blogs; post questions on LinkedIn groups and Twitter chats and use customer quotes in your printed material; and use stats for infographics. As well as extending the testimonial value of the story all these all serve as advertisements for the case study itself. It is critical you make the full story available and easily accessible to anybody and everybody that wants to read it. If you sell the sizzle but don’t serve the steak, you won’t satisfy the reader’s appetite.

In this excerpt from "ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror," co-authors Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan explain how ISIS funds its nascent caliphate.

ISIS has married its authoritarian governance with a remarkably successful war economy.

FSA and Islamist groups that controlled oil fields in eastern Syria, for example, did dedicate some of the revenue to run schools and supply electricity, telecommunications, water, food, and other services.

Some villages and towns saw a decline in such services because ISIS distributed oil revenue to other towns under its control in Syria and Iraq, establishing its own pan-territorial patronage system.

As a result, in oil-rich areas, warlordism—a side effect of strictly localized rebel governance— dropped steadily.

ISIS also forced municipality personnel to work, unlike previous groups that had allowed Syrian state employees to continue to re- ceive their salaries (mostly from the regime) while they sat at home and did nothing, no doubt with attendant kickbacks. “The streets are cleaner now; 70 percent of the employees were not working, even though they received salaries,” said a former media activist with the FSA from Deir Ezzor.

“They cancelled the customary day off on Saturday; they’re supposed to make Thursday the day off instead.” Regulations and price control are another area in which ISIS’s governance proved successful. It banned fishermen from using dynamite and electricity to catch fish.

It also prohibited residents in the Jazira from using the chaos of war to stake new land claims, principally in the Syrian desert, where they had tried to build new homes or establish businesses, much to the chagrin of their neighbors. ISIS also limited the profit margins on oil by-products, ice, flour, and other essential commodities.

Before ISIS controlled eastern Syria, an oil well produced around thirty thousand barrels per day, and each barrel sold for two thousand Syrian pounds—eleven dollars at the current exchange rate. Local families that worked in refineries would make two hundred liras (a little more than one dollar) on each barrel they refined primitively. After ISIS took over, a barrel of oil became cheaper because it fixed the price of a liter of oil at fifty pounds (thirty cents).

ISIS also banned families from setting up refineries close to residences under the threat of confiscation, a policy that led some families to quit the oil business altogether. Collectively, price control and regulations balanced the decline in resources and services.

Subsidies from Gulf countries, where many of those who live in ISIS-controlled areas work, also helped some families afford electricity-generating engines and oil by-products.

“Those in the Gulf who used to send once a month now send twice a month because they understand the situation,” said the former FSA media activist. “Also, there is no big difference in value. In 2010 a kilo of chicken was 190 pounds [$1] and is now 470 [$2.60].” 

Oil was a major revenue generator for ISIS until the coalition air strikes began. Before that, ISIS was thought to have earned mil- lions of dollars a month from oil in Syria and Iraq—$1 to 2 million a day. The revenue dropped significantly after the air strikes. But oil smuggling to neighboring countries such as Turkey and Jordan, and to other areas in Syria and Iraq, still makes significant revenue for ISIS.

The sharp decline in oil production affected civilians more than it affected ISIS, which could still generate wealth from other sources, but it hampered ISIS’s ability to provide for the local communities, especially much-coveted materials such as gas cylinders. “I estimate that the impact of air strikes was 5 percent,” said the media activist, who still lives in Deir Ezzor. “They affected oil primarily. Food is plenty, and most of it comes from Turkey or Iraq. Borders are open; if you don’t like prices here, you go to Anbar. I see the situation as normal.” 

ISIS’s oil market savvy has impressed and shocked many ob- servers, although Derek Harvey isn’t one of them. “I know for a fact that the Saddamists who were smuggling the oil in the ’90s, to evade UN sanctions, are now doing so for ISIS,” he said.

“People are saying that they’re selling it for thirty-five dollars a barrel. What we bombed recently is some of the local refineries. If you’re selling it at that price, it’s fifty to fifty-five dollars off the current market price. But here’s what happens: these middlemen are selling it, and there’s a kickback coming back in to ISIS’s senior leaders. They’re getting another twenty, twenty-five dollars a barrel in kickbacks, but that’s not on the books or being factored in by everybody. It’s going back into the kitty of financiers at the top of the pyramid. The ISIS fighters in Deir Ezzor would not be aware of that.”

Locals in eastern Syria had learned to survive on remittances from the Gulf and local economies even before the uprising.

High oil prices led many to rely less on agricultural products since the energy had to be spent pumping water from the Euphrates or Tigress rivers to their farmlands many miles away.

After the war started, cheaper oil revived the Syrian agribusiness—smuggling and livestock trade markets began booming again.

When ISIS seized control of the Jazira, people were already buying their own oil for irrigation and electricity and didn’t need to rely on subsidized services.

Germany’s foreign intelligence agency,the Bundesnachrichten– dienst (BND), has cautioned against “overblown” speculation about ISIS’s high oil revenue because there is a tendency to discount the massive overhead and spending inside its territories.

But, as per Harvey, ISIS pockets most of this revenue, as it sometimes taxes residents for services supplied by the regime, such as electricity and telecommunication. Unlike Islamist groups that operated regime-established facilities for the local communities gratis, ISIS has developed a surcharge economy to replenish its own coffers.

ISIS also makes millions from zakat (different forms of Islamic alms payable to the state). Zakat is extracted from annual savings or capital assets (2.5 percent), gold (on values exceeding $4,500), livestock (two heads out of 100 heads owned by a farmer), dates, crops (10 percent if irrigated by rain or a nearby stream or river, and 5 percent if irrigation costs money), and profits (2.5 percent).

ISIS also imposes annual taxes on non-Muslims living in its territories, especially Christians (4.25 grams of gold for the rich and half of that for moderate-income individuals). It makes money by stealing dressed up as civil penalties: it confiscates the properties of displaced or wanted individuals or as punishment for fighting ISIS.

This includes, of course, enormous stocks of weapons and ammunition as part of its community disarmament policies. While donations from foreign sponsors constitute a meager percentage of its treasury, deep-pocked individuals, whether foreign donors or members who have joined the group, still contribute to the group.

More significantly, ghanima (war spoils, which in ISIS’s definition encompasses robbery and theft) is one of the group’s largest and most valuable sources of income. ISIS seized millions of dollars worth of American and foreign military equipment after it forced three Iraqi divisions to flee in June 2014, and it has also seized large stockpiles of weapons as well as equipment, facilities, and cash from Syria’s regime and rebel groups.

Artifacts are also lucrative for ISIS—one man interviewed in Turkey said trade in artifacts grew during ISIS rule,with one of his cousins smuggling into Turkey golden statues and coins found in Mari ancient ruins, eleven kilometers away from Albu Kamal.

Michael Weiss is the editor in chief of the Interpreter and a widely published journalist with a focus on developments in Syria, Turkey, and Russia. He is the co-author of "ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror." Follow him on Twitter: @michaeldweiss.

Republished with permission from ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror by Michael Weiss. Copyright © 2015 by Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan. Reprinted by arrangement with Regan Arts. All rights reserved.

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

I started my career in public relations many years ago and have always had a fondness for this profession and the people in it. I believe we are entering a golden age of PR for those professionals bold enough and smart enough to embrace it. Here are three essential new areas of activity that could re-define the future of public relations:

Search engine optimization

What does PR have to do with SEO? Maybe everything. The days of backlink trickery and schemes are over. Yet earning backlinks from a variety of credible sources is still a powerful signal to Google that you matter.

How do we build those backlinks? Quality content — sure. But that’s probably not enough any more. There’s plenty of quality content that never sees the light of day. People also link due to relationships. People link to you because they know you, like you, and trust you. Who is going to build those relationships that result in links? Marketing? Some SEO person? Probably not. Wouldn’t this job fit best under the department that was built for building relationships — public relations?

Influence marketing

Here’s why influence marketing is struggling at many ad agencies and marketing departments. Ad agencies are accustomed to campaigns. They get money approved, do the work, the money ends, then they start the pitching process over again. But influence marketing cannot be a campaign. It has to be a relationship that builds over time, unlinked from a quarterly ad budget.

Influence marketing belongs in the PR department because this is a group that is normally already un-linked from quarterly sales goals. Their job is to build healthy working relationships with the press, community, and other stakeholders over a long period of time. Influence marketing is a vital, growing discipline and the best fit is PR.

Content distribution

A growing marketing need is content distribution. Today, great content isn’t the finish line. Great content is the starting line. We have to optimize our investment in content and determine other likely channels where the content could be distributed. This’s not far from pitching press releases to media outlets, is it? Creating content distribution strategies should be a natural activity for a PR professional.

Of course there is a lot of overlap between these three imperatives. Influencers can also be a source of backlinks. Channels that contribute backlinks might also distribute our content. Influencers are also probably publishers of content.

Public Relations 2.0

It’s remarkable to think that none of these activities would have been a priority for a PR professional five years ago but they are absolutely essential to business success today. All three activities also contribute measurable value to the enterprise.

Can PR evolve and embrace these crucial new activities? Time will tell but the smartest professionals will grab hold of these opportunities and drive measurable new value to the enterprise.

Your thoughts?

Customer Journey Through The Tourney written by Alex Boyer read more at Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

photo credit: Derrick Williams dunks over defender. via photopin (license)

Happy March, everyone! It is my favorite time of year. Spring weather is here, and March Madness is just around the corner.

While many of us are focusing on buzzer beaters and bracket busters, business owners should be focused on improving the way their businesses get their customers to Know, Like, Try, Buy, Repeat and Refer their product. We call this the customer journey, and we visualize it with a tool called the Marketing Hourglass.

But ignoring basketball this month is easier said than done, I thought I might visualize the customer journey a different way – through the lens of a college basketball fan.

First Four – Know

The First Four is the official kick-off to March Madness, and it begins the Wednesday before the first weekend of the main tournament. This may be the first time you have heard of any of these teams, let alone watch them play. This would mirror the first time a customer encounters your business.

While you watch these early games, be aware of all of the ways new customers may encounter your business for the first time, and imagine different ways to reach more people.

Second Round – Like

The next step is to get this customer to like your business. New fans of basketball teams begin to like the team if they know enough about them to correctly predict a second-round upset.

For your business, you must strive to give potential customers great first impressions. Think about all of those customer touch-points in the previous round. Are there ways to improve the experience to create better impressions?

Third Round – Trust

Getting your customers to trust you is an important step towards turning them into paying customers. The Cinderella team you have been following earns your trust by winning another game. Not only are you rooting for them, but you are starting to believe they have a chance to win it all.

Like the team working hard for an upset, show your customers you are working hard to earn their trust, and they’ll start to believe in your business.

Sweet 16 – Try

Say your favorite new team has made it past the first weekend of the tournament. Games are now stand-alone, so more people are watching and cheering for every team. This is the first time a new fan can truly feel like a fan, a part of this team’s community.

The same goes for your business. Give your customers an experience to try and show them the value of your product. If they like what they experience, they will take the plunge and buy your product.

Elite Eight – Buy

Now it comes time for your customer to buy your product. During the tournament, this may be the stage when a new fan buys a t-shirt or some other memorabilia from the now improbable Elite Eight run.

For businesses, some of you may think this is the ultimate goal. It isn’t. You want to now shift your focus to turning these customers into continuing business.

Final Four – Repeat

Not every team makes it to the Final Four, just like your customers don’t always become repeat customers. The thrill of your chosen team making the Final Four is your reward for your support so far. Win or lose, this is exciting enough you’ll likely want to experience it again in the future. Your business is no different. Reward your customers for their business with great customer service or continued support, and they’ll keep coming back.

National Championship – Refer

This is the biggest step a customer can take for your business. Customers that continually refer your business to their family and friends are the best for the long term viability of your company. For the basketball team, win or lose in the national championship game, you’ll be telling your friends you were there to see their run to the final, and they should be fans too.

Referrals are the culmination of all of the steps that came before, and it is the championship trophy you should be seeking for your business.

Alex Boyer is a Community Manager and Content Ninja for Duct Tape Marketing. You can connect with him on Twitter @AlexBoyerKC

When I wrote Startup Boards: Getting the Most Out of Your Board of Directors with Mahendra Ramsinghani, our goal was to help entrepreneurs understand how to create an excellent board of directors, manage it effectively, and get optimal value out of it. This was challenging to do, as the topic of boards can be boring. Based on the feedback we’ve gotten, including consistently positive reviews on Amazon, I feel like we accomplished that goal.

Last year the Kauffman Foundation, with which I’ve had a long relationship and am a big supporter of, approached me about doing a Kauffman Founders School video series on Startup Boards. We completed it early this year – the teaser follows.

There are seven modules that are each five to ten minutes long.

• Board Functions and Responsibilities
• Forming and Organizing Your Board
• Choosing Your Board Members
• Recruiting Your Board Members
• How to Run a Board Meeting
• Managing Your Long-Term Relationships
• Managing Company Transitions

Each module also has suggested additional readings, beyond our book Startup Boards.

I’m proud to be part of the Kauffman Founders School, which includes some great courses such as the ones listed below by folks like Dan Pink, Steve Blank, Bill Reichert, and Meg Cadoux Hirshberg.

The post Getting the Most Out of Your Board of Directors appeared first on Feld Thoughts.

In the early 1960’s, Walter Mischel, professor at Stanford University conducted the infamous marshmallow test.  Mischel and his team of researchers tested four year old children on their self-control, a skill often referred to as delayed gratification.    Each child was presented with a marshmallow and given a choice:  eat this one now or wait, and enjoy two marshmallows later.  

His research showed that children displaying self-control at a young age achieved more success as they moved into adulthood.  They typically scored 200 points higher on SAT scores and enjoyed more professional and personal success. 

So what does grabbing marshmallows have to do with hiring good salespeople?   Perhaps everything.     

Here are three places where poor self-control impact sales outcomes. 

#1:  Prospecting.  The sales manager works with the new hire on designing a sales activity plan that insures a full sales pipeline.  The new hire is pretty good at executing the sales activity for the first month.  Then the need for instant gratification kicks in.  The marshmallow grabbing salesperson  doesn’t take the time to calendar block time for proactive business development each week.  The only plan being followed is the ‘what am I going to do today’ plan.    Prospecting efforts are inconsistent and so are the sales results. 

#2:  Skill Development.  The salesperson connects with a prospect; however, the conversation is short, stilted and non-productive.   Marshmallow grabbing salespeople don’t and won’t take time to practice and hone their selling skills.  The salesperson possessing delayed gratification skills will put in the work of practice to earn the reward of a conversational and relevant sales call.  

#3:  Major Account Selling.   Elephant hunting takes time.  There is no room for instant gratification in the pursuit of large deals.  The high self-control salesperson puts in the time on pre-call planning, designing effective questions and value propositions to uncover the gaps in the competitor’s services.   They take time to meet with multiple decision makers.

The marshmallow grabbing salesperson looks at the work required in pursuing the big deals and give into the pull of instant gratification.  They pursue low hanging fruit, rather than big deals.    

Apply self-control and design several interview questions to test for delayed gratification skills.   Let your competition hire the marshmallow grabbers. 

Good Selling!

Job hunting can be challenging no matter your experience level, but it can be particularly tough for entry-level candidates who may feel that they lack the experience to compete. Coming out of college you may be confident in what you have learned but not have a lot of real-world experience that shows you can apply it. Don’t let this hold you back from creating a powerful resume. Make the most of the skills and experiences you have acquired.

Highlight your education: As a new graduate, this may be one of your stronger assets. Bring your education section up to the top below your summary of qualifications and core competencies. This can help to explain lack of experience and also show that your training and knowledge are current and fit with modern trends.

Maximize your experience: This does not necessarily have to be paid experience. It could come from internships, volunteering, or extracurricular activities such as clubs and other organizations. Emphasize transferable skills that relate to the type of position you are seeking. Also demonstrate soft skills such as leadership, communication, and time management. What results did you achieve and how did you make a difference? The experience may not be in the same industry or role you are applying for, but it can showcase your abilities in a positive light. For instance, organizing a fundraiser for a non-profit can translate to strong marketing skills.

Brand yourself: Create a strong branding statement and marketing message to clarify the type of position you would like. Some degrees lend themselves to multiple career paths, so let employers know the direction you are headed. Your summary of qualifications should focus on the strongest skills that you would bring to the position and align with what the job opening is seeking. Also, make the most of your education again by creating a solid list of core competencies based on your acquired proficiencies. Now that you’ve established a branding statement, show that you have the skills to back it up and succeed in the job you are applying for.

Check your grammar and spelling: Don’t let your strong education be questioned by simple spelling and grammar mistakes. Show that you have an attention to detail as well as strong written communication skills with a polished, professional-sounding resume free from errors. A letter (or word) added or deleted can change the whole impact of what you are saying. Don’t just rely on spell check as it may not catch every mistake. The word may not be spelled incorrectly but may not be the word you intended to use. Ask a friend or family member to carefully read through things for you and catch anything you may have missed.

While you may not have years of experience under your belt, prove that your education along with the experience that you do have make you a strong contender and worth interviewing.

Back in 1950, psychologists Leon Festinger, Stanley Schachter, and Kurt Back launched a study to investigate how friendships developed among students at the new Westgate Complex at MIT. They found that the strongest friendships developed between students who lived next to each other on the same floor. Where friendships developed between students who lived on different floors, one of those students tended to live near the stairways. These results clearly showed that physical proximity played a major role in the formation of friendships.

Their experiment, later dubbed “the Westgate Studies” was the foundation of what is now called the Propinquity Effect, and has been confirmed by numerous other studies.

The law of propinquity states that the greater the physical (or psychological) proximity is between people, the greater the chance that they will form friendships or romantic relationships.

Research into propinquity originally limited the concept to real-life physical interactions between individuals who lived or worked close to one another, but the advent of social media and other Internet-based platforms has led current researchers to explore the concept of virtual propinquity.

Tapping into this virtual propinquity, I propose that marketing propinquity (a term I coined) can result from increased interactions, both physical and virtual between a prospective customer and a brand. Essentially, marketing propinquity looks like this:

To see me → To know me → To like me → To buy from me

By mapping out key propinquity points both on and offline where prospective customers are likely to “interact with” your brand, and then creating helpful content to share at those propinquity points, you can set the stage to create preference among your prospective customers.

Research shows that the modern B2B prospect gets 57% of the way through the buying decision before ever talking to a sales rep. The fact is, your online content is your greatest salesperson. One way or another, your prospective customers are going to find helpful information somewhere online. If you’re not the one providing them with that content, they’ll get it from a third party source or worse, a competitor’s site. If that happens, you’ll miss out on both useful individualized data about your prospect’s needs and on opportunities to turn education into sales.

Now don’t miss this key component: the content you create must be helpful. Probably the single biggest mistake novice content marketers make is turning content that claims to provide useful information and guidance into just another sales pitch. They create effective white papers, research guides and checklist that purport to be educational, but that just aren’t helpful to the prospective buyer. So what do buyers do? They just click the next link in their Google search. And if that link takes them to a competitor who’s providing helpful information, that competitor may have just one the sale.

It’s easy to ignore the hard sell. But when, right at the moment that a customer is looking for information required to research a product or service purchase, your company displays chivalry and honestly tries to help them make a better buying decision–it’s hard not to like you.

Follow the propinquity approach and when your customer enters a buying mode, your company will become not only the first your customer thinks of, you’ll also become their preferred company—possibly the only company they will turn to for assistance.

On the minds of many CEOs for this year and beyond is making business growth a top priority. From the likes of surveys by IBM and Gartner to surveys by the multitude of research firms across the globe, the one consistent driver identified by CEOs is that of business growth. Coming out of the doldrums of the near global economic meltdown beginning in 2008, businesses are bent on growing.

Alignment is a tricky word. For marketers, it has meant gravitating towards the inevitable arguing on about tactical marketing and sales alignment. Where their eyes should gaze is towards aligning with business growth strategies. What organizations have to be wary of today are their marketing goals being out of alignment with business growth strategies.

Aligning Marketing With Business Growth

The digital economy continues to evolve and make the globe a smaller place. Communications are happening in an instant and connectivity is no longer the hurdle it once was. With this evolution well underway and gaining speed, organizations are realigning their business growth strategies.

Marketing, however, in most organizations continues to function as it has over the past few decades. Surely, what marketing is doing today in terms of tactics is much different than a decade ago. However, reorganizing the function of marketing into a strategic role, aligned with business growth strategies, is still an arduous road ahead for many marketing departments.

Far too many marketing organizations today are more aligned with tactically supporting individual products or service lines, specializing in tactics such as content marketing, and supporting newly implemented marketing automation.

Why does this continue to be the state of marketing you may ask? And, why is adapting proving to be so difficult?

Here is why:

Marketing is still doing the same thing it always has – pouring all its’ efforts at the end point of a target – namely the already identified target customer or buyer. What does this mean you ask? It means marketing is left out of the conversation on what business growth opportunities exists and what customers fit these opportunities.

Tactical Focus Is Good And Necessary

Marketing’s role in executing tactical approaches to gain the attention of customers and buyers is necessary for the success of any business. But, we should not confuse the strategic with the tactical when it comes to how marketing can be a significant contributor to business growth and customer strategies.

One way to think of this is to look at the front end and back end of the market and customer development spectrum. The front end is strategically identifying new growth opportunities. At the back-end, you are tactically reaching the already identified customer or buyer. Marketing is still clearly, in many cases, only at the tip of the arrow. Playing a tactical supporting role in reaching customers.

If you reflect on the many types of new marketing services introduced in the last few years, you can see where most of them are. At the tip of this continuum – attempting to help companies have a sharper end point of the arrow in reaching customers.

Using Buyer Personas For The Front End Of Business Growth Strategies

Being only at the tip of the arrow is certainly out of alignment with what confronts CEOs today. They are under enormous pressure to identify new business growth strategies. Most certainly, they will slap marketing leaders on the back for making a shaper tip of the arrow. However, getting to the table for CMOs means identifying new growth and customer opportunities.

There is an irony in the state of buyer personas today. When buyer personas were first originated, they were designed to be strategic in discovering as well as validating business growth strategies. Unfortunately, organizations are being incorrectly guided today in their buyer persona initiatives. What we see is such efforts are beginning and ending in the tip of the arrow to serve a very narrow tactical focus.

Some of the earliest usages of buyer persona development were exploring new market segments and customer opportunities. For instance, one of the first companies to make use of buyer persona development invalidated a new market segment push expected to cost $3 million upfront. However, it led to a previously undiscovered new market and customer opportunity as well as a new buyer persona, which allowed them to expand their market presence by $25 million in the first two years.

This is an example of how you connect buyer insights research as well as buyer personas to solving business growth problems.

You bet the CEO was happy for it achieved solving the problem of new business growth strategies. Not some metric related to how many times a buyer persona downloaded a white paper! I make this comment in jest as well as with a degree of seriousness. I hear far too many times the echo of “our strategy is to increase content consumption.” Getting a user, customer, or buyer to choose you or download content is a tactical plan. Knowing the difference between marketing strategy and tactics is crucial in the use of buyer personas.

Failing Due To Tactical Errors

In the end, many buyer personas efforts fail due to the fact they are placed only at the tip of the arrow as opposed to an end-to-end investment beginning with identifying business growth strategies. Instead, we see marketers hoping with fingers crossed they have produced just the right content with the right words and the download needle on the marketing automation dashboard moves up instead of down.

There is an interesting corollary here as well when it comes to content marketing. According to Forrester, nearly two-thirds of B2B buyers find content useless. Why? One reason is content marketing lives at the tip of the arrow and is out of alignment with business growth strategies. The tactical focus is on sharpening the messaging tip of the arrow. Could it be B2B buyers are saying “enough” with the number of content arrows being shot at them?

Marketing executives today should take heed to aligning with business growth strategies. Devoting attentive time to using the periscope of buyer insights research and buyer persona development to spot new growth opportunities. Reorganizing the purpose and function of marketing to be aligned with business growth is an important way for CMOs to not be left out of the conversation on the future direction of their organization.

What follows is a short talk from Rita Gunther McGrath, Columbia University Business School professor, who has done plenty of work in the area of growth strategy. Her most recent book, The End of Competitive Advantage: How To Keep Your Strategy Moving As Fast As Your Business, hits home on the point of getting the right insights and data upfront to identify growth opportunities.

This is the eighth installment of the #SellMore Small Business Boot Camp series, in which we have already discussed how to find a product niche, how to source your product, how to evaluate your small business idea, business laws and nuances you’ll need to address, how to conduct market research and how to categorize your market competition and how complete a competitive analysis. This week, we’ll be covering how to find your target market and begin to sell to them.

You’ve done a great deal of work over the course of the Small Business Boot Camp to help your business succeed. Now, it’s time to ensure you have enough customers to buy the product or service offered.

Although your products might appeal to a large group of people, it doesn’t necessarily make sense to market to everyone. Stay focused on a very targeted audience, especially at the beginning. Having a specific and clear vision of your expected customer base will help keep your efforts focused and provide a higher rate of return.

In this week’s #SellMore video, you’ll learn how to identify your target market and how to communicate with that audience to increase conversions and grow your online business.

Gather Intel: The Importance of Your Target Market

Having a clear vision of your expected customer base will increase your business’ chances of success. Clearly defining your target audience — whether it’s senior citizens, busy moms or millennials in California — can help answer a lot of questions and overcome obstacles that may be plaguing you as you kick-start your online store. Some of the business questions you’ll be addressing include:

• Is the potential market for your product or service large enough? Are there enough customers with relevant interests to create demand?
• Do you need to alter your business idea to best appeal to this audience?
• Should you tailor your product or service in some way to maximize effectiveness?
• How can you best target your marketing efforts to optimize reach with the most promising potential buyers?

Stay Organized: Create Customer Profiles

You’ll want to not only figure out why someone would want to buy your product or services but also who is most likely to buy it. Often, you will discover that those who find your product or service appealing share similar characteristics, which will help you in fine-tuning your business messaging from top to bottom. In order to uncover those traits about your customers, craft a customer profile to help you guide your research.

Demographic Criteria will get you started:

• Age
• Location
• Gender
• Income Level
• Education Level
• Marital or Family Status
• Occupation
• Ethnic Background

Psychographic Criteria will go a little deeper, bringing to light more of your target audience’s psychology:

• Interests
• Hobbies
• Values
• Attitudes
• Behaviors
• Lifestyle preferences

Remember, every industry, business and product is going to be different so these lists are by no means the end-all-be-all. Don’t be afraid to be clever, make adjustments and include criteria designed to add interesting layers to your customer profile — the more you know your customer, the more likely you are to achieve your specific business goals.

Be Specific: A Word to the Wise

Narrowly defining your target customer is more of an art than a science. As you get started, try to be as specific as possible. By starting with a specific customer profile, you’ll be able to make the most educated decisions.

Oftentimes, new entrepreneurs worry they will be too specific as they conduct their research. They tend to feel they’ll limit their business’s reach or the number of potential customers as a whole. This is not true. By identifying your specific target audience, you will have a guide in which you can always come back to, helping to ensure you make decisions that are dictated by your customers.

Also, who said you cannot have multiple niche markets in which you consider your “targets”? Check out Buffersocial’s Marketing Persona: The Complete Beginners Guide for a more in-depth walkthrough of why building out a multi-persona strategy can increase sales.

Work Smart: Tap Existing Resources

As we all know, it never hurts to Google it. You’ll often find there are a lot of existing resources that can help you pull together information about your industry, the market, your competition, and your ideal potential customer. The best part is, someone has already done the work.

In most instances, the information you gather won’t cost you a thing. However, the downside may be that the research you find may not be as focused or useful as you’d like. Below are a few resources to help get you started:

• Quantcast provides free, accurate and dependable audience insights for over 100 million web and mobile destinations
• Alexa transforms raw data into meaningful insights that will help you find your competitive advantage
• Compete helps to discover new business opportunities, monitor online competition and benchmark their performance
• Google Trends uncovers where your target customers are predominantly located

Also, don’t forget to think outside of the box! Every business is unique and your tactics for gathering information should be unique as well.

All of this information will help you learn more about your target audience so you can develop a strong brand identity.

Repurpose Your Hard Work: Look at Your Competition

Last week, we showed you how to complete a competitive analysis. Now, let’s take all you learned while you were completing your competitive research and organize it for your customers.

You’ll want to ask yourself a series of questions:

• What’s their market positioning? What are customers actually purchasing from them?
• How about their pricing? What are existing customers (who could be yours) willing to pay for your product or service? Are they willing to pay? Will they pay more if you offer something extra?
• What are customers saying on social media? What social media channels are they interacting with the most? What other interests do they list on their personal social media pages? What do they do for a living? What are their hobbies? What language are they using when it comes to your product or services?
• Are reviews screaming with opportunity? What weaknesses are identified that you may be able to address with your business?

Depending on how well your competitor is doing, you may not want to go after the same exact market. On the other hand, if their customers are extremely unsatisfied with current offerings, you may want to jump in. A smart business person will identify competitors’ weaknesses and overlooked areas of the market, and capitalize on them to drive business success.

Send Out Feelers: Conduct Your Own Primary Research

You can learn about your target audience through what is known as primary research. This involves learning about customer buying habits through direct contact. Although primary research can be a little more expensive than piggy-backing on other research or just digging into your competitors, it allows you to truly hear the voice of your customer and find answers to specific questions about your business.

Here are some things you can try out:

• Distribute surveys: send surveys to existing and potential customers via postal services, email or a web-based service like Zoomerang or SurveyMonkey.
• Conduct interviews: Talk to people you trust and whose purchasing habits dovetail with your small business. At trade shows, for example, stand in a high-traffic area and ask people to answer a few short questions.
• Assemble focus groups: Get feedback from a small group of consumers who fit your ideal customer profile. Facilitate Q&A sessions and group discussions.

Reassess: Look at Your Product or Service with a Fresh Light

Now that you have some serious insight into who you are selling to and how your product or service has been received in the past by your competitors, it’s time to ask yourself a series questions.

• Do you feel there are enough potential customers within your target audience to start a brand new business?
• Will your target market benefit from your product or service?
• Will this target market see a true need for it? Will they come back repeatedly to purchase?
• Do I understand what drives my target market to make buying decisions?
• Can my target market afford my product or service? If so, how frequently can they buy?
• Can you reach your market with your message? How easily accessible are they?

Answering these questions will help you understand if you are truly ready to jump into business or if you need to pivot your online store to appeal to a new target market altogether.

You’ll also want to periodically reassess your target audience. Every six to 12 months, conduct additional primary research and refine your customer profile accordingly. As the marketplace shifts and evolves, your ideal clientele may change with it. Get ahead of the curve, and you’ll also be one step ahead of your competition.

In Part 1 of this 2 part blog series, I described why creating good content is necessary to drive sales. In order to create great content, start with your buyer personas. If you’ve already been creating content in your company, now is the time to do an audit.

First, check what content is outdated and where you need to update the messaging, branding etc. Next, use your buyer personas to create different buckets of content. Remember that I talked about personas in part 1? If you know that your decision making unit typically consists out of a director of Finance and VP Marketing, create content that will assist them during their buyer journey.

Eventually, you should end up with a well segmented content database that’s relevant to your audience. Now, take each “bucket” and create subgroups of content that are specific for certain buyer stages. For example, at the early stages of a buying cycle, price sheets aren’t going to be relevant. Chances are your prospect/customer would rather be educated about the benefit they’ll receive from your product or maybe they aren’t ready for that and need to understand the problem or industry first. We like to call this sales driven marketing content.

Structure your sales content for the conversation

Making sure that the content you create matches the context of the conversation is critical to increase your sales. Hyper relevancy enables you to shrink your sales cycle. In B2B sales, the typical buyer is already through 60% of his buyer journey before contacting the sales team. So why would you spend your time talking about things they already know about? During the sales conversation, try to uncover where your buyer is located in his journey, and start using the right content from that point on. Therefore, it’s important to structure your sales conversation content.

In order to develop an effective content structure, you’ve got to start at the top of your content library and work your way down. This is important to have an intuitive environment for both the buyer and the salesperson. For example, the first layer of content structure could be language or country specific. This is especially important for bigger companies with a global presence.

If you’re active in, let’s say Belgium, France, Germany and the United States, chances are you’ll have 4 copies of each piece of content. One in Dutch, one in French, one in German, and one in English. This language segmentation is necessary to make sure that your French buyers aren’t going to receive product information in Dutch, for example. That wouldn’t add any value to the conversation and it might slow down the sales process.

Once you’ve got your groups of language-specific content, it’s important to analyze each language group separately. Look for the persona specific content buckets you’ve just created. Afterwards, search for buyer stage content that’s catered to your persona buckets. In order to better structure your content, your segmentation might look like this:

1. Translations of content based on locations you serve

2. Target audience of the content (buyer persona)

3. Buyer stage of that prospect

Quick summary, if you’ve got a meeting, use marketing content in your buyer’s tongue, content that’s relevant to their business needs and to the correct stage in the buying process.

When reading this series, you might’ve noticed that structuring content to drive better conversations can be a struggle for most marketers and salespeople. Using tablet devices and mobile sales enablement technology can help you align the marketing content you create and the sales conversations you’re having. To learn more, check out this Ebook on Mobile Sales Enablement Simplified.

This article originally appeared on the Showpad blog.

Image source: www.unsplash.com

(c)iStock.com/Andrew_Howe

More than two thirds of respondents in a survey from Software Advice currently use on-premise help desk systems despite the prevalence of cloud-based systems in the market.

68% of the more than 200 IT staff and management respondents have on-prem deployments compared to 18% utilising vendor-hosted cloud and 13% hosting on a leased server.

The most frequently used help desk software functionality, according to those polled, is ticket management (66%), followed by reporting and analytics (51%) and live chat integration (45%). The respondents also noted how software was having a positive impact on performance at the rest of the company; the vast majority of options had a more than 90% swing towards positive, with software problem resolution time (95%), first contact resolution (94%) and support staff productivity (93%) the most popular.

For 2015, more than two thirds (68%) said they expected a ‘moderate’ increase, with 16% predicting a significant increase and the remainder expecting a drop. The report argues this is the case for various reasons; not only do staff expect greater productivity, but customers also have higher expectations for the service they receive.

The report, which was funded and conducted by Software Advice independently, argues that while the CRM software market is dynamic, it creates a varied market, causing confusion for first time buyers. As a consequence, the company arrives at a list of best practice tips:

• Define the scope of use: Working out whether it will be an internal employee-facing or external customer-facing service is important, as more specialised solutions could provide a better fit
• Identify which business goals the software must address: Is the software going to address specific KPIs, or have a broader goal of improving the overall customer experience?
• Determine integration requirements: Are you going to use CRM suites that offer help desk functionality baked in with other applications, or is it a variety of best-of-breed software tools?

The most intriguing point, however, concerns the consideration of both SaaS and on-premise. Even though the majority of survey respondents go with on-prem, cloud is becoming more of a factor – and this has to be considered, the researchers argue, although noting companies who continue with on-prem will have specific reasons for doing so, such as complex integrations with other software platforms.

You can find the full report here.

In complex B2B sales, why do buyers buy? Not because a salesperson could present all the required functions and features. That was already available online and didn’t create additional value. No, buyers buy because they learned along their journey how various solution approaches would help them to achieve their desired results and wins. Somebody provided a valuable perspective – sales professionals. Let’s have a deeper look at how sales professionals create value for B2B buyers.

Sales professionals understand the customer’s context and the stakeholders’ different concepts

Sales professionals design their solutions around their customers, not around their own portfolio of capabilities. Sales professionals try to approach their customers early along their customer’s journey. For this reason, understanding their specific environmental and situational context is essential homework; followed by analyzing the involved stakeholders, their roles, functions and potential viewpoints on how to approach this situation. Sales professionals take advantage of various social selling tools to make sure that their conversations with prospects and customers will be relevant and valuable to them. Only if these preparations are done can sales professionals know what they don’t know. And that’s the perfect way to create meaningful questions for the next conversation. Showing customers the bigger picture, the real business impact of the issue they are trying to master or different approaches that could lead to better outcomes – all that creates immediate value for customers. Meaningful questions that inspire the customers to look at their situation from a different perspective – that’s what makes a sales professional an expert, a respected, valuable resource for buyers.

Sales professionals develop a shared vision of future success – with the customers

The decision to change the current state for a better future state is the most crucial milestone along the customer’s journey. Such a decision to change the current state has one key prerequisite – a better future vision of success. Often, this future vision is not yet clearly articulated, apart from the desired business metrics. What needs to be developed is a holistic big picture that considers all key aspects, tangibles, and intangibles. The challenge for the sales professional is to develop, to sharpen and to align this vision across the entire group of involved stakeholders. Once this vision is defined, the way to get to this future state has to be described. Customers need to understand how to get to their future vision, ideally in a phased approach. They need to know what it means to their business and to them personally. Only then can they evaluate the related risks. Remember when IT providers first sold cloud services? Customers simply didn’t understand the proposals. Many salespeople tried to win the business by discounting, when the customers simply wanted to understand what this new technology would mean to them. The ultimate goal in the awareness phase of the customer’s journey is to establish a shared vision of success, because without the customer’s decision to change the current state for a better future state, no buying phase will ever happen. In terms of value creation for the customers, this is by far the most impactful phase along the customer’s journey.

Sales professionals navigate the customer’s decision dynamic

Decision dynamics: That’s how a specific group of buyers/stakeholders is going to make a decision this time. As we know from research, customers make every decision differently, every time. That does not mean that there are no formalized buying processes. It means that the combination of situations, goals, desired results and wins, the group of stakeholders and their roles and functions, and many other criteria are different every time. This is one of the reasons why renewals can be challenging. For sales professionals, it’s key to understand the stakeholders’ different roles within this group, for instance who is influencing whom and why, who has the most organizational power, who is the opinion leader, etc. Sales professionals’ situational awareness, their adaptive competencies and their ability to understand complex environments make the difference in those situations. Sales professionals with those capabilities earn the buyers’ respect and trust by orchestrating the group successfully through the buying phase – to enable them to make their best buying decision. In parallel, sales professionals who have followed the steps outlined here are confident that they have offered the best approach they ever could – to make their customers successful.

Sales professionals own the customer’s outcome and orchestrate the value dynamics

Sales professionals don’t walk away when a deal is closed. They know that their success comes only from their customers’ success. Sales professionals are accountable for the value they have sold to the customers. They make sure that the value gets delivered during the implementation and adoption phase. They make sure that the customers can achieve their desired results and wins. Ideally they try to create even more value as they discover more options along the way. Orchestrating the value dynamics is the key challenge after the deal has been closed. It’s the end of the sales process, but it’s the beginning for the customer, and it can be the beginning of another sales process if the value gets delivered and the customers are happy. Customer experience just continues along the customer’s journey. Sales professionals make sure that the value gets communicated across the entire stakeholder network and specifically to the executives who were involved in the very beginning.

Sales professionals know that “after the game is before the game.”

Image source: Shutterstock

Ask any sales rep what the hardest part of their job is, and I’ll bet any money they’ll say “closing.” After all, signing new customers and upselling existing accounts is how a rep makes quota. If they’re not getting prospects to sign contracts, they’re not going to hit their number. There are a handful of mistakes you need to avoid if you hope to be successful. Here are nine of the most prevalent -- and devastating -- closing fumbles I see reps make.

1) Not asking for what you want.

Clearly stating your ask might be common sense, but it’s hardly common practice.

There are two reasons reps don’t simply state what they want from a prospect. It’s possible they’re afraid of rejection, so they soften their language to minimize the chances of hearing “no.” On the other hand, it’s possible they don’t know what they want! Too often, reps go into a call or meeting with no real concept of what they’re hoping to get out of it. And if you don’t know what you want, how can you get it from the prospect?

Enter every interaction with a clear objective in mind, and don’t beat around the bush when asking for it. For example, “I’m calling to see if you have questions about the proposal” doesn’t make it clear what you want the prospect to do. “Will you be signing and sending the proposal today?” does.

2) Closing only once.

You should consistently "close" throughout the sales process. Three reasons: First, you'll gradually secure greater and greater buy in from your prospect; second, you'll filter out tire kickers; and third, you'll get key information, meetings, introductions, and more.

For example, on your first call you might ask for the buyer's cell phone number. Being able to call or text them directly (rather than going through their assistant or calling their work line) will make them much easier to contact. At the end of the third meeting, you could ask them to connect you with Procurement so you can start learning about their purchasing requirements. Not only will you have a head start over the other vendors, you'll seem more prepared and experienced.

3) Persisting when the prospect says no.

If your prospect turns you down, the worst response is arguing with them. That sends a clear signal: You aren't confident enough to accept their "no." They'll lose faith in you -- not to mention your rapport will suffer.

So what should you do? Just say "okay." If another alternative makes sense, you can offer that one; for example, maybe they didn't want to connect you with Procurement because they think it's too early, so you respond, "I understand. Is there someone else within the organization familiar with your buying criteria who may be able to give me similar insight?" 

Showing that you can calmly get a "no" without becoming irritated, pushy, or insecure will raise your status in the buyer's eyes and increase the odds next time you'll get a "yes."

4) Stepping on the close.

A rep steps on their close when they immediately tack the word “or” or “and” to the end of their closing question. Instead of asking the prospect “Would you be able to meet tomorrow?” and letting the question hang, reps often hastily tack on an additional phrase, such as “Or are you available next week?”

Keep in mind that words such as “and” and “or” add choices to a conversation, when closing is about eliminating choices and pushing the prospect toward a simple “yes” or “no” answer. By adding an additional clause, you increase the possibility that you’ll get a muddled or half response.

5) Closing people who can’t deliver.

Why pose an ask to someone who can’t give you what you’re asking for? It’s not a good approach, and yet, I see this happen all the time.

A classic example is asking for a referral from someone who obviously cannot provide it. An entry-level engineer can introduce you to their coworkers and their direct manager. But the CEO? Probably not. Don’t ask a contact to commit to or give you something they can’t provide.

6) Attempting to close someone through a third party.

I most often see this mistake crop up with senior-level decision makers. Let’s say a rep would like to assemble all the relevant stakeholders they’d need for a deal to be approved, and they want to know who should be on the meeting list. If the rep can’t get through to the CEO, they might pose their ask to their assistant like so: “Who do you think your boss would recommend to be there?”

With this question, you’re asking the assistant to deliver what you want on behalf of their boss. Not a good idea. While it’s fine to pose your close to the assistant or a third party, make sure you’re closing that person directly. With this in mind, the above question becomes “Who do you recommend should be there?”

Close the person you’re talking to, not that person on behalf of someone else. The latter approach is a recipe for misunderstandings.

7) Using statements instead of questions.

Closes should always be phrased as questions, not statements. Why? Because questions require direct answers, and statements do not.

If a sales rep says to a prospect, “It would be great to meet on Monday afternoon,” that prospect can respond in a multitude of ways. But if the rep says, “Can you meet on Monday afternoon?” the prospect has only two possible replies at their disposal -- “Yes, I can,” or “No, I cant.”

Sentences that start with “I’d like to” or “Maybe we can” aren’t closes. Questions that start with “Are you,” “Can you,” or “Will you” are.

8) Adding commentary.

Silence can be uncomfortable, but it’s golden when closing. Unfortunately, reps often rush to comment on their prospects’ responses immediately after they’ve been uttered.

Here’s what this sounds like:

However, if the rep simply falls silent after the prospect responds, the prospect often answers the rep’s follow up question before it’s even spoken.

Here’s the above example, revised to use this approach:

Don’t get in your own way by jumping to fill the silence. 

9) Trying to make closing easy for the prospect.

Reps often ascribe to the thinking that closing needs to be easy for the prospect, but this is wrong. By definition, closing requires the salesperson to put the prospect in a mild state of discomfort.

If buyers don’t feel a slight amount of pressure, they’re not going to make a choice. And “no decisions” are always worse than closed-won or even closed-lost. Don’t be afraid to turn up the heat a few notches to get an answer.

In the age of ecommerce and the self-service support portal, prospects are empowered to buy what they want, when they want it. Having to deal with a salesperson when an option to purchase directly online is available can be perceived as an unnecessary and frustrating hurdle. 

Unfortunately for sales reps, research from Forrester corroborates the anecdotal evidence. According to the firm's 2015 B2B Buyer Channel Preferences Survey, 59% of buyers agreed with the phrase "I do my research online and prefer not to interact with a sales representative as my primary source of outreach." Additionally, 74% of respondents said buying from a website was more convenient than buying from a sales rep. In other words, don't call us -- we'll call you (but seriously, don't call us).

Findings like this led credence to Principal Analyst Andy Hoar's prediction that one million B2B sales jobs would be net displaced by the year 2020 -- primarily in the so-called "order taker" category. 

However, there was a bright spot for salespeople in the data. Although buyers made it clear that they don't want to work with a salesperson to make all their purchases, there were a few exceptions. 

At the 2015 Forrester Sales Enablement Forum, Hoar revealed the five sales scenarios in which the buyers surveyed desired a salesperson's assistance:

1. Price negotiation is involved (91%)
2. The purchase is complex (82%)
3. The purchase is expensive (67%)
4. The offering requires installation (67%)
5. The offering requires service (64%)

It seems that prospects reeling from sticker shock would still like the option of negotiating price with a human. But according to Hoar, software and algorithms could soon assume this duty. "There's a lot of technology out there that is making it possible for you to negotiate with a computer and not interact with a sales rep," he said. In fact, technology is likely to lessen buyers' dependence on human interaction in all the circumstances named except for "the purchase is complex," he added. 

So are salespeople at risk of becoming obsolete? Hoar argued that while certain types of reps will start to shrink in number, those that can act as consultants capable of dealing with complex buyers and complex purchasing decisions will secure their roles. However, by and large, self-service methods will threaten B2B sellers, Hoar warned.

"I don't want to talk to your people -- especially if I've decided what I want to buy. I want to just make the purchase," he said. "We've seen the future here -- it's called B2C." 

When it comes to marketing budgets, I often get asked two questions. The first question is usually something like: “How much are other B2B marketers spending on content?”

Now, I have a better answer. Sixty-four percent of B2B marketing leaders are planning to increase their spending on content development this year, representing the second largest category of increased spending, according to a study by ITSMA. Content is clearly a pressing need within B2B.

But this chart doesn’t the answer the second question I get about budgets. That one typically goes like this:

“How much should I spend on content?”

In these cases, I respond with another question: “How much do you want your marketing efforts to work?”

The reason why content development is so important is that all of marketing runs on content. SEO, inbound, PR, marketing automation, sales enablement—with the majority of the buyer’s journey taking place digitally, content is the catalyst for every stage of that journey. So content is critical to the success of all marketing functions, channels, and tools.

How marketers go about budgeting their investment in content is often short-sighted. The main areas of focus are on the costs (and only sometimes the returns) associated with hiring freelancers, aggregating articles, updating websites, outsourcing videos, etc. The first thing any marketer serious about content should consider is what tools and/or services they need to update their process to support the content fueling their channels, goals, and moving buyers forward.

Think about it. Marketing, particularly in B2B, is spending millions of dollars on technology. Most of this technology is designed to support one stage or facet of the buyer’s journey. In almost every case, those investments are dependent on content.

Yet, most marketing organizations fail to put in a modernized process for creating, distributing, and optimizing that content collaboratively and cross-functionally. It’s like trying to build a fancy house, complete with the latest gadgets, and forgetting the foundation.

“[Content] and marketing automation work hand-in-hand,” says Tiffany Coyle, a digital marketing manager of USGBC says.

“We can’t do marketing automation without thinking about content marketing.”

The first question in any discussion around budgeting for content—or marketing—should be: “Do we have the process and tools to successfully produce, publish, and maximize the content we need to support our efforts and move buyers through our pipeline?” I would argue the honest answer at most organizations is “no.”

And the next dollar you spend on content should move you toward “yes.”

Trade shows have more than their share of problems, but after some research you’ll notice that, regardless of the hassle successful companies continue using them as a sales tool. Those companies have a formula for success that ensures smooth operations before, during and after a trade show. For them a trade show isn’t only an advertising medium, it’s an opportunity.

Simply Put, Your sales team needs trade show training

• 91% aren’t sure how to handle a visitor saying, “I’ll be back.”
• 84% aren’t sure how to entice buyers into the booth, and . . .
• 88% don’t know what to do when the booth is flooded with too many buyers.

Those are sales problems. Your sales team needs to know how to separate the players from the attendees; one way is to ask about his/her role in the company. That way, you can separate the buyers from the visitors and even determine if the person is competitor. (Yes, your competition will visit your booth at least once.)

What’s important to trade show success? Everything.

There’s no profit in micro-managing a trade show. If you want to make a sales impact using a trade show venue, then focus your energy on the day-of strategy. Let a professional management company that is experienced in providing the best trade show support in the industry handle the details. Your trade show management company will provide assistance in every area imaginable or just the specific areas you need, including:

• Exhibit planning, design, and optimal spacing of your booth
• Information to support traffic flow and crowd control at your booth’s location. Your booth should be interactive, well lit, and if space permits, include a conference area. There should be pens, paper, water and trashcans available amongst numerous other items that the best trade show support management companies can suggest.
• Electrical expertise, union and labor law management, shipping companies, facilities workers and dealing with onsite professional coordinators.
• “Survival kits” for your sales team
• Additional personnel, serving as your team’s go-fers and troubleshooters during the trade show.

All That Other Stuff…

As you research, you’ll discover the best trade show support companies can also offer sales training and tips for your staff to help get them exited and more confident about working the trade show.  These tips may be anything from what kind of shoes to wear, the advantage of standing vs. sitting, eye contact, voice, and/or direct sales leading questions.

There are events management companies out there, so do your homework. You want customization that adapts to what you need, when you need it from the best trade show support staff possible.

As marketers, we’re always working to build deeper relationships with our audience. How can we learn what makes them tick? How can we build stuff they love and encourage them to come back to our website, social networks, or events day after day?

To do all that, we really need to know who they are as people. We might think of B2B as selling “business to business,” but as we love to say around here, it’s all just human-to-human (do I sound like a broken record yet?).

If you’ve started developing buyer personas, you’re well on your way to matching your marketing up with your audience’s specific needs and interests.

But the typical behavioral and demographic data you collect when building buyer personas might not be enough. Today, we’ll dig a little deeper into advanced tactics for building buyer personas that will make them even more powerful in guiding your content marketing decisions.

1. Learn Their Information Consumption Habits

Where do your prospects go for information? What blogs do they read? Do they keep up to date on current events with TV, newspapers, or Twitter?

Corey Eridon of Hubspot wrote, “If you’re going to market and sell to these personas, you need to understand how they consume information. Do they go online, or do they prefer to learn in-person or by reading newspapers and magazines? If they’re online learners, do they visit social networks? To Google? Which sources do they trust the most; friends, family, coworkers, or industry experts? If you know how they prefer to gather information, you can make yourself present in those spots and work on establishing credibility in those communities.”

In this age of information overload and emphasis on ROI, placing your content and paid media only in those places where you know your target audience will see them. Knowing their favorite sites or industry publications lets you hone in on the advertising or guest blogging markets that will be most lucrative in terms of leads and sales pipeline.

And it’s not just where they go for information – it’s how they get there. As Barbra Gago wrote for Content Marketing Institute, “With the web and mobile apps giving consumers and B2B buyers access to any kind of information at anytime, it’s important that you understand how your prospects are accessing and consuming the content that helps them make a purchase decision.”

This data will help you choose whether to invest in mobile-first content; start a podcast for your audience; or turn all your content into videos.

2. Consider the Whole Buyer’s Journey

In content marketing, we create buyer personas so we can tailor each new piece of content to that buyer’s unique needs and interests. And those needs and interests change at each stage of the buyer’s journey – so we need to create content that maps at each stage. Erin Everhart, writing for Search Engine Watch, recommends, “When looking at your notes from your interviews, ask yourself, ‘When they were doing X, what part of the funnel would that be?’”

At AirBNB, the team went through a lengthy exercise to map out the buyer’s journey for both travelers and hosts. Nathan Blecharczyk, AirBNB’s Co-Founder & CTO, wrote that they created detailed storyboards with illustrations of their of personas going through the user journey, “from the time she first hears about Airbnb to the time she leaves post-visit feedback.” Blecharczyk says, “We then had a roadmap for figuring out what a customer expects in each of those situations, what we were doing to meet those expectations and where we had an opportunity to create a ‘wow’ moment.”

Whether it’s search terms at the top of the funnel or price comparisons at the bottom, different buyer personas will ask different questions and have different requirements at each stage. Identifying and defining these stages for your buyers will give you a leg up to developing the perfect content to move them toward a sale.

3. Don’t Get Lost in the Details

Even while we’re talking about digging deeper into the details of your buyer personas, the final piece of advice is not to get lost there. Buyer persona development expert Ardath Albee cautions: “I don’t care if he lives in a tent, a sprawling rambler in the suburbs, or a cramped apartment in the city. That’s not going to influence how he builds consensus with his team to buy cloud storage, beef up his network to enable mobility or decide to virtualize his company’s call center.”

The key here is really to pay attention to the details that matter and not get lost fussing over the details that, well, don’t. Adele Revella of the Buyer Persona Institute advises: “If your marketing team is debating whether your buyer persona is a man or a woman, or if you are bogged down finding just the right stock image of your persona, then you’re focusing on the wrong things.”

Get the critical details down and leave the cosmetic or too-specific touches out.

There you have it – three ways to dig deeper into your buyer personas and develop closer relationships with your audience. By finding out where and how they consume information, considering the full buyer’s journey, and focusing your energy on the details that matter (and leaving out the ones that don’t) will make it easier to develop personalized, relevant content that moves prospects through the funnel.

Let us know in the comments how you’re developing your personas and mapping your content to the buyer’s journey.

Learn how interactive content fits at each stage in the Buyer’s Journey with our Interactive Guide!

Photo by Zak Suhar via Stocksnap

According to a recent report from content marketing hub Shareaholic, social media is now driving the largest share of overall traffic to websites. While the dominance of search may be still be considerable, the report reveals that media consumption habits have changed dramatically over recent years in favour of social media.

We walk you through 10 beginner mistakes you should avoid when managing the social media accounts of your company.

1.  Making It All About You

One of the biggest mistakes many brands make on social media is that they’re selfish with the content they share. While it may be a great idea to get the word out about your latest company offer, you need to nurture the relationships you have with your social audience by showing an interest in them.

Before you publish a social update, ask yourself whether or not your latest update adds value to the social feed of your customer. While an occasional funny photo or two can be entertaining, you need to keep in mind that your social reach will only grow if you can keep people engaged in your brand. Spamming your social following with sales messaging will rarely have a positive effect on engagement.

*Pro Tip* Engage with others by finding conversations within your industry that are relevant to your product or service. Try to focus on adding value by giving useful advice, rather than over promoting your own company. People will always remember someone that helped them so try to be selfless rather than selfish with your social activity.

2. Trying To Be Everywhere At Once

Are you a one man marketing team? Are you trying to keep an active presence on every major social media network under the sun? You’re not alone.

It’s often the case that companies will set up accounts across several social networks in order to protect their brand name from being used by someone else. While this may be a great tactic for brand protection, companies will sometimes try and fail to maintain an active presence across all of the social profiles they have set up. The problem with this approach is that these accounts will rarely prosper as they’re not getting the love and attention that they deserve. Be mindful of the social networks where the target audience for your business exist and focus on increasing your reach on it before you consider branching out to another social network.

*Pro Tip* Want to find out what social network your target audience lives on? You can use a content analysis tool such as Buzzsumo to find out which social networks people are commonly sharing content that is relevant to your company. As an example, if you owned a local bakery and wanted to find out what social network to get started on, a quick search on Buzzsumo for terms related to bakeries will show that people will generally share this type of content on Facebook.

3. Broadcasting The Same Message Everywhere

Have you crafted the perfect 140 character update to share on Twitter? Are you thinking about sharing the exact same update on Facebook? Stop!

One of the biggest sins that companies are guilty of is that they share the same update across more than one social media account. While it may save a few precious minutes of effort every day, it’s unwise to think that your audience will appreciate being shown the same message in multiple places. This problem is exasperated when companies use a tool like IFTTT or Hootsuite to automate the sharing of the same social update across more than one account.

*Pro Tip* If you’re a little bit stuck for time, you can use Buffer to schedule your updates for the major social networks. You’re not limited to sharing the same post to each of your accounts so be sure to take the time to craft the perfect message for each one!

On Twitter, you should try to keep your message short and snappy. On Google+ and Facebook you can make your status update longer and include photos to capture higher levels of engagement.

4. Tracking The Wrong Metrics

Are you tracking the metrics that mean the most to your business? While it may be nice to pat yourself on the back for having hit a new milestone in follower growth, the reality is that the number of followers for the company’s Twitter account will not mean very much to your CEO. You need to be able to attribute your time to something that moves the goalposts for your company if you want your work to be recognized.

*Pro Tip* The first step with social media marketing is to ask yourself, what are you hoping to get from it? Every company has different objectives with their social activity so if you’re unsure why you’re doing it, it will be very difficult to identify the performance metrics that you should be tracking.

For some companies they may be using their social accounts to improve brand awareness so tracking reach and impressions may be quite important to them. Other companies may use social media as a means of generating leads for the business so you should ensure that links are correctly tracked so you can measure the success of your campaigns in Google Analytics.

5. Bad Timing With Your Social Updates

As they say in show business, “Timing is everything!”; and the same holds true for social media as great communication involves both sending and receiving messages at the correct time for your audience.

Do you only publish updates to your social accounts whenever you’ve a free moment? You may be missing the optimum time to capture the attention of your audience whenever they’re most engaged. The harsh reality is that most social updates have a very short lifespan, and it can be hard to reach more than a small percentage of your social following if you’re not being calculative about your social sharing.

*Pro Tip* You can use Followerwonk from Moz to find out the best times to post updates to your Twitter account and if you have a Buffer account, you can quickly export a social schedule across to it to help you share content at the times when your audience is most active.

6. Misusing Hashtags

Did you know that tweets with hashtags will typically generate twice as much engagement than tweets without them? While you may now be excited to add hashtags to every update you publish, you should take a step back to think about whether or not your hashtag usage will add value to the content you’re sharing.

You can use a social media analytics tool like Topsy to identify how many people have posted a tweet with a particular hashtag over a specified date range. This will help to inform your choice of hashtags due to there being little point targeting words that are not generally used by your target audience.

*Pro Tip* Use a real-time Twitter analytics tool like Trendsmap to find out what hashtags are currently being used in your local area. The lifespan of a hashtag can sometimes be relatively short so take a look at what conversations are happening right now and become part of the conversation.

7. Poor Spelling & Grammar

Have you taken the time to carefully check the spelling and grammar of your latest social update before publishing it? Even the biggest brands are sometimes a little bit complacent with their spelling and grammar which can quickly tarnish your opinion of them. Every time you share an article, post a tweet or update your Facebook status, you have created something that will be shared with your audience and potential consumers. If you haven’t taken the time to check for spelling errors or grammatical mistakes then it will be quite hard to convince your customers to take you seriously.

*Pro Tip* Install the free spelling and grammar checker plugin by Grammarly to help you be more confident with the content you share through your social media accounts. It will check your content to see whether or not you have used words within the right context, highlight any grammar mistakes, suggest words to optimize the context of your update and flag any commonly confused words.

8. Buying Love, Not Earning It

While money can’t buy you love, many digital marketers are still trying to rent it. Astute social media marketers have long known that Followers and Likes are simple vanity metrics; but a large proportion of companies are struggling to look past the size of their social following as a measurement of success. The major social media networks are playing catchup with websites like Fiverr.com that allow you to purchase fake Twitter followers and Facebook likes.

You need to focus your attention on improving the engagement you have with your social following by sharing useful, actionable and relevant content that adds value to the social feeds of your audience. Organically over time you will begin to grow your social audience with the types of people who will have an interest in your brand.

*Pro Tip* Want to find out how many fake followers you have? You can use the Fake Follower Check to analyse your Twitter account and those of your competitors to identify the volume of fake followers.

9. Lazy Content

Are you exercising your creative muscles every time you post a weekly ‘Happy Friday’ update? Social updates like this have very little substance and will generally not feed back into a strong social media strategy. As a digital marketer you should be trying to share something that is unique to your company, adds value to your brand messaging, is memorable to your audience and ultimately captures their attention. While it may be tempting to copy your competitors, you need to invest time and resources into strong social media content if you want to grow your social following.

*Pro Tip* Have you tried BuiltVisible’s Content Strategy Helper Tool? It’s an incredibly powerful tool that will allow you to identify the types of content that are trending across social media, Google News and a number of other platforms. With this information you can begin to formulate ideas for content that will peek the attention of your audience when you share it through your social accounts.

10. Thanks For The Follow

Do you typically send pre-formulated direct messages and tweets on Twitter to thank every new follower? Stop it, stop it now! Nothing screams desperation more than template tweets and direct messages to each new person that follows your social media accounts. While some companies see this as a nice gesture to get to know their audience, it can often have the opposite effect by scaring them away.

*Pro Tip* Use BuzzSumo to identify the most influential people that are regularly sharing your content. Build relationships with them by reaching out with a personalized thank you email and follow-up with an offer exclusive to them or a small gift. The personalized approach will help your company be known as a warm and friendly brand that cares about its audience.

Heard of that recent (and really gritty) fan film based on the Power Rangers? Well, this post isn’t about that. It does, however, bring to mind something a manager might notice about the franchise that can apply to your sales leads.

Gritty remake aside, there’s something colorful about the way the Power Ranger series tries to give each Ranger a unique set of toys. Each toy in turn combines with the doodads of the other Rangers into something that really finishes the fight.

Whether it’s combining weapons or Zords, it’s a good analogy for a sales team. And as each sales person is unique, you need to give them sales leads to match. The bad news though is that some lead generators still tend to use static, one-dimensional processes. Here are signs that yours could be one:

• Failure to produce anything but the standard – If your lead generator is only producing one kind of lead with only one set of quality specifications, you’re only producing leads for one sales rep. Obviously that’s nowhere near as efficient as when all your salespeople each have a unique lead they can take on at once.

• Lack of interaction with sales – How often are your lead generators and sales rep even in the same conference room? If they don’t even have a clue about identifying top sale talent, how do you expect them to tailor leads that maximize the skills of each salesperson? If you’ve outsourced one or the other, that’s hardly an excuse. There should at least be some communication!

• No buyer personas whatsoever – The task of creating buyer personas has always been a staple of the B2B sales process. If your lead generator can’t even manage that then consider it a miracle that you’ve managed to generate leads at all! Fortunately, diversifying your buyer personas isn’t as hard as it looks. Start paying more attention to your current customers and see what makes them different from each other. Only then can you apply when you want to provide different leads to different kinds of salespeople.

Whether or not you like that messy little fan film, the classic Power Rangers were onto something when it came to teamwork. It’s something you achieve by not just acknowledging unique, individual traits but also giving them respective tools and resources to go with them.

If your Marketing team is traveling down a road at 100 miles per hour toward a brilliant campaign, and your Sales team is going down a path in the opposite direction, stopping regularly to scout for potential customers, which team will find qualified leads first?

It’s not a trick question. Your answer is as good as mine. But if either team manages to find some leads, it won’t have been nearly as many as if both teams had worked together.

“Marketing and Sales Alignment.” We’ve all heard of it. It can sound too theoretical or too challenging to implement. But I can tell you that at Vidyard, it isn’t a “nice to have”, it’s a “need to have.” In fact, sales and marketing alignment helped Vidyard grow by more than 1000% between 2012 and 2014.

That growth was the topic of a previous Salesforce case study, where we discussed how we utilize the Salesforce platform to improve efficiencies and customer service. Automation and CRM tools are only a part of the bigger picture of marketing and sales alignment. At Vidyard, we look at the “What,” the “How,” and the “Who” to keep these two teams in sync and on the road to continued growth and success.

The What: Aligned Objectives and Reporting

Traditionally, Marketing and Sales have been set up to run independently of each other. Marketing does what it needs to do to produce a large volume of leads, which it then passes off to Sales. Sales is measured by how many deals it closes. If Marketing produces a high number of leads and Sales teams are expert at closing leads, why then have these teams so often not been able to meet their goals? Something is broken here.

The buyer mentality has changed. Now, at least 70 percent of the sales cycle is completed before the buyer even contacts the seller, according to Sirius Decisions. Buyers are accessing content, data, and peer networks to self-service their needs, which in effect means that Marketing is making the first sales call. Sales has never needed Marketing more, and it has never been more imperative that Marketing knows exactly what Sales needs to close the deal. Marketing needs to know what buyers’ interests and pain points are so that Sales receives better leads, not simply more leads.

At Vidyard, the “What” means that both Marketing and Sales work together to align their objectives on qualified opportunities, pipeline, and revenue. We call this aligned team “Smarketing,” and both sides of it are measured on their actual impact on the business.

The How: Aligned Profiling, Processes, and Programs

Now both Marketing and Sales know they’re accountable for qualified leads, opportunities, pipeline, and revenue. So how we do we implement this unified goal?

Both Marketing and Sales need to be part of the conversation when defining what the ideal prospect looks like. They need to work together on creating ideal customer profiles and defining buyer personas, target markets, and related value propositions. At Vidyard, these definitions are continually refined, and the Sales team’s input is sought when doing so.

Once both teams know what we’re looking for, we work to be able to identify those prospective customers. Marketing and Sales collaborate on lead scoring methodologies, and what actions should trigger conversion from one stage of the funnel to the next. That includes the weighted value of different digital interactions and marketing program responses.

Both teams have a clear understanding of who the customer is, and what they might look like at different stages. Our teams have also created a unified “revenue engine,” which outlines the lead-to-revenue process and what information Sales needs from Marketing when a lead is flipped. If a lead is flipped too early, the process is reconsidered and realigned.

To remain aligned throughout the process, Marketing cannot simply “flip and go.” Where the traditional funnel began with Marketing and was quickly transitioned to Sales, now both teams work together throughout the cycle to make sure not only that the Marketing team’s leads are stronger, but that Sales receives the support they need from Marketing through programs and processes.

Using the right tools to their fullest also ensures Vidyard’s Sales and Marketing teams are aligned. We link our marketing automation with our Salesforce CRM, which provides a single view into all of a customer’s interactions with us. When both teams know exactly how a lead is engaging with us, they can respond accordingly, whether with further, targeted nurturing, or with related sales conversations.

According to Sirius Decisions, other than better leads, Sales’ top two requests from Marketing are programs that they can launch themselves, and programs that accelerate their pipeline. At Vidyard, the Sales team utilizes a variety of automated nurture streams set up for them by the Marketing team, enabling them to keep existing opportunities warm while focusing their energy on other accounts. Our Sales people also have the ability to quickly create their own custom videos, send them to a prospect, and receive detailed metrics as soon as that prospect watches the video. Simple tools and processes like these can go a long way to increasing sales effectiveness and improving funnel velocity.

The Who: Living Marketing and Sales Alignment

Sales and Marketing Alignment remains only a theory if a company’s people don’t buy into it. Alignment needs to be a part of the culture, and putting it into action starts from the top down. At the executive level, Marketing needs to be recognized for being as vital to revenue generation as Sales, and Sales must be given all the necessary opportunities to enable Marketing to generate the best leads possible.

On the individual level, both teams need to develop and maintain strong working relationships, and consider the input of their peers. There is a Sales presence at Vidyard’s weekly Marketing meetings, for example. A champion of the process can also help keep the alignment on track. That person at Vidyard is the Director of Demand Generation and Revenue Operations, but this role could be filled by someone in Marketing Operations or Sales Operations as well. We’ve seen other organizations add a full-time “Sales Liaison” role to their marketing team as a way to facilitate this alignment and the continuous exchange of information and feedback between the two groups.

Marketing and Sales Alignment isn’t just a “nice to have.” It can have a significant impact on your company’s growth, as it has here at Vidyard. Forrester Research has indicated that aligned organizations achieve an average of 32% annual revenue growth while less aligned companies report an average 7% decline in revenue. The numbers are there, and the tools and strategies are available to create this kind of alignment today. Just remember that the solution doesn’t just lie in people, processes or technology; it requires focused attention on all three areas and a disciplined approach to objective setting and performance management.

Want more tips for growing your business? Download our free e-book, Secrets to Business Growth: Tips from 3 Successful Entrepreneurs.