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I ran out of moves on Candy Crush and was about to press the “try again?” button when I noticed the message had changed to “give up?”

Being a person who never “gives up,” I felt challenged and for the first time ever I was seriously tempted to pay money to continue the game. The makers of the game, by simply changing two words, had reached out and pushed my emotional red button. I had to work hard to fight the emotion to keep up my commitment and never pay for lives.

I found it really interesting how a simple message could influence my decision by affecting my emotions which in turn affected my choice.

Is it possible this simple change from a positive to negative message could make me more inclined to make a certain decision?

Negativity Bias

Being positive is essential for well-being and success. When you are in a positive state of mind you generate a wealth of healing biochemical compounds (see article How do laughing, kissing and closing a sale differ?).

To maintain a positive attitude we need to be careful about the messages we give to ourselves. Negative messages, such as fear of failing, can be a powerful motivator but more often they serve as a discouragement and can be harmful for your self-esteem and perception of self-value.

Research published in 2008 demonstrated the effect positive messages have over negative ones. This research shows it is not about the essence of the message but about the wording. A simple difference, as the one between “Don’t eat candy or you’ll get fat” and “Eat fruit and be slim” can produce incredible results.

Psychologists refer to this as the negativity bias. Negative messages tend to have a greater and more lasting impact and are easier to recall over a positive message. We also pay more attention to negative images, words, and messages.

Newspapers, talk back radio, and television news tend to highlight negative stories – especially in their promotion of upcoming programs or articles. Journalists look for the ‘dirt’ as they know this brings in viewers.

Why do negative messages work?

Negative messages trigger strong emotional responses by flooding your brain with chemicals to drive action. This emotion is forcing you to pay attention and be prepared for action. In the case of the change of message with the words “Give Up?” at the end of a Candy Crush game the words triggered a chemical response in my brain and I was being prepared for action. By ignoring the message I felt bad and was more likely to take some action, in this case pay money, to continue to play.

Feeding your mind positive messages triggers the chemicals that maintain a positive outlook about life and can inspire you and get you ready for action. Positive messages never contain phrases such as “don’t” or verbs that are associated with negativity. Positive messages push you towards giving your best. Negative messages, on the other hand, can discourage you and increase your level of stress, instead of promoting motivation and hard work. (Read this paragraph again and you may feel your brain flipping with each sentence!)

What messages are you sending to yourself and others?

The difference in meaning between “try again” and “give up” is not great. The difference in emotion, however, is significant. The wording of “give up” is associated with defeat and makes you think less about yourself. “Try again,” on the other hand, suggests persistence and strong will.

All decisions are influenced by emotion, and our emotions can be easily affected by something as simple as the words used.

We need to be careful about the words we choose when we send messages to ourselves and others. Positive thinking and positive words will increase your mood. More importantly, those around you want to do business with positive and inspiring people. Choosing the right message will inspire you and your team to go on and be the best you can be.

Today’s question and actions

There are many ways negativity creeps into your life. To overcome this negativity we need a constant stream of positive messages.

Here are some ideas.

• When you wake up each morning welcome the day with a “This is an awesome day” message.
• Celebrate each of your wins and embrace positive feelings. Replay them in your mind to make sure you have them planted and rooted ready to grow.
• Link a negative to a positive. When I am running I often feel like giving up, however, I have a strategy of linking the positive feeling I have at the end of the run and the extra creativity I get throughout the day as a result of the run – and all of a sudden I feel better!
• Use sentences that start with “I can …” and “I will …”

Feeding your mind positive messages balances out the negativity the world throws at you. Take time to check the messages you are allowing to feed your mind.

Have a great week!

We’re obsessed with finding ways to convert our leads into customers. We obviously invest time on customer service and educational content, but the most effective method of converting – by far – is through a webinar.

In fact, the conversion rate of webinar attendees to paid customer is a robust 20%.

Even though our product is easy to use, some people just don’t discover all our features until they attended a webinar. And even when they did use all of the features, our webinar taught them unique use cases they never thought of.

Since webinars are so crucial to converting users, we decided to ask some successful brands like Buffer, Hubspot, and Hootsuite for their secrets to creating compelling webinars. Here are 15 lessons from the best at what they do:

Lesson 1: Don’t focus on features. Focus on how your product can help your users.

Product webinars can be a great marketing tool when they focus on giving the attendees a fantastic experience. Customers should leave a seminar knowing how to kick ass at their job, not how to use an interface. Unfortunately, that’s rarely the case.

Our Intercom webinars could easily talk about Auto Messages, Automated Mails, Segments, Profiles, and the like. That would be focusing on the features. It would be a monotonous list of instructions. You know the sort, “Now, simply, click the message button to send a message”. Yawn.

Instead, we do our best to teach how to increase engagement, identify activity churn, automate customer development, increase user retention, and boost life time value. They are the reasons people use and love Intercom.

– Des Traynor, CoFounder of Intercom

 

Lesson 2: Don’t Let Your Presenters Present as Normal. Do Ask them to Over Act.

Presenting on a webinar is very different than presenting in person. You lose all the dynamics of seeing the person present and instead the audience has to rely on your slide deck and your voice alone to keep the energy going during a webinar. This is really hard. Ask your presenters to over act. To add 25% more energy to their presentation (even though it’s over the phone.) Ask them to smile more. Ask them to wear a headset and stand up and present. It will make a huge difference. You won’t see the energy – but you will hear it!

– Andrew Davis,Founder of Monumental Shift

Lesson 3: Be Spontaneous and Show Off Your Personality

Probably the biggest observation I’ve noticed about webinars as both a listener and a presenter is that they seem to be one of the best ways to show a bit more of your personality to your audience and help them get to know you a little better.

As a result, I think I prefer webinars that are a little bit unpolished and have more of a spontaneous, just-chatting kind of feeling. Often this can be accomplished by having a co-presenter or partner with whom to share the platform, or by devoting a generous amount of time to questions from those listening so more voices are in the mix. And of course, knowing your subject matter backwards and forwards is a great way to have the kind of confidence it takes to go in this more unscripted route.

– Courtney Seiter, Content Crafter at Buffer

Lesson 4: Don’t Assume Your Audience is Listening

When hosting a webinar, the #1 mistake to avoid is assuming your attendees are listening. We live in a world of distractions and attention is the currency. As a presenter, you are competing with multi-tasking, omniscreening, and tab hell. The good news is there are things you can do to capture (and hold) your audience’s attention.

Encourage engagement – Incorporate a poll early on in your webinar. Attendees will learn that this is a 2-way communication stream and that their input is not only requested, but valued. While most of your webinar will most likely already be structured, this is a great way to cater your examples throughout to make your content more relatable and relevant.

Allow time for questions throughout – Instead of a long Q&A session at the end, take little pauses throughout to address questions. This will ensure attendees are following along.

Pace yourself – The easiest way to lose the attention of your audience is by going too fast or too slow. Naturally, it will be difficult to master the pace with a large audience, but a check-in early on will give you a good benchmark for where your audience’s skill set is.

– Ada Juristovski, Program Lead at Hootsuite

Lesson 5: Promote your webinar on every channel possible

You audience consumes content in different ways – whether it is through social posts, blogs, emails, websites or even word of mouth. If you aren’t promoting your webinar on every channel possible, then you are missing out on a key part of your audience. This goes for both inviting people to the webinar as well as promoting the webinar after it ends. Don’t forget – we live in an omni-channel world!

– Lizzy Funk, Senior Marketing Specialist at Marketo

Lesson 6: Send a reminder email a few days before the webinar

To get a nice boost in your registrations and attendees, send out a reminder email a few days before you do the webinar. This email should be a reminder for the original announcement and should go out to the same marketing list that you’re using.

To avoid spamming people, filter out anyone that opened the first announcement. Or you can just filter out clicks if you want to be more aggressive. You won’t get as big of a spike in registrations as the first announcement email but you’ll get a 30-50% increase in registrations. They work so well that this is now part of our standard webinar announcement process at KISSmetrics.

Also, you might need attendees and not just registrations. This is the case if you’re pushing for a sale at the end of the webinar instead of just using the registrations for lead gen. The best way to increase the percentage of registrants that attend is to NOT offer a recording. Yes, you’ll get complaints about this but it’s the most reliable hack at increasing your percentage of attendees.

– Lars Lofgren , Director of Growth at KISSmetrics

Lesson 7: Have a friend in the room while you’re presenting

Aside from really knowing your stuff and having it organized in a way that will communicate to your audience, the key to a successful webinar is all in the delivery. How many webinars have you logged into only to realize that behind a fantastic title lurks an awful presenter?

Remember there’s a person on the other side of that line who’s taken time out of his or her day to listen to you. Try to be entertaining as well as informative; conversational and useful. If you need to, have a buddy in the room with you while you’re presenting–this might help you relax, speak at a normal speed, and actually connect with the members of your audience. Your “attentiveness” stats should skyrocket.

– Isla McKetta, Content Crafter at Moz

Lesson 8: Create a hashtag for the webinar and tweet from that hashtag

Live webinars are all about interaction with the audience. To maximize the benefit of this, start before the webinar! Create a hashtag for the event, and promote it on the webinar sign up page and in emails about the webinar. Tweet from that hashtag, to get a community of people involved pre-webinar. During the webinar, live-tweet on the hashtag, and interact with people who are listening in live.

Ask the audience questions in the questions panel, answer the questions that come in during the webinar, and follow up afterwards on the hashtag on social media. On our last webinar, we gave away a free ticket to INBOUND to one random person who used the hashtag before the webinar. This got us a lot of buzz!

Have a host or moderator. Having more than one speaker on a webinar can liven up the conversation, but it also can cause things to get off track. Having a host or moderator that can bring the conversation back to the topic at hand, and move things along, can be very helpful. The host can also get the audience excited by kicking things off, and close out the webinar nicely at the end after the last topic is covered or Q&A is complete.

– Amanda Sibley, Co-marketing manager at Hubspot

Lesson 9: Assume Your Audience is Smarter Than You Think

Presenters tend to default to dumbing things down so less savvy or experienced audience members don’t get lost. Going too basic means you lose the “smart” folks, though. Always assume your audience knows more than you think — and if you’re concerned that something might go over a few heads, create a resource slide they can refer to afterwards. That way you can say, for example, “If you don’t know the basics of lean manufacturing, there’s a link to a great resource at the end of the presentation,” and then you can keep rolling with the good stuff.

Never forget that your audience wants to learn things they don’t already know — so don’t risk losing them by explaining lots of stuff they do know.

– Jeff Haden, BlackBird Media

Lesson 10: Display a Poll to Listeners During the Webinar

The best webinars are those where the audience feels engaged. To keep the attention of your customer during the webinar always try to invite active participation whenever possible. At Hootsuite, our webinar platform allows us to ask our participants multiple choice questions or polls and display the overall results back to the entire audience. It’s amazing what you can learn about your customers by asking these questions!

As a Social SaaS company, we also encourage users to engage with us and ask questions via Twitter during and after the webinar. Not only does this allow us to continue our conversation with customers after the webinar has ended, but it allows our customers to connect with each other and share their Hootsuite experience.

– Ronan Archibald, Social Media Coach Manager, EMEA at Hootsuite

Lesson 11: Take regular breaks asking for input from the audience

I look at webinars as a virtual extension of physically delivering content. When I speak at dozens of social media events every year, I begin by encouraging all of the attendees to ask any social media-related question they might have at any time. It is often from these questions that I deliver unique, “user-prompted” advice that has the most impact, and it often generates conversations amongst the attendees that help the audience feel that they are a part of the presentation. It also helps develop a deeper relationships with the attendees.

This is hard to do with webinars, but you can achieve a similar result by 1) making sure you ask for questions before the webinar and respond to every single one of them without exception during the webinar, 2) take regular breaks asking for input from the audience, and 3) finishing the webinar with an offer to continue the education by being open to answering post-webinar questions.

– Neal Schaffer, Founder of Maximize Social Business

Lesson 12: Give yourself more time, and keep everything organized in 1 place.

The biggest mistake I’ve made when it comes to webinars (other than misspelling “you’re” in an email invite subject line) is not giving myself and the presenters adequate time and resources to be prepared. We all dream of webinars that drive hundreds even thousands of registrations with thought-provoking content and beautifully designed slide decks; but none of that is possible if you or your speakers are rushed.

After repeatedly losing registrations to lack of preparedness, I’ve come up with a motto of my own: More time + more organization = more registrations.

So, in an attempt to always be prepared and optimize my registration opportunities, I’ve come up with 2 simple solutions:

– Whatever the prep time you think you need, add two weeks on.

– Keep all outlines, timelines, logistics, graphics, whatever in one organized, easily accessible place and share it with all parties (speakers, team-members, co-marketing partners) from the very beginning. I like to use a Google Doc like this one to keep track of my webinars.

– Kate Gwozdz, Partner Marketing Specialist at Wordstream

Lesson 13: Ask Poll Questions In Relation to Offers to See What Your Audience Wants

Make sure your webinar is interactive! Engage your audience right from the start with poll questions. For example, at SEMrush, we’ll start off with a couple of questions that give our webinar guest an idea of who they’re speaking to and their experience level. This helps the speaker adjust their language to meet the needs of their audience.

Also, if anything is being offered during the webinar, leave it to the end and ask a poll question in relation to the offers to see what your audience actually wants. That way you can provide a follow-up email that’s tailored for the people who requested your specific product, service, etc. This will save your company time in the long run by not reaching out to people who are more unlikely to convert.

Lastly, make sure to hit the record button! The most frequently asked question we get during our webinars is, “Will this webinar be recorded?” Notify your audience at the start of the broadcast and let them know they’ll receive a follow-up email within 24-48 hours post-webinar with the video URL. The quicker the follow-up, the more likely people will be motivated to take the next step.

– Anneliese Sparks, Marketing at SemRush

Lesson 14: Don’t be a Zombie. Talk like a real person

The easiest way to lose people in a webinar is reading from a script. Unfortunately, that’s also the easiest trap to get sucked into because it’s hard to make an emotional connection when you’re talking at a computer screen.

You have to make it seem like you’re right there in the room with your audience; otherwise people will tune out, start checking emails or just leave. Be conversational. Have bullets of what you want to say but don’t map out word by word the entire webinar. Talk off the cuff. This helps if you have someone else in the room with you.

– Erin Everhart, SEO Mananger at The Home Depot

Lesson 15: Find out what concerns your audience and address them in your webinar

Webinars work really well because they are personal, you are actually talking to a specific audience. Thus find out what concerns them and address these issues in your webinar. You can do this with polls on larger webinars or simply ask them on smaller webinars.

Many people worry about what can go wrong. To minimise the risks you can do some simple things such as have a test run; turn up early for the real thing; make sure you are in a quiet space, turn off all notifications, emails and Skype on your kit; have a wingman, especially for large webinars as they can monitor the chat and pick things up if they need to; and have slides as a backup if you are doing a live demo. Also remember that the audience is human too, not everything has to be flawless, take a pause if you need to. Finally, webinars should be about two way communication, so get them involved and encourage questions.

– Steve Rayson, Director at BuzzSumo

Authentic stories help powerful brands make deep connections with customers. But that high-level principle creates real-world challenges for content marketers. What is a powerful story and how do you tell it? I’d like to share four tips on how to tell stories that make connections and get results.

1. Find a moment

A moment happens at a specific place and time. No two moments are exactly alike. Think of your own personal stories, from a first kiss to a moment of triumph. What happened? Who was there? What did they say? What would we have seen?

Now think about this in terms of your brand. Every brand lives for customers as a series of touch points. A parent may have made a special meal using your product. An IT administrator may have cut request time in half and been promoted. Or in our case at Story2, a student may have just received an admissions offer from the college of her dreams. If you can put your customers at that moment where they feel what it’s like to encounter the best value of your brand, you’re one moment closer to connecting them to your brand.

In written and multimedia stories, the Adidas #mygirls campaign exemplifies the value of a moment with content about young women using Adidas products in contexts from mountaineering to field hockey to running. But the stories are not about selling the product. Each woman’s story starts with a compelling moment, illustrating the brand experience. “There was a massive pop, so loud it sounded like a gunshot reverberating through the training gym,” begins one story about an injured South African field hockey player. The moment links courage and determination with the Adidas brand but never hits the viewer over the head with that connection.

2. Use your authentic voice

The language of marketing is notorious for feeling artificial. Generic product attributes and abstract business-speak is forced. Believe us when we say no one really cares about “quality manufacturing” or “industry-leading service levels” unless they know exactly how that feels and believe what you say about your brand.

When using stories as a vehicle for content marketing, take this advice from the Story2 Moments Method®: Stand in front of a mirror, look yourself in the eye, and tell your brand story out loud. Do you believe it? Now tell a friend or family member face-to-face. Does it connect with the listener? If the answers are “yes,” take that authentic story in your voice and write it down.

In authentic storytelling there’s no need to “business-fy” it. GE Reports a Tumblr blog excels at this, sharing rich stories about inventors and users of high-tech industrial products. One recent example: a story about their scientific microscopes. One scientist on the team brought a bee’s leg from his daughter’s science project to test the capabilities of GE’s latest imaging device. The topic would have been a great occasion for jargon and product-speak, but instead it authentically sheds light on the passion behind the product.

3. Map it

A map is simply the arc from the beginning to the middle and then the end. When you want to captivate your reader, think like a Hollywood blockbuster. In these two examples, you can see how it works:

• Draw them in, like a magnet:

Story 1: Half the potatoes on the floor and the rest behind the stove … what was I supposed to do about Thanksgiving dinner now?

Story 2: Our CFO had just called for the fourth time asking for last quarter’s numbers, but our systems were still down.

• Raise suspense, with a pivot:

Story 1: “That looks great, but we don’t serve frozen food at holidays,” I told my husband as he stood there with the foil tray of FoodCo’s carrot soufflé.

Story 2: SoftwareCo’s representative sat next to me at my desk for an hour while he fixed the broken database queries. I couldn’t help grinning when I saw the numbers pop up finally.

• End on a memorable glow:

Story 1: We’ve had carrot soufflé instead of potatoes on our family’s menu ever since, but we still laugh about the look on my face when someone mentions anything scalloped.

Story 2: I was home that evening in time to tuck the twins in bed and read them a story.

Once you map the story, you can think of all sorts of ways to describe your current audience’s journeys and how its stories can help your brand connect with new people. Coca-Cola, as part of its truly impressive “Journeys” approach to brand journalism, does this in numerous ways. I was struck by a story told by a Coca-Cola employee who took up skydiving. The story uses a “magnet, pivot, and glow structure. And while ostensibly it’s about her personal experiences, it does a fantastic job selling Coke’s corporate culture and inspires the desire to work with employees like her.

4. Focus outward

You’ll notice that none of these points in the story map use wording like “I thought,” “I felt,” “I realized,” or “I learned.” That interpretation and analysis puts up a wall between you and your reader. Experiment with different ways to present your thoughts and feelings using dialogue, sensory details, and physical descriptions. In our hypothetical examples, we used these details to show the reader how the high quality of a frozen food adds something to the customer’s life, and how reliable, diligent service helps software users get their job done with less stress.

Hallmark’s “Ideas” website section does a great job of this with stories about card-giving occasions mixed in with lifestyle tips, nicely aligned to using a card or gift to express the emotion in the moment.

In summary, these four steps, all built on the neuroscience of storytelling, provide content marketing techniques that literally synchronize your reader’s brain with your brand marketing content. As our examples show, throw a few stories in the mix and see just how compelling brand messages can become.

Uncover the unique story your brand was meant to tell. Download Launch Your Own Content Marketing Program for step-by-step guidance.

Cover image by Viktor Hanacek, picjumbo, via pixabay.com

The post 4 Steps to Creating Authentic Stories Your Customers Will Want to Read appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

The last couple of years have produced a number of challenges for those engaged in the B2B market. Some of the problems will be temporary – while others will become new permanent fixtures on the landscape. Let’s examine a scenario that highlights one that falls into the latter category.

You have been working with a new potential customer for several months. You have spent a lot of time in the account because it is a significant opportunity. You have talked with all the key players and you and the customer have a shared vision of the problem.

Several weeks ago you presented your solution and the feedback was extremely positive. Your internal champion told you after the session that your solution was not only responsive but also technically and operationally better than the competitors. You have had several subsequent conversations but the sale has absolutely stalled – nobody has given any signals about moving ahead.

While this dilemma is not new, it has occurred with more frequency over the last two years. This nightmare was well analyzed in an article by Bob Apollo. The author noted: “in today’s risk-averse environment when you are selling a major solution you need to conduct two sales: the first involves persuading the prospect that they cannot afford not to address the issue. The second sale involves persuading them that your solution offers the most effective approach to solving the problem. If you win the “second sale” without addressing the first, the most likely outcome is that you will get selected, but you won’t get bought.”

First Sale. The first sale is all about making the business case. It involves making a clear connection between the benefits of your solution and the measurable business outcomes that matter to the customer. It includes contrasting the risks associated with your solution versus the risk of doing nothing – the consequences of inaction. It compares the costs of your solution versus how you are equipping the customer to spend less or sell more.

Ask yourself – how many sales have you lost not to the competition but to the customer postponing a decision or deciding to do nothing because of budget or timing or for some set of unknown reasons? For most of us the answer is – more than we would like.

Second Sale. Let’s look at the second sale and assume unlike our scenario neither you nor your competitors have yet proposed a solution. So the challenge is to craft a solution that the customer judges to be the best among their alternatives.

So how do you that? How do you achieve a competitive edge? To achieve a competitive edge you have to understand your competitive strengths and weaknesses and understand your customer’s perception of that assessment. It is particularly important to keep in mind that your assessment and customer’s perception are often not in alignment – when that is the case that needs to be addressed. This requires having an informed answer to these questions:

• Who are the competitors that have a viable chance of winning the business?

• What are the decision criteria the customer will use to decide between the competition and you?

• How do you stack up on those criteria relative to the competition from the customer’s perspective?

• Why would the players engaged in the customer’s buying process buy from you instead of those competitors?

When answering these questions, think about your responses from two perspectives – your company and yourself. In some cases, a customer may buy from you because of the service you personally provide as their salesperson. We see this scenario often in the medical device market.

In other words, an answer to that fourth question is: the customer might buy from you instead of your competitor even if they don’t see much differentiation between products or price because you provide value by the way you sell, as well as, by what you sell. You are the competitive edge.

The nightmare of course is – winning the second sale and losing the first.

3…2…1 your contest is officially complete.

You know who the winner is, and judging by the lengthy list of new leads in your database your contest was a great success.

But to tell you the truth, your real work has just begun.

What good is a list of new leads if you don’t know how to convert them into paying customers?

Turns out 65% of businesses admit they don’t have lead nurturing systems in place.

Simply sending an email isn’t going to cut it either. You need multiple follow-up strategies to ensure you’re gaining true value from your contest.

It’s time to find out the 5 crucial follow-ups you need once your contest is finished.

1. The Follow-Up Email Offer

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Let’s start out simple. Once you’ve announced the winner of your contest you need to send out an email to thank all participants for entering, and communicate how much you value them. This is pretty obvious.

But don’t think that the sole purpose of this email is to say thank you. Your thank you email needs to keep your leads engaged (otherwise a “thank you” email is the same as “goodbye”).

Whether it be sending new leads to your website or to check out something relevant to your contest, your email needs to include a call-to-action. An email without a call-to-action is simply a wasted opportunity.

Actionable Follow-up Strategy:

Attach a discount code or coupon to your consolation emails.

• This type of offer is a great practice to convert leads into paying customers. By providing them with a purchase incentive you are encouraging them to buy from you down the line (and comforting them after their loss).
• Set a time limit on your coupon or discount to create urgency and ensure that your new lead doesn’t forget about you.

2. The Follow-Up Content Email

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Not every follow-up email needs to be coupon or discount related. In certain situations, you may want to further educate leads and that may be what they’re interested in most.

Send leads an email with a link to a different portion of your website or a landing page with gated content. You’ve already gotten their email address from their contest submission, so ensure your page doesn’t ask for it again.

Actionable Follow-up Strategy:

Send an email prompting your new leads to download gated content related to your contest prize. Be sure you’re asking them for information beyond their email. The more personal info you gain from leads the better you can provide them with targeted, personalized content or product information down the line (which will increase click-throughs, opens, and final sales).

3. Create an Email Segment With All Contest Participants

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Hopefully (if you’ve read my “5 Most Heart Wrenching Contest Mistakes We See All the Time” article) you ran a sweepstakes in which participants entered to win a specific product from your business.

This gives us really valuable lead information: all of your contest entrants like the product or service you set as a prize.

This allows you the opportunity to place all of those who did not win into a new email segment. From here you can specifically target them with emails in the future related to either the product they entered to win or one like it.

If you already have a newsletter subscriber list, simply creating a new segment ensures you’re sending these warm leads related information in the future.

Actionable Follow-up Strategy:

Let’s say you just ran a contest which gave people the chance to win a dedicated 2 hour consultation with you on Facebook marketing, something normally valued at $250. Everybody who entered to win that prize is clearly interested in Facebook marketing, so segment them accordingly.

If you’re curious of how to set up a segment in Mailchimp, check out their great guide (or ConstantContact’s).

4. Create a Custom Audience on Facebook

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If you’ve generated over 100 leads through your contest, a custom audience on Facebook is a great way to reach these individuals again in the future.

They’re aware of your brand and who you are, so a Facebook ad targeted at them will be likely to grab their attention amongst the noise of their News Feed.

So what exactly is a custom audience?

It sounds like fancy Facebook lingo but its doable for any Facebook marketer.

A custom audience allows you to reach those leads that you already know. You can upload all of the email addresses you obtained from your contest (as long as you drove at least 100) and deliver Facebook ads specifically to these participants.

Actionable Follow-up Strategy:

Put out an ad to all past participants that did not win, right before your next contest. You can then tailor the ad directly to these individuals. You may say something like “We know you really wanted that “prize”. Lucky for you, you get another chance” with a link to your new contest.

To do this, go in to your Ads manager, click Audiences, Create Audience and decide how to import your list. A custom audience is a valuable way to specifically target past participants. Don’t overlook it as a way to reach out and grab the attention of leads when they’re least expecting it.

5. Create a Lookalike Audience on Facebook

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Facebook is a great tool for reaching past participants, but it can also help you to reach new audiences as well.

A lookalike audience is the perfect way to find like-minded individuals to enter your next contest. Once again, if you have more than 100 entrants’ emails you can easily create an audience on Facebook targeting those who don’t know about your business.

A lookalike audience uses an algorithm to reach out to people likely interested in your business or contest because they’re similar to those leads in your list. In simple terms, if your leads wanted to enter your contest why wouldn’t those who are just like them?

A lookalike audience can be created under the custom Audiences portion of your Ads manager. You can select one country at a time and then base your lookalike audience off of “Similarity” or “Greater Reach.”

• Similarity – optimizes the audience based off the top 1% of people in that country that are the most similar
• Greater Reach – Includes the top 5% of people in that country similar to the original audience (but less precise matching)

Actionable Follow-up Strategy:

Create a lookalike audience based on your existing contest leads. Aim to capture this new group of individuals with ads directly targeted at them as an audience. Your goal should be to get them intrigued and interested in entering your next contest or at least thinking about your brand.

Why Bother?

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Once your contest is complete, your goal should be to build relationships with your leads and nurture them further down your sales funnel. Get them engaging with your content and your brand.

There are no simple rules when it comes to following up after a contest.

Well actually there is one – be creative.

The 5 options mentioned above are just examples of what we have seen our clients do over the past few years.

Try them out and discover what works for you and your brand.

Never look to sell contest participants right away. Build these leads into an engaged audience and eventually you will be rewarded with brand advocates sharing your contests, entering your contests and spreading positive word of mouth for your business.

Conclusion

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What methods have you tried to follow up with contest participants? Have you had success using any of the above strategies? I would love to hear your experiences in the comments section below!

How do you identify the contacts most likely to engage and convert on your company’s services? Custom lead scoring is a tactic that should be shared by both the marketing and sales departments and is a vital tool to include in your inbound marketing strategy.

The practice of lead scoring gives you the ability to gauge what leads are worth pursuing, which leads are unqualified and where your leads currently are within your sales/marketing funnel. Setting up custom lead scoring can empower both your marketing team and sales people with tangible data for evaluating each lead as they interact with your web assets. Creating scoring also allows you to prioritize the leads in your database, quantifying the buyer’s journey into steps with actual goals.

Sounds awesome right?  Well you might also find it interesting that even though lead scoring has been attributed to more qualified leads that, in turn, improve your sales team effectiveness, many marketers and companies are still not taking advantage. In fact, a Marketing Sherpa study showed that 79 percent of B2B marketers had not established lead scoring at all.

You know you should be doing it, but setting up lead scoring is easier said than done. In order to get an accurate picture of your leads and how engaged and interested they are in your services, you really need to dig deep and identify what actions, behaviors and demographic features determine a lead’s qualification.

Here, we determine what criteria you should consider, as well as how to use the information you obtain from your lead scoring to evaluate your leads and categorize them into specific groups that fuel your sales funnel with cleaner, more qualified leads.

Understand Explicit and Implicit Data 

When setting up custom lead scoring, you will need to identify the explicit and implicit data you can use to build your lead profiles. Lets look at these two categories:

• Explicit Data:Information provided directly by the lead through interactions on your web assets, like the information received through a form submission.
• Implicit Data: Information you get through observing the lead’s interactions on your website. Generally, this type of data is derived from behavioral and engagement interactions not directly given to you by the lead.

Set Up Scoring Criteria

The next step to setting up proper lead scoring is to understand the different types of data you will want to record and evaluate. Here at Kuno Creative, we look at three main categories:

1.) Engagement: How engaged is the contact when he or she visits our website? Some criteria to consider include:

• The number of pages viewed
• The number of website visits
• The number of forms submitted
• The number of emails opened and/or clicked

2.) Behavior: Data used to understand a lead’s willingness to engage with or interest in your material. Behavioral criteria should be used to identify the specific traits or interests the lead has—giving insight into why he or she has visited your website.  Behavioral scoring criteria may include:

• Visiting subject-specific pages
• Blog subscription preferences
• Performing featured website actions, like watching a video on a specific subject or completing a subject-specific quiz

3.) Persona/Demographic:  This is perhaps the most important criteria you can use to identify if your lead is a good fit for your business/sales objectives. Criteria to consider here includes:

• Job Title
• Company Size
• Revenue
• Industry
• Budget
• Location
• Time to purchase

Once you have identified the different criteria, you will need to identify how these items are weighted. For that, you need to understand where each interaction falls within the buyer’s journey and where that interaction is in your sales/marketing funnel. Understanding this will allow you to assign certain points to top-funnel interactions (infographic views, eBook downloads, etc.) and more points to interactions that fall at the bottom of the funnel (demo request, consultation requests, etc.).

Don’t Waste Your Time with Unqualified Leads

To ensure you are capturing the right leads and only sending qualified leads to your sales team, you need to create negative lead scoring criteria that will weed out those who are unlikely to turn into sales prospects. These may be competitors, students or other professionals who will simply never need the services you offer.

Generally, the best way to do this is by filtering information collected in the persona/demographic data. For example, you might add negative scoring to a lead that lives in a specific country or a lead that provided a personal email address rather than a company email. Like any of the suggestions here, it will be up to you to determine which criteria holds negative scoring values, as it will be based on your goals and the type of leads you are pursuing.

Set Goals and Identify Lifecycle Stages

Once you have determined your scoring criteria, you will want to create a series of goal lists to categorize your leads into different lifecycle stages. Most importantly, the two lists you will want to look at are your Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) and your Sales Qualified Leads (SQL). This is where your scoring criteria will come into play.

People who can be categorized as a MQL might be highly engaged in your content and have the ideal demographics, but have not taken that extra step (requesting a demo?) to bring them to an SQL lead score level. These leads are the ones you will want to continue to nurture with content, developing their profiles and interacting with them to see what type of prospect they are. The goal is to develop these leads so that they might become SQLs though further nurturing.

Not too bad right? Setting up custom lead scoring sounds like a daunting task but, in reality, it’s actually pretty simple. Remember, the goal here is to gain a better picture of the people visiting your website—this will not only allow you to better market to your audience, but it will also provide your sales team with hot leads!

We’re currently shifting from the Information Age to the Intelligence Age. The Intelligence Age will be characterized by autonomous communication between intelligent devices that are sensitive to a person’s presence and respond by performing a specific task that enhances that person’s lifestyle.  The shift is driven […]

How the internet of things will power the Intelligence Age originally published by Gigaom, © copyright 2015.

Continue reading…

Last month, Sweden’s Riksbank, the country's central bank, took a step into the unknown by lowering its key interest rate into negative territory in an effort to combat falling inflation. However, the experiment is starting to pose serious problems for Sweden's high-street banks.

Roughly half of all European government bonds have some sort of negative interest rate. And as the experiment in Sweden shows, this is going to crush bank profits.

In simple terms, retail banks make their profits by charging higher interest rates on the money they lend than they pay on the money they give to savers or other banks. In a traditional model, a bank is simply an intermediary channelling money that people wish to put away for a rainy day to those who need to spend money now in order to finance an investment or a house, etc.

But when you get negative interest rates that all goes haywire.

Here's the problem. When a central bank introduces negative interest rates it effectively charges banks to hold money there. The idea is that charging institutions for holding cash will mean that they are more willing to spend the money, or make new investments in companies, rather than pay a charge for storing it.

In theory, this increase in economic activity will  boost inflation. (Sweden's consumer prices have fallen 0.2% in January compared to a year earlier following a 0.3% drop in December.)

The chart below shows Swedish inflation (purple line) versus the Riksbank's key interest rate:

So what does this mean for banks? Well initially lower rates offer a boost to the banks. They push down the rates charged by other banks to lend them money.

Although the rate that they are charging on variable rate legacy loans falls with the central bank rate, the interest that it receives from legacy fixed rate loans and the rate they can charge on new loans does not fall at the same pace as their funding costs, and that allows them to defend their profit margin (at least in the short term).

This is exactly what we have seen in Sweden do far:

This process should also be good for borrowers. In a competitive market, lower funding costs should start to pull down interest rates on new loans as banks find that they can gain market share against their competitors by lowering rates. That is, people can borrow more cheaply than they could previously — again helping to boost spending in the economy.

However, once interest rates dip below zero these benefits grind to a halt. 

In theory, if you borrow money from a bank at a negative interest rate then the bank would pay you to take the loan rather than charging you interest. And if negative rates were imposed on your bank account, you would have to pay the bank for the privilege of them holding your money for you.

In the real world, however, while governments appear to be able to borrow at negative nominal rates, individual banks don't get the same luxury. This is because savers would simply shift their money out of banks if they start trying to charge their customers for holding cash. And other banks start worrying about the stability of their own funding and reduce lending to other institutions.

In other words the zero lower bound — whereby rates get stuck at zero and can fall no further even if inflation remains low — remains a big problem even though central banks are increasingly pushing through it. Here's the evidence, the one-month Euribor rate (a measure of the average interest rate at which European banks are lending to each other) has flat-lined just above 0.

If banks can't lower their cost of funding, it means they will either see lower profits or even be forced to raise the interest rates on their loans in order to make up for the losses being imposed by the central bank.

This is already happening in the German network of regional savings banks, or Sparkassen, which are heavily reliant on customer deposits and are struggling to eke out a profit.

That we haven't seen these problems emerge yet in Sweden is predominantly due to the impact of new banking regulation forcing banks to increase their capital buffers (the amount of high-quality capital they have to hold to protect against possible shocks). As Moody's ratings agency writes (emphasis added):

According to Sweden’s banking regulator Finansinspectionen, in recent years banks have been able to extract higher lending margins, even as repo rates started falling in 2011, by not fully reflecting the reduction in their funding costs in the lending rates they offer, as shown below. The costs of covered bond funding (which backed 77% of mortgages at year-end 2014) have declined, even as deposit pricing nears its floor. To date, competitive pressure has eased as all major banks have required higher margins to build buffers to comply with higher capital requirements that were introduced in August 2014, and to meet their double-digit return on equity targets with these larger capital bases.

This is all about to change, according to Moody's.

Smaller lenders have expressed their intention to start increasing their mortgage lending — a move that will challenge larger banks to lower their lending costs in order to maintain market share. And even if they don't, the temptation for larger players to take some of their competitors' business will eventually become overwhelming.

What this implies is that a squeeze on profits in the Swedish banking sector is now imminent. And that squeeze will potentially reoccur in any other country that imposes negative rates on its banks.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: This Video Of The Largest Breakage Of Ice From A Glacier Ever Filmed Is Absolutely Frightening

While the millennial generation embraces all things digital, technology has also provided them with endless amounts of information. The good news for marketers is that this demographic – also known as Generation Y — still very much uses email throughout their daily lives. But it’s important to know that millennials view technology differently than other age groups, and understanding the way they approach email is key for ensuring outbound marketing success. Here are five strategies to keep in mind:

1. Social Strength: According to a recent study by Pew Research, millennials’ use of email is essentially similar to that of Gen X and even Baby Boomers. Millennials, however, are more likely to tweet, update their online profile, or send a text message multiple times throughout the day. As such, it’s important to incorporate social media into your email marketing, such as by allowing subscribers to easily share a deal by posting it to their Facebook page or tweeting it out to their followers. If you can get just a few millennials to open and read your email, they are more likely than any other age group to share it on social networks and expand your brand’s outreach.

2. Be Relevant: Millennials are more than willing to sign up for email campaigns – they are less concerned than older generations about spam or privacy. But since they have an endless supply of information available to them online, there has to be a compelling offer to induce them to share their email address or cell phone number to begin with. Early engagement campaigns can provide your newest subscribers with enticing deals or valuable information. If your emails are untimely or irrelevant, your special offers will be lost in an ocean of emails, status updates and tweets.

3. Contact and Control: Ask your prospects their preferred form of contact (such as email or text), and use that information to correspond with them in the manner they desire. According to a study from Pace University, millennials welcome direct brand interactions through email, but want more ability to control, organize and manage the interactions. Encouraging millennials to interact with your brand across multiple platforms will allow you to collect data and better understand how to interact with this “always connected” generation.

4. Mobile Matters: Millennials are more likely than all other age groups to have a cell phone: 94% have one and 88% of them use them to send and/or receive text. As such, you need to optimize your email for use on smartphones. Include links in your messaging only if the website has been optimized for mobile devices. Make it simple for users to subscribe to your mobile/email list using their phone.

5. Conversation Counts: Sending generic content will provide little return to any target audience; particularly millennials. After all, they grew up with caller ID, and they’re extremely adept at recognizing and blocking spam. By segmenting your contacts into lists based on demographics, desires and behavior, you can more effectively target your emails to the right audience and experience greater returns as a result. The need for engaging and resourceful content has never been greater thanks to the buying behavior of millennials and their thirst for information. But they’re adverse to sales pitches. Rather than being sold to, they prefer doing the research on their own in order to make decisions. They value conversation. Think smart phone over megaphone.

Also, don’t forget that millennials have spent their entire lives blocking out unwanted marketing messages, which is why they seek out brands that provide the substance and engagement they’re looking for — and why earning their trust is essential.

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GUEST:

If you’ve been to a marketing conference in the last few years, you’ve probably heard how data has become the new oil of the digital economy. Many companies are accumulating their stockpiles of this new digital fuel via loyalty programs, web analytics tools, and CRM systems.

But all of the data magic happens “behind the curtain.” Consumers don’t see the automated marketing wizard pulling all of the levers. You may sense an advertisement or marketing offer has something to do with your recent browsing or search behavior, but you’ll never see the actual algorithms or business rules that generated it. The lack of transparency in these data-driven marketing scenarios has contributed to the sense that consumers are being stalked by companies. It has inadvertently introduced an unwanted creepiness factor between brands and their customers. Rather than letting data push brands and consumers further apart, how can data bring them closer together? The answer may lie in sharing and not just taking.

Giving Data Back to the Consumer

Customer data should flow both directions as both an input and an output, forging a potent data loop that is mutually beneficial to both companies and their customers. Let me explain what I mean by this.

I recently caught a small glimpse of the data loop’s potential when I received an interesting email from Pandora Radio. I’m an avid user of their online music service, and they regularly send me various promotional emails. Often these emails feature different artists or upgrade offers, but the one that caught my attention was a monthly email that shared three simple data points:

1. How many songs I had listened to the previous month (214)
2. How many songs I had given a thumbs-up rating (6)
3. What my favorite music channel was (Thievery Corporation)

Besides these three insights, there were no fancy charts, just a question — “What will you do this month?” — and a prominent “Listen Now” button. I was intrigued to see data at the heart of this particular email communication. You’ve probably seen LinkedIn’s website do something similar when it shares stats on how many people viewed your profile or how many new people are in your network. In both cases, these companies shared personalized data that their users wouldn’t necessarily have access to. I think they’re onto something that could benefit more businesses.

Data sharing between companies and their customers isn’t an entirely foreign concept, but it has been primarily reserved for customer-service interactions. I’ve received data-centric alerts from my bank when an account balance was low or my mobile provider when my family was about to exceed its data usage limit. I regularly access account information on various self-service websites where I can scroll through rows of tabular data. In most cases, the data hasn’t been proactively analyzed with valuable insights visualized and packaged up for my benefit. Traditionally, data sharing hasn’t been viewed as a way to strengthen customer relationships or generate a competitive advantage. Essentially, it’s a means for deflecting customers from using more expensive, labor-intensive channels (mail, call centers, in-store customer service, etc.) and nothing more.

By imparting valuable data insights to their customers, companies can strengthen relationships, avoid attrition, and increase product/service usage. The data geek in me started to wonder what other numbers Pandora could have shared with me that would have added value to our relationship. Pandora could have given me more detailed information on my top artists, music genres, or sub-genres to help me in my quest to find new music. It could have shared my listening patterns over time and benchmarked them with those of average Pandora users, which would help me appreciate how much I rely on the service. Clearly, there’s still untapped potential in Pandora’s data that the music service could use to engage more of its users.

Just like informed marketers make better decisions, so do informed customers. An automobile maker could monitor driving behaviors and share tips on how you could become a better driver (e.g., you rarely use the sixth gear when you should be, which will conserve x% more gas). A software provider such as Adobe could report on which features a user touches, how it compares to other users, and share how-to videos for those areas that aren’t being used. In both cases, the product user is enlightened and the company benefits from the positive halo effect created by proactive data sharing.

As you look at the data you’re collecting from your customers (or could be collecting), what types of insights could be shared with your customers? How could they benefit from these insights? How could your company benefit from sharing more information? How would it differentiate your brand or products from those of your competitors? Opening your eyes to the possibilities of data sharing will help you unlock even greater returns from your customer data.

Data sharing isn’t without challenges. It may expose weaknesses or problems you don’t want your customers to see. Some companies will be perfectly happy to keep their customers ignorant of how inefficiently they use or misuse their products or services. Too much data can also confuse customers. Companies will need to be selective about what data they share, how they share it, and how often they share it. Identifying key metrics, leveraging effective data visualizations, and choosing the right cadence will be critical to your data sharing success. Organizations will also need to determine which channels are best for sharing personalized data — text messages, mobile apps, emails, websites, in-product, etc.

Unlike fossil fuels that have a finite supply, data is an unlimited resource that will only expand with the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT). As data becomes more pervasive, a healthy data loop with brands will be expected and rewarded by increasingly data-savvy consumers. It’s no longer just about how your company can extract valuable insights from your customer data, but how the data can create value for your customers. It’s time to start planning how your firm can embrace the bi-directional sharing of information and master the emerging data loop.

Brent Dykes is the Evangelist for Customer Analytics at Adobe and is responsible for guiding and evangelizing the vision of Adobe’s analytics solutions. He has been focused on enterprise-level web analytics consulting for eight years, working with many industry leaders, including Microsoft, Sony, Dell, Comcast, and Nike. Dykes is also an author and recently published his first book, Web Analytics Action Hero, which outlines how to become a successful analyst who drives action from digital data.

[Explore more VentureBeat opeds here.]

Only 2% of customers buy on their first visit – these marketing tools will get them to complete the customer journey.

Let’s be honest. It’s very rare that you visit a website and want to buy something straight away. A customer journey just doesn’t happen that quickly.

Most of us simply want to browse. Only 2% of people who visit an online shop make a purchase on their first visit. That’s even lower for considered, high value purchases or B2B services.

The problem that we face as marketers is losing these visitors, and having dead customer journeys. Our challenge is to get details from our website visitors, so that we can retarget them, nurture them and make those sales. Thankfully there are a few tools that we can use to bridge that gap so we can reach our targets.

1. Email collection pop-up

Business and internet marketing blogger Matthew Woodward found that his conversion rate of collecting emails increased 44% with these types of pop-ups. Padiact is a particularly useful tool as it feeds into all the major ESPs. It means you can capture details to target potential customers with a nurture campaign and your newsletters, encouraging their customer journey to last longer.

2. Live chat (excellent in high value sales)

The thing with high-value, complex sales is that customers often have several pain-points and lots of questions. If you offer a chance for people to ask questions, and get them answered almost instantly, you can win their loyalty and details. Live chat is perfect for picking up customers directly from your site, who may have disappeared forever because that page didn’t answer their questions. Live chat solutions can help you to retain your customers and help them along their customer journey.

3. Cut downtime and slow-loading websites

Slow-loading websites cost online retailers £1.73 billion per year. 38% of UK shoppers said that they abandon websites or apps that take more than 10 seconds to load. That’s even higher on mobile devices where 74% of customers said they abandon sites that take more than five seconds to load.

To stop needlessly losing customers, it’s important to ensure your website is always spic, span and speedy! MonitorHub notifies admins if the site becomes slow. This means that your technicians can fix any slow-hosting problems and cut website abandonment. You can also change your website’s design to speed up loading.

4. Exit-intent offers

Many customers abandon purchases before leaving a site. If you can capture their details, and make them a special offer before they leave – then you have a better chance of them becoming a customer. That’s the aim of Picreel, a tool that monitors mouse movements to look for signs that a visitor is about to close a window. Then when a customer is about to leave, they suddenly have the option to leave their email address and get a discount. This is perfect for e-commerce sites.

5. Remarketing

Some find it creepy, some find it powerful, But there’s no denying that retargeted ads are effective. Retargeting boosts ad response rates by 400% and improved conversion rates for Kimberly-Clark by over 50%.

For e-commerce companies, Adroll is one of the leaders in the space. For B2B businesses, Resonance lets you retarget customers with a content funnel.
You’re always going to lose some website visitors along the way. But if you can use these tools to engage them and extend their customer journey, you can reap the rewards.

Now you’ve got customers, you need to  make the most of those relationships!

Download the eGuide: The ultimate guide to: upselling and cross selling to maximise your returns.

This post originally appeared on the Redspire blog

Working with bloggers is without a doubt one of my favorite parts of PR.

With all the research that goes into pitching, you basically come out an expert on XYZ subject that you (most often) knew nothing about before.

Then, once you’ve secured interest and start working with a blogger, nine times out of 10 you’ll actually become professional friends, in a sense. Be it sharing funny content or just keeping up with life happenings, you thoroughly enjoy and look forward to your encounters.

And when you do blogger outreach the right way (cough, no spray and pray, cough), those feelings will be mutual.

But, instead of me sitting from my PR soapbox and preaching blogger outreach best practices, I’m bringing in the experts.

Meet Brad Sams, tech blogger at Neowin, and Dorothy Beal, running blogger at Mile Posts and creator of I Run This Body.

They’ve been kind enough to share the inside scoop on how PR pros can best work with blogger relations. And hint: mass pitching is not included in their tips.

Q1:   What’s your biggest pet peeve when it comes to PR?

Brad: Sending a wall-of-text PR blast. The first step in getting me to write up your information is reading the email. If I open the message and it looks like it will take 35 minutes to read, there’s a 99 percent chance I’ll delete it.

My favorite types of emails are ones that have the announcement broken into a few bullet points; all I want to know is the exact bit of info that is new.

I don’t care about the fluff part or how it’s revolutionary (it’s my job to decide if it is /isn’t). Simply say what’s new, and move on.

Dorothy: I cannot stand when male PR pros reach out to me and the first line is about how their girlfriend suggested my blog to them.

The takeaway? Keep it short. Don’t add in unnecessary fluff or jargon, but do show that you – not a significant other – read the blog. This can be as simple as pitching the right information to the right person.

Q2:   How can PR pros get your attention?

Dorothy: It sets things off on the wrong food when a PR pro doesn’t take the time to make sure they have the correct spelling on my name and/or my blog name.

I realize PR pros send out lots of emails but if you can’t be bothered to spend two minutes making the email personal and only sending it to me, then I can’t be bothered to read it.

Oh and don’t look on the first page of my blog and pick a post and tell me you are a long-time reader and really loved my recent post on “music.”

Brad: I know who you are. I’m significantly more likely to read your email if we have met previously or worked together in the past.

The takeaway? Double check your spelling. Don’t fake being a reader. And build those relationships, whether through Twitter, IRL coffees or another tactic.

Q3:  What advice would you give to PR pros reaching out to bloggers for the first time?

Brad: Brevity. Every writer is different. For me, it would be best to not start off with a pitch. A quick intro email asking the writer what they want to have sent to them is helpful. I get about 50 pitch emails a day, which means there is no time to write everything up.

My mental checklist when I look at a pitch is

• Do I like the topic/is it in my general coverage area?
• Do I have time to write it?
• Has it already been covered by a million other sites? Any time I am given advance notice of a post (embargo), it means it automatically passes items two and three, so all it needs to do is align to part one to be covered.

Dorothy:  Know the blogging world and put an effort into establishing quality relationships with key bloggers. Then these bloggers will talk about your product even when they aren’t being compensated in any manner. Readers trust these brand-loyal relationships more than they do blog reviews.

I also think blog reviews are on the way out and a more natural form of marketing is taking its place. Don’t underestimate the value of an Instagram picture over a full blog post about a product.

You want to analyze the whole picture of a blogger, not just their blog stats they send over to you. A blog is so much more than just page views.

The takeaway? Keep it brief. Give the blogger what s/he wants quickly (the sooner you share news, the better site traffic s/he will have). Consider an embargo. Look beyond traffic numbers (I personally think engagement is one of the most important metrics), and be open to new, creative blogger collaboration tactics.

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The best blogger relations centers on, well, relationships. And relationships that don’t benefit both parties have little to no future.

Dorothy shared a smart reminder to help PR pros understand the relationship side of blogger relations, particularly how to think beyond clients and determine how you can best help the blogger, too.

“It seems so rude when companies write me and the email is all about what they want me to do for them. What about including what you are going to do for me?

It takes time to write posts and promote them. My blog is now part of my business so if you want me to take your business seriously then you have to take mine seriously.

I think brands also lose when companies go for quantity rather than quality when it comes to bloggers. If I see a product on 30 different blogs in the same week you can bet I won’t ever buy that product.”

If you have any other blogger relations tips (or pet peeves), please share in the comments below.

This post originally appeared on Stephanie Vermillion’s blog, PR State of Mind.

Most people don’t grow up wanting to be a salesperson. If you talk with a kid, they might say a fireman, doctor, or journalist – or, perhaps today, a pro basketball player, movie star, or American Idol contestant. Sometimes (yes, it’s true!) sales can even get a bad rap. Think of portrayals from Glengarry Glenn Ross and Tin Men or the age-old caricature of the used car salesman.

Mary Kay Ash, an extraordinary salesperson, once said, “Everyone wants to be appreciated, so if you appreciate someone, don’t keep it a secret.” Given that Friday is National Salesperson Day, we’d like to show our appreciation all week long and recognize the positive and often unsung attributes of the sales profession. Salespeople put themselves out there every single day, and deserve to be celebrated for their many exceptional abilities.

Sales leaders provide enormous value and fill an important need – not just selling products or services but selling new ideas, new methodologies to solve problems, and new ways of thinking.

Here are just a few of the qualities that we admire in top salespeople.

Salespeople never give up.

Hearing the word ‘no’ can be disappointing; however, salespeople never take ‘no’ personally and, in fact, often welcome a ‘no’ – because they understand that it frees up their time to focus on other, potentially bigger opportunities. Books like ‘Go for No,’ have shown how increasing your failure rate can actually accelerate ultimate sales success.

In addition, salespeople recognize that getting turned down from one person doesn’t always mean they’ll get the same answer for others in the organization. They keep moving on – chugging up that hill and don’t give up. They think they can – and in the power of thinking they can – they frequently do.

Salespeople go the extra mile for customers.

Salespeople are ‘people-people.’ They want to please customers and get satisfaction from solving real problems. What is sold changes from month to month, year to year, and decade to decade. But the art of selling is timeless and based on cultivating and nurturing relationships. Joanne Black, founder of No More Cold Calling and an expert in referral selling, identifies relationship building as THE one activity that will get you ahead in sales. (10 Ways to Gain a Competitive Edge.)

A good salesperson goes out of his or her way to assist a customer in need – to build the relationship, even if it doesn’t necessarily result in an immediate sale.

Salespeople don’t let fear hold them back.

Fear of failure can be powerful – and paralyzing. The American journalist Dorothy Thompson said, “Only when we are no longer afraid do we begin to live.” Salespeople embrace that belief, and we celebrate that ability not to let fear hold them back. According to Jonathan Farrington, globally recognized sales thought leader, being afraid to leave one’s comfort zone can hold everyone back – even those with far superior skills and talents. Good salespeople don’t let fear stop them from trying.

Salespeople like to have fun!

Good salespeople enjoy what they do! They’re friendly! Top sales leaders today advise you to smile when you’re calling prospects and be friendly to increase the duration of prospect engagement. If you smile, the whole world will smile with you, right?

To tap into that spirit of fun and pay tribute to salespeople on National Salesperson Day, take this short sales ‘personality’ test ‘What’s Your Sales Psyche?’ Answer five short questions to learn your sales psyche!

This blog first appeared here.

When a client or prospect comes to us to create a new website, our first question is why? The reasons typically vary from the following: our site is dated, we have broken links, or our design does not compare to competitors’. While these reasons do influence how your prospects and customers view you online, they are not the root of the old website’s limitations.

More often than not, B2C and B2B consumers look online before contracting a service or making a significant purchase. In fact, GE Capital Retail Bank conducted a study reporting that 81 percent of B2C consumers go online before going to the store. In a study on B2B online activity, CEB Marketing Leadership Council recorded, “on average business buyers do not contact suppliers directly until 57 percent of the purchase process is complete.” That means nearly two-thirds of your customers’ buying process is done online. They are forming opinions, matching your services against their needs, comparing you with competitors and eliminating those deemed unfit – all with minimal influence from you.

In today’s marketplace, whether you sell shoes, mechanical seals, or metal surface solutions, you need an online strategy to maximize impact and drive further communication.

1) Set Measurable Goals

Everything you do online is measureable. Having clear goals for what you want visitors to do once landing on your site will set the tone for the overall user experience. For instance, if you were Zappo’s, your goal would be to provide every customer the ability to easily view a selection of shoes in their size, preferred color, style, and price range.

To get started, ask yourself the following questions:

• What is your creative vision?
• What do you like or dislike from competitor or industry influencer websites?
• What online tools and resources can you provide your clients or prospects to highlight your capabilities (e.g., digital portfolio of your work, case study of client successes)?
• Will your clients benefit from a mobile version or an app?

2) Design for Your Visitors

If you don’t know who is coming to your website, why do you even have one? A great place to start is determining your buyer persona. Hubspot defines buyer persona as “a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer, based on market research and real data about your existing customers.” Consider this buyer persona with every website decision you make.

What do your customers want? Have you asked them? A critical miss for any website design project or marketing strategy overall is not having a handle on why people buy. This infographic created by the Buyer Persona Institute shows how making assumptions can cost you. Invest wisely in creating buyer personas and design a user experience tailored to them. Unless of course, you only want your employees and family members to visit your website.

Lastly, is the information your customer seeks easily accessible? Is it information the customer even cares to see? Last year, we were honored to win two 2014 W³ Awards, a web competition “recognizing the power of web creativity.” The judging criteria can be considered when evaluating any website: creativity, usability, navigation, functionality, visual design, and overall experience.

3) Develop Your Site Strategically

You now have set goals, you understand who your buyer is, and you know what type of information they are looking to find on your site. These answers ensure your website content will be a success. Now, how do we steer the customer towards the path to conversion?

One of our clients that does this very well is Bi-Link. After conducting a strategic analysis of who they were trying to target, they determined their prospective buyers tended to be in one of two stages. They were either engineers with a product idea and ready to start tinkering, but have not yet taken action; or they know exactly what they need, are prepared with specs, have files to attach, and are ready to place an order.

When you land on the Bi-Link homepage, all of the information is easily accessible for whatever your needs may be. Bi-Link states who they are, what makes them different, they tease their service offerings without giving too much away, and they provide the following calls to action – “I HAVE SPECS READY” and “I HAVE AN IDEA.” These links provide the user a contact form to further communicate with a Bi-Link representative who can best support their needs.

Since launching their strategic website design, Bi-Link has reported success in converting web traffic to sales.

4) If You Build It, They Will Come …

… I have only seen this work for Kevin Costner in “Field of Dreams”. The rest of us need a plan for getting visitors to our site and having them take action. This is a highly competitive and ever-evolving challenge, and there is no single solution.

But the following efforts are low-hanging fruit that everyone should consider:

• Make your website launch a big deal. You worked hard for the end result, so brag about it.
• Invest in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Don’t let Google bury your site back on page 17.
• Share the news via social media with links bringing people back to the site.
• Frequently develop valuable content and always link shared content back to the website.
• Consider Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising.

Invest in excellent user experience for your customers, and you’re one step closer to closing the deal.

Did we miss a great tip? Please share your ideas below.

Whether you are a startup or an existing business, having broad market-based acceptability for your product(s) or service is vital for long term success.

So many startups today when bringing their product to market can be led into a false sense of security of the viability of their product or service. They have friends, early adopters, and others who support and believe in them and their product. This false sense of security can result in a lot of lost revenue and a cloudy understanding of how the market really views and will ultimately accept them.

Whether you acquire this information yourself or outsource it, putting in place an intensive 30 or 60 day outbound prospecting strategy can reveal a vast amount of market and buyer intelligence. This type of strategy can reveal numerous data points that will help to focus future sales and marketing efforts.

Some of these data points would include;

*Identifying buyers vs. users.

*Sales messaging.

*Identifying unknown objections as well as known objections and how to best handle them.

*Identifying best industry verticals.

*Competitor analysis.

*Improved accuracy of current prospect data. 

*Early brand identity.

As the old saying goes; “information is power”, the better the information one is armed with prior to a full scale launch the better the outcome will be.

Many existing companies that are launching new products often feel that if their customers have bought from them once, hey why not again? A properly conducted buyer assessment analysis can help to eliminate those one time buyers. Locating valuable channel partners to further drive sales and revenue can be a huge asset to a new product launch.

There is no fool proof way to predict anything. Some of the most successful products hit big with no clear understanding how or why. Understanding how and why can only improve the odds of the success for the organization.

So if your customers seem to be made up of people in your network and those that just love “new stuff”, you might want to put in place a plan to vastly widen your scope of prospective new customers. Narrow markets only lead to narrow revenue.

Good Luck & Good Selling!

Many Managing Partners have traditionally thought of websites as a necessary evil. According to this view, your firm’s website is required to explain what you do, but it doesn’t add much value. Think glorified brochure..

The goal for these decision-makers was to make their websites acceptable. But many firms didn’t (or still don’t) view the site as an investment that would really help them grow their firms.

Unfortunately, this attitude can cause your firm to miss out on crucial opportunities, and fall well behind the competition. The fact is, for a modern professional services firm, a website is one of the most important investments you can make when it comes to generating new business and driving your firm forward.

Here are some key points every Managing Partner needs to consider.

1. A website attracts new business.

Often, people take a narrow perspective of their website’s capability to attract new clients. They assume that their visitors will only be folks who are searching for their firm through a search engine. It’s not uncommon to hear these decision-makers say, “None of our clients would Google for a firm.”

Of course, how you think clients search for information and how they actually behave can be two different matters entirely.

Research shows that many firms get leads through their website. In fact, a recent study of 500 professional services firms found that 77% of firms generate leads online. Further, the more online leads they generate the faster they grow..

The numbers show that professional services buyers are searching online, and they’re making extensive use of providers’ websites. And the research-based lessons don’t stop there.

Referrals represent a major lead source for many firms. If you do get leads from referrals, some of our most recent research shows that having an informative, modern website helps stimulate more referrals through generating more awareness of your firm’s expertise. Speaking of expertise…

1. A search optimized website demonstrates your expertise.

When buyers purchase professional services, they’re ultimately buying expertise. It’s a critical component of any professional services engagement. But how do you demonstrate the expertise your firm possesses in a credible, relevant way?

The problem is that such demonstrations are difficult when you simply meet someone socially. Anyone can claim to be an expert, and even a provider’s past engagements may say more about their relationships than their expertise.

But a website full of helpful educational content puts your expertise on display, demonstrating to your audience what you know and how you think about problems. And they will check out your website. Our recent research shows that 80% of potential clients do exactly that.

This approach is much more elegant than saying that you’re an expert. Instead, you’re showing it. The power of this technique has driven the rise of content marketing.

A search engine optimized website isn’t just a digital billboard for your firm – it provides online visibility for your expertise itself. Not all buyers will be searching for your firm by name, or searching for your general type of business.

Many will be looking for solutions to a specific problem. If you create a website rich with educational content on the challenges that matter to them, they will find you through the issues you deal with and the nature of your expertise, not just your name.

3. Your website can keep you from being ruled out. (Or get you ruled out faster.)

An important fact to remember about referrals – if your referral gets ruled out of consideration at an early stage, then it was wasted effort. Many providers claim that if they can get in a room with a referral, they can demonstrate their services’ value and close the deal.

But half the time, referred firms don’t get the chance. Our research on 523 professional services firms shows that 51.9% of respondents have ruled out referrals before speaking with them. If you buy professional services, chances are that you have too.

As we’ve seen above, a wide majority of buyers check you out through your website. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that it figures into buyers’ decisions about which firms to consider. Take a look at firms’ reasons for ruling out a referral:

Figure 1. Why Buyers Rule Out Referrals

An “unimpressive website” ranks as the fourth most common reason referrals get ruled out. Poor quality content also plays a major role, according to over 23% of respondents. A dated or uninformative website that seems more focused on promotion than the needs of clients can easily send buyers looking elsewhere.

The key take-away? A bad website kills referrals.

By contrast, a clear, informative, and contemporary website helps referrals count, so you don’t get cut out of the running before you can talk to your potential new clients.

1. Your website shows visitors what league you’re in.

Look at that chart again. There is another response that is important to highlight here – “They looked like they weren’t in our league.”

Are you a serious player or are you an amateur? Your website goes a long way toward answering that question for first-time visitors.

Indeed, your website is the first and sometimes the most significant impression you will make on many potential buyers. It reflects your level of sophistication. If you haven’t put much effort into your site, visitors will question your credibility.

It’s an important point to stress – your website is not a billboard, but a hub to which your audiences will return again and again for solutions to their challenges. That’s great for building your reputation and your relationship with your audience, but to achieve these goals, your site has to be equipped to support rich content and drive new business.

1.  Your site conveys your culture.

Let’s return once more to the chart above. Note the number three reason buyers rule out referrals, “They didn’t seem to be a good cultural fit with my firm.”

Buyers want to feel comfortable working with you – perhaps over the long term. To feel this way, they need to understand your culture, and your website is a major key to this understanding.

Your site is an opportunity to easily communicate your firm’s values and problem-solving approach through copy, educational content, and videos about your firm.

This ability to communicate your culture is also important in recruiting. Our research on professional services marketing priorities in 2015 shows that recruiting is a top priority of a lot of firms. A website that conveys your culture clearly makes it easy for top talent to feel comfortable joining your team.

The bottom line.

If you’re wanting to grow, it’s important to move past a traditional view of websites. A website is about more than image or necessity – it goes right to the heart of your business.

Our research shows that firms generating 40% or more of their leads online grow the fastest and are most profitable. The lesson is clear – your website is an investment in the future of your business.

In order to lead your firm forward, it’s important to have a contemporary website that can serve as the center of your marketing efforts. From educational content to social media, your site will help share your expertise and generate new leads.

Given the many roles and abilities of a firm’s website, you could argue that it’s even more important than your office — more people will likely be seeing it, and it will shape your business for years to come.

The key to social selling success is fishing where the fish are. You might be fishing where the fish are, but you do know what to do when you get a nibble on the line?

Many sales meetings are full of fish tales about the one that got away. These fishing holes are filled with sellers, who did not use social selling techniques.

There are customers willing to engage, or bite on an intelligent insight, but many sales professionals do not understand the social selling signals. Their missed quotas, management excuses and intrusive and brand-centric emails are partly related to connecting with the customer at the wrong time with the wrong message!

Do you know an under-performing sales person who misunderstands what those ‘nibbles’ look like?

5 Reasons Why It’s Important To Pay Attention To Social Selling Triggers

1. Get on their buyer’s journey radar
2. Nurture a relationship with a prospect, who is not ready to make a decision
3. Sustain your relationship with your customer
4. Accelerate the sales process by adding value with content and insight
5. Develop your reputation

Here’s Some Research To Hook You Into The Decision-Maker

• 84% of C-level/vice president (VP) executives use social media to make purchasing decisions. (Source: IDC)
• Social networks, like LinkedIn, are the #1 influencer in the final stage of the purchase process. (Source: IDC)
• The average B2B buyer, who uses social media for their purchase decision, is senior, has a larger budget and has a greater span of buying control than a decision maker who does not use social media. (Source: IDC)
• B2B buyers find the greatest benefit of social media is gaining greater confidence in and comfort with their decision (Source: IDC)

The big insight from this research is your customers use social media and expect to engage – either with you or your competition!

The big question is, do you know when and how to engage with your network? Do you understand the sales triggers giving you the permission to connect?

Here are the 30 social selling LinkedIn sales triggers to help you identify when to reach out a be a part of the customer conversation.

30 LinkedIn Sales Triggers To Help You Achieve Social Selling Success

1. Your LinkedIn profile is viewed
2. You receive an invitation to ‘LinkIn’
3. Contact accepts your invitation to ‘LinkIn’
4. Contact changes a job
5. Contact gets a promotion
6. Contact has a birthday
7. Contact has a work anniversary
8. Contact is mentioned in the news
9. Contact updates something in their profile – photo, summary, etc.
10. Your LinkedIn blog post is liked
11. Your LinkedIn blog post is shared
12. LinkedIn blog post is commented on
13. Daily update is liked
14. Daily update is shared
15. Daily update is commented on
16. Group post is liked
17. Group post is shared
18. Group post is commented on
19. Group member makes a comment in a group
20. You are endorsed for a skill
21. You are recommended by a contact
22. You have an opportunity to ask for a recommendation from a contact
23. You are invited to join a LinkedIn group
24. A shared group member reaches out to you
25. You receive and InMail
26. A contact’s contact likes a LinkedIn update post
27. A contact’s contact comments on a LinkedIn update post
28. A contact’s contact shares a LinkedIn update post
29. Your contact writes a LinkedIn blog post
30. LinkedIn’s People You May Know feature presents a contact which is connected to someone in your network

Do you have another social selling sales trigger to add? If so, please comment below or reach out to me at MarketingThink.com!

So, do you really understand how to use your expertise and reputation to hook into the buyer’s journey? Customers provide 30 ‘tugs on the fishing line’ on LinkedIn – or, in other words, social selling triggers. Pay attention to them to you know when you can begin to ‘reel in the fish!’

Oh, now the next thing you need to figure out is how to respond to every sales trigger!

Prospecting requires discipline — and time. And since there a million demands on our day, routinely blocking out time each week to make those prospecting calls is a great way to stay organized.

Let’s say you make your prospecting calls on Tuesday mornings. Every Tuesday you grab a cup of coffee, fire up your computer and automatically start calling leads. You don’t even have to think about it — your habit keeps you honest.

But how do salespeople decide when to prospect? If you’re like most of us, you decide based on your schedule. But you’d reach a lot more potential buyers if you called based on theirs.

A study from MIT compiled data from thousands of B2B sales calls. By analyzing the data, the researchers wanted to see if they could identify the best time to reach prospects.

Here’s what they found: 4:00pm to 6:00pm is the best time to call to make contact with a lead. Surprising, right? You may think that people are mentally packing it in around 4:00, and often out the door by 5:00. But the research says that this window is the best time to reach your prospects — 114% better than the worst time period (11:00am to 12:00pm).

The beginning of the day was also found to be a good time to reach prospects. 8:00am to 9:00am — again, outside of “normal” business hours — was also effective, with 9:00am to 10:00am rounding out the best times to call.

The study didn’t just look at times of day but days of the week as well. The research found that Wednesdays and Thursdays are the best days to call leads — almost 50 percent better than the worst day, Tuesday.

As it turns out, if you’re calling prospects midmorning on a Tuesday, you may really want to reconsider your approach.

Of course, the numbers might be very different for your industry or company. So it’s worthwhile to take the time to analyze your own calls over several weeks. Using that data, you can create a personal Time Optimization Plan, or T.O.P., that allows you to identify and make the most of your prime call times.

Time Optimization Plan

To begin your T.O.P., use a tracking spreadsheet (you can download one here). In it, keep track of the day and time, how many dials you make per hour and how many prospects you actually get to speak to. Use your spreadsheet to calculate your contact rate for each hour, like this:

Contacts per hour / Calls per hour = Contact rate

For example, if you made 10 dials in an hour and reached a prospect on two of those calls, your contact rate is 20 percent.

After you track your calls and your contact rate over the course of several weeks, you’ll have a clearer picture of your best times to call.

The T.O.P. isn’t only useful for prospecting. You can also use it to track customer behavior. Say you need one final piece of information from a buyer in order to finalize a deal. By consulting your customer data, you’ll know when you have the best chance to reach them right away, as opposed to leaving a voicemail, playing phone tag and potentially losing a day or two in limbo.

You can also use the spreadsheet to track email correspondence. For example, you may find you get a quicker response to your e-mails when you send them out at after 7 p.m. — probably because your buyers see them in their inbox first thing in the morning. So that’s your optimal time for sending out e-mails.

Once you’ve identified your high-value times for calls and correspondence, protect them as best you can. There are all kinds of demands that intrude on your workday. But there are only a few windows of time where the likelihood of reaching your prospects is at its peak. Try to stay completely focused during those times. No e-mail. No office conversations. No coffee breaks. You should even ask to reschedule a meeting if it falls during these time periods.

Bottom line: Not all selling time is created equal. Know your optimal call times. Look for patterns in your prospecting efforts. Think about prospects’ and customers’ availability.

Your prime times are a scarce commodity. You’ll sell more by making the most of them.

Want to make 2015 the year you close more deals than ever? Download our free e-book with 130 Sales Tips.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is all about identifying, pursuing and managing valuable customer relationships to keep your sales wheel rotating and you, smiling.

Fierce competition makes it mandatory for your business to retain existing customers and attract new ones.

You need to fine tune customer development and management cycles to turnaround your business.

CRM tools can do that!

Integrate a new CRM in your work flow process to gather vital metrics on customer behavior and improve the marketing outcome.

So, if you want to take your business growth to the next level, you need to integrate a good CRM in it.

Here are 5 good CRM tools to choose from:

1. Agiliron

The AGILIRON Integrated Business Management Suite is a great example of a classic CRM that can be easily customized with the front-end office modules to enable real-time management of sales, customers, order and customer support.

You can carry out front-office operations smoothly because of the following features:

• Effortlessly merge streams of sales data from different sales channels.
• Real-time tracking of marketing activities, sales cycle, quotes and orders.
• Real-time order management that includes customer and order information with tracking and operations (Front-Office).

How it Works: Front Office Workflow

All the authorized agents or staff members have direct access to the immediate product inventory data, prices, customer history and buying information.

This empowers them to engage customers and create sales orders directly in the Agilirion system and route it to the work order management module.

You can leverage the customer behavior data from customers’ history and create a marketing campaign pinpointed at your target audience without incurring extra cost.

The following salient features improve your marketing outcome:

• Marketing automation and direct sales management
• Track business potential through sales cycle and activities
• Track and manage leads
• High degree of automation that speeds up sales cycle- conversion of quotes to order; order to invoices

Agiliron, with its user-friendly features and high automation level, guarantees full satisfaction in providing a cost-effective, efficient and seamless customer relationship management service.

2. Bullhorn

Bullhorn is a versatile web-based CRM software that closely manages customer relationships and helps you nurture prospects by maintaining detailed historical data.

You can use that at any given time to improve your marketing outcome.

A mobile-ready CRM, accessible from any browser, Bullhorn gives you much needed flexibility to work anywhere, anytime on any device.

You have a mobile CRM that your sales force can connect to, on the move, for making informed decisions at the right time.

Following are some great features that will ease your CRM worries to a great extent:

• Use Bullhorn accelerator feature to quickly copy any useful information from web pages into the Bullhorn application to speed up marketing outcomes
• Open API that allows you to integrate business-critical tools and applications
• Completely automated marketing and sales pipeline
• Easy mesh of email, key contact data and communication in a contact management application

Bullhorn with its quick-to-implement CRM offers small to big companies a scalable customer relationship management solution with a shorter deployment time.

3. SnapForce

SnapForce CRM is a good fit for B2B and B2C companies in any industry vertical because of its easy-to-customize front-end.

At its core, lies a fully automated, comprehensive sales automation module that speeds up the sales cycle.

Aided by other modules such as Web-Self Service, Call Center, Field Service, Social CRM, Customer Service & Support Channel Management, SnapForce CRM provides a robust customer support service.

It has a comprehensive customer management module that tracks and stores all customer data in the form of emails, phone calls and notes.

This allows the marketing team to monitor customer behavior and create the right marketing strategy.

The automatic call-log in the cloud-based SnapForce CRM makes it easy for marketing personnel to interact with customers on their individual mobiles or office phones.

All the call information or data is recorded up to the last second (this can be analyzed later) as part of the effort to provide personalized service.

Companies looking to move away from the traditional CRM models to the cloud and telephony-based CRM should shortlist SnapForce for a closer look.

4. Salesforce

Salesforce is a cloud based on-demand CRM that offers a broad suite of applications for small to big organizations.

Focused on bolstering sales and support, the Salesforce CRM along with its partner network (AppExchange) offers a scalable architecture to suit CRM requirements of organizations from different industry verticals.

This CRM supports social media interaction and contact management through two apps, Chatter and Outlook.

Chatter enables social media collaboration across the enterprise, while Outlook allows users or stakeholders to synchronize emails, tasks, calendar of events and contacts.

This nullifies any chance of double entry because it’s a cloud based app that can be accessed- anywhere, anytime by many users.

Packed with rich functionality features like in-call scripts, team-selling , business workflow, in-built approval and automation and advanced API integrations, the Salesforce CRM empowers you to harvest web leads, track sales, monitor performance through an automated sales pipeline and speed your time to the market.

Salesforce is a market leader in its domain and there are no doubts about it.

5. Base

Is your business mobile-ready?

If it is and you are looking for a CRM, Base could be a great pick for your needs.

Designed to perform seamlessly on different mobile platforms like iOS, Android and Windows, Base CRM promises great mobile connectivity to B2B and B2C sales personnel spread over different geo-locations.

The software has features like:

• Robust sales automation module
• Easy-to-use visual interface
• Out-of box sales reporting
• Complete customization of data entry fields and automatic task integration
• Clear view of entire sales pipeline

Base offers users next-generation CRM capabilities with seamless connectivity from office to mobile devices like iOs, Android, and Windows phones through its native apps.

It is currently the highest-rated CRM in both the iOS App Store and Google Play; it also seamlessly integrates with MailChimp.

So mobile-savvy businesses should give a closer look to this CRM.

The CRM Tools Conclusion

Choose and integrate the right type of CRM in your business to optimize customer retention in an extremely competitive business environment.

What CRM does your business use? Let us know in the comments section below!

See you in the social sphere!

 

Organization and convenience. These constitute the real key to success in B2B lead generation and appointment setting. Considering that B2B companies manage a large pool of B2B leads, they would need effective tools to properly assemble their campaigns and determine highly possible sales prospects.

Specifically, a well-organized database should always be considered. Leads can be effectively tracked and nurtured, allowing the marketing department to supply sales with high-quality leads through an effective application of lead scoring, email and telemarketing engagements.

Also, a very efficient database ensures high productivity. Bad leads are easily eliminated while cold leads are given more time to make well-informed decisions. Not only does this entail lesser stress but also higher revenue generation and satisfied customers.

It is therefore crucial for marketers to maintain an efficient lead management database. How? Check these steps towards building a potent database:

Identify your ideal clients

This is a matter of profiling people who might want to consider buying your product or service. This doesn’t necessarily mean focusing your resources on high job titles and budgets. The main aim of customer profiling is to find your niche. Once you have your niche, effective strategizing will follow.

Capture your leads

In order to fill your database with leads, you will need to set up a lead capturing campaign through your landing page. Although fill forms are considered to be the best in terms of capturing the information of target prospects, you can also use other strategies to acquire email addresses and names, such as webinars and phone surveys. This will increase your chances of generating better leads.

Segment your lists

Once you have identified your target audience, it is important to group or segment them based on certain attributes. You can sort them by budget and company size, it all depends on you. The main point here is to organize your list and ensure each prospect receives his corresponding content.

Clean your lists regularly

Overtime, your lead database will accumulate data you do not need. Leads that do not fit your ideal client profile shall be suppressed to avoid the likelihood of pursuing such leads. A regular cleanup of your lead management database is essential in keeping you focused on better business opportunities.

Often, you might need some help in keeping your database in tip top shape. Trust that a lead generation company can provide the necessary skills, tools, and know-how to stuff your sales people with as many quality leads as they can manage.

Fully seven in 10 U.S. adults agree a 'good, hard spanking is sometimes necessary to discipline a child,' while less than half as many disagree

Sales 101: Five Techniques for Positioning a Price Increase

Karl is a Sales Professional with McGinniss and Company[1], a leading supplier of raw materials to manufacturers. For 15 years, Karl has been using Sales 101 techniques to build strong relationships with clients, despite a volatile economy that has driven prices down and materials costs up.

Fortunately, the economy is improving, and McGinniss is seeing the benefits through increases in sales as high as 10% in seven of the last eight quarters. As a result, McGinniss is now in a position to implement price increases for the first time in seven years.

Karl doesn’t know what to do.

Like many Sales Professionals in the volatile economic conditions of the 21^st century, Karl has never had to communicate price increases to his clients. Lacking experience in positioning a price increase, he is afraid of weakening the strong relationships that he has developed, or worse, losing clients by delivering this difficult message. However, for Karl, as for many Sales Professionals, economic growth is making price increases inevitable.

Fortunately, it is possible to maintain strong client relationships in this situation by following five techniques borrowed from Sales 101 for leading a consultative conversation about price increases:

1) Know the reason for the price increase. There are a number of reasons for increasing prices. For example:

• Your costs (materials, labor, facilities, etc.) have increased.

• The original pricing that you established with the client no longer reflects current conditions, and your margins are too low.

• The market has shifted upward since you last quoted a price for the client.

• Be honest with your client about your company’s reason(s) for the increase, which will help create transparency and build trust.

2) Anticipate client resistance. Think through the implications of the price increase for your client, and be prepared to acknowledge these implications. Anticipate in advance how the client will react to the increase so that you are best prepared to address his/her objections and concerns.

3) Neutrally position the price increase. As briefly as possible, lay out for the client why you are implementing a price increase, how much the increase will be, and when it takes effect. Do not belabor the point with excessive rationale. Remain neutral and confident. Avoid using phrases like, I know this increase is hard on you … or, I know this increase seems high … which could create a perception that you don’t support your company’s decision.

4) Remain silent after positioning the increase. Anything you say after that point will open up room for negotiation in the client’s mind. Do not ask a checking question. If the client raises objections or concerns, use the Objection Resolution Model to address them, but avoid creating the impression that the increase is negotiable.

5) Strengthen the relationship. End on a positive note. Thank the client for understanding and for his/her continued business. Express your enthusiasm for continuing to work together.

What sales techniques have you used to position price increases? Share them with us in the comments below!

Learn More About Richardson’s Consultative Selling Solutions

Want to learn more about how to position price increases, yet maintain long-term relationships? Click the image below or the following link to download a brochure on our award winning Consultative Selling sales training solutions! Or you can contact Jim Brodo, SVP of marketing directly at jim.brodo@richardson.com.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[1] Company name changed to protect confidentiality

The post Sales 101: Five Techniques for Positioning a Price Increase appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

This is a post from Above Avalon, a new site from Neil Cybart, an analyst who previously commented on our site under the name Sammy The Walrus IV. You can sign up for his Apple newsletter here.

The Apple Watch represents the biggest product bet Apple has placed since the iPhone in 2007. Apple will never be the same kind of company once Apple Watch pricing is revealed on Monday. Management's primary focus during Monday's "Spring forward" Apple Watch event will be showing how a premium mass-market technology brand can embrace luxury without alienating a portion of its customer base. On one hand, Apple Watch is a device that seemingly no one asked for, but on the other hand, it is a device that holds enough potential to reshape the mobile landscape by altering the way consumers use iPhones. 

Goals for Monday's Keynote

Reposition Apple as a premium mass-market luxury brand. Apple is currently a premium mass-market brand, selling gadgets to addressable markets that number in the hundreds of millions. With Apple Watch, Apple is entering new territory, embracing luxury and the required scarcity of supply that comes with a luxury label. Such scarcity at the high-end is obtained by controlling the demand side of the equation through high prices. Apple Watch Edition collection prices will likely shock those observers who aren't aware of Apple's motivation to become more like a luxury brand. At the same time, Apple is holding on to its premium mass-market heritage by selling Apple Watch Sport at a $349 starting price.

As confirmed in The New Yorker Jony Ive profile, Apple's decision to embrace luxury is deliberate and likely taken in recognition that to be successful in the wearable space, a new strategy would be required. Consumers need to feel connected to a wearable accessory as the device becomes an extension of their personality. Apple's new premium mass-market luxury brand will also help drive subsequent demand for new product categories that position fashion and emotion as key buying determinants, with materials utilized as differentiation between luxury items and premium mass-market goods. 

Apple will need to frame this branding message a bit before revealing Apple Watch pricing in order to clearly demonstrate that Apple Watch is targeting everyone from high school students to senior executives with three distinct watch collections, and not just luxury items with low-end counterparts. 

Explain Apple Watch. Apple will likely demonstrate through app demos and talking points why the Apple Watch exists: to shift some utility from the iPhone to the wrist. Management can also discuss stand-alone features such as health tracking. There is some risk involved here. Talk up the device functionally too much, and the iPhone upgrade cycle may be put at risk as consumers hold on to iPhones for longer and instead buy new Apple Watches. Talk down the device, and consumers will choose to bypass it altogether. The ability to market Apple Watch in context of the entire Apple ecosystem is a powerful variable that literally no other company can copy, and I would expect Apple to reiterate that. In many ways, some of Apple Watch's features may need to be demonstrated not so much to sell Apple Watch, but to sell the Apple Watch plus iPhone combination. 

Soft sell the Apple Watch.  Apple has consistently used timekeeping, communication, and health & fitness as Apple Watch marketing tent-poles. If one is expecting Apple to drastically change from this strategy when it positions Apple Watch to the public on Monday, there may be some disappointment. Apple spent only 12 minutes demoing Apple Watch last September. On Monday, there will undoubtedly be much more time to demo various apps, including possible in-house apps or features that Apple kept under wraps. 

Contrary to consensus opinion, Apple will rely on soft sell messaging where the overall message is that Apple Watch is a personalized device capable of doing various tasks. Relying on a strategy similar to the way iPhone and iPad were sold may fall flat for a luxury item. Instead, Apple needs to rely on the device itself, including its look and design, to spark interest. The hardest part will be getting consumers interested in the device. Once that relationship is established, Apple can rely on its retail infrastructure to turn interest into a sale, and then that's where Apple's marketing message comes into play. 

Questions

What will be the price range for the Watch collection? Edition collection pricing will be established with scarcity in mind. Watch collection pricing will determine how big of a seller the mid-tier option will be when compared to the Sport collection. If Watch collection is priced near $500, it may be tough to forecast which will sell more: Watch or Sport. However, if Watch collection is priced above $1000, the Sport collection will be the primary beneficiary from a unit sales perspective. 

Will there be new watch bands? While most of the attention has been given to the various watch faces, the bands may be the bigger story of the day. Details ranging from price to availability will help determine how versatile Apple Watch can be and how much fashion enters the buying decision. Is there a possibility Apple will unveil new ultra-luxury bands priced well over $10,000? 

What will the Apple Watch rollout look like? Reading in between the lines, it would seem that the Apple Watch rollout will be more measured than previous product launches that we are used to. The going assumption will be that the U.S. will get the device at launch. Tim Cook mentioned Germany will see the device in April, which implies that there will at least be a handful of countries receiving the device within the launch month.

The Apple Watch is a big deal for Apple. Not only does the device represent a new product category, but success will be dependent on behavioral change related to iPhone usage. Wrist real estate is in precious demand, and I continue to see an upcoming battle for ultimate wrist supremacy. Apple's strategy will be to mask additional utility with fashion and design. Luxury presents a number of opportunities, and challenges, for Apple. As recent executive hires have shown, Apple is ready for the challenge. Apple will never look the same after Monday. 

This is a post from Above Avalon, a new site from Neil Cybart, an analyst who previously commented on our site under the name Sammy The Walrus IV. You can sign up for his Apple newsletter here.

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NOW WATCH: Here's the unlikely story of how auto-tune was created

If you own or manage marketing for a small business, I probably don’t need to tell you that video can have a major impact on your business. But in case I do need to tell you… Hey… You… video can have a major impact on your business.

Content is king

I have always believed, and still do, that quality of the content comes first. That goes for video, audio, websites and really any marketing message.

I would rather you film a video with poor quality, bad lighting, spotty sound that has a compelling message than a professionally polished video that is boring.

Putting a pretty wrapper on something will not make the quality of the content better. You can put lipstick on a pig… but it’s still a pig.

Production value should be better

Today in 2015 people do expect a higher production value. Again, content comes first. But putting your best foot forward with production quality can make a huge difference.

If you have the money, the best way is to hire a professional. They will do a better job than you’ll ever be able to do no matter what kind of equipment you have. They know how to use their equipment better than you do. And they can edit better and faster.

If you need a referral for a great videographer, just get in touch with me. But if you don’t yet have the budget, there are ways to do it very inexpensively in your home. In this video series I am covering some fundamentals for setting up your home studio and then shooting the best video you can.

Here’s the video:

This video was shot using my iPhone 6. I used iMovie on my Mac to edit it.

On the video, I promised I’d share my list of equipment. By the way, these are not affiliate links. In 2011 Connecticut imposed a sales tax measure that would tax any purchases made online. So companies like Amazon shut us affiliates down. Thanks much, Governor Malloy!

The equipment

The entire setup, if you get exactly what I have, will cost you about $336 plus shipping. Not too bad for the quality you can get.

The Apple Watch is going to hit the market very soon. 

But before the Apple Watch was announced, another well-known brand captured the attention of the horological universe in dramatic fashion.

It was Swatch. 

Yes, Swatch — maker of all those witty plastic timepieces that everyone wore in the 1980s, and that still have a following in both low and high places today.

Swatch is actually the Swatch Group, which includes names such as Omega, Breguet, and Rado. It's a huge force in Swiss watchmaking and, with the creation of the Swatch brand several decades ago, is often credited with saving that country's watch industry in the face of an onslaught of inexpensive quartz timepieces from Asia.

CREATING A SENSATION

The watch was the Sistem51 — an innovative and radically new automatic timepiece that's purely Swiss and purely Swatch.

The Sistem51 only costs $150 and went on sale in the US in 2014. It created a sensation at the big annual watch show in Basel in 2013.

There were four original versions of the watch. They have now been joined by five new editions, including a variation of the Sistem Blue that now has a more legible dial for timekeeping.

Sistem51 took the Swiss watchmaking community by storm.

"Jaws dropped," said Carlo Giordanetti, Swatch's Creative Director. "No one thought it would be possible."

So what exactly did Swatch manage to achieve with Sistem51?

It reduced the number of parts in the movement to 51, about half of what a typical automatic watch requires.

An automatic movement is powered by the movement of the wearer. The finest watches in the world are automatics, costing tens and even hundreds of thousands. Their movements — complicated miniature machines — are a source of fascination to watch collectors and enthusiasts.

There are plenty of cheap automatics out there. You can pick up a perfectly good one for less than $100. It won't be anything to write home about, but it won't need a new battery every few years, either.

And it won't be as innovative as Sistem51. 

"51 became a target," said Giordanetti, who has been with Swatch since 1987. " It was a challenge for our engineers to get the same number of components in an automatic as in a quartz."

ELIMINATING COMPLICATION

The overriding goal was to eliminate complexity. For the record, complications are what the traditional Swiss watch industry thrives on. More complications can make for a far more valuable and desirable watch. Quartz watches, by contrast, are fairly simple: they use a quartz crystal and electric oscillation to generate very precise timekeeping. 

Automatic watches use mechanical action to wind a mainspring, which powers the timekeeping function.

There's no fastidious watchmaker laboring over a bench with tiny tools and a sure, practiced hand producing the Sistem51. Instead, there are robots. The entire assembly process is automated. The movement is constructed around a single, central screw.

No shortage of traditional watchmaker know-how went into creating the watch, according to Giordanetti. It was, however, updated, forward-thinking know-how.

"There were 25 to 35 young people involved, all from watchmaking families," he said. "No other brand could have done this."

The traditional Swiss watch industry is doing quite well these days, supported by global demand for luxury timepieces from Rolex, Patek Philippe, and other big names. It's all about automatics, so Swatch saw an opportunity to use its heft to introduce something radically new into this market — all while keeping intact the brand's affection for whimsy and irreverence.

IT'S NOT ABOUT SHOWING OFF

"It was an innocent provocation," Giordanetti said of the roll-out of Sistem51 in Basel in 2013.

But it was more than that. "It was emotional," the Swatch veteran added.

Apart from watchmaking innovation, Sistem51 also represents another core Swatch value: cheerful unpretentiousness. 

"It's not about showing off," Giordanetti explained. "It's all about lightness. A Swatch collector wants to look at his or her watch and smile two or three times a day."

"You can hide it," Giordanetti said, and he's right. This isn't a watch that will live on display below your shirt cuff. It's the farthest thing from a chunky, stainless-steel dive watch you can get. It's the anti-Rolex Submariner. But like the Rolex, it's still a completely Swiss watch.

And at $150, it's also the most affordable all-new, super-innovative all-Swiss movement you can lay your hands on.

Sistem51 is a piece of watchmaking history, as important as the arrival of Swatch quartzes were in the 1980s. The Apple Watch will be a big deal. But Apple isn't the only innovator in watches these days!

You can find the Sistem51 here.

Here's a look at the new designs:

 

 

SEE ALSO: These 40 cars prove the Geneva Motor Show was the greatest in history

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NOW WATCH: Watch 2 armed gangs fight on a busy road in China

Coca-Cola recently made news by eliminating their company voice mail system. Now, instead of being asked to “leave a message after the beep,” callers hear a message encouraging them to “call back at a later time.”

As this Hubspot blog points out, Coke’s decision is indicative of a change in buyer behavior. Given what we know about B2B buyer behavior, relying on a single channel of communication in today’s connected world is detrimental to success.

Your sales team needs the ability to connect with buyers through a variety of modalities. Help them focus on building a robust network, and initiating connections on the buyer’s terms.

Here are three ways to do it:

Get Them Connected

Today’s buyers are more educated, more social media-oriented, and more content-focused than ever before. They don’t want to receive cold sales pitches from someone with whom they have no connection.

Find out what social networks, LinkedIn groups, and other online communities your prospects spend time in, and encourage your team to join them there. Teach salespeople to build their networks online, paying attention to both quantity and quality of people. When you have ways to reach your prospects outside of voice mail and email, you can improve your chances of getting their attention.

Building connections with buyers also gives your sales people the ability to continually add value through engagement after the opportunity has closed.

Get Them Comfortable

A sales team that knows how to comfortably and confidently engage with prospects through multiple channels improves their odds of getting through and showing value to prospects. Provide your sales team with the tools and processes necessary to get comfortable with the vast and ever-changing array of communication alternatives now available.

Many professionals are buried in emails that they never read, but those same professionals may be active on Twitter, or happy to exchange through LinkedIn. If your sellers aren’t comfortable engaging prospects and customers on these networks, they’re missing a valuable opportunity. Your job as a sales leader is to give them the skills and tools that make them comfortable communicating with their customers and prospects through a variety of channels.

Help Them Be Resourceful

Once your team is spending time in the right places connecting with the right people, ensure they have an operating rhythm around articulating value and differentiation throughout the sales process. Buyers are more research-oriented than ever before, and more wary of “being sold to.” They want solutions, not pitches.

Teach your team to tap into the digital buying process by connecting prospects with valuable content and resources that demonstrate the value of your solutions as they relate to their most pressing business issues. We talk often about becoming a trusted advisor in the sales process. Trusted advisors add value because they’re resourceful. Your sales team needs the ability to be a continued resource for their buyers and current customers. Then, your sales team can escape the need to leave repeated voice mails or email chase, and focus instead on drawing qualified buyers to them.

The price of luxury real estate is rising faster in the United States than it is anywhere else on earth, according to the latest World Wealth Report from real estate firm Knight Frank.

Prices rose by almost 13% across US cities last year, compared with just 2.5% across Europe, the report said. And worldwide, growth was even flatter, with global luxury property prices rising by just over 2% in 2014.

New York saw the highest jump, with luxury residential real estate prices rising 18.8% year over year. In 2013, Knight Frank found that $1 million could buy 40.2 square meters of property in Manhattan; a year later, that figure has shrunk to 34 square meters.

Monaco still has the most expensive luxury real estate overall, followed by Hong Kong and London.

The chart below, via Knight Frank, gives a great visualization of what $1 million buys in various luxury housing markets around the globe.

 While Monaco may be a magnet for wealth real estate buyers, The super-rich (defined in Knight Frank's report as those with $30 million or more in net assets) say that London, New York, and Hong Kong are the most important cities when it comes to doing business.

 

SEE ALSO: A photographer set out to meet 100 Russians at every age, and the results are incredible

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

Did you ever waste your time on marketing strategies that didn’t bring you any results? If you ever tried Social Media Marketing my guess is that your answer is “Yes”. There has been plenty of debate in the past on whether SMM is an effective marketing strategy and even today lots of marketers get discouraged […]

The post A Simple Twitter Marketing Tactic That Has The Highest ROI appeared first on Blogging Tips.

As a B2B marketer, you're responsible for driving leads. But what happens when you overlook a valuable channel, such as inbound phone calls--which are excellent for generating leads? Nothing good... Read the full article at MarketingProfs

In many cases, amazing innovations start with a single question. When we started Salesforce, we asked “Why can’t business software be as easy to use as Amazon.com?” And with that question, we completely disrupted enterprise software. We also asked “Can you build a software company rooted in philanthropy?” From that question, the Salesforce Foundation and the 1-1-1 model of integrated philanthropy were born.

One of the questions I’ve been trying to answer recently is “How can we get more women into technology?” The answer is more than just women “Leaning In.” Tech leaders play a big role in in creating more diversity and ensuring that a more varied range of voices rise to the top. That is why I’m proud to support LeanIn.org’s new initiative, #LeanInTogether, which gives men an opportunity to advocate for the diversity that keeps us all innovating and improving.

Leadership truly sets the tone. Are we actively actively try to recruit, provide opportunities for and promote women? As a cofounder of Salesforce, I am committed to asking these questions and challenging myself to do better. Below are a few things we should all do to create more diverse, more successful teams:

Be transparent and facilitate an open dialogue.

It all starts with your culture. You have to create an environment in which people can have open and honest discussions about these challenges. Are you having the tough conversations? Are you allowing employees to express their opinions and ideas? At Salesforce, we have several communities that facilitate the dialogue in a open way, and I love that our employees feel comfortable talking about diversity openly. It’s the first step toward change.

Address unconscious bias.

No matter how inclusive we strive to be, it’s hard to step outside yourself and see the assumptions you bring to a situation. Researchers call it either unconscious bias or implicit bias, but the definition is the same according to a report published last year by The Ohio State University: it is “the attitudes or stereotypes that affect our understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner.” If employees are aware that bias works on a subconscious level, they may try to be more aware of their actions and attitudes. We also need to hold ourselves and our employees responsible for acting on biases, unconscious or not.

Develop diverse tech talent early.

Code.org estimates computing jobs will more than double by 2020 and increasing participation in computer science education is the key to having more women — and more people — in the field of engineering. I believe every student should have the opportunity to learn computer science, whether they go to public or private school. Let’s make it a part of the core curriculum. At Salesforce, we support organizations like Code.org, Black Girls Code, and Girls Who Code, who are all dedicated to this mission.

Engineering teams with people from different backgrounds, who have a variety skills and perspectives, will help you identify opportunities, anticipate and solve problems, and innovate faster than your competition. In fact, a 2012 study found that employees who felt included and believed diversity was supported at work were able to innovate more (an 83 percent increase), and team collaboration improved by 42 percent. You can bet sales went up as a result.

At Salesforce, we believe for a company to do well financially, we must do good. And creating a culture that appreciates diversity is a big part of it. It’s a challenging task — one that starts with our children’s educational system, requires mentorship and fostering of talent along the way, and ultimately leads to a truly representative workforce. It won’t be easy, but we can make an impact with every question we ask and every conversation we have.