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The scariest new word on the lips of Microsoft's sales managers these days is "consumption," multiple sources have told Business Insider.

Consumption, also known as "usage," refers to how much cloud computing a customer is actually consuming.

And there is a disconnect between how many of Microsoft's biggest enterprise customers have access to Microsoft's cloud as part of a larger contract, and how many of them are actually using it.

The disconnect between how many companies have access to its cloud services and how many are really using it is causing all sorts of problems internally, sources have told us. Specifically, we are hearing:

• Microsoft has been structuring deals that give away access to Azure, its cloud competitor to Amazon Web Services, for little to no extra cost to some customers who have no plans to use it. It has been counting some revenue from those deals for its cloud, but if they don't actually use the cloud, that revenue won't continue. Ditto for Office 365, its cloud-based email and productivity suite (although we are hearing that Office 365 is really starting to take off).
• Microsoft is pressuring its sales force to get their customers who have these free "cloud credits" to actually use the cloud. It has changed its compensation plans for many sales teams giving them "consumption" goals.
• We've heard that some sales people are quitting and/or are being told that their bonus is at risk over these consumption numbers. Receiving no bonus is deadly to a sales person, where a career depends on being a top seller.
• Sales units are having all sorts of meetings to come up with plans to raise their consumption metrics.

When we asked Microsoft for comment on this story, the company characterized cloud usage as "strong," and told us, "We are seeing strong usage of Microsoft Cloud services by businesses of all sizes. Over 60% of all Azure customers use at least one premium service, like media streaming, and over 80% of Office 365 enterprise customers have two or more workloads."

The rush to the cloud

To understand the sales people's panic over these new consumption metrics, it's helpful to have some context.

In the cloud world, companies only pay for the actual resources they use, like minutes of computing time, bytes of storage, usage of add-on apps and services, and so on.

Customers love this and are ditching traditional software and computers at a rapid rate so they can rent their tech via cloud computing.

There's a rush at every major tech vendor to sign up customers for their own cloud offerings before their competitors nab them. They are trying to nab their share of a market that will grow — conservatively — from $56.6 billion in 2014 to more than $127 billion in 2018, according to market research firm IDC.

As we previously reported, Microsoft has spent the past few years trying to coax its huge bevy of enterprise customers to try its cloud products using a tried-and-true plan: Give them free credits to its cloud, with the idea they'll like it so much they'll start paying for real once the free credits are up (and hopefully, keep paying forever).

But it doesn't just give them free credits. "A customer has to pay for anything that's on the EA." (That's "Enterprise Agreement," a licensing contract that almost all big Microsoft customers have.)  "There's no sort of like, hey here's a free product," a source close to Microsoft told us.

Instead, Microsoft offers big discounts on the software part of the contract — say, Windows licenses or licenses to its SQL Server database — and then it applies those discounts to the cloud portion of the contract.

The net cost of the contract remains basically the same to the customer as if they didn't have the cloud services attached. 

But this also means Microsoft gets to claim some portion of that contract as cloud revenue, a source told previously told us.

This was a smart try-before-you-buy strategy that allowed Microsoft to funnel funding toward the cloud unit. But it was risky. If enterprise customers didn't start using the cloud, blowing through their credits and then paying for more, Microsoft didn't really land them as cloud customers, even though its balance sheet made it look like it did.

And that's exactly what's happening in some cases.

"The dirty secret is that very few customers are actually taking Microsoft up on using Azure in any meaningful way," this source told us in November.

Another source at Microsoft recently told us, "Microsoft got the money, and the customer didn’t use the cloud."

This source offered an example of how Microsoft negotiated a huge multi-million dollar contract with a customer where it bundled in tens of thousands of dollars of cloud credits, "where they have ZERO current plans to use Azure (nor even security approval to use it)."

This source told us, "Don’t get me wrong, some customers are going gangbusters with Azure and doing great things with it." But in some sales districts, fewer than 20% of the enterprise customers account for 90% of the Azure consumption, the source told us.

That's good for the salespeople managing those 20%. It's not so good for everyone else.

How widespread?

Another source close to Microsoft said the problem was not widespread. 

"Having looked at thousands of EA agreements and Azure agreements, etc., a very, very small percentage" of these contracts include Azure credits that companies neither wanted or used, this source told us. 

As for the discounts, this person acknowledged what we'd heard about how those discounts are applied to other products, so Microsoft can still charge money for Azure, but believed the practice wasn't common.

"We didn't discount Azure, we discounted other products to use that as funding for Azure on the EA. That would be a pretty small scenario of folks doing that type of thing," this source explained.

He said that Microsoft would NOT be "losing money" on these contracts.

"It's that the customer would pay for something [Azure] they didn't use. The Azure agreement is a year-long agreement. And so if it's something that lands on a customer's EA, they have a year to leverage and use that service, or they don't get the value of what they pay for it."

This source also confirmed, "Yes, we are asking our sales people to get customers to use Azure because that's basically how we charge for Azure."

However, other sales folks have told us that the practice of bundling in Azure is extremely common.

Software licensing consultant Cynthia Farren also confirmed this when we reported on the situation in November.

"I have also heard some Microsoft sales folks go so far as to boast that all of the EAs [enterprise agreements] they manage have some cloud services on them but have also explained that not all of them have implemented those services yet," she told us.

Wall Street is asking

The crux of the issue is that insiders are starting to understand this contract situation and are asking Microsoft to disclose more details.

When Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in January that Microsoft's cloud business is on track to be a $5.5 billion business, industry experts wanted more details.

"What I would really like to know is how many of their total number of users have ever been activated. I’d really like to see a more transparent way of reporting the numbers (such as active users, etc)," Farren previously told us.

So would some Wall Street analysts.

In January, during the quarterly analyst meeting, Citi's Walter Pritchard came right out and asked Nadella and CFO Amy Hood about actual user numbers on Office 365, which sources tell us is starting to pick up steam with enterprises.

"Can you talk about deployment rates? I know you've done a good job of getting those into contracts, how many customers are actually running it, running their email and SharePoint and other products in the cloud versus just having the rights to it?" Pritchard asked.

Management sidestepped an answer. Instead of reporting active users, Hood said, "The actual goal is the commitment that the customers show to the movement to the cloud and then moving them quickly as we can."

The pressure is on 

Now, Microsoft is apparently pushing salespeople to make sure their customers use the cloud services they sold.

"The fundamental challenge is that Microsoft incented sales teams to sell Office 365 and Azure aggressively without regard for whether the customer needed, wanted, or had a plan for using it," one source told us.

Sales bonuses were tied to how many customers they could get to agree to add cloud services to their contracts, sourced told us.

What's new: Microsoft is starting to factor "consumption" into a salesperson's quotas, and into team managers' quotas as well, our sources say — and doing this for contracts that were already signed.

"The new compensation model punishes the sales team because the customer is not 'consuming' the cloud offering(s) that they 'bought.' Many districts are having monthly or bi-weekly 'consumption business review' calls to whip the [salespeople] into getting this done," one source told us.

By "getting this done" our source means getting their customers to use all the cloud they paid for and then some.

And while some sales people are freaking out about how they will get their customers to actually use the cloud, Amazon and Google are recruiting cloud talent from Microsoft like crazy.

One source told us Microsoft "is suffering heavy losses on the technical side of its enterprise sales force to Amazon and Google at exactly the wrong time."

'Consumption' is all the rage

The focus from acquiring customers to "consumption" isn't just going on at Microsoft.

In January, HP CFO Cathie Lesjak openly fessed up that HP was working on it when HP reported earnings and she talked to analysts on the quarterly conference call.

When HP reported its quarterly earnings in late February, software revenue was down down 5% last year from the year-ago quarter, "We continue to shift our portfolio and operating model to SaaS and subscription based offerings. Customer consumption behavior and the need to adjust sales motions accordingly created a near-term revenue headwind," she admitted.

Meanwhile, cloud computing's king, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, downright bragged about how customers are using Salesforce's cloud when the company announced its year-end earnings in late February. Salesforce is one of Microsoft's biggest cloud competitors.

"We've delivered 177 billion transactions for our customers in the quarter. That's up 68% from a year ago. You can see our usage rates are soaring. Customers are using our product more aggressively than ever before. That's an average of nearly 3 billion enterprise transactions every single business day. That's unprecedented in enterprise technology. No other enterprise platform comes close to that," he says.

Salesforce has for years published some of its usage statistics on the internet.

Now, the pressure is on for Nadella to start talking details about consumption. And, clearly, before he does that, he intends to have something really good to say.

SEE ALSO: SOURCE: Here's The 'Dirty Little Secret' Of Microsoft's Cloud Business

Join the conversation about this story »

Saving for retirement can be hard when you don't have a specific dollar amount in mind.

Nicole Lapin, author of "Rich Bitch: A Simple 12 Step Plan for Getting Your Financial Life Together ... Finally," suggests using one of the many retirement calculators available online to estimate the amount you'll need, such as those provided by AARP or FINRA — but first, you need to know a few things in order to get a remotely accurate result.

Before calculating your retirement number, make sure you know:

1. How you want to live in retirement

Lapin points out that "conventional wisdom has long held that you need less money in retirement than you do in your working life." However, the author suggests assuming that you'll spend at least as much money during retirement as you spend while you're still working.

Just how much you save really depends on how large you're planning on living during retirement. If you're okay with being frugal, Lapin advises saving enough to provide nothing less than 60% of your current salary in your retired life. If you want a comfortable lifestyle, shoot for 80%, and if you want what Lapin calls "Betty White status," aim for 100%.

2. How much you expect to get back from your retirement investment

Lapin refers to this question as a "delicate little dance." Assuming too low a return means saving more now, which "lowers your standard of living in your nonretirement years," Lapin writes. She continues, "If however, you assume too high a return, the calculator might say you don't need to save as much now, but you might end up eating cat food when you're 90."

For a number that's neither too crazy nor too conservative, Lapin suggests expecting no more than 7-8%.

3. How much inflation will set you back

Lapin emphasizes the importance of accounting for inflation since "what you really care about is the value your money will have in retirement." She says ignoring inflation will most likely cause you to "show up to the retirement party shortchanged." Lapin suggests assuming a 3% rate of inflation when using a retirement calculator.

4. The age you expect to retire

According to Lapin, the average age to retire is 67. But essentially, this is a personal decision. Lapin says you can play around with this age to see what will work best. The most important thing to keep in mind is staying realistic. "A lot of us would like to retire ASAP, and if you win the lotto or strike it big, that can happen," the author writes. "But for now, don't be unrealistic about the age at which you can realistically retire."

5. How long you're expected to live

No one likes to think about when they're going to die, but when you're considering how much to save for retirement, it's necessary. Lapin recommends using nothing younger than 95, and she says that 100 is better, since people continue to live longer as time goes by.

The author also makes the point that men and women differ on this criteria. "Women do, on average, live longer than men. (Our healthcare costs also tend to be higher than those of men, which is another reason we need to get our retirement situation in check,)" Lapin writes.

6. How much — if anything — you'll get from Social Security

According to Lapin, some calculators have you put in a "Social Security assumption." She says if you receive an annual report from the Social Security Administration, you can use the number from that report. But Lapin also cautions against relying too heavily on Social Security.

"... With Social Security always in danger of being eliminated, don't take it as gospel," Lapin advises. "You might want to put in a lower number or skip it altogether in your calculations." Worst-case scenario, you end up with more money than you expected.

SEE ALSO: Here's The Key To Choosing Between 2 Common Retirement Accounts

Join the conversation about this story »

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

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BARCELONA, Spain – For the past 25 years, Rich Miner has been at the center of developing a number of technologies that have had a substantial impact on our lives.

Most recently, that included being cofounder of Android, the company acquired by Google almost a decade ago that developed the operating system that now powers about 85 percent of all mobile gadgets sold. For the past five years, he’s also been a partner with Google Ventures. And along the way, he was a cofounder of Wildfire, the voice-based personal assistant.

All of this gives him an interesting depth and breadth of experience in terms of how mobile has changed the world, and what forces are continuing to shape the mobile computing revolution. I sat down with Miner this week at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona for a wide-ranging conversation.

Here are five things Miner believes are going to shape mobile computing in the coming years:

1. Payments: Miner firmly believes that mobile payments are a fundamental use case for smartphones and wearables going forward. But he says the mobile payment systems we’ve seen so far don’t go far enough in revolutionizing payments. He says things like Apple Pay fall short because they simply re-create the basic payment process, just substituting a smartphone for a credit card.

Miner says that’s why companies are still rolling out and experimenting with so many systems: Samsung with Samsung Pay announced this week; Google with its wallet and Android Pay API ; and PayPal acquiring Paydiant this week. But for any of these to really click with merchants and consumers, he said they need to offer far more value than just making a payment. There needs to be additional services like rewards, loyalty cards, and much, much more that are rolled into a singular system that enhances the relationship between merchants and customers.

2. Pen-based computing: Because everything old is new again. Miner says Samsung has had success with its Galaxy Note, and this week in Barcelona he’s seeing more gadgets that offer a digital pen or stylus of some kind. These kind of uses are great for meetings or just general note-taking, filling out forms, and taking tests. Particularly because handwriting recognition software is so robust now.

Silicon Valley went through a pen-based computing craze in the early ’90s. And then there was the Palm Pilot. Then Steve Jobs famously hated them. But, apparently, resistance is futile. Miner expects companies to start integrating them even more deeply into the hardware and software, increasing their usefulness. And speaking of businesses…

3. Enterprise: While businesses have been adopting mobile devices, Miner thinks they haven’t really even scratched the surface in terms of how fundamentally smartphones and tablets could reshape every aspect of business workflow. Instead, companies are grafting them onto their current workflows. Note to entrepreneurs everywhere: Miner thinks this is a shortcoming being ignored by startups. He believes there’s a gigantic opportunity for software and services that take all the information gathered by people’s smartphones, tablets, and wearables and use it to automate huge portions of a company’s workflow.

“These things know far more about the movements of your salesperson than that person knows from their own intuition,” Miner said. “All of that stuff — emails, calendar, that he was five minutes late to a meeting — should just flow automatically into a database.”

4. Ads: Another area that no one has completely cracked. Miner points out that a huge chunk of people’s attention has shifted to mobile devices, but only a tiny portion of advertising dollars have followed. Lack of cookies have made it tough for most advertising to be interesting and relevant on phones. Plus, things like banner ads are just duds when it comes to the mobile experience. He says one of his portfolio companies, Yieldmo, has the goal of inventing a new mobile advertising format every day. Yes, every day. Miner said that kind of experimentation is going to be needed to find the formats that convince advertisers to accelerate their spending on mobile.

5. Voice: Considering Miner was a Wildfire cofounder, perhaps this isn’t surprising. But Miner says the power of voice-activated services to control just about everything on your smartphone and many wearables is going to be an important force in reshaping people’s relationship to their gadgets. And in the coming years, as more beacons and sensors are deployed around people’s homes and businesses, and connected gadgets continue to expand, voice is going to become the default way that people interact and control all these devices.

Has your all-star sales team lost its mojo and no longer performing as well as it used to? Could it be that they have already plateaued or simply lost motivation?

Perhaps they feel like they not catching the eye of management anymore and have faded into the “average” category.

The real reasons for declining production of many sales teams may surprise you.

Sales is such a fast-paced and competitive field that many managers make the mistake of only taking a short-term focus on their talent.

They regularly emphasize how to attract the best talent, but often do not pay proper attention to their current staff.

There is a great deal of excellent sales literature describing the best ways to get the right people onto your sales team. Yet little advice exists for managers who need help figuring out how to retain those Driven and competitive employees you have worked so hard to find.

 

Use Sales Assessments to Get Started

For a long time, sales managers have relied on their “gut” to make decisions. Many have come to realize that this usually means acting randomly based on personal biases.

Modern managers use sales assessments to collect relevant data about their current employees. These can be used to design mentoring, training and coaching programs for salespeople with high potential.

These salesperson assessments can also help managers figure out how to identify the best candidates during the hiring process.

Quite a lot of research has shown that self-motivated salespeople are the highest performers. Using sales tests can help identify candidates with a Drive to succeed and those current employees who will most benefit from training.

Managers often make the mistake of seeing their role as some kind of cheerleader. In sales, it is vital that employees not only perform their assignments well, but actively seek out new work.

Highly self-motivated people are naturally suited to the sales profession. Those who need constant monitoring to stay on task will find it difficult to make hundreds of cold calls.

But there is so much more to knowing who on your team is self-motivated, which is why it is so important to utilize sales assessments during the hiring process as well as with existing salespeople.

 

Improving Performance Through Intelligent Management

Sales assessments are an important first step in this process because they enable managers to learn what motivates their employees. Instead of relying on theories, they can actually see what their employees need to succeed.

And while theories should not be the sole basis of understanding your sales team, there are a few good ones that can add some value to your management practices. They are often based on data collected on a broader level and have gleaned useful insights, such as:

The hallmark of self-motivated workers is their tendency to seek out challenges and try to improve their capabilities through learning and exploration.

Having a lot of rules is counterproductive when motivating salespeople. Excessive formality in processes reduces the likelihood they will be done properly.

Low pay not only hinders performance and motivation, but also makes employees resentful. Human beings react very strongly to feelings of unfairness and will tend to focus on that inequality over their job.

Money is not everything, though. Allowing creativity and freedom in accomplishing tasks increases the productivity of self-motivated employees. When monetary gain is the only reward for work, employees often lose interest in the tasks themselves and focus only on the money.

Self-worth when performing job duties will motivate high Drive salespeople far more than external incentives like stock options. Recognizing accomplishments are a good way to boost employee confidence and morale.

Fear is the worst motivator, because it focuses worker’s energy away from their work. This leaves them tired, stressed out and unfocused, and has the opposite of the desired effect.

While this is hard to find in sales, it is important to find people who are not entirely driven by money. Self-motivated employees derive satisfaction from the work they do and the money they make, not one or the other alone.

Factory workers engaged in routine work are often well motivated through reward and punishment. Applying this principle of management to educated corporate employees devastates their motivation by reducing self-worth.

Many managers have found that self-motivated salespeople are the best hires, but can be difficult to motivate as long-term personnel.

It is important to identify those traits early on and understand how each of those candidates are best managed. Salesperson assessments are an effective way to gain this unique understanding.

Some candidates may appear highly Driven during the interview process, but it is difficult to determine what is really motivating them.

Administering an assessment prior to the interview process can uncover their underlying motivations and their likelihood for sales success when provided with the right environment.

To be successful in the long-term, a salesperson has to derive satisfaction out of the work they perform aside from their compensation. Many sales managers realize that it is unwise to focus on short-term results, but fail to see that someone entirely focused on money and power is not going to last long.

 

How to Motivate an Ambitious Sales Team

Because self-motivated employees do not require micromanagement, and it actually will hurt their performance, it is important to set high-level goals.

If managers can try to involve their staff in the strategic process, it will improve their feelings of self-worth.

Managers must also be empathetic, or emotionally intelligent, to ascertain the best way to communicate with each worker.

Every individual has their particular language and communication habits and managers have to be flexible.

Sales teams are naturally competitive, which means sales managers must be proactive in fostering a healthy culture.

A self-motivated team means managers can focus on encouraging good working relationships among the staff. This is best done through getting to know and understanding them as individuals and helping them find common cause.

Managers who use their employees’ self-motivation to their advantage can reap the most rewards. Instead of fearing their workers’ ambitions, if they can find a way to direct and encourage them, they can increase their already impressive motivation and performance.

When a manager gets to know their staff, they can begin to tailor their rewards and motivators to individuals on the team. Each employee is motivated by something different; identifying and understanding this is vital to augmenting their performance.

 

Learn More about Effective Sales Management

There are many excellent resources available to help sales managers learn how to attract and maintain Driven salespeople.

A thoughtful and informed process could enable an organization to find and keep the talent they need.

Take advantage of the latest research on motivation and salespeople to build the best team for any organization. There is no need to go with the “gut” ever again.

 

The post How to Continually Push Your Driven Salespeople appeared first on SalesDrive LLC.

The trend can't be ignored any longer -- buyers are more informed and self-sufficient than ever before. They can do all the research they want about a particular product or service on the company website, and even buy online if the option is available. So what role does the salesperson play in the new B2B buying journey?

This question was the topic of Andy Hoar's presentation at the 2015 Forrester Sales Enablement Forum. And the principal analyst didn't shy away from dropping the bomb that his research indicates is on the horizon. 

Of the 4.5 million B2B salespeople in existence today, "we believe one million jobs will be net displaced by 2020," Hoar said.  

However, not all types of B2B salespeople will be impacted equally. Hoar identified four main seller archetypes, listed in order of representation in the overall population:

1. Order takers - Salespeople who work with a non-complex buyer dynamic and non-complex product or service.
2. Navigators - Salespeople who work with a complex buyer dynamic and non-complex product or service.
3. Explainers - Salespeople who work with a non-complex buyer dynamic and complex product or service.
4. Consultants - Salespeople who work with a complex buyer dynamic and complex product or service.

Of these personas, order takers are projected to take the biggest hit in jobs lost, according to Hoar. 

"Order takers are in the cross hairs, because if [a buyer] knows what they want and they're ready to buy it, just give it to them," he said. "Enable them to buy it -- don't create friction." These salespeople stand to be displaced by self-service portals.

Explainers are the second most at-risk group, thanks to sophisticated company websites. "If you look at really compelling websites, they provide things like how-to videos, detailed facts, and user-generated content," Hoar said. "So as technology gets better at explaining things, we don't need humans to explain any more."

Navigators will take a small hit due to the rise of tools and integrations that streamline procurement. While 91% of B2B buyers in a Forrester survey said they would like to interact with a salesperson on price negotiations, Hoar said he sees "a clear trend toward software and algorithms doing more of that." 

But there was one bright spot -- the consultant category is expected to grow instead of shrink, according to Hoar. 

"Consultants are a qualitatively different bunch of people," Hoar said. "They can explain abstract concepts; they can solution sell; they can build relationships. They're true consultants."

So while this research doesn't spell the demise of all salespeople, it certainly puts a date on the death of the traditional salesman. What should companies do to mitigate the impact on their sales teams?

Hoar offered a few suggestions. First, he recommended scaling back on field sales in favor of inside and online models, especially in the "order taker" category. 

In addition to changing sales models, he also suggested reexamining business models. "The reality is a lot of B2B companies we talk to are getting out of the product business entirely -- they're now doing services," he said. Lastly, he advised that organizations embrace technology and adopt new tools to radically alter their sales operations. 

As for individual reps? "Not everybody's going to make it," Hoar acknowledged. While much of the burden of reskilling salespeople falls on companies in the form of reimagining sales and marketing processes, salespeople would be smart to start tweaking their personal techniques today. Your job might depend on it.

The post Dan Pink on How to Succeed in the New Era of Selling appeared first on Copyblogger.

Everyone is telling you that you need more and more content in order to grow your business.

But you’re not sure why it’s so important, and how to ensure you are getting the right content in front of your potential clients.

And there is so much content on the web that you wonder if your content is going to matter, and will the right people see it?

Let’s have a look at why B2B content is so important, and how to ensure the right people see it.

Importance

The reason B2B content is so important is because that’s how your potential clients are judging you, and more importantly, finding you now.

Here are some significant statistics for you to know.

1. 90% of B2B buyers say when they’re ready to buy, they’ll find you. (Earnest)
2. 94% of B2B buyers report conducting some degree of research online before making a business purchase. (Acquity Group)
3. Content creation is marked as the single most effective search engine optimization (SEO) technique (Marketing Sherpa)
4. Most buyers are 50-60% of the way into the buy cycle before they’ll talk to you (Earnest)
5. 80% of business decision makers prefer to get company information in a series of articles versus an advertisement (CMI)
6. 81% of B2B CEOs believe that the importance of marketing has increased, and 46% of them say significantly. (Stein IAS)
7. 73 percent of tech buyers surveyed said they read two to eight assets before deciding whether to purchase. (Eccolo Media)

Ensure Your Content is Relevant & Distributed Properly

The other side of the marketing coin is to ensure your content is relevant and distributed to the right platforms for maximum viewing and effect. Here is why that is so important.

1. 66% of B2B marketers with a documented content strategy feel they are effective, vs 11% of B2B marketers who don’t have a content strategy (CMI
2. 78% of CMO’s think custom content is the future of marketing (Ragan)
3. Peer reviews matter. Ensure you have case studies and testimonials That Sell. Customer testimonials are the most effective form of content marketing. (SocialTimes)
4. People gather information from mixed sources. So you need to put your content on a few social media sites. Blogs, LinkedIn, Twitter, Youtube and Google+ are relevant for B2B buyers.
5. 87% of B2B marketers use social media to distribute content (CMI and Marketing Profs)
6. The average content length for a web page that ranks in the top 10 results for any keyword on Google has at least 2,000 words. The higher up you go on the search listings page, the more content each web page has. (QuickSprout)
7. 83% of B2B marketers invest in social media to increase brand exposure; 69% to increase web traffic; and 65% to gain market insights. (Social Media Today)

And finally, here is a graphical comparison effectiveness of B2B content marketers.

Click on graphic for full size.

In order to develop the best content marketing strategy, I have written a short eBook for you titled, 15 Reasons B2B Content Marketing Fails and how to correct it.

You can get your free copy here.

The last thing you need is another article telling you what to do.

The value of social media, the importance of content marketing strategy, benefits of an omni-channel approach, creating a best in class customer experience, or the top 5 reasons you need a mobile strategy – you get it (and while you’re reading that article, one of your competitors might be two steps ahead, putting that strategy into practice).

For many of the brands that I talk with the biggest issue isn’t what to do, but how to make it happen with the required level of executive support and resources. Instead of driving the same tired points home, it’s more important that you build out the case with information your decision makers are looking for – ROI.By crafting a business case (a more complete and strategic plan to generate that ROI) you can earn the approval and resources needed to make your digital marketing wish list a reality. After all, if you get through the business case exercise, and if your proposal still looks like a good investment, who wouldn’t want to invest and generate more positive marketing momentum? (Revenue, sales, leads, traffic, engagement – you get it.) Start crafting your own business case for any marketing initiative with these 7 steps;

By crafting a business case (a more complete and strategic plan to generate that ROI) you can earn the approval and resources needed to make your digital marketing wish list a reality. After all, if you get through the business case exercise, and if your proposal still looks like a good investment, who wouldn’t want to invest and generate more positive marketing momentum? (Revenue, sales, leads, traffic, engagement – you get it.) Start crafting your own business case for any marketing initiative with these 7 steps;

#1 – Define the Opportunity

Data can help tell your story and strengthen your reasoning when presenting your case. Quantify your opportunity with research that supports your claim. Leverage tools to help gather data such as identifying search volume with Google’s Keyword Planner or discovering trends through social listening tools like Topsy. Talk with platform, partner and tool vendors to find case studies and other resources – it is in their best interest to support your efforts internally (the best ones will even build the business case for you).

#2 – Demonstrate the Opportunity

Paint a picture with context and real-life examples that establish the value of your defined opportunity. Add on a clear and concise summary of the return on investment and you will grab attention and visibly define value.

#3 – Define the Strategy

Develop your plan of attack leveraging the data you gathered to define your opportunity. Craft your plan into a detailed, phased approach that will be easy to understand and implement when the time comes. Talk with vendors or strategic planners and define exactly how you are going to go about taking advantage of the opportunities you want to pursue.

#4 – Define the Tactics

Establish all the tasks, marketing channels, and campaign elements that will be required to effectively execute your strategy. Leverage the knowledge of internal and external resources to determine how you will use each tactic individually and as a cohesive plan. Ensure your plan is complete and fully leverages the opportunity to generate maximum engagement.

#5 – Define the Risk & Competition

To accurately assess your plan you must examine it from a realistic standpoint and identify the risks involved. Illustrate the potential shortfalls and obstacles you may face to demonstrate that you’ve evaluated the opportunity at all points of execution. Identifying risks will show executives what is possible if you (a) don’t do the tactic, (b) if you do the tactic and it fails, (c) if you do the tactic and something extraneous happens.

Additionally, observe what your competitors are doing that might position them ahead of your brand. Summarize competitor marketing strategy, tactics, tools, platforms, experience, and promotions – anything that a customer would take note of, resulting in market share loss for your brand. Whether conservative or realistic, the expectation needs to be set so you can build trust when marketing tactics deliver.

#6 – Show Projections and ROI.

This is the roadmap to success, and the one visual goal that can keep anyone (no matter how large the team gets, with internal staff, vendors, consultant) on track to meet the goal. For digital marketing tactics, you’ll want to show the following figured over a 12 or 24 month timeframe:

• Projected Impressions / Visibility
• Projected Engagement
• Projected Traffic
• Projected Conversion Rate
• Projected Revenue
• Cost (Internal & Outsourced)
• Projected ROI

If there isn’t an immediate connection to traffic and revenue, show specific examples and instances of the way tactics will assist your overall marketing objectives.

#7 – Plan Resources & Incentives.

If the tactics you’re looking to implement don’t align with corporate and personal goals of those involved, there’s a good chance it will fail. Develop a strong team that backs your vision by demonstrating the value for the brand and the individuals involved. Teammates are more inclined to help push something forward that has a certain amount of WIIFM (What’s In It For Me). The more you can share the love with the WIIFM, the more support you can garner. Know what makes your company tick, and leverage that however possible. If the return is greater than the effort it would take to roll out a new project, make it happen!

For more resources or help, start talking with marketing vendors (it is in their best interest to support your internal efforts), or check out Harvard Business Review’s HBR Guide to Building Your Business Case eBook & Tools (it comes complete with case studies and ROI worksheets).

Whether it’s about IT and marketing (namely the CIO and the CMO) or growing dissent between sales and marketing, everywhere you turn seems to be another piece of content trying to shed a light on changing dynamics and the need for alignment.

I’m not disparaging such conversations, they’re obviously important. Yet, such interdepartmental emphasis distracts from intra-marketing alignment issues, a problem of that grows day by day.

As my colleague David Crane wrote in a recent blog post,

For decades, we’ve understood the importance of marketing-sales alignment. In the last few years, however, marketing’s importance has grown substantially, resulting in increased responsibility, bigger budgets, and a division of labor into intra-marketing teams that have in some cases become just as distinct as sales is from accounting.

Sub-disciplines within marketing are well-understood, but we rarely, if ever, discuss how such specialization can decrease performance when varying roles become misaligned. In my customer success role at Integrate, I often see how such misalignment in large marketing organizations can limit efficiency and performance.

Due to the nature of Integrate’s software solution, I most often work with marketing ops and demand gen pros, so the issues I’m discussing focus on that particular relationship. Yet, I’m sure there’s much relevance to other internal marketing relationships as well.

As last week’s interview with Scott Fingerhut highlighted, the primary causes of misalignment between marketing ops and demand gen stem from:

Different goals

Marketing operations is responsible for running marketing like a business, ensuring efficiency, a seamless flow of data and alignment with other departments. Demand gen is primarily concerned with filling the pipeline with quality prospects. The two objectives are certainly related, but you can easily see how ops’ larger-picture priorities can conflict with demand gen’s more specific concerns.

A step toward solution:

Ultimately marketing’s job is to help the business acquire valuable customers – both ops and demand gen can agree on this and find ways to increase symbiosis. But this takes communication…regular communication.

We’ve met with some large enterprises where we actually had to introduce members of one team to those on the other. Needleless to say, these weren’t the most efficient or productive marketing orgs.

On the other hand, we’ve worked with some incredibly innovative, vastly successful marketing organizations; the common denominator: strong relationships between every team throughout the department. They make it a point to hold weekly meetings where they discuss large initiatives, the ways they affect individual teams, and brainstorm together about potential issues and who may be able to help.

Most importantly, these meetings help build relationships. As Scott Fingerhut said in his interview,

I found it very helpful to have weekly meetings where, if nothing else, you connect to the team. Building a good rapport is critical – you avoid so much stuff when people care about each other, and most people have that ability.

Different Language

I’ve been in some customer meetings and heard demand gen say, “Well, we mean a lead as in what our group considers a lead.” We’ve seen this as well with prospect nurturing stages such as marketing qualified lead (MQL), sales accepted lead (SAL), etc. It’s one thing for different companies to have varying terminology, but a single marketing department should strive for standardization, especially with regard to terminology.

A step toward solution:

In your regular meetings, create and keep a running glossary of terms. You’ll likely find that two teams use the same word for different things; in this case, agree on new terms and write them down. It doesn’t take much time, but it will save much confusion (and possibly money) in the future.

Lack of cross-team knowledge

Here is the biggest issue in my opinion. Marketing ops sees the leads in their marketing automation and CRM systems and at that point they know what happens. They understand the nurture tracks, the sales follow-up process, etc. Ask a marketing ops pro how the lead got into the systems and they may know the source, but it’s likely they won’t know the process that led to the data entry.

On the other side of the coin, a demand gen pro knows all about the media partners, the IOs, the content marketing, the lead-file spreadsheets, etc., but often doesn’t understand the nurture tracks through which a prospect travels once in the marketing automation system. Some demand gen pros don’t even know the basics of their marketing automation tool.

A step toward solution:

While it’s not required that each side be an expert on the other’s systems and processes, they do need to know the essentials if they’re ever going to understand how they can best assist their efforts. This again comes from communication between teams during meetings; demand gen, you should fill ops in on the media partner processes and user experience of the lead while interacting with the company’s content.

Ops, you can really help cut down on the bad data clean-up if you give demand gen some hands-on time with your systems, allowing them to learn the fundamentals and more clearly understand what happens to a lead after importation.

The above are simple, very general steps you can take. Once you put these ideas into action, you’ll likely find specific alignment procedures that work best for your organization. The main idea: alignment results from understanding, and understanding results from frequent communication.

Before assuming my current role at Integrate (sales and marketing ops), my career focused strictly on sales and sales management. My journey to ops was a slow evolution, during which I witnessed and learned greatly from the many struggles that typically characterize the sales-marketing relationship: miscommunication, systems limitations, misaligned objectives, and most importantly, inaccurate perceptions of the other side. Without the multi-disciplinary knowledge I’ve acquired, I couldn’t do my job effectively, nor could many of the marketing execs and CMOs who have towed both sales and marketing lines during their careers.

Sales’ perspective of marketing – the worst case scenario

During my time in sales at several companies, I heard mentions of marketing teams, but I was never quite sure what they did. A common, almost rhetorical question often thrown around between sales reps was, “What is it that marketing does?” …as if to imply that they sat around all day doing nothing except maybe trying to come up with a catchy tagline.

Occasionally we sales reps would get lucky enough to receive a marketing-generated lead, only to later complain that it was the worst lead we ever had. If a lead did convert, we certainly thought it had nothing to do with marketing – it was simply sales doing its job well.

Yet, we never provided any comments (in any shape or form) back to management, much less to marketing. We didn’t think it was worth it because we didn’t respect marketing enough to think they’d do anything useful with our feedback.

Fortunately, such a bitter, ignorant perspective of marketing is rare these days. My experiences took place years ago; the sales-marketing relationship in most organizations today is much warmer and more transparent, largely because of communication-enabling technology.

Yet, most sales departments aren’t completely void of such sentiments. This is no longer due to a lack of respect, but because of differing objectives and immediate priorities. In sales, your time is spent focused on booking meetings and progressing your pipeline to hit your monthly or quarterly number. It’s a lot of pressure that makes it hard to focus on working hand-in-hand with marketing to indirectly effect results that you might not see for months. It’s much easier, on the other hand, to work on things that directly, and quickly, influence both your paycheck and your job stability.

Why it matters to marketers

Understanding sales’ priorities, concerns and processes enables you to better work with them to gain actionable information used to build marketing’s business value and boost your career.

Think of the customer acquisition funnel as an Olympic relay team; the team may be made up of four Usain Bolts, but it’s not going to matter much if they can’t figure out how to pass the baton (the customer). Marketing may own 60% of the funnel, but you still need sales to finish the race.

Sales is the lens through which marketing is seen. Sure lead volume is a great metric for marketing’s performance, but if a forecasted number of those leads don’t convert to customers, it’s going to reflect on marketing just as much as sales (possibly even more).

The fact of the matter is that marketing has more accountability than ever before. And with marketing’s value to the business in many ways resting in the hands of sales, you‘re going to want to enable those hands to kick some ass.

Another reason to better align your efforts with sales’: Sales people know people. Networking is what they do. And don’t let anyone fool you, your career is just as much about who you know as it is about what you know. If you work hard to support sales, they’ll return the favor when you’re looking for new career opportunities.

Understanding sales’ objectives, priorities and processes is the first step toward supporting sales. And this step is made much easier with an effective communication strategy and the right mix of technology.

Creating an effective communication strategy with sales

You want a collaborative, bi-directional line of communication between sales and marketing. Marketing should be able to quickly and easily inform sales of all initiatives they’re working on (thought leadership, owned and paid media, sales-enablement, new marketing tech, partnerships, influencer relations, etc.) and even suggest ways in which sales may leverage these initiatives.

On the flip side, marketing benefits greatly from sales feedback. We want quantitative data such as which content or channels are converting at the low end of the funnel. But we also need the qualitative information that we often can only obtain from sales’ direct engagement with prospects and customers.

In my experience, two tactics do a remarkable job in providing the bi-directional communication: (1) weekly sales-marketing calls and (2) periodically including marketing on sales calls with prospects. Of course, larger organizations have more difficulty in executing these tactics. Yet, it’s not impossible, it just requires more discipline and a set agenda for each call. For example, requesting a selected number of sales reps and marketing pros to speak about predetermined topics during each call.

A sample weekly call agenda may include several or all of the following depending on time and size of org:

What sales should cover:

• deals in process
• what’s working and what’s not
• customer/prospect feedback (maybe select a single rep per week to discuss recent experience)
• sales’ needs from marketing
• sales-tech initiatives

What marketing should cover:

• thought leadership projects
• sales-enablement projects
• media coverage
• how sales can help promote content/media coverage
• marketing-tech initiatives

Leveraging technology to align teams

CRM systems have been a primary driver behind better sales-marketing alignment over the last decade. And it’s probably safe to say that most organizations have a CRM at this point. It’s important, however, that such advances in alignment not allow sales and marketing become complacent in their pursuit of a closer relationship.

Marketing and, to a lesser extent, sales technology is proliferating rapidly. One of the greatest benefits of these technologies is greater transparency between the two teams, which is led by CRM and marketing automation systems acting as centralizing hubs of bi-directional data flow.

Yet, if sales and marketing teams don’t continually reassess their respective tech stacks to ensure adequate integration, we risk a reemergence of the siloes of old; after all, technologies influence processes just as much as processes influence the tech we choose. And if we build stacks without consideration for adjacent departments, it won’t be long before each team has unique vocabularies, disconnected systems, and misaligned processes.

When selecting new marketing tech initiatives, it should always be done with a consideration for the ways it affects sales systems and processes. And such effects should be communicated to the sales team. The best way to do this is to create and continually update a marketing tech blueprint, which can be given to all stakeholders within the org.

With the rapid growth marketing is experiencing – proliferation of channels, greater responsibility, larger departments, and substantial tech investments – it’s easy to neglect operations at the bottom of the funnel. But doing so is a mistake. The entire funnel must work if the business is to succeed. And this is accomplished through open communication and shared data.

In the days leading up to our Startup Sales Conference, I asked a few of our speakers to share their expert sales tips for growing your startup.

1. EMBRACE SOCIAL SELLING

Jill Rowley,

Keynote Speaker, Social Selling Evangelist, Startup Advisor, Investor

Use Social Networks like LinkedIn and Twitter to find and be found.  The modern buyer is digitally driven, socially connected, mobile, and empowered.  Social is an additional channel to do Research to be Relevant to build Relationships that drive Revenue.  Further, you can use Social to shine the spotlight on your BEST salespeople — guess what? — they’re not on your payroll — they’re your customer advocates. Your employees need to look as good online as they do offline — optimize social profiles to attract customers.  If you suck offline; you’ll suck more online. #Don’tSuck

2. WORRY ABOUT CUSTOMERS, NOT COMPETITION 

Adam Metz,
VP TerrAvion, Amazon #1 Marketing Author

“If you’re worried about your competition in tech, save that worry for when your company has achieved greater than 10% market-share. In the meantime, worry about your prospective customers who are using nothing as an alternative to your product or service.”

3. CREATE YOUR MOMENT OF TRUTH AND MAKE IT COUNT

Jim Benton,

Co-Founder & Chief Business Officer, ClearSlide, Inc.

“Create a reason a prospective customer MUST hear you out; something so compelling or drives so much curiosity that they agree to book a call or meet with you. Then you have a single moment of truth to deliver on this and convince your prospective buyer that the solution you offer would truly change the way they do something for the better.  They key to this moment of truth is to have a well honed and repeatable way of showcasing the value of your product or solution – something that goes well beyond a simple product demo but includes customer examples, ROI stories, passionate quotes, and teachings about how something is changing and how you harness it to add value.  The more you deliver this personalize story consistently, the better you will get at it, and the higher the likelihood of closing business.  Focus on making sure these moments of truth count.”

4. FIND COMPATIBLE SALES TALENT 

Dwight Foster,
Vice President of Sales and BD, Cirrus Insight

“More and more startups with strong initial traction have been founded by engineers. Very often “sales” to these founders is like coding is to sales pros. Many founders make the mistake of hiring “seasoned and experienced sales veterans” from traditional and established tech companies…..which is very often too much too soon and results in bad outcomes and lost, valuable time. Founders should seek out and consult with sales veterans with deep experience that understand the startup landscape and can recommend near, mid, and long term sales plans and strategies often for a fixed fee or company stock tied to specific deliverables and milestones. Beware the temptation to associate successful selling at Oracle or Salesforce to similar success at your company.”

5. DON’T PITCH THE PRODUCT, LISTEN TO YOUR CUSTOMER

Brooke Botros,
Dir. of Sales, Spanning

“It’s very easy in sales to want to pitch your product offering and explain your solution right away to your prospects. Don’t let this be the case, and ask questions first to uncover THEIR business and THEIR needs. You will get more customers and referrals when you take the time to understand their landscape and make the selling process as easy as possible for them to do business with you.”

6. DRILL SMARTER

Ryan Nichols,
CEO, Tylr Mobile (ex-Appirio)

“Selling a startup’s product is like prospecting for oil. And it is tempting to get excited when you see some oil seep into the first well you dig, and keep drilling. That’s dangerous– to scale, you need to tap a gusher. That first taste of oil– a great customer call, for example– can keep you from moving on to where you should really be drilling.”

7.  FOCUS ON HOW WE SELL

Frank Slovenec,
Partner
at Jack B. Keenan

“In this time of an abundance of immediately available information, about every product and technology: How we sell is much more important than what we sell. The days of a sales person as a purveyor of product information, features and benefits is long gone.”

8. LEVERAGE YOUR PASSIONS

Braydan Young,
Vice President of Business Development, First Job

“You cannot avoid the social interaction of networking especially in the Bay Area. Whether it’s going out to dinner with friends, running into an old acquaintance from college, seeing a co-worker outside of the office, or being introduced to a new connection, this city is an open arena for social networking, which makes it great. My advice is to not only attend networking events, but find some fun, exciting and interesting things to do– join clubs, groups, teams–whatever it may be, get involved with others who share similar interests. In essence, leverage your passions. In doing so, you directly leverage your networking.”

9. DON’T WRITE BIG SALES PLAYBOOKS

Nilay Patel,

Co-Founder & CEO of Selligy

You absolutely need aggressive sales development – do multiple touches by email and phone for both inbound and outbound leads. But don’t write up big sales playbooks, because no one reads them. Sales development solutions are affordable for small teams, you’ll get more touches per rep (and thus more conversions) per week – and won’t waste time writing something no one will read!

If you found one or more of these tips helpful, visit Startup Sales Conference website to learn more.

Given the potential that social media marketing and blogging has for businesses, it comes as no surprise that there is a sense of urgency with some of my clients to eagerly jump on the bandwagon. In fact, B2B marketers in 2015 plan to increase their investment in Email, website and social media marketing by over 50% according to MarketingProfs. Businesses looking to increase brand recognition, sales and leads can find interested and eager prospects online, but it’s critical to recognize that regardless of the marketing channel you use, a solid understanding of the foundations of marketing is essential if you want to find success in your online marketing. Here are 5 tips to help you get your marketing on solid ground.

1. Understand Your Target Market

To be successful, you need to focus on your target market by identifying their unique attributes. Many businesses create a customer avatar or persona to dig deep into both their demographic and psychographic features. Failing to define a specific target customer is a very common reason why some businesses fail to thrive. They focus on the product or niche they find interesting and then start to market to it. You are waging a losing battle if you start this way.

There are many ways to learn about your market. Here are some simple ways to get started:

• Look at your current customer base if you have one. What are their key demographics? Send a survey to learn more about what they need.
• There are companies that focus solely on target market research. If you have the money, invest in this.
• If this is a new venture, take a look at people who are in your target niche. Find out where they are online and start to join those groups or forums or social media sites. Here are more ways to dig into the online world and learn about your target market.

2. Give them what they want

Once you have a clear understanding on your target group, the next step is simple-find out what they want and create products or services they need. Once you know your market well, it’s easy to find areas where there is a performance or quality gap that you can fill.

3. Deliver the Goods

Once you find that hungry group of people who are desperate for your product or service, your next challenge is to decide how to put that solution in front of them with a compelling offer. Depending on your business model, this involves face-to-face or physical contact or you may have transactions online via your website.

Before you can make your offer, you need to think about the cost of your product or service. You can evaluate your competitor pricing, evaluating production and delivery costs with the right profit margin.  You can also consider the psychological value that your goods provide to your target market. I found a great article on how to price your services which proposes that you consider a three pronged approach. You can read that here.

4. Pick the Right Promotion Method

The array of promotion methods available can make anyone confused. Online promotion methods include:

Offline promotion methods

• Advertising in print or on television
• Hosting or sponsoring events
• Promotional items
• Coupons
• Direct mail
• Networking in the community (Meetup groups or Chamber of Commerce)

Online Promotion Methods:

• Search engine optimization (SEO) techniques
• Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google, Instagram Pinterest, YouTube and LinkedIn
• Email list
• Online promotions
• Blogging
• Podcasting
• Article Marketing
• Online Events or Livecast
• Mobile
• Search marketing

The trick here is to find the channel that has the most value to your prospect.

The key to successful marketing no matter what methods you use or products you promote is to keep it focused on your prospects. Always start with what they need and want, and work your way back to your offer from there. If you know them well, provide what they want and promote it where they can see your offer.

5. Develop an Effective Marketing and Communications Plan

Once you have completed the fundamentals, you can now think about how you are going to communicate to your audience.

Here is what you have to focus on when planning your campaign:

1. What is the goal of your campaign? Do you want to build more brand awareness, increase leads and sales?
2. What is the message you want to convey to your target market?
3. What communication channel do you want to use? What makes the most sense based off what you know about your target market?
4. What type of media will you send? Video, infographic, emails or will you use an integrated approach?

Remember that the success of your marketing communications plans relies on your ability to craft the right message at the right time, delivered in the right way.

If you need additional tips and to dig into our target market more, consider using my target market profile worksheet to document all the key demographics of your target market. You get it  free when you purchase the complete Target Marketing Report: Take Away The Guess Work and Learn More About Your Market. Click here to get it now

With 2015 well underway, you’d think that Snapchat, Vine or some other social network would have already stolen the marketing spotlight. But for those of us who work in the marketing world, we know better. Email marketing is a tried and true marketing strategy and should be a primary facet of your marketing mix now and moving forward.

Email marketing is (and will continue to be) the most important channel any business can use to continually get their name in front of their past and present clients. Email is consistent, targeted, effective, inexpensive, and used by over half of the world’s population.

I’ve put together these 10 email marketing stats that will show you why your business can’t survive without using email marketing as a primary revenue driver.

1) Email marketing yields an average 4,300% return on investment for businesses in the United States. (Direct Marketing Association)

2) Companies using email to nurture leads generate 50% more sales-ready leads and at 33% lower cost. And nurtured leads, on average, produce a 20% increase in sales opportunities compared to non-nurtured leads. (Hubspot)

3) Small business owners estimate that getting an extra hour in their day back from doing their own email marketing (and other activities) is worth $273/hour. (Constant Contact)

4) For every $1 spent on email marketing, the average return on investment is $44.25. (ExactTarget)

5) Marketers consistently ranked email as the single most effective tactic for awareness, acquisition, conversion, and retention. (GigaOM Research)

6) Email conversion rates are three times higher than social media, with a 17% higher value in the conversion. (McKinsey & Company)

7) Email is nearly 40 times better than Facebook and Twitter at acquiring customers. (McKinsey & Company)

8) 70% of people say they always open emails from their favorite companies. (ExactTarget)

9) 95% of those who opt into email messages from brands find these messages somewhat or very useful. (Salesforce)

10) 91% of consumers check their email at least once per day on their smartphone, making it the most used functionality. (ExactTarget)

Armed with the knowledge of these email marketing stats, how much do you plan to change your existing approach to email marketing? Do you have any other compelling stats to share? Let me know in the comments.

What if I told you there is an element on every website that is crucial for increasing sales and conversion rates, but is often neglected by online marketers and online business owners?

It’s your unique value proposition (UVP – or unique selling proposition). To be effective, it should quickly show visitors the benefits of using your website, who it’s ideally for, and why use it instead of competitors.

But websites often poorly convey their UVP, unknowingly causing visitor misunderstanding, higher bounce rates and many lost sales.

In this in-depth article you’ll learn 20 ways to quickly improve your UVP. And if you do a great job with this (and better than your competitors do), you’ll get fantastic increases in sales and leads without needing more traffic. Indeed, it’s one of the key things I get my clients to focus on.

Ready to give your UVP some much needed love? Let’s get started in two key areas of tips…

Optimize the uniqueness and strength of your value proposition

These first 7 tips are essential. It doesn’t matter how good your website looks or how much traffic you get if your UVP is not very engaging, unique or strong – it won’t convert well into sales or leads. Never presume its already good enough! Here are some ways to improve and get the most out of it:

1: Get great UVP feedback from your target audience
First it’s essential to get feedback about your UVP from people who will be interested in your offerings. Use a tool like UserTesting.com or UsabilityHub.com to get this feedback and find out what they think, including what could be improved. You should also test showing them different UVP variations to see which versions appeal to them most. Here are 3 revealing questions you can use to get highly actionable feedback:

2: Brainstorm ideas to improve your UVP and test to find best elements
Start thinking of new ideas to improve and mention in your UVP. For example, maybe your customer support is available longer hours than competitors, or you don’t include hidden fees like other websites do, or you have the most customers. Then test to find the most compelling elements from your ideas – using Adwords or Facebook ads is great for testing to see which are most compelling to use on your website.

3: Make your UVP customer focused, not business focused
Make sure you realize your UVP is not your mission statement! Instead, put yourself in the shoes of your visitors and think ‘what’s in for me’ and ‘why should I use this website’ – don’t just list the objectives of your business (often very dull).

To help with this, always use more visitor centric wording in your UVP, like ‘you’ and ‘yours’ instead of ‘we’ and ‘our’. Here is an example of a poor about page with business-focused mission statement, not showing good UVP – a real turn off for visitors, right?

4: Answer common visitor problems and pain points with your UVP
To make your website and UVP even more customer focused, make sure you address your visitor’s common problems and pain points in your area of business, and then make sure your UVP helps solve them. Spend some time brainstorming these most common pain points, challenges and frustrations, then clearly highlight why your UVP and offering is the best solution for them.

Here is a great best practice example of UVP solving pain points on Unbounce.com:

5: Evaluate and beat your competitor’s UVP
Review your major competitor’s websites – do you offer anything good that they don’t? Or vice versa? It is essential to think of ideas to make your value proposition a bit more unique. Perhaps no one offers free returns yet or a money back guarantee? And if you are selling products, always give reasons for visitors to buy from you instead of Amazon.com! Lastly, don’t just copy competitor ideas – make them better!

6: Is your offering really that valuable and beneficial in the first place?
Take a step back for a while. Is there actually much interest and demand in your value proposition? It doesn’t matter how unique it is if people don’t really care about the benefits you are offering. Getting good feedback on this essential – run a quick visitor survey using a tool like Qualaroo.com to discover their true interest. Maybe its time to pivot into a business that people really care about and there is a real need for?

7: Don’t show off by using many superlatives in your UVP
Don’t scare your visitors away by using over-the-top superlatives in your UVP that you can’t back up with facts or stats – this will often cause an increase in bounce rates and lost sales. For example don’t just say ‘the worlds best’ or ‘#1 provider in the USA” if you can’t prove it! Removing wording like that will make your UVP seem more believable and less salesy – and more engaging!

Optimize the promotion of UVP on your website

Many websites have strong UVP, but forget or neglect to promote it well. It doesn’t matter how good your UVP is if your visitors often don’t seen it or be influenced by it. Never just presume they know it! To ensure its quickly understood, show it on key places on your website – as you’ll see in these next tips:

8: Prioritize the best parts of your UVP and promote them more
Don’t presume all elements of your UVP are equally important. Maybe your price match guarantee is more important than your free shipping? Find out which parts engage visitors better by doing some testing. Either with A/B testing, or if you don’t have enough traffic you can test using titles in Google Adwords or Facebook ads. Once you find the most clicked versions, promote them more often by using the next tips.

9: Use bullet points to show UVP above page fold on homepage
One of the quickest ways of conveying UVP is by adding some short bullet points on your homepage that highlight the top reasons to use your website (particularly instead of a competitor). This should be shown above the page fold so your visitors can see it without having to scroll, and come up with a good title for the section (like ‘reasons why you’ll love us’). Here is a good example from one of my clients:

10: Use a tagline under your logo to show elements of your UVP
This is quick easy thing to add to your website – take 3-5 keywords that best highlight your UVP and add them right under your logo as a tagline. Your visitor’s eyes often look towards the logo first, so adding UVP messaging there ensures that it’s quickly seen and engaged.

11: Use UVP-focused headlines on key pages to increase prominence
Headlines are often one of the key levers for increasing conversions and sales, particularly for engaging visitors quicker. Therefore, on your homepage and key pages, use a compelling headline that mentions the strongest aspects/benefits of your UVP. Asking questions and mentioning pain points is a great way of doing this. Here are a few good UVP focused headlines for your inspiration:

12: Mention key aspects of your UVP in the header of your website
Don’t presume that visitors will see your UVP on your homepage – many visitors will arrive on interior pages via SEO in particular. To compensate for this and make sure your UVP is seen no matter what page is arrived on, mention the most compelling key elements of your UVP in your header, ideally with icons to help draw your visitor’s eyes.

This is particularly important for ecommerce websites to mention things like free shipping, lowest price guarantee etc. Here’s an excellent use of this on AO.com:

13: Promote your UVP high up in your blog sidebar
Never just presume your blog visitors will understand your UVP and who it’s for, even if you think its obvious. And realize that many blog visitors will only see your article pages and miss the UVP on your homepage. To prevent this from happening, in your sidebar you should create a small area with a quick overview of the benefits and reasons of your blog (a summary of your UVP), and place it towards the top to ensure its noticed. Here is a great example of this on the RebootedBody.com blog:

14: Create a ‘why us’ page to compare your offering to others
Take your UVP messaging to the next level by creating a page that explains ‘why use us’ and the uniqueness of your offering in more detail. This page should compare your website offering against your key competitors, and even against the offline/conventional way of doing it. Be honest though, and always include some aspects that your website is not quite as good.

Using a comparison table or a matrix can often work well to highlight UVP – here is a great example of a ‘why us’ page from one of my clients:

15: Add UVP related items to your main navigation menu
After you have created a good ‘why use us’ page, you should add a link for this page in your main navigation menu so it can be prominently seen and often visited. You should also have a page in your navigation menu with the wording of ‘benefits’ that explains this in more detail – don’t just say ‘products’ or ‘services’. Those two navigation improvements are great ways to get your UVP quickly seen and engaged upon, from any page on your website.

16: Simplify your UVP to make it easily scanable
When mentioning your UVP and benefits avoid using long paragraphs – visitors often don’t read online as much, they scan. To help ensure your UVP is read, cut out less important words to make it easier to read and digest, format them visually, and make use of bullet points and bold to convey key points/words.

And don’t confuse your visitors by using jargon or less known acronyms – always dumb down your UVP wording. Here is an excellent example of a great visual, highly scanable UVP on WebSynthesis.com:

17: Reinforce your UVP on your checkout/signup flow
On your checkout or sign-up pages to reduce visitor abandonment (where the chances are often highest of) you should also reinforce your UVP by repeating the key benefits of using your website. A great place to show this is in the sidebar of these pages, using short bullet points.

For best results, this UVP wording should be shown in combination with risk reducers like guarantees, and secure wording/imagery. Adroll.com does an excellent job of this doing this on their checkout page:

18: Emphasize uniqueness when mentioning benefits and features
When mentioning features of your service/products on key pages, always take the opportunity to add wording to point out ones that are most unique or better than your competitors.

For example instead of just saying ‘we offer 200 templates’, also add ‘double more than leading providers’. Or for the pricing section, don’t just state the price, also mention things like ‘we don’t include hidden fees like other competing services do’. This is a great highly contextual place to emphasize your UVP.

19: If using a homepage slider, make your first slide UVP focused
If you are using a homepage image slider – make much better use of it! Instead of just showing a random promotion or product in your first slide, a better way is to show a slide that mentions key points of your UVP, with a good matching headline, imagery and call-to-action. Better yet, test replacing the whole homepage slider with just a static image mentioning UVP, as ASOS.com recently had the great idea of:

20: Think outside of the box – promote UVP on emails, ads and more
And last, don’t just promote your UVP on your website – take a step back down your visitor journey and always mention it in all your ads, search results and all your email marketing efforts. Basically anywhere you can place a message in front of your audience, mention key your benefits and UVP. This way you can intrigue them to come to your website in the first place! Here is an excellent example of UVP in an ad:

Don’t forget to test to find the best UVP variations!

Just like any content or elements on your website, you should always test to find the best converting variations and page locations for your UVP. Use an A/B testing tool to find the best elements of your UVP, the wording you use, the style of them, and their location on your key pages.

And if you don’t have enough traffic, you can test using ways I discuss in my low traffic A/B testing article.

Wrapping up – how good is your UVP?

Your UVP always has room for improvement – particularly how you promote it to your visitors! So go ahead and try using some of these 20 UVP tips, then sit back and watch your sales or leads increase!

Now over to you – what’s your website UVP? How are you going to improve it? Comment below. Thanks!

There is valuable data in non-lead outcomes that, if properly nurtured, can increase marketing returns substantially. Most recently, in part 2 of this series, we discussed pipeline dispositions*—prospects that are just one or two touches away from being converted to sales-ready leads. Here in part 3, we’ll examine “nurture” dispositions. A nurture disposition is a qualified company, contact and operating environment without any specific next step in the short-term. For every 100 “suspects” dispositioned, 25 - 30 can be identified as nurture opportunities. Unfortunately, I find that most companies ignore the value of qualified nurture dispositions—meaning that while they go to the expense of identifying leads, they squander the opportunity to identify the highest potential long-term prospects. What a waste!

With that said, how does this all play out?

Identifying Nurture Opportunities

Your inside sales support team finds out, via dialogue with decision-makers and those surrounding them, that a company is “firmographically” qualified (right size, right SIC, right location type, right geography, right contacts, etc.); and they are environmentally qualified (current solution or lack of a solution indicates they will eventually recognize pain and be in the market for what you sell). What you have here is a nurture disposition—a qualified company with at least latent pain and a decision maker or strong decision influencer identified—but they are nowhere near ready to engage in a conversation with sales. So what next? That’s where nurturing comes in.

Nurturing Nurtures

Rather than depending on scoring to trigger follow-up on this group of qualified, nurture-worthy prospects, set up trigger alerts for specific activity (such as changes in the C-Suite, mergers and acquisitions, a competitive or legislative threat, etc.). Send personal emails with recent and relevant wins, information about their industry, and ideas you have learned from all of your conversations with the market that may help the prospect—whether or not it directly benefits you. When you can get in early and drive the evaluation rather than respond to it, you will yield more and better (more strategic) wins.

At what point, then, are these ready to pass on to sales? Some (mistakenly, in my opinion) argue that a prospect isn’t sales-ready until it is BANT (budget, authority, need and timeframe) or ANUM (authority, need, urgency and money) qualified. I beg to differ. Waiting until the buyer is “70% of the way through the buying process” before getting on their radar screen is just wrong. It’s crucial to get sales involved as soon as a need/urgency has been identified. If you wait until all the stars are in alignment, more than likely you will find yourself in evaluations that have already been won by a more agile competitor. At this point you are invited to the dance simply as column fodder to compare to the already victorious winner.

To Recap

The beauty in all of this is that the math works! Let’s say we have 100 suspects identified. Of those you’ll generate (on average):

• 5 highly qualified, sales-ready leads generated from a new, “cold” list.
• 5 pipeline dispositions identified (which will convert to 1 - 2 additional, incremental leads).
• 25 - 30 companies identified as nurture dispositions. Over time, an additional 5 - 6 leads (or about 20% of the total) will result from nurturing the “nurtures.”

The result? The potential total of 11 - 13 leads—more than double than if we had stopped after our first pass through the list and started over on the next campaign. Ignoring the value of pipeline and nurture dispositions is precisely what costs many companies tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars in wasted spend.

Next, we’ll talk about the value of nurturing unresponsive suspects. You’ll be shocked at how many leads you can close as business for your company within one year. Stay tuned.

Read the other posts in my "Nurturing" series:

Part 1: Why Are Leads Ignored by Sales?

Part 2: Don't Underestimate the Value of the Pipeline

Part 3: This post

Part 4: Multiply Lead Generation Results with Nurturing

Part 5: Reach Out to the C-Suite, They Will Respond

*Disposition - noun: the classification of a prospect account as determined after a cycle of lead qualification activity; verb: to classify prospect accounts using a cycle of lead qualification activity. Standard PointClear disposition categories include: Lead, Pipeline, Nurture, Disqualified, No Response, Bad.

When you embark on a journey, a map is a handy thing to have, whether it’s a Google Map on your smart phone or the old-fashioned road map in your car. The same is true for the buyer’s journey, especially for B2B customers with a long and possibly complicated trip ahead of them. As marketers, it’s our job to help them get to their destination as quickly and painlessly as possible – to be their helpful tour guide. And to be good guides, we need to fully understand the journey each customer takes when they engage with our company.

Stations Along the Way

The B2B customer journey is generally seen to have five stages: Attract, Capture, Nurture, Convert, and Expand. It’s also important to measure the movement through each stage and report on the results. Let’s take a look at the metrics that matter during each phase of the lifecycle.

Attract

In the beginning, the prospect is just starting to become aware of your brand. There are many different ways a new potential customer could find you, so it’s important to understand the channels they’ll use and the content they’ll be looking for, in order to move them along the process. Questions to ask at this stage include:

• Which channels are being used?
• What content is being consumed?
• How many people consumed the content?
• How often do content consumers share content?

Your goal is to increase visibility, and grow your audience with more impressions and deeper conversations.

Learn essential ways to use content to attract top-of-funnel leads, with our eBook “Attraction 101: Content Marketing.”

Capture

Once you’ve attracted the attention of a potential customer, the next step is to find out who they are and what they want so you can start a conversation that speaks to their interests. Questions to ask here include:

• How many content consumers became known visitors?
• What calls to action are most effective? With which audiences?
• Which channels are most effective?

The goal here is to increase the number of known prospects in the funnel and gain as much insight about them as possible.

Nurture

Nurturing can be defined as building a relationship with a prospect through a series of timed touches designed to help them move through the buyer’s journey, and to keep your brand top of mind. Segmentation, lead scoring, triggered campaigns, and automated programs are all proven lead nurturing tactics. Questions to ask at this stage might be:

• How many Marketing Qualified Leads are generated?
• Which automated programs are most effective?
• What’s driving up lead scores?

By nurturing leads, you can make sure they’re ready to buy when the time comes. Plus, nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads, according to The Annuitas Group.

Download this comprehensive eBook, “10 Ways to Nurture the Buyer’s Journey” to learn 10 tactics to build a successful lead nurturing campaign in today’s inbound, multichannel, custom-tailored B2B marketing world.

Convert

This can be either the conversion of a lead to an opportunity, or an opportunity to a sale. In the later stages of the process, it boils down to a win – the customer chooses your solution or goes to a competitor. You may also face the dreaded “no decision,” which happens in as many as 26% of deals, according to CSO Insights. Here are the questions to ask at this stage:

• How many Sales Qualified Leads are generated?
• Which campaigns are most effective at closing opportunities?
• How often do content consumers turn into customers?

The goal is to create higher quality leads at less cost per lead and less cost per customer.

Expand

Once the prospect becomes a customer, the journey’s not over – or at least it shouldn’t be. Creating a deeper relationship with customers is key to more efficient revenue growth. Key questions include:

• How many resells, upsells, and cross-sells are generated?
• What customer marketing campaigns and programs are most effective?
• How often do customers turn into repeat customers?
• Which loyalty programs are driving the best results?
• How much revenue is driven from existing customers?

Building relationships with existing customers does more than help increase their lifetime value – it can also turn them into evangelists who recommend your brand to others. According to Ken Krogue of InsideSales, leads that come from referrals are worth 4X as much as leads from your website, and 36X as much as a lead generated from a cold call.

Finding a Leader

So who is the tour guide for the customer journey in your organization? Most marketing, sales, and services teams see customer lifecycle engagement as a series of overlapping steps. Marketing leads some steps and is a key contributor to others. The passage from nurturing (marketing-led) to conversion (sales-led) is managed through an agreed-on set of reciprocal responsibilities, creating sales and marketing alignment. The expansion stage is managed through an agreed-on set of reciprocal steps among sales, service, and marketing.

The recent report from Gleanster and Act-on, Rethinking the Role of Marketing, demonstrated that marketing teams have traditionally focused their time and money on only one part of the journey – customer acquisition. But now, marketers in top performing companies are becoming the new managers of the customer relationship throughout the lifecycle – including customer retention and expansion.

Of course, that’s in top performing companies. Many average marketing teams just aren’t there yet. But in order to make sure someone is serving as the cruise director on the customer’s voyage, it’s first necessary to map that journey out, and make sure there’s accountability for every leg of the trip – as well as the transfers from one station to the next.

According to the companion eBook to the report, Marketing: The New Stewards of the Customer Relationship, there are four steps to closing the gaps when it comes to creating a customer journey map:

1. Identify who owns which aspect of the buyer’s journey and the role each department plays.
2. Align those roles to each other and to the buyer’s journey.
3. Consider creating a three-way Service Level Agreement to help each department identify which portion of the journey they own, and how they will cooperate with the others.
4. Audit and evaluate your existing content – tools, case studies, solution briefs, white papers, videos, demos, webinars, etc. – based on which persona it addresses, which questions it answers, and which stage of the buying process it will serve.

There’s also a template that you can use to create your own Customer Lifecycle Accountability Matrix. Check it out, and see if it can help you identify some of the gaps in accountability throughout the journey.

After all, customers should feel like they’re on an adventure, not locked into an unstoppable assembly line. A good customer journey map – one that changes, reorients, and recalculates a new route on the fly based on what the prospect says or does during the trip – can make your customers feel like they’re traveling first class all the way.

B2B companies spend a lot of money generating leads for their sales teams. A $100 million company may spend 2% to 5% of its revenue on marketing. That can be up to $5 million .

The good news is that this investment can generate lots of leads. The bad news is that only about 2% of leads convert to sales.

As the graphic below shows, companies pay for leads from many sources: Internet, social media, tradeshows, advertising, direct mail, PR, etc.

Source: McCarthy & King

Generating leads is the easy part. The problem is that too often sales reps don’t nurture these leads.

Consider these statistics from a forbes.com article by Ken Krogue of insidesales.com

• The typical sales rep makes only 1.3 attempts to reach a lead.
• Only 27% of leads are actually contacted (sales rep speaks to the lead).
• 35% to 64% of leads never get called at all.
• 87% of leads are abandoned.
• 79% of marketing-generated leads don’t result in sales.

Rather depressing, huh? A majority of leads (between 45% and 63%) buy eventually — from someone. But they may not buy from the company that generated and paid for the lead.

Respond Promptly

So why don’t more leads convert to sales? Two reasons: 1) Sales reps don’t contact the leads fast enough and (2) Reps don’t stay in touch. They give up too easily.

According to Ken Krogue, in the forbes.com article, if you call within 5 minutes versus 30 minutes, the results are dramatically much better:

• The odds of contacting a lead are 100 times higher.
• The odds of qualifying a lead are 21 times higher.

An immediate response is effective for three reasons:

• The prospect is probably still at her desk and is easily reachable. Wait 10 minutes and she may be off to a meeting or on the phone.
• Your company is top of mind. You won’t be two days later. That’s when the typical rep responds to the lead.
• The prospect is impressed that your rep responded so promptly. Ken calls this the “Wow” factor.

Ken cites an example of a sales team that reduced its response time to 1 day from 6 days. They more than doubled their close rates to 7.5% from 3.2%

Cultivate Systematically

Qualified sales leads are like plants. They need cultivation. Even if your sales reps respond promptly to leads and are able to qualify effectively, that’s just the beginning of the process.

After a lead becomes a prospect, she may not be ready to buy. In fact, she may not expect to make a purchasing decision for several months.

Now your challenge is to stay on her radar screen. You want to be her first choice when she’s ready to buy. You don’t want her to forget about you.

This is where many sales reps fall down. They don’t follow up.

Here is a hypothetical sequence of communications that a sales rep could use to stay in touch with a prospect. Note that it takes almost 6 months for the prospect to be “sales ready.”

• Day 1: Make introductory phone call and send follow-up email
• Day 28: Send e-newsletter with voicemail alert that it’s there
• Day 42: E-mail recent customer success story, in a related industry if possible
• Day 60: Send personal invitation to forthcoming seminar and follow up with a phone call
• Day 80: Mail case study and personalized letter of transmittal
• Day 100: E-mail recent article of interest on Internet
• Day 120: Phone call to answer questions, if any
• Day 140: Mail follow-up letter with free report
• Day 160: Answer prospect’s call. She’s ready to buy!

Your marketing department needs to be able to provide sales reps with the tools to make this process very easy. A rep should not be trying to create newsletters, emails, case studies, etc. All of these materials should be readily available.

For a modest amount of money and a modest amount of follow up, the ROI on your lead generation budget can increase dramatically.

You’ve already spent a lot to get those leads. Why not spend a little more (time and money) and actually get what you paid for — new customers.

The “war” between sales and marketing is legendary inside many organizations. Sales thinks marketing provides little value and marketing thinks sales is uncooperative and places the blame for underperformance on them. Content, which should be a bridge between the two, reinforces this disconnect.

Sales: “Marketing creates content that is useless in my world.”

Marketing: “Sales doesn’t use our content even though this is what customers want.”

According to SiriusDecisions, 60-70% of B2B content produced by marketing goes unused, sitting on sales portals and website shelves.

One of the biggest disconnects lies within the role of the content that marketing creates and the assets sales needs. Marketing produces content to generate and nurture leads, while sales wants enablement tools. A great white paper on the virtues of the cloud, for example, nurtures prospects in the consideration and preference points on the path-to-purchase. Sales, however, finds it difficult to parse this long-form asset into the salient points that will drive a meaningful conversation. Therefore, they deem it useless.

How can this gap be bridged?

Advice runs the gamut from “collaborate with sales” to “do lead scoring and prove the value of specific pieces of content.” In order to make inroads, a more prescriptive approach is in order. Here are three “easy” things that should make a difference.

Easy to find: One of the biggest pain points of sales is spending too much time searching for content that fits a specific need. According to IDC Research, sales people average seven hours per week searching for content and reference materials. Assets need to be searchable and accessible from any device. A recommendation engine should surface content that calibrates the search and brings a suite of content to the salesperson that could fit the immediate need.

Easy to apply: Once the salesperson discovers appropriate content, s/he must be able to quickly discern how to use it. Does it fit the role-based needs of specific people in the buying center? Does it efficiently bring the salesperson insights that can spark deeper conversation? Two things can help here:

1. Every time marketing creates a new piece of content, think about all of its uses, including sales. Create a template for converting the content to sales assets, such as scripts, that focus on the content’s topic, role in the sales playbook, importance at which point of the decision journey, etc. Always summarize the asset, especially long-form content. Also, show the salesperson all related pieces of content, hopefully in multiple formats. This should become the basis of the taxonomy for content in the sales portal.
2. Integrate the content into the playbook. Many organizations are converting to tablet-based playbooks that help the salesperson prep and then guide him/her through the sales call. This removes the need to hunt and exposes role-specific content in multiple formats for a specific point in the decision journey. Voice of the customer, case studies, analyst reports, how-to guides, etc. are all important and fill different roles at different points in time. Marketing does a lot of customer journey and persona work that provides deep insights into the type of content that could be integrated into these role-based playbooks. This alone should be the basis of a new type of collaboration.

Easy to share: Making easy to share content is another value-add for sales. Digital and social content predominate and have usurped printed collateral as the sales “leave behind” of choice. Sharing from any device should be easy and result in the recipient getting content that provides a great, device agnostic experience.

Helping sales articulate value and use marketing copy strategically will help create a new era of collaboration and better results for both sales and marketing. Converting the leads generated by marketing into sales brings value to both and drives organizational success.

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VB WEBINAR:

Join us for this live webinar — Marketing Technology: Cost of Ownership and Return on Investment — on Wednesday, March 11 at 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern. Register here for free.

Which CRM and marketing automation tools will increase leads, conversions, and revenue — and which might suck up your investment, have you second-guessing your decisions, and leave you staring into a sea of uncertain choices?

What about ecommerce, email marketing, or social media marketing tools? Which ones will be the transformational tech tools you were counting on — and which ones may never live up to their far-reaching promises?

In this essential webinar, we’ll take you through the research that led us to separate the winners from the losers in 13 major martech categories.

We’ll guide you through the findings we reached after reviewing 2,119 marketing technology users and data from over 100 products — and then combined this with over 18 billion other data points, such as sales and marketing salaries, ad impressions and conversions, martech product logins, affiliate transactions, and pricing data.

And we’ll give you the chance to fire off questions about anything we cover with presenter Stewart Rogers, VB Insight’s Director of Marketing Technology. Of course, you can always check out the full Cost of Ownership and Return on Investment report — or show up for an hour next Wednesday and get some the most important takeaways.

What you’ll learn in this webinar:

• Which categories and tools provide the biggest return, and which are a waste of money?
• Which are the most expensive to own?
• Which tools might be best suited to your size of organization, and which should you discount from your selection criteria?
• And how do ROI levels change during different stages of marketing and sales?
• How any marketing technology project rail to return on their investment
• Different approaches to marketing technology management, including on-premise to cloud-based solutions

Register here for free.

 

Is your email marketing not getting the results you want? Follow this 12-point checklist to make sure your email marketing packs a wallop.

Email is the workhorse of Internet marketing. It’s the connective tissue of digital marketing. It’s the glue that holds it all together. You get the idea.

And that’s not just my opinion. McKinsey reports that email is about 40 times better at customer acquisition than social media.

So how can you you get your email marketing to work that well?

One of the most important things to remember with email marketing is to add value, not ask for it. Make sure you’re sending content that is valuable to the recipient versus just asking them to buy.

Granted, you’re using email marketing for a business purpose, but to be successful, your emails should be so useful, helpful and/or entertaining that your prospects and customers would notice if you stopped sending them.

Here is a checklist of 12 ways to make sure your email marketing is strong and effective:

1. Identify a Goal – Why are you sending email? The answer to that one question can dramatically improve your email marketing. For instance are you trying to generate new leads, follow up on an offer download, collect audience feedback, increase awareness of a new product, nurture leads, facilitate the sales process?
2. Send your email from a person, not a company. People prefer to do business with other people rather than companies approximately 100% of the time. Test after test has shown that email open rates increase when the sender is identified by name. That doesn’t mean you can’t include a company name along with a persons name, of course.
3. Use personalization. Think of this as a form of digital eye contact. Include the recipients name (and company), make reference to what they’ve downloaded, have the email come from the sales rep with whom they’ve perhaps already spoken. According to Aberdeen Group research, over 75% of email revenue is now generated by alternatives to generic one-size-fits all campaigns. Further, personalized emails see 14% higher click-through rates and 10% more conversions.
4. Get to the point! Rambling on and boring your recipient does not actually work. Instead, create subject lines and email copy that get to the point. Focus on the benefit to the recipient and pique their interest enough to get them to want to open the email. But keep it short – try to keep your email message under five sentences.
5. Speak directly to the recipient. Use the word “you” and “your.” Address the recipient as if you’re having a one-on-one conversation.
6. Use actionable language. Incorporate verbs into your in-text calls-to-action (CTA) and your CTA buttons. It makes the message stronger and helps the recipient understand that they need to complete an action (e.g. “download now”). Another way to include actionable language is to let them know what they can get by clicking CTAs (e.g. “generate more leads”).
7. Focus on benefits, not features. Black and Decker doesn’t sell drill bits, they sell holes. Scotts doesn’t sell grass seed, they sell green lawns. Let people know what they are going to get by using your product or taking whatever action you want them to take (e.g. don’t tell your prospects what is in your ebook, tell them what they will learn and how they will benefit).
8. Leave no call-to-action behind! You only get so much real estate in email so use it wisely. Use each component of your email as a CTA. For instance, include alt text in case your images don’t load when the email is opened. Add CTAs to your signature. Use images as CTAs by linking them to landing pages or wherever you want people to go in order to take action. You can even use your preview text as a CTA – get them to open your email by explaining why they should.
9. Encourage sharing. If you’re using email for lead generation, you want to encourage sharing. Many email tools allow you to enable social sharing buttons in the editor. Also, make sure to use a tracking code so you can tell where your leads are coming from. You can also encourage sharing right in the body of the email.
10. Edit the plain text version. Not everyone is going to see the beautiful HTML version of your email and will instead receive a plain text version. Make sure to clean it up and simplify it to make it more aesthetically pleasing. For instance, you might need to remove the social sharing options from the plain text version because they can get really messy.
11. Optimize for mobile. According to Litmus, 48% of emails are now opened on mobile devices. So you need to make sure your emails look right on mobile devices and tablets. You can also use responsive email templates which fit to any screen size. Before sending your email, preview it on a mobile template (or send a test to your mobile device).
12. Analyze this! Run A/B tests for things like subject line optimization, email templates, offers, length, images, copy, CTAs, etc. Make sure to measure things like delivery rates, open rates, click-through rates, contact churn, and hard/soft bounces. Also, analyze how effectively you’re able to get someone to complete your goal (see #1 above). Analyze behavior like URL click popularity, unsubscribes versus email preference changes, social shares by channel and CTA click rate.

Conclusion

Use these 12 steps as a pre-flight checklist for your next email marketing effort and you’ll start to see your email marketing pack a serious punch and get the results you want.

photo credit: Post-Explosion Mad Scientist Costume via photopin (license)

Peter Diamandis is a space-obsessed entrepreneur who has founded companies, like Space Adventures and Planetary Resources, that are in the process of opening the space frontier. Diamandis, who just authored a new book called "Bold," explains how outer space will create the first trillionaire and why it's so important for humans to explore space.

Produced by Will Wei

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Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty has a new, very bullish note on Apple.

"Apple's ability to charge a premium, grow recurring revenue, and accelerate the pace of category expansion argue for a re-rating more in-line with platform companies, at 18-19x," says Huberty.

She jacked her price target on the stock to $160, up from $133 previously.

She says Apple has the "most valuable technology platform" and it has a strong eco-system to lock-in users. If someone buys an iPhone, then they'll buy an iPad, and a Mac, and whatever else Apple might release. 

The most interesting part of Huberty's note is her speculation about how big Apple can become. 

To Huberty, the sky is the limit. 

She says that by 2020, Apple's products will have a "total addressable market" of $3.4 trillion. In English, that means she thinks Apple will be selling products that are a part of industries with total sales of $3.4 trillion. 

How does Apple get there? Through the wearables market, TVs, and cars. 

Here are a few charts to explain it.

Huberty says this is how people spend their time. Of this, Apple only captures 33% of our attention. Huberty thinks Apple can grab another 75%.

A large chunk of that time can come through wearable devices like the Apple Watch. The Watch can be a fashion item, it can also be used for fitness, health, and sleep tracking. 

Here's a look the wearable market's potential:

Apple sells an Apple TV, but there's opportunity to do more in the TV market. Here's the size of the TV market, per Huberty:

And, finally, there have been a variety of reports about Apple getting into the auto industry. It's a big market for Apple to crack: 

Add it all together and this is what you get:

To be clear, Huberty isn't saying that Apple is going to capture all of the value in these markets. She's just noting that Apple has room to grow if it enters these big markets. 

Join the conversation about this story »

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

When it comes to customer service on social media, there are brands that get it…and those that don’t. The brands that truly excel in social media customer service know that response time is everything. But just how fast is “fast?” And what happens when a customer isn’t satisfied by your response? A new infographic from West Interactive addresses the top three problems with social media customer service. This is a must-read post for any brand on social!

The Facts About Customer Service On Social Media

• 17% of people expect to be able to use social media for customer service inquiries.
• Twitter receives 59.3% of social media-based questions and complaints. Facebook receives 40.7%.

Problem 1: Lack Of Response

Now, in 2015, the failure to respond to customers on social is a cardinal sin. Still, 59% of questions and complaints on Twitter went unanswered on average across all industries, reports the infographic.

The Fix: The infographic’s authors suggest looking for questions and complaints by searching for them both with and without the “@” symbol. There is also software brands can use to automatically re-route Twitter messages to your staff for review (if they aren’t dealt within a timeframe you deem appropriate). Solid advice. But I would also add… learn the ins and outs of advanced Twitter search. There’s a great resource by Neil Patel (here) that I’ve recommended in the past.

Problem 2: Speed Of Response

Speed of response is also immensely important for your social media customer service team. According to the infographic…

• Within an hour of posting a product or service complaint on Twitter, 72% of customers expect a response.
• 42% expect answers to questions within the hour.

The Fix: The infographic’s authors suggest creating a dedicated customer service handle to improve response time. I’ve shared my tips for improving social response-time on the BuzzPlant blog. Check out that post here.

Problem 3: Poor Response

Thirdly, even a speedy response isn’t worth much if it doesn’t impart actual value. Only 36% of customers report having their problems effectively solved via social media in a timely manner.

The Fix: Dedicate an individual or a team to handle your social media customer service. Oftentimes, the duty of a timely and effective response gets lost in the fray. Assign ownership and set processes in place. According to the infographic, “Though 99% of brands are on Twitter, only 30% dedicate a part of their customer service team to it.”

What Are Your Biggest Challenges In Customer Service On Social Media?

What keeps you from serving your customers just like you would in person or via private communications like phone and email? Let’s talk in the comments below.

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Did you know that 91 percent of B2B marketers and 86 percent of B2C marketers are using content marketing? Everybody and their mom, dad, aunt and cat are creating content. So how do you make yours stand out?

We thought Marcus Sheridan, author of The Sales Lion blog and highly sought after public speaker, would be the perfect person to ask. Marcus grew his swimming pool company to one of the largest of its kind – all thanks to awesome content marketing. These days, he uses his powers to help other entrepreneurs grow their businesses.

Read on in this Q&A to learn how to get started in content marketing, specific topics you should write about and the one thing you need to add to your website today.

Kristen Dunleavy (KD): Customers can form an opinion of a business’s website pretty fast. What’s the first thing they notice?

Marcus Sheridan (MS): I actually do this experiment a lot with smaller groups and workshops, and it’s done by asking a very simple question: What emotion do you experience as soon as you see this website? Then, I’ll show the website and they are asked to say the first emotion that comes to mind.

Most companies have never actually done this with a group of people unfamiliar with their business or brand, and the reality is reactions and impressions can be profound.

Ultimately, what people “feel” as soon as they open up a webpage is whether or not it’s cluttered – and therefore whether they can find what they’re looking quickly. If they can’t, they’ll quickly leave. That’s reality.

KD: What’s the best way to quickly make your content stand out from the competition?

MS: In every industry (B2B, B2C, service, product, whatever), there are subjects that “move the needle.” In other words, there are subjects consumers very much want to talk about, but few businesses want to join in on the conversation online. These five main subjects are:

1. Cost/pricing questions
2. Problems/issues questions
3. Comparison/versus questions
4. Reviews
5. ‘Best of’ questions

KD: Do you have any tips for business owners that want to keep tabs on their competitors? What should they be paying attention to?

MS: I think paying attention to the competition is way overvalued. I’m not saying you shouldn’t care, but what I am saying is that the competition doesn’t pay your bills, and therefore don’t merit the attention. Who does merit the attention? Your ideal customers, that’s who!

Businesses should be obsessed with the way their ideal customers think, feel and what they want to know. And for those that are obsessed, they usually are the ones doing incredible things – online and off.

KD: What’s one thing that every business owner needs to add to their website?

MS: A definitive guide to product/service pricing for their industry. Unless a consumer sees at least some cost/price info on your site, they’ll leave. They won’t call you. They won’t fill out a form. They’ll leave…just like you do when you feel like a business is “hiding” something from you online.

KD: How can businesses build trust with prospects using their content?

MS: Content, in my opinion, isn’t worth a grain of salt unless it’s incredibly honest, transparent and unbiased. If it’s those things, it will build trust. If it’s not – or it’s too sales-y – forget about it.

KD: What’s one content mistake that too many businesses are making?

MS: This goes along with the previous question. Business are naturally biased. They are, and consumers can sense this immediately. Unless a business learns to “disarm” the reader with their content, they won’t experience great success.

KD: A lot of business owners aren’t sure how to get started with content marketing. What’s the first thing they should do?

MS: Brainstorm every single question consumers ask as they are researching your product/service/company during the buying process. Now take each one of those questions and answer them one by one in a blog article on the website.

KD: Time can be an issue when it comes to content marketing: people just don’t have it. Any tips for maximizing your time when it comes to content?

MS: I actually don’t agree with this question. “Time” has nothing to do with content marketing. Rather, “value” and “understanding” have everything to do with it. In other words, if a company comes to me and says, “Marcus, we simply don’t have the time for content marketing,” what they are actually saying is, “We don’t value content marketing, Marcus.”

In life, we magically find the time to do that which we value.

And if we don’t value it, we don’t get it done.

It’s that simple.

KD: In your opinion, what turns mediocre content into game-changing content?

MS:

• It’s gutsy – It addresses subjects others won’t touch.
• It’s unbiased – Read above.
• It’s thorough – Great teaching is key here.
• It’s real – This is something we “feel” when we read or watch something. It’s hard to define, but easily felt.

KD: Can you name some companies that you think are doing content right?

MS: I’ll name some businesses that have amazing blogs and content most folks haven’t heard of:

• Health Catalyst
• Block Imaging
• Yale Appliance
• Segue Technologies
• Alaska Sleep Clinic

Last month President Barack Obama was interviewed by the beloved photo blog Humans of New York.

When asked a penetrating question — "When is the time you felt most broken?" — the commander-in-chief gave a telling answer.

“I first ran for Congress in 1999, and I got beat," he said, "I just got whooped." 

It was a dark time for Obama, who was then in the Illinois legislature. Though he was working hard, he said that he wasn't getting a lot done. Plus he was away from his family and his marriage was getting strained.

He was filled with doubt: 

[F]or me to run and lose that bad, I was thinking maybe this isn't what I was cut out to do. I was forty years old, and I'd invested a lot of time and effort into something that didn't seem to be working.

But the thing that got me through that moment, and any other time that I've felt stuck, is to remind myself that it's about the work.

There's a name for this attitude. 

"So Good They Can't Ignore You" author Cal Newport calls it the "craftsman mindset." 

Instead of following your passion, you figure out what kind of value you can offer the world and organize your career around developing that capacity. 

For Obama, it was the work to be done in politics.

"Because if you're worrying about yourself," he said, "if you're thinking: 'Am I succeeding? Am I in the right position? Am I being appreciated?' — then you're going to end up feeling frustrated and stuck. But if you can keep it about the work, you'll always have a path. There's always something to be done."

It's like what Obama's dining partner Steve Jobs said: Instead of following your passion, feed the current of history.

SEE ALSO: Steve Jobs And President Obama Had A Dinner Together In 2011 That May Have Changed The Course Of US History

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: This 40-year-old Indonesian is Obama's doppelgänger

Despite the hype in the sales space about social selling, adoption numbers remain fairly low. A new survey from PeopleLinx reveals that a scant 31% of reps incorporate social media into their sales process.

However, the lack of social selling adoption isn't due to a lack of interest or perceived value. It's just that reps don't know how to do it. Only 26% of respondents felt as if they knew how to use social media to sell. 

Surprising? Not to Gorka Amian, business intelligence manager at PeopleLinx.

"This makes sense -- at least to me. A lot of the salespeople I meet tell me (usually in hushed, guilty tones) that they don’t understand Twitter, LinkedIn, and sometimes even Facebook," he wrote in a blog post. "They know social technologies are valuable. They feel they should be doing more to cultivate relationships with buyers. But … they’re clueless."

The survey tried to uncover a solution to this problem by examining what impact (if any) training had on social selling adoption rate. I think it's safe to say that the silver bullet has been revealed. Adoption increased to 74% among reps that had been trained on social selling. However, only 11% of respondents indicated that their companies provided social selling training.

Another notable finding is the gap in perceived selling value between LinkedIn and Twitter -- the top channels social selling experts recommend salespeople get active on. While 76% of respondents saw the value in using LinkedIn to sell, only 16% saw value in Twitter. Is a lack of education to blame? Or is it that Twitter is truly not a worthwhile channel for social selling? Maybe time (and more research) will tell.

In any case, the takeaway for sales leaders who want to foster social selling initiatives in their teams is clear.

"Companies need to help their employees," Amian wrote. "This is a problem of skill, not of will. When salespeople get encouraged, trained, and measured, their social selling activity shoots up."

Buyer Personas do a great job targeting marketing and sales campaigns to reach the most probable buying audience. But it’s possible to make them even more efficient.

Here’s a question: Do you want to sell/market? Or have someone buy? The belief is that if you can sell/market appropriately – the right campaign to the right buyer with the right solution at the right time – buyers will buy. If that were true, you’d be closing a helluva lot more than you’re closing. Sure, Buyer Personas make a difference in your close rate. But it could be higher.

Currently, your targeted campaigns blanket probable audiences and find buyers at the exact moment they are considering buying, merely closing the low hanging fruit. It’s possible to enter earlier and facilitate (and influence) the complete buying journey.

STAGES IN THE BUYING DECISION PATH

Sales and marketing address activities surrounding solution placement: solution pitch details, solution features, etc., vendor details, gathering needs. But neither facilitate the entire decision path which constitutes issues beyond choosing a solution. Some might call these ‘Pre-Sales’ events. I call it the Buying Decision Path, along which sales is merely one of the entry points needed to close a sale.

Briefly, here are the stages buyers go through prior to purchasing a solution ((Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it fully details each stage www.dirtylittlesecretsbook.com):

1. Idea stage.
2. Brainstorming stage. Idea discussed with colleagues.
3. Initial discussion stage. Colleagues discuss the problem, posit who to include on Buying Decision Team, consider possible fixes and fallout. Action groups formed. Research begins. New Team members invited.
4. Contemplation stage. Group discusses
*how to fix the problem with known resources,
*whether to create a workaround using internal fixes or seek an external solution, and acceptable type/amount of fallout from each,
*people who would need to buy-in.
5. Organization stage.
6. Change management stage. Group determines
*if more research is necessary (and who will do it),
*if all appropriate people are involved (and who to invite),
*a review of all elements of the problem and solution,
*the level of disruption and change management as per type of solution chosen,
*the pros/cons/possibilities of external solution vs current vendor vs workaround.
7. Coordination stage. Review needs, ideas, issues of any new members invited aboard and how they affect choices and goals; incorporate change considerations for each solution; delineate everyone’s thoughts re goals and change capacity; appropriate research responsibilities.
8. Research stage. Specific research for each possible solution; seek answers to how fallout or change would be managed with each solution.
9. Consensus stage. Buying Decision Team members meet to share research and determine the type of solution, fallout, possibilities, problems, considerations in re management, policies, job descriptions, HR issues, etc. General decisions made. Buy-in and consensus necessary.
10. Action stage. Responsibilities apportioned to manage specifics of Stage 9. Owners of tasks do thorough research and make calls to several vendors for interviews and data gathering.
11. Second brainstorming stage. Discussion on results of data gathering including fallout/ benefits of each. Favored vendors pitched by Team members.
12. Choice stage. New solution agreed on. Change management issues delineated and leadership initiatives prepared to avoid disruption. Vendor contacted.
13. Implementation stage.

Buyers have to manage these stages (most of which are not solution- or problem-specific) with you or without you. Without being directly involved with behind-the-scenes politics or processes you’re left waiting, pushing product data, and hoping to be there when they’re ready. And knowing the details of your Buyer Persona is insufficient.

Do you want to sell/market? Or have someone buy? Right now your efforts to sell and market are bringing in no more than 5% close rate (net). To become the vendor who truly helps buyers buy, to get an early leg-up on the competition and become part of the Buying Decision Team during the Pre-Sales process, sales (entering at stage 1) and marketing (entering at stage 3) can add another layer of skills, tools, goals, and touch points.

Buying Facilitation® is a Pre-sales Management model that I’ve developed and taught for 30 years with profoundly different results from using sales and marketing alone. It uses neither sales nor marketing thinking: it employs a new form of question, a different type of listening, and a systems-thinking role consistent with true consulting to facilitate the issues that bias the buying decision. And then you can sell earlier and faster, to the right people, on the solution placement end.

I can teach your sales team how to become facilitators, or show your marketing team ways to design the right questions to help buyers traverse each stage of their unique buying journey. See more articles on www.sharondrewmorgen.com.

Sharon Drew Morgen is the author of 9 books, including NYTimes Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity, and What? Did you really say what I think I heard? She has developed facilitation material for sales/change management, coaching, and listening. To learn more about her sales, decision making, and change management material, go to www.sharondrewmorgen.com. To learn more about her work on closing the gap between what’s said and what’s heard, go to www.didihearyou.com. Contact Sharon Drew for training, keynotes, or online programs at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com. Sharon Drew is currently designing programs for coaches to Find and Keep the Ideal Client, and Lead Facilitation for Lead Generation.

Using Buyer Personas During Pre-Sales Stages is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

1. Spending money on Social Media and ignoring your antiquated website. Even people who find you on Facebook or other social sites will check your website. More and more they will do this on mobile devices. Studies show that people will judge a company’s credibility and ability to meet their needs by their websites.  Websites that have not been upgraded using mobile friendly technology will not only be ignored by viewers, but Google will not even display these sites for mobile searches.
2. Starting a Social Media Marketing program without a solid strategy in mind. While it is free to start Social Media sites, and free to post, your time is worth something.  Facebook’s new algorithms are designed to ignore companies that do not understand how and what to post.  The reality is that if you don’t know what you are doing, you may be wasting your time.
3. Buying Facebook Fans.  Buying “fans” who are not interested in your company is a waste of money. While it is tempting to boost your ego with thousands of fans, doing this can actually hurt you.  Because these “fans” will likely not interact or engage with your page, when Facebook “sees” this, it may not display your content even to the “real” people who have liked your page.  Also, since the goal is to build a relationship with customers and prospects, your relationship could be compromised if they realize that you are “buying” friends.
4. Hiring a Social Media Manager and quitting after a few months because “nothing is happening.” In marketing, as in life, there are no shortcuts.  Building a strong presence on Social Media not only takes time and patience, but also a carefully honed strategy.  The way a page operates will be shaped by the Page’s fans, which means that the strategy will morph and grow as the page does.  Quitting too soon will not only disappoint the fans you already have, but waste the money you have already spent.  Even traditional marketing needs time for leads to be nurtured before they turn into sales.
5. Hiring an SEO Company who is answering the wrong question. An SEO that promises to get you on Page 1 of Google is answering the wrong question. SEO has changed. The goals today are leads and sales rather than “high rank.”  Websites are not the only results that matter to Google today.  Blog titles, Facebook posts and “tweets” can now all be found on Google’s results pages. People are interacting with the Internet in new ways, including mobile searches, so having a strong internet presence, across as many platforms as possible, is crucial.
6. Spending most of your budget on traditional marketing tactics. A computer repairman told me he needed to advertise in the phone book because when someone’s computer goes down they will look a service provider up in the phone book.  The truth is that most of us will check the internet on our smart phones or tablets if our computers break down.  In fact, most people today start the searches for most products and services on the Internet.  However, the most compelling reason to shift a marketing budget may be that the cost per lead for inbound marketing is 62% less than for traditional (outbound) marketing,

To say that marketing has changed in the last decade would be an understatement. In fact, it is changing constantly.  Allocating your marketing dollars correctly may be the key to your company’s survival.