Tech stocks may be riding on record highs, with sky-high valuations, but investors shouldn’t fear another Dotcom Bubble crash, according to Terry Smith.
Terry Smith is a well-known fund manager in the UK, and has been called “the new Warren Buffet.” Smith’s fund is heavily invested in tech stocks, leading to some concern that he’s vulnerable to another Dotcom Bubble crash. In a letter to investors (PDF), Smith addresses those concerns and explains why he doesn’t believe tech stocks are in jeopardy.
One of the biggest factors Smith points to is how differently tech stocks, which often have intangible factors, must be evaluated. In so doing, he points out an inherent advantage of tech companies, whose trade is more often than not in information and intellectual capital.
The main assets of the companies we seek to invest in are often intangible. Some examples of intangible assets are brands, copyrights, patents, know-how, installed bases of equipment which require servicing and maintenance and so produce customers who are locked-in to the supplier, software systems which are critical to a business or person and so-called network effects. They are distinct from tangible assets such as real estate, machinery and equipment, and vehicles.
The return on intangible assets is higher as they mostly need to be funded with equity not debt and attract an appropriate return. Lenders seem to crave the often false security of lending against tangible collateral. Intangible assets can also last indefinitely if they are well maintained by advertising, marketing, innovation and product development and the duration of an asset is an important factor in figuring out its real returns.
Interestingly, Smith also makes the case that COVID is setting up for some specific growth trends. Like many, he likens the current pandemic to the Spanish Flu, and draws a comparison to Henry Ford and the Model T.
The assembly line was not invented as a result of the Spanish Flu pandemic — the Model T Ford was put on an assembly line in 1913 — but it accelerated its adoption.
The increase in productivity this delivered helped to fuel an economic boom as the cost of production of items such as cars and household electrical appliances were reduced as the volume of production rose so that they became affordable by the middle classes for the first time. This helped to fuel the economic and stock market boom of the Roaring Twenties.
Smith sees the possibility of something similar happening post-COVID as a result of remote work and digital communication becoming normalized. Salesmen will be able to meet with more clients virtually than they could in person, businesses will see reduced costs, factories will be able to maintain production despite using less staff and more.
Obviously, as he points out, it’s not good news for all industries.
Of course not all businesses benefit from these developments. The airline industry, hospitality, bricks & mortar retailing and office property may all have some very difficult problems to face, just as you wouldn’t have wanted to have been a saddler when Henry Ford and his competitors hit their stride.
This analogy helps explain why Smith’s fund is so heavily invested in tech and why he’s not worried about a possible crash. Of course, as he humorously points out, no one’s predictions are perfect.
I will leave you with this thought: What are the similarities between a forecaster and a one-eyed javelin thrower? Answer: Neither is likely to be very accurate but they are typically good at keeping the attention of the audience.
One of the most important topics for retailers is getting your listings to the top of eBay search results, or in other words, eBay SEO. For many businesses, learning how to do effective eBay SEO can literally mean the difference between making a few hundred bucks or thousands of dollars.
JR Business recently talked about how they have risen to the top of very popular eBay search results and offered their insider advice for you to do the same. In fact, on one recent listing, they have made over $70,000 in just two months. Below are some highlights from their recent talk on how to do eBay right:
Getting Started with eBay SEO
We’ve been using eBay for ten years now and are very successful on the platform. We have hundreds of listings that occupy very high SEO rankings on search results. For example, there’s a search result with 1.8 million results and we occupy two of the top three slots. eBay SEO is very tricky, they are constantly changing things, tweaking things, updating the platform, so you have to stay up-to-date and if you don’t make certain changes when they need to be made you’re gonna drop in SEO ranking. It’s very hard to stay relevant and at the top but we’ve managed to do it by following 3 important steps.
The 3 big things are the performance of your account, the listing set up, and your customer satisfaction. eBay SEO really falls into those 3 categories and those are what’s going to make up your ranking.
Becoming a Top Rated Seller
eBay is not going to put their number one listing as somebody who has 4 seller feedback points, 40 points or even 400 points. You need a lot of seller feedback points to get to the top of eBay search results.
Being a top rated seller or a power seller is going to help immensely. However, becoming a top-rated seller is really tricky to get. You have to accept refunds, you have to have a certain shipping time and can’t be delayed on shipments, and you have to have a high customer satisfaction. You have to meet all these standards and also have a certain number of transactions and also hit a certain dollar amount in sales. All these things have to be there to become a top rated seller. Once you are there, you get a discount on seller fees and again it helps with SEO.
Pay for Everything eBay Offers
It is important to pay for everything that they offer sellers on eBay. If your listing is going to do super successful long-term, you’re going to make a ton of money from it, then pay for the $2 subtitle, the $4 bull title, the secondary listing category, the enlarged images for a dollar… all that stuff! It is very little in the grand scheme of things. If you’re gonna be making a lot of money for that listing, like its a cash cow listing, then you need to throw the money at eBay.
My theory is that since you’re paying eBay more then they may help you out a little bit. More importantly, in the buyer’s eyes, when they see a bold title, an enlarged image, and they can find you in two categories, this will increase engagement with your listing.
Pack Your Titles Full of Keywords
I also can’t emphasize enough the packing of your listing title full of keywords that people are going to search for. Based on what industry and niche you’re in you should know what keywords are going to do the best. If you’re selling iPhone chargers, you better know to pack that title with “works with iPhone six, seven, eight and ten, etc.
When you’re done with the title there should be zero characters remaining. You need to pack that thing full. When somebody searches something on eBay it is referencing off the title unless they do a description search, but otherwise, it has to be in the title to show up.
The subtitle isn’t searchable but it’s still important. Once they find your listing, you want to make sure they stay on your listing and that they have enough information.
Create Extremely Long Descriptions
They need to know about the product, so not only are you packing in information into the title and the subtitle, but also the item specifics. Those are the pre-fill in little boxes that eBay gives you based on what category you selected. So fill in that information but also the description, it’s one of the most important parts of the listing.
Please do not have a four-sentence description! I see it all too often, but that’s just gonna kill your listing. If you not giving them all the information they need to know about the item and if you’re not keeping them on your listing, they’re gonna go somewhere else and find one that explains it better.
You should have a nice attractive title, maybe inlay a picture or something in the description, but also just have paragraph upon paragraph about the item. Then talk about your shipping methods and if you’re an experienced account say so. We always say that we’re a trusted eBay seller for the past ten years with thousands of feedback points. We tell them to look at our recent feedback, reassuring confidence in them.
Ship as Fast as Possible and for Free
It’s unbelievably important to have quick shipping times. There’s no reason not to be shipping within one to two days, and you shouldn’t ever need three-day handling time because it starts to hurt your sales. Anything above five days or more is really going to affect your performance.
If eBay sees that you’re a fast shipper and that’s what you described, at the top of the listing they’ll post fast and free shipping and estimated time delivery. People want to get their stuff quick!
You should also offer free shipping. Personally, just about every single one of my items is free shipping. That helps with the algorithm because eBay can tell the buyers free shipping and they see it as a better deal.
Improve Listing Performance with Deals
One other big tip for listing performance, I have found a lot of success with using sales promotions. It may not even be that much of a sale, but something about buyers seeing sale is going to Incline them to buy. Sales also plays into eBay SEO as well.
Experiment with Sponsored Listings
One other thing that you can experiment with is the sponsored listings with eBay. I promote some of my listings and have found good success because it helps them move up in search results quickly.
To get the ball rolling I throw some sponsored ad budget through eBay and they’ll often bump it up to the first page. Then people start to see it and then some solds will start to appear. Once you start selling some items and you have good buyer satisfaction on that listing and people are leaving good reviews and they’re not returning the items that will help immensely with your eBay search ranking.
Keep Your Customers Satisfied
If you have 6 five-star reviews on your listing people are gonna feel super safe buying. We all know we feel reassured when we see good reviews on an item. Alternatively, if you see only one-star reviews on an item that will hurt your customer satisfaction. That’s why having good communications with your customer, working out problems and just making sure everything is top-notch with the transaction is so important.
Good reviews and good feedback on your account is so big because once you get some products sold on the listing everything is gonna compound pretty quickly. You’ll start getting some reviews on your products, you’ll start to get some sold quantity.
I Made $70,000 With One Good eBay Listing
Two months ago I added what I thought would be a good listing, nothing crazy, but I knew it’d be a decent cash cow listing. I probably spent about six hours making a full thorough description. I went really really detailed on that and I paid $12 for extra eBay boosts as I described above.
So $12 and six hours of my time and within a couple weeks it was starting to sell. I sold 30 or 40 quantity on this listing and each item is over 50 bucks apiece, so I was making some money. I’m like okay that’s pretty good, and then that point of compounding came and things just started to hit and the listing took off. It went crazy with people loving the items, had great reviews and eBay could see that fast and free shipping with timely deliveries tracking.
It was a perfect listing and it really started to take off and now two months later that single listing has sold over $70,000 worth of product!
“I actually believe that we don’t sell products, we sell change,” says Tiffani Bova, Customer Growth and Transformation Evangelist at Salesforce. Bova was interviewing legendary speaker and author Seth Godin when she made that comment.
“What great marketers and great sales people and great organizations do is only one thing, as Michael Schrage has written about, we make change happen,” responded Godin. “My favorite example of this is Harley Davidson. Harley turns disrespected outsiders into respected insiders. That’s what they do. They make half of their revenue licensing their logo, because the logo, the totum, the uniform is a symbol of the change. You don’t even have to have a motorcycle to be changed by the brand.”
This is the company’s internal marketing positioning statement that illustrates the point that Bova and Godin are making:
The only motorcycle manufacturer
That makes big, loud motorcycles
For macho guys (and “macho wannabes”)
Mostly in the United States
Who want to join a gang of cowboys
In an era of decreasing personal freedom.
Godin also talked colorfully about sales, marketing and social media:
“It all comes down to what story does the sales person tell himself when he shows up at work every morning. Trust and awareness are the two key things here. What we want isn’t email, we want me-mail. What we want isn’t to hear about you, we want to hear about us. We want to hear about our dreams, where we are going. Salespeople who get that, who show up at work everyday intent on making that happen, they don’t have a social media problem.”
LinkedIn added Conversation Starters to their messaging platform, making contacting people you never speak to so easy, even a fifth grader can do it! Let’s get started:
Let’s say you’re a salesman and you want to contact someone you have never talked to before about buying your product. This is always a dilemma, right? Hmm… what should be my opening line? Well, LinkedIn has now made this easy by giving me handy conversation starters.
All I have to do is click the lightbulb. Great!! 🙂 And it’s not creepy or spammy at all! Every executive will love getting tons of these kinds of messages:
Click… Hi Suzi, I’ve noticed you’ve also connected with Mike Manuel. How did you…
Click… Hi Suzi, I noticed you have 7 connections at Edelman. Have you heard…
Click… Hi Suzi, I noticed you have 5 connections at Bateman Group. Have you heard…
Click… Hi Suzi, I noticed you have 6 connections at Intelligent Energy. Have you heard…
Click… Hi Suzi, I noticed you have 10 connections at Google. Have you heard…
“With conversation starters, you can spend less time figuring out what to say, and more time having conversations that help you get ahead and reach your professional goals,” says Sammy Shreibati, LinkedIn Product Manager.
Sheesh… give me a break! Helpful. No. Spammy. Yes. Seriously, this is not an authentic way for salespeople to contact prospects, especially because it is built-in to LinkedIn messaging where decision makers can be guaranteed to receive multiple versions of these in their in-box.
All sales messages should be authentic, personalized to the prospect and provide some specific solution the marketer knows that the receiver of the message will relate to.
Microsoft’s Skype did something very smart today, it made it possible to use Skype in guest mode and with that eliminated a choke spot for using it as a business tool. Often meetings happen spontaneously, someone emails a request to talk about a potential deal and then the teleconference platform needs to be decided on. This decision is often made based on the communications tool that both are registered to use.
Now anyone can use Skype without having to go through a registration or download process, making it much easier for business professionals to use for their deal making.
“By joining Skype as a Guest, you can quickly chat, voice or video call without any hassle,” noted the Skype Team in their announcement. “Perfect if you’re new to Skype and want to quickly chat with someone, anywhere in the world, for free.”
I ran across a YouTube video by sales guru Marc Wayshak offering key tips for writing effective prospecting emails that decision makers want to open, read and respond to. The problem is most prospecting emails fail to engage the recipient because they are never opened.
How to Get Your Recipient to Open Your Email
The first key to successful engagement is to get the target to open the email and this starts with the subject line. Wayshak suggest using non-promotional subject lines. “Most people are actually checking their emails using their phones, so think about what’s actually showing up on that phone,” he says. “Who’s it from, the subject line and then the first couple of words in the email body.”
He says to use non-salesy language, personalize the company name and to keep it short. In my experience, if a prospect feels it is simply a cut-n-paste, they will ignore, delete or click spam. Think of the subject line and first few words in an email as you knocking on their door. The recipient is looking through the email key hole and assessing whether you’re worth listening to.
Personalization is Key
When anyone receives an email the first thing they assess is whether the email is bulk or personal. This is a key theme of Wayshak’s in all of his tips for increasing email engagement.
“If a prospect thinks that what you have just sent out is a copy and pasted email that’s going to really everyone, it’s going to be deleted immediately,” says Wayshak. “It’s time to make those emails hyper specific to their exact world. We want to show that we’ve done our homework, that we know about the organization and that we know about them and maybe some of the challenges that they could be facing.”
Keep Prospecting Emails Short
The goal is to get the recipient to respond, not tell them every benefit or feature of your service or product. Wayshak believes that keeping it short is imperative to obtaining engagement. “We have at the most 20 seconds for the entire email before prospect is going to delete even the most engaging email,” he says. “So that means 3-5 sentences and then we’re done.”
Also keep in mind that keeping it too short can in itself seem promotional and not truly personal. It’s key to keep it personalized to the potential customers needs with the words in your prospecting emails similar to a short elevator pitch that feels real and solution focused for their specific business. With every prospect email, you should be trying to light a fire of interest that compels the reader to want more information.
Offer a Value Propositon
The only way to make a potential customer become a customer is to convince them that your product solves a problem. Knowing the company is key to correctly making this pitch. What are their problems and how does your product or service solve them? Wayshak suggests giving them specific feedback on their company.
“I have a client who helps companies improve their YouTube channel,” noted Wayshak. “What he did recently is he went through some of his top prospects YouTube page and gave them specific feedback on different areas that they could improve on their YouTube channel. Immediately, he got lots of responses from people saying I want to meet with you.”
He says that most salespeople are looking to take when they are writing emails, so instead give value. “That’s going to help you stand out from your competitors.”
Don’t Forget the Hook!
Your email is personalized, not too long and boring, is clearly written with an understanding of the prospects business and their problem and offers your product as the solution, but it’s still often not read. That’s because your forgot to add the hook!
“Conclude those emails with a question that’s going to engage them,” says Wayshak. “The problem is that most emails end with something that sounds like this. Let me know if I can ever be helpful. That is a total waste of time and you are not going to get responses.”
“Instead, engage like this. Do any of these challenges ring true to you? Or, where can I send that book to? Something that is specific and easy to answer that is likely to engage them in a very quick conversation.”
Technology is impacting sales in a way never seen before as evidenced by Salesforce’s massive integration of artificial intelligence into all of their various clouds and products. At the Salesforce Dreamforce event much of the discussion is about how technology is changing the sales landscape requiring salespeople to adapt or fail.
There are so many trends really impacting sales right now,” says Tim Clarke, Director of Product Marketing at Salesforce. “You can’t lead with products anymore, as Brent Adamson of CEB said, 57% of the buying process is completed before they engage the salesperson. We know that with a lot of the purchasing decisions that we make we’ll just do our research online, so the professional sales person now needs to truly add value.”
He noted what we all know, that the most effective sales strategy relies on having the right conversation at the right time, at the right place and on the right channel. However, it’s really more than that, it’s about standing out knowing everything there is to know. “We’ve probably all received those prospecting emails which are just generic, and then you get the second one saying, I didn’t hear from you and then the third one asking, did you get hit by a car?” said Clarke. “Clearly, prospecting and sales development is really an exciting area right now and there’s so much technology that really can support sales professionals to be successful.”
Salespeople Must Stand Out From the Herd
An extreme depth of knowledge about the customer is becoming more important. “First, the customer is obviously much more educated today than they were even 5 or 10 years ago,” said Will Anastas, SVP of Enterprise Corporate Sales at Salesforce. “The proliferation of technology that enables customers to be smart is also at our disposal as well in sales.”
He noted that it is key for salespeople to “stand out from the herd of salespeople” that literally have the same information as we do. “So how do we change our perspective and how do we do discovery so that we can show up literally like your customers customer?” Anastas asks. “By providing that point of view that is authentic, genuine and empathetic that will help you break through and separate yourself from really everyone that is trying to sell to this individual. I think it’s a challenging time, but I think it is full of opportunity.”
Try Different Things to Get in Front of Your Prospects
“We launched a project with a company called Somersault Innovation which is led by Ashley Welch and her co-founder Justin Jones,” said Anastas. “What they did was take the principals of design thinking and applied it to a sales process, a sales discovery methodology. There were 3 main components of it, empathy, customer centricity and curiosity.”
Salesforce rolled out their program internally in order to improve their own sales. “What I’ve noticed is that as we’ve rolled out this training to our salespeople they have found themselves in situations that they didn’t expect to find themselves in,” noted Anastas. “For instance, one of my executives has Greyhound as a prospect account and we been trying to get into Greyhound for years, doing the same thing over and over again, looking at LinkedIn and looking at the available information on the web.
“Finally, after we did this training, our account executive just went and got on a bus,” he said. “Instead of flying to LA for the weekend, he took a Greyhound from San Francisco to LA, he talked to a bunch of people at Greyhound and he figured out a bunch of insights that he would never have gotten by sitting at his desk and looking at the web.”
Later, Anastas said that when the salesperson phoned up Greyhound he was able to talk about his personal experience of the bus ride and as their customer. “That warm, empathetic intro has taken him all the way to the office of the CEO at Greyhound in a very short period of time.”
“So to me, it’s really about separating yourself out and trying different things to get you in front of your prospects faster.”
The Personal Connection is Also Important
The CEO of CCI Global Holdings, Walter Rogers, says that technology has become available that really allows a seller to become much more knowledgable about their buyer, their buyers customers, their buyers needs, both personal and professional. However, he says making a personal connection with these individuals and leveraging all of this information enables the salesperson to make an “impact” on the potential customer.
“We talked a lot about the impact of technology on sales,” he said. “I want to sidestep and talk about the personal connection with a human being. That’s something that I personally experienced working in partnership with Amazon Web Services. I’ve actually gone deep into their sales cycles as they try to convince customers to move from on premises to a cloud based infrastructure.”
“There was one customer that we were working with that just did not want to move,” Rogers said. “They were very efficient in how they were running their operation and they felt they would not save any money. However, when we dug really really deep, his personal motivator was impacting the public education system.”
He said that showing the customer that moving their data from to the cloud, would allow them to correlate information across many other databases and build out a predictive analytics model. “This let them spot students before they got in trouble, by looking at various trends, such as did the parents just go on welfare, those types of things,” says Rogers. “Because we are able to make that human personal connection, this company is beginning to make a migration across the AWS infrastructure.”
“We can’t ever overlook the impact of the human connection,” he said. “You’d be amazed at what a difference it can make in getting email response when you take the words me, I and we out of your emails completely and focus them all on the word you and what’s important to the other person. The response rates will go up about 50%.”
Facebook is getting better at competing for brick & mortar ad dollars, announcing an ability to tie a retailers inventory into their product ads, so that they aren’t advertising out of stock items. Very smart and necessary to compete with Google for online retail ad dollars.
Just this past June, Facebook added features to track in-store purchases prompted by a retailers Facebook ads. We wrote at the time:
This is the holy grail for convincing brick and mortar advertisers that Facebook is an effective platform to drive in-store business, assuming the data shows their advertising working. It could also be Facebook’s achilles hill if advertisers discover that their ads aren’t driving business.
Tying ads to inventory is a way for Facebook to increase click to conversion percentages. This lowers a marketers ad cost per sale, and is an especially important metric which retailers use when considering their ads effectiveness.
The inventory feature is targeted toward large retailers like JC Penny, Nike and Coach, of which many have been insisting on connecting their local inventory availability before they make large Facebook marketing commitments. Facebook is still in the very early stages of their attempt to make their platform a local retail sales channel.
Facebook, with this new feature, gives retailers the ability to create customize creative for every store location based on local product availability, pricing or promotions. This is a major step toward attracting the big brands and is a continuation of where they see most of their ad revenue coming from in the future.
Consumers are now using their mobile phones to price check, look for coupons and compare products while in the store and they are also continuing to engage in social media. Facebook aims to take advantage of this and over time change the mind-set of their users about Facebook, making it about both social exchange and ecommerce and in-effect combining the two.
“If a fashion retailer wishes to advertise a nationwide sales event happening at every store, dynamic ads for retail will only showcase products that are in-stock at a nearby store and display the price found at that location,” said Facebook in a blog announcement of this feature. “As the ads are linked to the local product catalog, if a product sells out in one store the campaign automatically adjusts so that people in that region will no longer see it advertised. Product selection for each ad can be optimized based on people’s online and mobile shopping behavior.”
Facebook describes their dynamic retail ads this way:
Local availability: An availability indicator on the ad shows people that a product is available at a store near them, and the store locator makes it easy for people to get directions.
Product summaries: Advertisers can use Facebook-hosted product summaries to give potential shoppers the information they need without leaving the Facebook app.
Different actions: Product summaries include ways for people to take actions like contacting the nearest store, buying online, or saving the product for future reference.
Similar products: Similar products available at the nearest store are featured so people can browse the aisles right from their phone.
Facebook says that they are currently testing dynamic ads for retail with advertisers including Abercrombie & Fitch, Argos, Macy’s, Pottery Barn and Target. They will be expanding to more retailers in the coming weeks.
“Extending the power of Facebook’s dynamic ads to in-store inventory opens up exciting new possibilities for Macy’s as an omni-channel retailer,” says Serena Potter, Group Vice President Digital Media Strategy at Macy’s. “We were excited to be the first up and running with Facebook’s dynamic ads for retail as it truly allows us to personalize product ads based on online behavior and inventory at the nearest Macy’s store. This bridges our online and offline channels to deliver a more engaging, relevant, and useful experience to shoppers.”
Facebook Also Introduces Store Visits Objective Options
“We’re also introducing our first marketing objective built specifically for advertisers to drive more people to their stores or business locations,” noted Facebook. “The store visits objective builds on the geo-targeting and ad format features of the local awareness ad solution and introduces store visits as the primary reporting metric and a new optimization model.”
They have added features to let retail brick & mortar advertisers add an objective defined by the marketer in order make their marketing more efficient. They said that Albertsons grocery store used this in beta tests that decreases their cost-per-store-visit by 40 percent.
Also added were improvements to geo-targeting, where advertisers can now define a geo radius based on population density and desired reach.
All of these features are only available in mobile Facebook advertising.
In a major initiative that has been in the works for two years, Salesforce is integrating artificial intelligence into all of its CRM cloud platforms. It enables any business to use clicks or code to build AI-powered apps that get smarter with every interaction. Their AI system learns from all of the data you enter about your customers and prospects (CRM data, email, calendar, social, ERP, and IoT), and makes predictions and recommendations on actions you should consider. It can even automate tasks it certain situations.
Salesforce Einstein is designed to help their customers take advantage of the huge amounts of data produced by making sense of it and seeing trends before humans typically do. What Salesforce has done is to make the use of artificial intelligence possible for all businesses, without have to employ their own data science teams.
“Powered by advanced machine learning, deep learning, predictive analytics, natural language processing and smart data discovery, Einstein’s models will be automatically customized for every single customer, and it will learn, self-tune, and get smarter with every interaction and additional piece of data,” writes Jim Sinai who is VP of Marketing at SalesforceIQ in their company blog announcement. “Most importantly, Einstein’s intelligence will be embedded within the context of business, automatically discovering relevant insights, predicting future behavior, proactively recommending best next actions and even automating tasks.”
Salesforce Einstein is designed to be a simple and intuitive approach to deliver AI to companies using their cloud CRM products. They say that by “removing the complexity of AI” they are “enabling any company to deliver smarter, personalized and more predictive customer experiences.”
“We couldn’t be more excited to finally unveil Salesforce Einstein after two years of hard work and targeted acquisitions,” added Sinai. “As we continue to build out AI for CRM, we are committed to understanding the next generation of AI technology and how it can best be applied to Salesforce. This effort will be led by Salesforce Research, a new research group focused on the future of AI, under the leadership of Dr. Richard Socher, our Chief Scientist.”
Bringing Artificial Intelligence to Sales
Adam Blitzer, the EVP & GM of Sales Cloud at Salesforce sees significant value in companies using AI within the sales process. “At Salesforce, we are focused on helping companies evolve from the first level, where the CRM is a one-dimensional system of record, to the second level, where the CRM is a system of engagement. And finally, we are helping companies make the leap to the highest level, where the CRM works for them as a predictive system of intelligence.”
“AI arms teams with more intelligence, enabling them increase productivity and predictive capabilities across everything they do,” adds Blitzer. “Importantly, it gives sales teams better insights that build human relationships, an area where sales reps far excel beyond machine capabilities.”
“This (Sales Cloud Einstein) makes people, teams and entire companies, better able to discover insights from data, recommend actions that help close deals, automate processes that give reps more time to build 1:1 relationships, and predict outcomes or hiccups that enable reps to be proactive and remain a step ahead of each customer’s needs and competitor’s potential attack,” stated Blitzer. “I’m excited for our customers to start experimenting with the features we’re announcing today—Predictive Lead Scoring, Opportunity Insights and Automated Activity Capture, you can learn more here. And, I’m even more excited about the business growth these AI solutions are going to drive.”
Bringing Artificial Intelligence to the Service Industry
“Until now, most customer service leaders have been unable to put intelligence in action,” stated Mike Milburn who is head of the Service Cloud at Salesforce. “With Service Cloud Einstein, companies of any size will be able to deploy a connected customer service experience that is predictive, automated and intelligent, bringing AI to the forefront of customer service like never before.”
Milburn says that with Service Cloud Einstein, organizations of all sizes will be able to resolve customer service cases faster by utilizing history and trend data, automate routine inquiries and predict case resolution times.
He also offered a bigger picture of how the Salesforce Cloud Platform could be integrated within devices far removed from CRM and marketing. “Consider this: a connected device–like a dishwasher–could self-diagnose that it needed routine maintenance from a field tech. The dishwasher is connected to Salesforce IoT Cloud, where it’s performance is monitored. When IoT Cloud identifies an issue, it triggers a case in Field Service Lightning and a dishwasher repair tech is dispatched automatically–without a customer or agent needing to be involved. That’s the future of service, and the amazing thing is that with Einstein and the Customer Success Platform, it’s possible today.”
Bringing Artificial Intelligence to Marketing
AI in marketing is about combining historical and real-time data in order to see trends, predict what’s likely to happen and offer contextual suggestions on what to do next. “We are giving marketers the ability to shift away from using analytics that only look at past behavior to analytics that predict the optimal timing, channel, content and audience for any marketing message,” says Bob Stutz, CEO of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud and their Chief Analytics Officer.
Einstein integration within their marketing cloud enables companies to take advantage of Predictive Scoring which puts a percentage on the likelihood of a customer taking a certain action such as making a purchase, or unsubscribing from an email blast. With the Predictive Audiences feature marketers can group predictive actions based on their scores in order to more effectively modify marketing strategies. Finally, Automated Send-time Optimization predicts the best time to send new marketing messages.
Stutz says that Marketing Cloud Einstein has been in beta for about a year with “tremendous” results. He says that ecommerce and coupons company ShopAtHome redefined customer engagement around predictive scores and experienced a 23% increase in email clicks, and a 30% increase in email opens.
Bringing Artificial Intelligence to the Entire Salesforce Platform
“What is most important to Salesforce Community Cloud customers is that Einstein’s intelligence will automatically discover and surface relevant insights, predict answers to solve questions fast, and proactively make recommendations,” said Mike Micucci who is the SVP of Product Management at Salesforce. “It will even automate certain tasks. And you don’t have to do a thing. Einstein puts the best alternative right in front of you.”
“With IoT Cloud Einstein, our customers will be able to unlock a whole new wave of innovation for the Internet of Things by pairing their IoT data with services powered by Salesforce’s new artificial intelligence platform,” notes Woodson Martin, the head of Thunder & IOT Cloud at Salesforce.
Salesforce is also making it possible for companies to build custom apps using their Einstein AI technology. “Today, as we launch Salesforce Einstein, we’re democratizing the technology necessary for any business to build AI-first apps,” said Adam Seligman, Executive Vice President and GM of the App Cloud at Salesforce. “Einstein combines all of our adventurous reaches into data science, data management and modern app development into one set of platform services enabling anyone to build the next generation of apps, powered by AI, that customers will love.”
“Who here feels happy?” asked Sir Anthony Seldon, in a Google talk last year. Seldon is the author of the book, Beyond Happiness and Britain’s best-known headmaster. Sir Anthony famously introduced happiness, or well-being, lessons at his school, Wellington College. In 2011, he co-founded Action for Happiness, a body to raise awareness of the discovery of happiness and reduction of depression, whose influence according to many is growing rapidly in Britain and across the world.
“Who here would like to be happier?” he asks. “Who thinks deep down that other people are responsible for your happiness? Who blames other people for the unhappiness that you feel? Who blames others, in part, for the unhappiness that you feel in your life? And lastly, who believes that we have it in our power to be unbelievably happy?”
“So the question then is, what is it that is stopping you from being happier,” asks Seldon.
Sir Anthony Seldon provides an excellent introduction into the concept of happiness and how you have the power to either make yourself happy or unhappy. Business has caught onto this concept as an opportunity to improve productivity and profits. But how do you change an individual employees’ mindset? Here are a few thoughts from some experts.
Shock: Happiness Impacts Productivity!
“It’s not so shocking, it turns out that employee happiness impacts productivity in the work setting,” says Corbett Barr, Co-founder and CEO of Portland, Oregon based FizzleCo. “Of course, I know this probably isn’t news to you, but when I’m happy I know it’s really easy to get work done and when I’m bummed out or if something really negative happens it’s hard to find the motivation to do anything worthwhile.”
“I remember back when I worked in a big company environment, if my boss was a jerk it was really hard to get work done,” Barr added. “Likewise, if the company felt like it was going nowhere or if my results just weren’t being acknowledged, it was really hard to put in that extra effort.”
“But here’s the thing, this also applies to our work as entrepreneurs,” he said. “If you work for yourself, you’re the boss, so stop being such a jerk. Have fun once in awhile and your productivity will jump.”
How Do You Find Happiness at Work?
“It turns out that autonomy is a really big factor, meaning that if you have influence over where, when, and what you’re working on, it’s much easier to be happy and therefore productive in your work,” says Barr. “Of course as an entrepreneur it’s probably easier to have influence over these things then when you’re in a big corporate environments, but you still have to think about it.”
“The next step is to lower your stress and anxiety in all facets of your life, not just your work life,” explained Barr. “This means eating well, exercising regularly, getting enough sleep, avoiding caffeine and other stimulants, and making sure that you’re letting yourself have fun on a regular basis when building your own business. It’s really easy to feel like you have to be committed to your business 110% of the time, but this can lead to stress and burnout which leads to anxiety and depression which reduces your productivity which then makes you feel more stressed and more burned out. You can see how this cycle can start to spiral.”
“Take a breath and commit to spending less time on work and more time on staying healthy and having fun,” recommends Barr. “Your work will improve dramatically because of it.
Happy Employees Increase the Bottom Line
“I saw this news piece (last year) about happiness in the workplace and about how some companies were embracing these new workshops, teaching employees how to be happy,” noted Stephen Goldberg is the founder and president of Optimus Performance, which offers companies training programs to help motivate and improve the productivity of their employees. “I thought that was really interesting.”
“One of the company’s was a pharmaceutical Sanofi here in Montreal another one was Kohl’s in the United States,” said Goldberg. “They were saying how the happiness workshops were paying off fantastically in terms of improved productivity and Sanofi said it actually created an increase of about 40 percent in productivity and the bottom line.”
“So yes, you can provide motivation to people in the form of teaching people how to be more happier and I think that’s a great thing to do,” commented Goldberg. “But I think it’s a responsibility of each person to find their own happiness, because really happiness is an experience, it’s a feeling inside that we have and yes certain things that we do can cause that feeling.”
“It’s really something independent of everything we do on the outside,” he said. Otherwise, we’re always dependent on doing things or having things that are going to cause certain happiness.”
Employee Happiness is Contagious
“Imagine if everybody came with the mindset of appreciation and giving and helping each other in an organization,” exclaimed Goldberg. “That would really sparked teamwork and would also create a better performance, because people would be supporting each other much better.”
“Of course, the employer has a responsibility when it comes to performance, not just creating a happy workplace, but also providing the tools and the support so that people can do their jobs,” says Goldberg. “Even if they’re motivated for their work, they need those tools, support and direction. They need clarity to know what’s expected of them.”
Turning Your Brain Happier While You’re At Work
“We know that in the traditional business world, employees and managers think about happiness as something that you do at home, something that you do on your own time, that work is for work and that doesn’t necessarily make you happy,” says Eric Karpinski, Co-Founder and Director of Strategic Development of Potentia Labs, a neuroscience-based behavior change platform for enterprise talent development. “I want to turn that concept on its head.”
“I think it’s been turning over the last 10 to 20 years, people know that’s not really the core, but it’s still at the base of a lot of our assumptions around work, that it’s supposed to be something we are constantly focusing on,” he said. Karpinski says that research shows that happiness actually leads to success. “If you can find a way to turn your brain happier while you’re at work, it will give you all kinds of benefits.”
“You can increase your happiness,” he adds. “A lot of happiness and positive emotions in general are about choice. We can choose to feel happier.” Karpinski believes that by changing your habits you can actually rewire your brain so that you are more likely to “grab onto your happiness and notice the good things.”
“Happiness is infectious,” he says. “As each of us take on habits and start doing things that are going to help us be a little happier each day, we spread that out to our teams at work, to our families, to our communities and to our friends, and that lets everybody else tap into the benefits of being happier.”
Front-line employees are the employees that are the first to deal with customers such as the cashier, those working on the service floor or anyone dealing with customers face to face in the store, phone or email. It’s the first level of dealing with the customer at the lowest level in the organization.
Motivate, Don’t Educate
I think education is really focused on imparting knowledge. With front-line employees knowledge isn’t enough, you need to be showing them how to use that knowledge and showing them how to understand their own feelings and their own emotions. The motivational part is actually about getting them confident with the tools and the techniques so they feel more motivated to want to go out and do a good job.
A lot of front-line employees really have difficulty with the challenges of front-line service. And when they do they sort of turtle up and shell in and you want to bring them out of that and give them that confidence.
Customer Service Versus Customer Experience
Customer experience is the entire journey, the entire experience a customer has with the organization. Customer experience involves a marketing piece they may get or an email, it’s not just a point in time. Customer service in the traditional lens is a part of customer experience. It’s more about that one to one interaction and helping to serve you in the moment.
But that may not be the entire experience. Let’s say I’m working at a bookstore and I’m behind the counter, the customer service would be while I’m helping you. Customer experience may be were the isles cleaned, were they neat and organized? All of that feeds the experience or as we talked about the customer journey.
Mentality and Mindset
Mentality and mindset is what I really wish I knew and understood when I was young and on the front-lines. Not only understanding the customers mindset but what makes them tick and why they do what they do. Also my own mindset, why am I taking something personally, why can’t I depersonalize the situation, why am I getting upset when I don’t need to be? So many front-line people, they’re not experienced in the world or in business in a lot of cases and they don’t have these skills and this lens on how we all think.
We Still Have Caveman Brains
If you look at it from the standpoint of experience, what does every experience have in common? The are all filtered through this imperfect organ called the human brain, so it behooves us to understand how that human brain works. The good news is that we live in the golden age of psychology. We’ve learned more about neuroscience and what makes humans tick in the last few decades than we have probably ever known before. The bad news is what we have learned is that we are all basically irrational. Our mind is designed to take shortcuts.
If you look at sociology, society, digital technology, all of these things have evolved very rapidly, but our brains have evolved pretty slowly. We still have, unfortunately, caveman brains which are designed to make snap judgements to survive. These snap judgements aren’t that firm when it comes to customer experience.
Making Our Caveman Brains Work For Us
Here’s how you can apply these principals to customer experience. We’ve all heard of first impressions and their is a ton of research on first impressions and they all basically say the same thing. No matter what the study is, first impressions happen subconsciously and they happen very quickly.
There is another principal called confirmation bias and that is the principal that we all want to be right, which is why politics is so much fun. What we do is ignore the evidence that tells us we’re wrong and we accept the evidence that tells us we are right. When you combine those two things that’s an important factor when you are designing a customer experience. You take a first impression and you combine that with confirmation bias and what do you have? You have a bad first impression and you are already in the hole.
The human brain is trying to tell them that that first impression and what they already believe is correct. Similarly, there is something called negativity bias which is why the evening news always leads with something like ‘your microwave is going to kill you’. We are attuned to negative information, we are always looking to what’s a threat. We give more credence to negative information than to positive information, meaning if you give a bad experience it is going to be weighted heavier than a positive experience.
What I find fascinating from a customer experience standpoint is that you can use all these psychological principals and evaluate each touch point, each place where you come in contact with a customer and say how are we violating them, how are we prepared if we set those off? How are we prepared to deal with that or our team trained for that?
The Customer is the Customer
Customers can not only be wrong, they can be nuts and mean at times, all kinds of different things. The problem with the traditional concept of ‘the customer is always right’ is that the principal behind it got lost and the phrase carried over. That was from a time that their wasn’t customer service and they were trying to teach people that the customer is valuable, their opinion is valuable.
We try to look at it as the customer is the customer. That means that you and the customer are not on the same level. It’s called customer service and we are there to serve the customer. They are our focus and they are not there to give to us. They should be decent of course and there are some lines they shouldn’t cross, but big picture, it’s customer service and we’re there to serve.
We know what a customer is in modern times and if you are a customer centric organization, what you are doing, your actions, your processes, your systems should all be revolving around the customer.
Closing a B2B sale is a process that involves understanding your customer and making them believe that your product or service will without a doubt improve their business. Your entire sales process should be built around that principal.
9 Expert Tips on Closing B2B Sales:
1. “How do you get your 1%?,” asks Ravi Kompella, Director, Enterprise Sales for Salesforce. “I guess the best way to address this is by going back to the drawing board and figure out if you have done everything REALLY well. Keeping your customer warm throughout the sales cycle can give you information you never thought would get, which in turn can be used to get your 1%.”
2. “In the past, sales people were taught that skills such as ‘pitching’, ‘differentiation’ (USP’s) and ‘closing’ were essential for winning business,” writes Laurie Smith, Director & Executive Coach. “Nowadays, these ‘techniques’ have no relevance in the modern business environment. They need to take on a far wider range of skills and competencies that they may not have been aware of or exposed to before (that of a researcher, educator, negotiator, accomplished communicator, business expert, insight-provider, trusted adviser and value creator).”
3. “Forget closing tactics,” says Jeffrey Gitomer, King of Sales author and speaker. “They’re worn. They’re awkward. They’re manipulative. And they don’t put you in a very “professional” light. What you have failed to uncover is the prospect’s motive to buy what you’re selling. You’re looking for a tactic when what you really need is a better strategy.”
4. “Why didn’t you hang up already?” asks Steli Efti, the CEO at CEO at Close.io. “I’m sure you’ve hung up on many other people who cold called you, so why are you still on the line with me? Why did you open my email or respond to it? What exactly about my email sparked your interest? Ask this question early in the conversation. The answer will guide your approach to the conversation, tell you which angle to use when conveying benefits of your product, and which questions to ask to keep them engaged. It’s a shortcut to gaining real insights into their wants and needs, so you have a more targeted conversation.”
5. “In other words, if you’ve earned the right to ask for a sale, ask for the sale then say nothing,” writes Lewis Greene, Recruitment Director at Globaleye Wealth Management. “The temptation to talk is great but once you learn how to resist the temptation and how to close your mouth, your sales closing percentages will increase.”
6. “Master closers know the outcome long before they get to the end of the process and the reason is; they have a well-qualified prospect, they know the prospect’s dominant buying motives, they have identified all the potential objections before they were even expressed, they have carefully observed the various buying signals from the prospect and they gave an effective and interactive presentation,” said David Shultz, CEO & President of Market Share Consultants. “They know long before they ask their closing question what the answer will be.”
7. “Don’t worry about closing the sale, instead, focus on making a authentic connection with your customer,” says Dale Carnegie instructor Doug Stewart. “Asking quality questions about their work their needs and their life. This will open the door for you to talk about your product. Once they trust you and believe you have their best interest in mind, they will buy from you if you have a product that will in fact meet their needs. All you will need to do is ask.”
8. “It is vital NOT to use a close before you have confirmed that your prospect is ready to make a commitment,” writes Australian sales guru Peter McKeon. “If you do, they will feel pressured and the stress level will go up. Use a trial close instead. You should make closing easy and natural, not uncomfortable. Once you know it’s time to ask for a commitment you don’t need any tricky closing techniques. A simple question to gain commitment is all that is needed.”
9. “A deep understanding of your client and the political process they must navigate within their organizations is essential to how to make a sale,” says John Shea, CEO of the Alignment Group. “There is no comparable step in the buyer’s journey to what is happening politically within your prospect’s organization. The people, process, politics, agendas, and other projects on the plate are unique to each company. Understanding the political landscape, players and agendas is well beyond the buyer’s journey and sales process, but critical to closing leads; inbound and outbound.”
Amy Karam, author of the book, The China Factor:Strategies to Compete, Grow and Win in the New Global Economy, recently was interviewed at Google’s Mountain View campus, providing insight for companies to better compete.
“The main intention of “The China Factor” is to equip western-based companies with strategies and tactics and knowledge to better compete with emerging entrants like those from China,” says Karam. “China has risen, they’re doing a great job, there a strong force in our economy and they do business differently. The premises is that we as western-based companies need to change our game. We need to know that emerging competitors have different approaches and we need to be more creative about that.”
“The other element is the innovation advantage and how do we protect or maintain and evolve our innovation advantage?” she asks. “How did China become so strong? What are the strengths and weaknesses of each side, the West and the East?”
Working for Cisco in China Was Eye Opening
Karam’s time at Cisco where she was involved in the Cisco sales strategy shaped her opinions of how Western companies can better compete. “The results were eye opening,” she said. “Wow, this isn’t business as usual. It’s not like our domestic competitors. It’s not a product superiority play anymore, where it’s like my box is better than your box so I’ll win the business. That’s not what was happening in emerging markets and especially with some emerging competitors.”
“That was the catalyst for me to say, wow, this is not a trend, this is not a blip, this is here to stay.” She noted some big competitive differences with Chinese companies. “First is the severe price discounting and that’s no shocker right? Most of us know that that’s generally a pretty consistent market penetration strategy, but there was really no bottom to it. I encountered a lot of escalations where they say, hey my competitors just discounted me by another 25% and I need approval for another discount. We realized that wasn’t going to be a successful strategy for either competitor and even for the customer, it wasn’t a winning game.”
“Another big thread was financing, which we didn’t really get into very much as a Western based company but that’s a a real helpful tool for emerging customers. This competitor would help them with financing and to an extreme degree. Sometimes they would help finance over a very long
period of time and that was a real great value to these emerging markets customers.”
“Another huge trend that came up was the use of politics to influence business decisions,” Karam said. “We’re like whoa, where did that come from what do we do about that? I would get escalated complaints from emerging markets that we’ve been working this deal for two years, we had in the bag and in the eleventh hour they would just say it was a an influence from above and we have no idea where it came from. It was government-to-government influencing for business decisions at a more granular level.”
What Can Western companies Do at the Practical Level?
“For those who are business geeks, you know there are the 4 P’s of marketing… product, price, place, promotion, so I created the 5th “P” which is politics,” said Karam. “I created the 5 P’s of Global Marketing framework. Because this has become such a a big world but it’s small at the same time, we need market access, we want to play and other peoples sandboxes, but there are certain rules and there are certain limitations that we need to encounter. When Google pulled out of China in 2010 for censorship reasons that was a big decision and the implications were huge. You could have affected 1.5 billion people in terms of access to knowledge, but there were really good reasons and those were the the boundaries within which a Western based company decided that they did not want to operate.”
“Recent headlines say that Google is going back in,” says Karam. “So market access is really important and reach is really important, so the political element is knowing that co-oppetition is is the new element. It’s an integral part of a strategy going forward, it’s not us versus them. It’s how do we all play together within our own boundaries and desirables to get ultimately the success that we need. That’s it at a high level.”
“Then how do we at the working level deal with politics?” she asks. “Politics even happens at the organizational level and generally there’s a pretty negative connotation to politics, but it’s really important, we can’t ignore it anymore, we we need to embrace it and apply it.
“So how do we apply it from a sales perspective is to educate the sales teams on some of the tools available from the US government and the local governments in the different countries,” asks Karam. “How can they engage with their own government to help influence their own sales locally? Reaching out to the consulates, how do you get them involved, how do you know that some of these deal opportunities are happening early on in the game? There may be unfair trade issues that you’re experiencing so that maybe some intervention sooner rather than later so it’s not at the eleventh hour when we oftentimes hear about it.”
“We’re also organizationally changed and we’re able to convince the senior vice president of government affairs to shift the focus from just a policy perspective to helping with sales objectives,” she says. “Using the influence that they have in the government affairs group for more of the end result in terms of numbers and not just policy has been very effective.”
How Should Western Companies Evolve and Change?
“Very simply, go global,” says Karam. “A lot of times Western based companies have been hesitant to go global. The second part is let’s move out of emerging markets being a novelty. I think a lot of Western based companies dabble in emerging markets thinking it’s really cool, it’s let’s try it out let’s throw a few people and in there and see how it works out, and then… oh no, not making the ROI that we need so we need to pull out. It needs to be a longer-term investment, it needs to be a commitment and you need to know that it’s it’s not just a temporary thing.”
“Make sure that your product development is catering or customizing to local customer needs,” she says. “We can’t just recycle, saying this is a mature product in this market and let’s just throw it over the fence and see if they’re going to like our old product.
How Can Western Companies Maintain Their Innovation Advantage?
“Every company, East to West, really wants to be innovative because that’s where the next phase of growth comes from,” says Karam. “We see contingents of emerging folks coming to Silicon Valley wanting to learn the secret of how is Silicon Valley innovative, how do you do it how do you become creative? But the idea is that we have to also be creative – we have to be innovative at being innovative, so you can’t just the rest on your laurels. This whole concept of innovation is evolving and as more players from different backgrounds are becoming innovative they’re bringing different business models.”
“Some business model innovations are coming from the East,” she says. “They’re really good and commercializing things and we’re really good at making things, really cool things, but they’re really good at making money yet from really cool things or even making money from ok cool things.”
“We also talked about supply chain or process innovation,” said Karam. “There’s the reputation of manufacturing, they’ve got it down. One venture capitalist who I interviewed for the book says, you know all this business about bringing manufacturing back to America, we don’t have the efficiencies, we don’t have the ecosystems yet to do that, and some of the Eastern countries do. We need to either establish that ecosystem or just understand that there’s there’s a different source of innovation happening out there.”
“What I’m saying s let’s get more creative, let’s figure out what’s our what’s our innovation 2.0,” she says. “How are we going to step up our game and learn from others as well?”
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half,” said marketing pioneer John Wanamaker in the early 1900’s. That is why CRM software was invented and why it is used by every serious marketer. In today’s “Big Data” World, enterprises are making not just marketing decisions, but almost ALL decisions based on data analytics.
“Big Data holds the potential to describe target customers with an accuracy and level of detail unfathomable only a decade ago,” said Jean Spencer on the SalesForce blog, who is a Product Marketing Manager at Microsoft and was previously the content marketing manager at Kapost. “While old-school marketing efforts were limited to things like tracking returns on direct mail campaigns, or number of subscribers to newsletters, modern marketers can have data on people’s exercise habits, digital clicking behavior, time spent on various sites, purchasing history, personal preferences based on social media postings, time awake, time spent in the car, caloric intake, and almost anything else you can imagine.”
SalesForce is at the epicenter of data, marketing and sales. They offer this overview of the concept:
Using Data To Make Better Marketing Decisions
A report by the Aberdeen Group says that 44 percent of executives are dissatisfied with the analytic capabilities available to them and that they often make critical decisions based on inaccurate or inadequate data. That was in 2014 and fortunately CRM has improved dramatically since then and executives are now typically integrating CRM solutions into their marketing platforms.
“No longer do we rely on conclusions based on vague and imprecise relationships such as “we advertised last week and sales increased so it must have worked” or the common one that I’ve heard many times, “the objective was awareness and clearly many people are now aware of us”, said Gerald Chait who is Director/CEO of Marketing By Objectives. “In today’s world, this just does not cut it anymore.”
Chait added in a blog post, “Gone are the days when we would define roughly segmented target audiences and place an ad hoping someone would purchase something. Today’s marketing enables us to identify who to work with to make a sale, right down to the individual level. What’s more, we can personalize and customize our advertising and messaging to each specific person, no matter how many people there are. We can even customise and personalize website pages depending on who’s viewing them.”
It’s often referred to as predictive marketing, gathering data to learn what is working and what isn’t using precise analytical strategies and technologies in order to finely tune your marketing.
“Predictive marketing is the application of predictive technology to the entire marketing process, across the entire buyer’s journey, and across every channel of communication,” says Eli Snyder, Associate Technology Director of Strategy at Intelligent Demand. “It means not only having predictive insight into the future through predictive analytics, but also using that insight to make better decisions about who and how to engage, and then build better content, campaigns and programs.”
“In order to execute your marketing strategy in the most effective way, you’ll need your business management platform (or CRM) and marketing automation tools to work together seamlessly; using one to generate leads, and the other to maintain them, so you can get a complete picture of your business,” said Mark Sokol who is the VP of Product Marketing and Branding at ConnectWise.
The Intersection of Marketing & CRM is Leads
CRM and marketing are now tightly integrated in order to make marketing more efficient and and successful. “In the past, the marketing campaign stops here in the CRM software system and the rest is carried out externally,” said Denise Holland, VP & Senior Analyst of Genesys Advisory in the CRMsearch blog. “In today’s world, the right customer relationship management system can create the message, compile your target list, distribute your messaging pursuant to an automated schedule, capture the replies and inquiries from these marketing placements, route them to the right sales person or department, track the sale opportunity progress, record the successful sale event and calculate the campaign ROI.”
“This CRM system can also advise the best time to call or email your customers, what type of messaging will illicit the best response, if your customer is really serious or just shopping around, how you can improve your products and services, and what new products and services your R&D department should focus on next,” he says.
“CRM has one common component to help you make marketing decisions, Leads, says Joe CRM on the PowerObjects blog. “Lead data allows you to gauge how healthy your marketing is, what works and what doesn’t, and lets you understand lead quality. In today’s post, we’ll provide some lead data sources from CRM you can use to help make marketing decisions.”
Joe at PowerObjects says you need to know where your leads are coming from. “Some examples of lead sources include outbound cold calls, email, chat, website form submission, and events,” he said. “Keeping the lead source simple lets you use a different field, source campaign, to describe the lead source in more detail as needed.”
He says that knowing where leads come from drives marketing decisions such as:
Number of employees needed for the inside sales team
Budget disbursement for paid advertising
Landing page success
P&L for events attended
Create a Data-Driven Culture
“To cultivate a data-driven culture within your organization, it’s important to remember that without data, you’re simply another person with an opinion,” commented MeetMe CTO Jonah Harris on the NGDATA blog. “All too often, with valuable data and insights in hand, people remain invested in their own hunches and intuition.”
“Transitioning to a genuine data-driven culture is a challenge for many organizations, but one of the ideal first steps is to start leveraging the data your business has to guide evidence-based decision making,” added Vaclav Shatillo of Business Intelligence at Clutch. “When data reinforces or, better yet, contradicts the gut feeling, the conversation around the importance of a data-driven approach is bound to begin.”
At what frequency the data is needed to make actionable decision, and
How to package the data so it can be easily digested, analyzed and reacted to.
Find other great advice from a variety of experts quoted about how to create a data-driven culture here.
Darren Catalano, the CEO of HelioCampus offers some great tips on building a data-driven culture that can be applied to any business:
Data is Marketing Gold
“Data isn’t an overwhelming set of facts and figures,” said Megan Totka is the Marketing Director for ChamberofCommerce.com. “It’s marketing gold. It shows you what your customers want and how to get your customers to buy from you.”
Joe CRM says that the “data you receive from leads that turn into opportunities and then end up as customers is a goldmine.” He says, “This data alone can give your company direction and help you find your niche. That’s why when you use your closed as won accounts it should be for a macro view of your marketing processes. This is the data executives want to see from marketing because it helps prove ROI or that the money spent was worthwhile.”
Data that can power your successful marketing strategy is sometimes found in places that you don’t expect. “New marketing technology, measurement platforms and other advances have greatly expanded the sources that marketers can sift through for nuggets of information,” said Eva Rohrmann, the director of solutions and customer lifecycle marketing for PR Newswire. ”
Rohrmann says that the “most useful data that will turn strategic, positioning and tactical efforts into gold oftentimes is hiding right under your nose: with other teams within your organization.” She believes that ideas and data are “streaming” from many directions, “from sales to product to customer support.”
“Every team within your organization has a treasure trove of actionable marketing intelligence waiting to be discovered,” she says.
The marketing landscape is changing and that should make every CMO’s job easier because they are using justifiable logic instead of just gut intuition. In order for a company to reach their maximum sales potential they must utilize data-driven CRM strategies.
“Marketing is currently undergoing a metamorphosis from a once qualitatively measured art towards a quantitatively driven science,” said Eamonn O’Raghallaigh, the Managing Director of Digital Strategy. on the company’s blog. “This paradigm shift will indeed lead to significant impacts on the competitive landscape; with the bias towards companies who adopt and embrace a data-centric culture within their organization.”
Sharon Gillenwater, Founder of Boardroom Insiders and their CXO Engagement Strategy Expert posted an article today on the Saleforce blog making the point that LinkedIn should just be a starting point for sales people selling to CXOs. You can make the case that her article is self promotional since what she says to do, learn more about the CXOs you are selling to, is exactly what her company Boardroom Insiders brings to the table, but her point is spot on and should be written big and bold on posters of all sales team offices.
“If you are an enterprise sales or marketing pro focused on C-suite selling, LinkedIn is not a silver bullet,” said Gillenwater. “It simply does not provide the insight required to engage a Fortune 500 key decision maker. In fact, LinkedIn can give you a false sense of security going into important meetings. You think you have done your due diligence by looking at a few LinkedIn profiles, but halfway through the meeting it can become painfully apparent that you don’t know what you don’t know.”
The idea is simple enough, don’t put your foot in your mouth by NOT KNOWING what is easily knowable. Has the company recently been acquired? Did the Chief Marketing Officer that you are meeting with write a company blog post last week where she blasted a competitor that you were going to reference as similar to them? Did the Germany based IT Manager that you were planning to lunch with to discuss your company’s tech solution post a YouTube conference presentation where he mocked the unprofessional state of tieless tech guys?
You might just wear a tie to that lunch meeting! It’s important to know your potential customer before you speak to them and even before you email them. The more you know, the more likely you will be to sell them. As Gillenwater says, “An executive is not going to write in her LinkedIn profile: “I hate jargon, so don’t use it when you meet with me.””
“You’ll need everything available publicly online, from media interviews and Twitter posts to the latest quarterly earnings call transcripts, industry news, and corporate press releases,” says Gillenwater. “Selling to CXOs requires a commitment to knowing what’s on their minds and guiding their decisions—and keeping up with that as it changes.”
“How do you price your good or service? It’s one of those questions that you have to have an answer for on day one. And you really, really want to get the right answer,” says John Henry, entrepreneur, venture capitalist and host of eBay’s Open for Business Podcast. “It all starts back in 2008 when a guy named Terry Kniess did something on The Price is Right that hadn’t been done in four decades. He did something that every business owner can learn a valuable lesson from.” What the now legendary Terry Kniess did was “guess” the exact price of $23,473 to win the Showcase prizes in 2008.
What did Terry Kniess and his wife do that entrepreneurs can learn from? Study the data. Once Kniess and his wife decided to attend a Price is Right taping they decided that it would be a good idea to study the show by recording episodes and watching the show looking for clues. “After we decided that that was where we were going to go, I said if we’re going to the Price is Right, let’s do it correctly,” Kniess told Henry. “I said, let’s study the show, and we’ll go in the fall.”
“We’d sit down every night and watch the show and look at the prizes that were up for grabs that day, and we started making a little mental list, of ‘Oh, this has been on before,” said Kniess. “And the first thing we noticed, was that the prizes repeated… and the prices never changed!” That key piece of information was the trick that Kniess used to predict the price of his showcase. “Do your homework. Do your homework. Do your homework.”
Lesson One: Do Your Homework
“Do your homework sounds really simple, but it can feel daunting when you’re first starting out,” stated John Henry, the 23-year-old Dominican-American entrepreneur and founder of the startup accelerator Cofound Harlem and the podcast host. “How do you go about taking all the work and expense, the blood, the sweat, and the tears you’ve put into your business, and distilling all of that into a single number, the price of your product?” Henry noted that picking the wrong price can be disaterous, even leading to business failure. He says, “Do your homework. That’s lesson one. Everything starts there. The thing is, doing your homework used to take a lot of time. In the past, companies had to send people to actual physical stores all over the country, in order to get information about their competitors’ prices and set a baseline number. Now there are tons of e-commerce sites that can help you find the right price. And one of those sites is eBay.”
“I like to think of eBay as sort of like the Kelley Blue Book of everything,” stated Zoher Karu, Chief Data Officer at eBay. “We have such a vast number of items for sale. I think it’s around 900 million now, and eBay, of course, has brand new inventory, but it also has, for example, last season’s model. Or it has maybe a refurbished version. The used version. So it’s that breadth and depth of inventory and sales histories that allows us to think of the Kelley Blue Book of everything.”
In essence, eBay should be used to validate all of your product price points before you add them to your ecommerce website or on eBay itself.
“If you do it right, you can bear fruit for a long time, and if you do it wrong, which is what happens in most cases, you’re digging out of a hole for a long time,” commented Mickey Goodman, who has worked for Kraft and Unilever and has taught classes on pricing strategy at NYU Stern and is now a Professor of Business & Entrepreneurship at Savannah College of Art and Design. Henry points out that most small business owners do something called “cost-based pricing,” and it’s a really bad idea. “Let’s take it back to when I was setting prices for dry cleaning at my first company, Mobile City,” explained Henry. “I called all the dry cleaners in the area, and pretended to be an interested customer. I asked how much for a shirt, how much for a blazer. Eventually, they’d get suspicious and stop giving prices to me over the phone, so I’d get my girlfriend at the time to call. And then, once I knew the price range I was working with, I decided to charge just a little bit more for the service than what it cost me to provide it. In business speak, this is called “cost-based pricing.” And in my case, and lots of other cases, it’s a mistake.”
“That’s what people intuitively do because it kind of makes common sense, which is you take your costs and you say ‘I’d like to make a 20% profit,’ you know, whatever it is,” replied Goodman. “And you add 20% to your costs and you say here’s my price.”
Henry drives the point home with a personal story that all business owners can learn from:
“If you go the cost-based route, you risk underselling yourself and leaving a lot of money on the table. It can cost you your business. It nearly cost me mine. I remember sitting in the living room with my Pops. I was crunching the numbers. I usually did it every Sunday and I realized I was gaining customers, but actually losing money. And that’s because I simply was not charging enough. I called a mentor of mine, and I’ll never forget what he told me. He said, ‘John, you’re delivering five star quality at McDonald’s prices.’ That conversation saved my company. The very next day, I immediately raised my prices. And while I lost a bunch of my customers at first, I ultimately found a new clientele that weren’t as price sensitive. They were happy to pay a premium for the service I provided. This brings us to lesson two: don’t set a price based on what it costs you to make something. Instead, set the price based on what your customers think that thing is worth. This is what Mickey calls “value-based pricing.””
Lesson Two: Use Value-Based Pricing
“It’s based around the concept of you know when people are buying a good or service it’s ‘cause it’s fulfilling some need for them,” stated Goodman. “Now at the most basic level if they’re thirsty and they buy a bottle of water the need is that they were thirsty.” Henry replied, “So lesson number two: value-based pricing. Price your product based on how much it’s worth to your potential customers.”
There is also the question of how to determine value. Jon Wirt, Head of Marketing for Pushd, tests the market for its new products by having people come in and give their feedback on the product, price and value. “How much do you think this costs to buy and what is the max you personally would pay for it,” Wirt asked a beta tester in reference to their new digital picture frame product called the Aura.
Tester: “I think something like this is probably worth $150. I would not pay more than more than $225.”
Wirt tells the beta tester the actual price is $399.
Tester: “Yeah, that’s expensive for the size. I could see if it bled all the way up to the end, I would consider paying $399, but as-is I wouldn’t pay $399.”
“It’s a weird experience to come in and do that,” Wirt said. “Like, you came into a beta test, you’re getting paid, you’re using something that’s half finished in a room where I’m videotaping you and writing down notes. It’s like an awkward experience. And then you’re like guessing this number. I don’t expect them to get it right.”
“I have to ask, you’re framing it like they’re getting the answer wrong,” stated Frances Harlow, Branded Content Producer at Gimlet Media and one of this podcasts producers. “But what if you guys are getting the answer wrong and how do you know that you’re not getting the answer wrong?” Wirt replied, “Until you launch, you don’t really know.” Harlow added, “What Pushd is facing is a problem that lots of business owners face. When we consumers are presented with a product, we naturally and immediately make mental comparisons. We ask ourselves, ‘What is this thing like?’ And then we form our opinion about what the price should be. And in the beta testers case, I got a clue about how this works when Jonathan brought up the iPad, and the tester described his mental comparisons.”
Lesson Three: Manipulate Your Comparisons
“And this challenge that Pushd is facing gets to our third lesson,” stated Henry. “As a business owner, you have to manipulate your comparisons.” Henry elaborated, “Position your product in the marketplace so when people inevitably compare it to similar products out there, they’ll feel like they’re getting a good deal.”
“What you want to do is differentiate your offering so much that there is no straightforward comparison,” added Ruth Bolton who is Professor of Marketing at the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University and formerly worked in R&D at Verizon for years helping them with their pricing. “You have something that’s somewhat unique.”
“There’s always, in a sense, a competitive offering in that there’s some substitute that the customer will make if they can’t buy the service or the product that you’re offering,” said Bolton. “So it really comes down to kind of benefits per dollar.”
“One other point about manipulating comparisons — or the kinder, gentler way of saying it: creating favorable comparisons,” added Harlow.” One way to position your product in the marketplace is to literally position it, in the right environment. So with Pushd, they want you to think “fancy home decor” when you see the Aura.”
“Well if they want to do that, it might just be helpful to put them in a “fancy, home decor” showroom with the Aura, not a startup’s temporary office space,” said Henry. “And there’s one more thing Ruth would do differently, she doesn’t ask open-ended questions about prices, the way that Jonathan does at Pushd. What she would do is ask each customer a single yes or no question.” Bolton responded, “Would you buy it or not and then you do it with somebody else, would you buy it or not?”
“You don’t push back and you don’t ask how they arrived at that number,” said Henry. “And that’s because it’s more realistic. With pricing, it’s almost always a yes or no question. Would you buy it or not?” Bolton added that “you start varying the price and so you can kind of sort of start to figure out, what the shape of that demand curve is.”
“The shape of the demand curve is what we’ve been talking about this whole time… how to set a price,” said Henry. “There is no guaranteed way to pick the perfect price, but there are concrete steps you can take to get close.”
John Henry’s four steps to picking the perfect price:
1. Do your homework. The good news? It’s now easier than ever with all the data we’re gathering from e-commerce sites, like eBay. That will give you a range of prices.
2. Once you’ve found that range, be bold. Pick a number that reflects the value you bring to your customers, not just your own production costs.
3. Create favorable comparisons. Position your product so that customers feel like they’re getting a fair deal, and one way to position your product is to pay close to attention to how you’re physically positioning it.
4. Be prepared to repeat steps one through three. Prices change. They’re dynamic. That’s part of why they’re so hard to set in the first place. Even on the Price Is Right. After Terry’s spectacular win,, the show’s producers switched it up. The show now features all-new prizes, and guess what? Their prices change.
Hootsuite announced that it has acquired Sales Prodigy, a mobile app aimed at helping sales organizations tap into social selling opportunities.
The app, which was previously part of Hootsuite’s App Directory, surfaces selling opportunities for you on social media, where it helps you start conversations with prospects and customers in real time.
Hootsuite VP of corporate development Matt Switzer commented on the news, “Many organizations have invested in social marketing and social support, but there’s a big gap in the market for social selling solutions, and we want to address it. Companies like Palms Hotel and Marketo already use Hootsuite as part of their lead generation efforts. With the addition of Sales Prodigy, we’re bolstering our platform to better align with our customers needs for social selling.”
Sales Prodigy founder and CEO Mik Lernout added, “We started Sales Prodigy to help sales people build rewarding relationships with customers on social media. Hootsuite has been by our side every step of the way: as an inspiration, customer, and partner. We’ve been impressed by their ruthless focus on providing their customers with best in breed solutions, and could not be more excited to join their team.”
In announcing the news Hootsuite points to a report from Altimeter, which found that 64% of organizations have or plan to have a social selling program, and that simply teaching sales teams to use social tools isn’t enough.
You can find that “2015 State of Social Business” report here.
In 2014, Salesforce launched Community Cloud, propelling itself into the fast-growing enterprise collaboration market. Last year, it launched Wave Analytics.
Now, the company is introducing Wave for Community Cloud, which gives businesses analytics tools that can be applied across their partner ecosystems.
“We’ve heard it before: Selling is a team sport,” says Salesforce’s Jamie Domenici. “Companies across the manufacturing, high-tech, consumer packaged goods, financial services industries and more rely on an extensive network of resellers, distributors, brokers, franchises and agents to drive growth. In fact, thousands of Salesforce customers are already using the Salesforce Community Cloud to better manage relationships and foster collaborative selling, planning and knowledge sharing amongst their channel partner ecosystem. And they’re seeing results — Community Cloud customers report an 86 percent increase in cross-sell and upsell opportunities. Now with Wave, customers can further extend the power of Community Cloud by arming partners with the same sales insights that a company’s own reps leverage to accelerate growth.”
“Wave for Community Cloud enables customers to embed Wave Analytics dashboards into any Partner Community, providing channel partners with the insights they need to optimize sales,” Domenici adds. “Previously, partner managers couldn’t see all of their data in one place and would spend time reconciling spreadsheets or searching disparate systems looking for insights on what worked in the past. And worse, partner sales reps would often be left guessing which deals to focus on or wasting time following up on the wrong opportunities. But when armed with personalized, data-driven sales insights, channel partners are able to unlock new sales opportunities and close deals faster, as if they are a true extension of a company’s sales team.”
You can check out a demo here:
According to the company, the offering will help channel partners better understand their own business by way of interactive performance summaries and historical trends. Dashboards can utilize data from any source, and security permissions can be personalized for visibility on a partner-by-partner basis.
Columbus Day sales are happening at stores around the United States as well as online. As you’d expect, Twitter is full of reactions to the controversial holiday and its related sales.
Many are cracking jokes at the expense of Christopher Columbus and ultimately the holiday itself. Here’s a sample.
The BMW dealership said they were having a Columbus Day sale. So I can just walk in, grab the keys to a 6 and say "I discovered this?"
As you can see, it’s mostly variations on the same joke, and most aren’t being nearly as original as they might think. Still, it’s clear that a lot of people have similar sentiments about the merits of Columbus Day sales.
Others are just more generally expressing disgust at the concept of Columbus Day sales, and more still are looking for some deals (of which there are plenty). One store has buy one, get one 50% off on Crocs.
According to Apple, the iPhone 6s had the best opening weekend in the history of iPhone opening weekends.
The company says it sold over 13 million new iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus models in the first three days of availability.
“Sales for iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus have been phenomenal, blowing past any previous first weekend sales results in Apple’s history,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “Customers’ feedback is incredible and they are loving 3D Touch and Live Photos, and we can’t wait to bring iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus to customers in even more countries on October 9.”
The opening weekend saw sales to Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, New Zealand, Puerto Rico, Singapore, the UK and the US.
On October 9th, the new phones will arrive in Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Greenland, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Isle of Man, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Maldives, Mexico, Monaco, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and Taiwan. On October 10th, Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates. And finally, Malaysia and Turkey on October 16th.
Apple hopes to have the iPhone 6s in 130 countries by the end of 2015.
Anyone like accurate data-driven predictions? Here was a good one.
Foursquare, which has gotten out of the check-in business (well at least they’ve put it off to the side) and focused more on local recommendations, has a lot of location data at its disposal.
And it recently used said data to make a prediction about this weekend’s iPhone 6s mania.
According to Foursquare, Apple will sell between 13 and 15 million new iPhones this weekend. That would be a record for the company.
To make this prediction, Apple looked at historical foot traffic to Apple stores leading up to previous launches, as well as Apple’s public sales data.
“For each launch, visits to the Apple stores spike in the week leading to launch day with a major spike on launch day and shortly thereafter. Over the last three years, foot traffic has increased by 200 to 300 percent on launch days over the average Friday,” says Foursquare.
“Looking at Apple earning reports from the same period, we can assess how launch weekend sales volumes perform versus normal weeks. In 2012, Apple reported sales of around 5 million units — an increase of around 140% over the normal weekly sales volumes that quarter. In 2013 and 2014, Apple sold around 9 and 10 million units, an increase of around 245% and 230% respectively.”
Based on this link, Apple says foot traffic at Apple stores this Friday will push 360% that of a normal Friday.
Of course, a lot more goes into sales that foot traffic and historical sales data. But Foursquare’s prediction isn’t that much higher than Apple’s own shipping figures.
