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Customer Experience is Your ONLY Differentiator. You’re About To Be Rewarded or Punished.

Forget about your company’s historical point of differentiation. Customer Experience reigns supreme today and you will either be rewarded or punished for how you are treating your customers.

Lately I have been digging deep into what sets companies apart these days. In an age where you can launch any product or service you can dream up with surprisingly little cash, you can rule out historical concepts around “speed to market”, “cost efficiency” and “uniqueness”. When it comes right down to it, the only point of differentiation left today is the customer experience itself.

I recently had an incredible interview with Kevin Cochrane, who is the CMO of Jahia, a digital experience management provider. He is also a member of the board at Digital Clarity Group and, previously, he was CMO at OpenText and former VP of Enterprise Marketing at Adobe. I encourage you to watch the entire interview on YouTube.

In this interview, Mr. Cochrane discusses all three waves of digital marketing and, as someone who has been in the digital marketing industry since its inception, I can attest to his accuracy of how we got from 1994 to today. The focus of this article, however, is the current wave of digital marketing because we have reached the defining moment for companies and how they are leveraging all of their tools to deliver on an incredible customer experience (or not).

Your future depends on how you deliver on your customer experience. This is a deep dive as to why and what you must do in order to succeed the third wave of digital marketing. Here are the profound insights from Mr. Cochrane:

Delivering on the Next Generation of Customer Experience
To deliver on the next generation of customer experience, it’s not about targeting, personalization and acquisition; it’s about what happens when you already are a customer and login. I expect you to know me by name, my preferences and everything I want to buy from you or have bought from you. It’s all 100% personally identifiable information. Every single employee needs to know exactly who I am. And this is scary for people because your digital life IS your life.

Brands need to protect this personally identifiable information and this is a shift. It’s no longer just about your credit card information. It’s about protecting all of your personally identifiable information and not selling it to 3rd parties.

Now layer in the data coming out of the Internet of Things and it’s super scary as someone knows where you are at every second of the day.

With Deeply Personal Data Comes Great Responsibility
To win, you need to know the intimate details about your customers. From when they wake up to when they go to sleep and what dreams and aspirations they have. But, at the same time, that’s the very same data that makes it so valuable to steal from you.

What do you do about that? You not only need the infrastructure to empower your employees to analyze customer data in real-time, but you also have to put the governance in place to empower the consumer to know what data you’re collecting, why you’re collecting it, how long you’re keeping it and how they can delete it.

That’s what we do here at Jahia. I thought it wouldn’t happen until 2020, but we’re here now because of targeted breaches that have sped up the rapid adoption.

Breaking the Customer Experience Bottleneck
How do you break the customer experience bottleneck? Specifically, the personalization and context bottleneck? Today, in order to deliver the right content in context, you typically have a small team of people who test and optimize using all the data analytics and insights. In order to deliver true 1:1 personalized customer experiences, you need to break this bottleneck. This is about empowering your team to connect (1:1) with their audiences.

Aggregate context across all the silos, then give it to subject matter experts so that they can make an informed decision about writing content. Who am I writing this content for? You have 10,000 people writing content, but they don’t have access to the right data for personalization and context. Empower people to do their jobs well. All content must have the proper context.

This is the democratization of big data (vs. “power mongers”).

Companies must be comfortable with losing control of their content marketing, empowering the entire organization with the data insights they need to create the content that your customers are hungry for.

Balance Access with Governance
Give responsibility and authority to subject matter experts. You also need a governance framework – the bumper rails – so that your team doesn’t (unintentionally) do harm. So it’s about locking down the data. Who gets access to what data? How long do they have access to it (making sure they don’t have access to the data for a longer period of time than they should)? And we’re going to need to be transparent to the consumer about the data we’re collecting, why we’re collecting it, how long we’re holding it and we’re going to allow the consumer to make the choice about what should be anonymized, what should be deleted and we will NEVER sell that data to a 3rd party.

Every marketer will have access to every customer they are touching and targeting and every consumer will have trust because they will be able to click a Jahia-powered website privacy link to see what everyone in the company knows about you, and you can say what data you want anonymized, deleted and even where the data should be stored. The consumer will have control of their own data.

What Drove the 3 Waves of Digital Marketing: A Historical Context
Of the three waves of digital marketing, the first wave was a CIO-led wave. The first part of that first wave was infrastructure to power a brand experience online; CIOs ran the implementation of websites for their CMOs. But then continuing beyond that initial phase was web infrastructure to power things like extranets, web server portals, as well as to empower the entire employee experience with the roll-out of various portals such as intranets.

The second wave was purely a CMO-led wave around demand generation online tied to customer acquisition experiences that were both mobile and social.

What started to change in the early 2013 timeframe was the role of the CIO. This is because the technology in the marketing tech stack had relevance beyond the marketing acquisition. Employee engagement, for example, is critically important to drive the customer experience. Additionally, all of the targeting and personalization that you do for acquiring customers has relevance for your business partners. The CIO’s role, which before was much more focused on managing operational infrastructure, was now thinking much more strategically about leveraging the backbone of the digital business and taking the technologies that marketers were using to acquire customers and use them through the rest of the enterprise.

Beyond customer acquisition experiences, digital infrastructure was needed to empower the CIO to enable them to power the digital enterprise.

The third wave of digital marketing came faster than I ever expected. I thought it would be another 10 year cycle (like waves 1 & 2), but a couple of things accelerated it, like the union of CMOs and CIOs together to power next-generation business and customer analytics to drive targeted, personalized 1:1 experiences to build trusted, long-lasting brand relationships. The three things that occurred in rapid-fire succession were: (1) popularization of Apache Hadoop, (2) Big Data became a reality enabling the processing of real-time data sets and (3) in 2014 the Internet of Things took off. You suddenly had more sensors in more places in the home and work and that provided more data that you could process in real-time than you ever could before.

The Great Consumer (& CEO) Awakening of 2015
In 2015, consumers woke up and realized they were targets; that enterprises were collecting more data in more silos and yet they had no idea what data was being collected, why it was being collected, how long it was being maintained nor how it was being used for their benefit. The only people who really did know were the cyber criminals who were breaching enterprise security, primarily through smart phones, and causing catastrophic damage to people’s lives.

This was the dawn of the third wave. CEO’s woke up in 2016 and said to themselves that customer experiences are the only way we are going to be able to distinguish ourselves in the marketplace long-term. There is no other sustainable advantage. Product cycles are too short. Any person can start a company in a garage and have immediate access to global markets; switching costs are entirely low. There is no sustainable differentiation other than your customer experience. Your customer experience IS your brand.

But, there’s a challenge there. You spend a lot of money acquiring those customers. You spend a lot of money making them loyal brand advocates. But in one second, you can lose trust from that consumer and they will never go back to your brand again.

So the CEOs have two major goals: (1) drive a differentiated customer experience and (2) mitigate risk and damage to the brand by making sure they establish trust in the online and offline experiences by protecting consumer data and privacy. And those that don’t have this as a mission better wake up because it’s the law in Europe and, if you’re doing business in any European country, you do not want to get a fine as a percentage of your revenue. And you will because chances are you’re getting breached every single day – you just don’t know it.

Forrester says you will either be rewarded or you will be punished. You’re not going to spend money with someone you don’t trust or who is harming you.

Warren Buffett has said that “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.” This is just as true for the individual as the corporation these days. If you’re not managing the customer experience and the associated data you’re collecting properly, then you’re essentially dead.

On the flip side, if you’re giving the power back to your customers to control their own data (with respect to their engagements with you), then you are being given permission to provide incredible customer experiences for your best customers; this is the very thing that will allow you to not only survive but also thrive in this next wave of digital marketing. For more on this topic, I encourage you to watch the entire interview on YouTube.

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What Is a Chief Marketing Technologist?

We can no longer afford separate silos between marketing and IT. The rapid collapse of these silos means that one person must be able to converse seamlessly between both groups.

Haven’t met anyone with the title of “chief marketing technologist” yet? You will. It’s the ultimate culmination between the chief marketing officer (CMO) role and the chief information officer (CIO) role, and it’s growing in popularity.

The line between the CMO and the CIO has been blurring for years. The first time I came across this was at a 2013 Ad Age conference featuring Bob Lord (Global CEO) and Ray Velez (Global CTO), of Razorfish, who had just published their book,Converge: Transforming Business at the Intersection of Marketing and Technology. It’s a great book and I highly recommend it if you are interested in this topic. Their point is that at this time in our digital marketing history, marketing and technology musttranscend the very silos they have been neatly shoved into.

Naturally, the person best suited to collapse the marketing and technology functions within your company is someone who has been trained to handle both. Today, this is somewhat of a rare skill set, but it won’t be for long.

Gartner predicted this three years ago!

In February 2012, Forbes ran an article that read, “Five Years From Now, CMOs Will Spend More on IT Than CIOs Do.” Their main points to support this prediction were as follows:

  1. As we all know, marketing is becoming increasingly technology-based;
  2. Harnessing and mastering Big Data is now key to achieving competitive advantage; 
  3. Many marketing budgets already are larger and faster growing than IT budgets.

More recently, CIO published this article: “CIO-to-CMO Transition of Power Is Becoming a Reality”. CIO pointed out that the transition has happened faster than the five-year time horizon Gartner had predicted in 2012. The article argued that since most of today’s marketing is driven by data, CIOs are a natural fit to become the next generation of CMOs.

Who is playing the role of Chief Marketing Technologist today?

For this article, I interviewed Gary Shatswell at Sizzling Platter, LLC. His LinkedIn profile pegs his role as, chief information officer and VP of marketing. As the acting head of both marketing and IT, Gary Shatswell is a bonafide chief marketing technologist in role, even if he hasn’t officially received this exact title.

When learning more about Gary’s background, I discovered that, like many chief marketing technologists, Gary started in IT and worked his way up to the CIO role. As it became clear that today’s head of marketing is analyzing big data, building complex technology systems and architecture to manage customers and their loyalty, as well as marketing automation systems, all of this felt very familiar to Gary.

“I believe any CIO will initially feel a bit anxious about owning the marketing function in addition to their more traditional CIO role,” said Gary Shatswell, “but as CIOs discover that all of the most important information assets are currently being managed by the marketing department, migration from the role of CIO to chief marketing technologist feels like a natural evolution of the CIO’s role.”

What is so unique about the role of the chief marketing technologist?

The role itself is an acknowledgement of just how important the marketing group is to driving revenue within the organization and, when properly resourced, how today’s marketing information systems are driving the current and future growth of the business. If CIOs are not actively collaborating with their marketing counterparts, then there is a growing disconnect between the role of the CIO and the traditional role of the CMO. Only by bringing these two roles together can the CEO have a complete picture of what insights must be acted upon quickly in order to establish or maintain the top position.

In short, the power comes from the intersection between marketing and IT. Marketing without technology is quickly being left behind by more sophisticated approaches based on real-time big data, which, when properly analyzed, leads to insights, actions, and a sizable impact on the company’s bottom line. Conversely, an IT organization that is not connected to the marketing function is essentially blind to a large majority of the information assets being cultivated and managed by marketing information systems.

A hybrid approach is needed to maximize the effectiveness of your marketing and technology.

Today, we can no longer afford separate silos between marketing and IT. The rapid collapse of these silos means that one person must be able to converse seamlessly between both groups. While many CMOs are getting their arms around the technology side of their business, the natural evolution of this role is for the CIO to improve its marketing skills in order to grow into the chief marketing technologist role. The faster we embrace these trends, the bigger the impact we will have on our bottom line. That’s a great business insight steeped in data. This is our future, and it’s the reason chief marketing technologists will be in high demand for the foreseeable future.

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Digital Marketing’s Top 3 Trends per Digital Marketer’s CEO

Digital Marketer finished 2015 with more than $30 million in revenue and expects to close out 2016 with over $50 million. So, when Ryan Deiss shares what he believes to be the future of digital marketing, you’d be wise to listen up.

Ryan Deiss, the CEO of Digital Marketer, is a bit of badass. Having launched his first company in college as a means to buy an engagement ring for his girlfriend, he finished 2015 with more than $30 million in revenue and expects to close out 2016 with over $50 million. I had the chance to speak with Mr. Deiss before his keynote address at the Traffic & Conversion Summit, and he identified the 3 biggest trends in digital marketing.

Trend #1: Professionalization of Digital Marketing
2016 is the year more companies choose to professionalize their digital marketing efforts. “For far too long, companies have outsourced and off-loaded their digital marketing to someone else,” explains Mr. Deiss. “The biggest thing driving this trend is that consumers are demanding transparency and authenticity. That, and the fact that traditional branding isn’t working anymore.”

Mr. Deiss points to the role of the in-house digital marketing professional as truly emerging and creating a new class of marketing professional. “Businesses are bringing the function of digital marketing in-house with the idea of working with agencies on larger projects,” Mr. Deiss explains. This is leading to the need to train, certify and support the needs of in-house digital marketing experts, which is one of the fast growth areas that Digital Marketer experienced in 2015 and expects to see continued growth around in 2016.

“If you take a look at the hottest most in-demand jobs on Yahoo right now, you’ll see Product Marketing hovering around the #5 spot,” says Mr. Deiss. “If you drill into the job description you’ll see there’s a heavy emphasis on digital marketing knowledge. This is one of the best jobs you can get without a graduate school degree. The trouble is, universities have fallen behind in their ability to train for this position.”

As more companies look to add digital marketing professionals to their staff, they are finding that these individuals are in high demand and tend to have wide variance between their skill levels. Some may be experts at social media while others are better trained in the area of search, for example. Digital Marketer is doing what it can to level the playing field through its own certification program.

Trend #2: More Shopping via Native Commerce
Yes, you read that subhead correctly. I know you understand the ins and outs of Native Advertising, but Native Commerce is different. As brands look to balance their branding efforts with direct response, they are seeing some interesting opportunities around Native Commerce.

In Mr. Deiss own words, “I say bring on the complexity! Native Commerce is tough, but it’s about how we can serve our customers best.” He broke it down for me this way:“Native Commerce is about attracting passionate buyers of different categories of products through building content-driven communities”. Think of it this way. If you’re into the latest fashion trends, you want to stay up on trendy nail colors and beauty tips. If a business wants to attract you to buy their products, they will work to build a content-rich community in which it makes total sense to sell products that support that community.

Contrast most ecommerce company’s retargeting efforts versus Native Commerce. You go onto an ecommerce site, look at a product and maybe even put it in your cart. God help you if you don’t check out and buy that product as you’re going to see a ton of ads retargeting you and luring you back to that ecommerce website to complete your transaction. Yuck! Now, what if you had a content rich community where you could ask questions about the products you’re interested in. Rather than receiving the hard sell, you get honest feedback from community members which include representatives of the brands, but not exclusively. Over time, Mr. Deiss is betting that you will shop your passions with other Native Commerce communities and spend less time purely transacting.

Trend #3: Emergence of Customer-Centric Business
A great quote I heard from Tony Robbins at his Business Mastery conference was, “Fall in love with your customer, not your products”. This idea was echoed loudly when talking with Mr. Deiss who urges you to, “Define your business based on who you serve vs. what you do.” He went on to explain that most companies define their business by the product or service they sell rather than the audience they serve. Mr. Deiss believes that this is a major difference that will lead to your success or failure.

“Think about Channel,” Mr. Deiss explains, “they know exactly who their woman is and they live to serve her. Apple became hugely successful only when they stopped defining themselves based on selling computers but rather to serve a specific demographic. That’s why it’s not weird for you to buy a phone, watch or even a car from Apple.”

And we went on to think about the most successful companies out there and they all had a clear picture of their ideal customer and continued to change their products and services to fit the changing needs of that customer. Those who fall in love with their products eventually disconnect from the needs of their customers.

Think about Facebook versus Twitter. While Twitter has struggled to grow and remain relevant as a dominant social media platform, Facebook continues to innovate, reinvent itself and jump to the next place where their customers want to be–from the desktop to mobile to virtual reality. They anticipate the future needs of their customers and ensure they continue to serve them now and in the future.

“I can’t stress how important it is to build your product around the audience you serve,” says Mr. Deiss. “If you’re not a customer-centric business, then you will struggle to remain relevant in the future.”

So ask yourself, “Where can I serve my customer best?” and you will realize that there are things you’re probably not doing now that you should be doing (and things you are doing that will not serve you in the future). As I said, Ryan Deiss is a bit of a badass and you would do well to heed his three predictions. As a 22 year old digital marketer myself, I agree wholeheartedly with these assertions and urge you to implement them in your business immediately if you haven’t already.

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Should Your Spouse Be Your Business Partner?

The two unions of a marriage and a business have very different objectives and neither partnership can be ignored if you want to be successful in both. Here are the 5 things to consider before going into business with your spouse.

According to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, 90 percent of American businesses are family-owned or controlled and Harvard Business School estimates that at least half of all companies in the US are family businesses. When trying to dig in to how many of these family owned or controlled businesses are husband and wife teams, the most recent research appears to be a more than decade-old study by National Federation of Independent Businesses which pegged the number at just over 1.2 million.

And Forbes reports that, “only a small sub-set of more than 1.2 million husband and wife teams running companies, have achieved great wealth, and fewer still have managed to do so and still stay married. In the U.S. Forbes found 8 billion-dollar couples.”

Staying Married & Growing A Business
The two unions of a marriage and a business have very different objectives and neither partnership can be ignored if you want to be successful in both. I fully admit that there are cross-overs. Earlier this year, I shared the 3 Rules of Marriage (applied to employees) that were handed down to me by my blissfully happy in-laws who celebrated their 60th anniversary.

But to answer the question, “Should your spouse be your business partner”, I reached out to my network. I connected with Christian Brown, the husband and CEO to wife and President Christine Brown of Jobbuh, an employee-content-driven job search company with a mission similar to the hugely successful GlassDoor.

I asked Christian Brown how he decided to go into business with his wife. “The decision to work with my wife was not an easy one”, Mr. Brown responded. “Our marriage was one of the best things about my life, and I didn’t want to complicate that. I’m happy to report that it’s worked out better than expected, and taught us a lot about ourselves as well as business.”

In an effort to share these insights, I asked Mr. and Mrs. Brown to identify what they have learned and what they would council other married couples thinking about going into business with each other. Here’s what they recommend.

5 things to Consider before Going into Business with Your Spouse

  1. Understand the scope of the decision – Christian Brown had previously worked for two married couples, one successful and one not successful. They both spent a lot of time arguing. This is not something to take lightly and not for everyone. Don’t ask your spouse to be a business partner because you enjoy their companionship. Ask them because they have the skillset and the capability that the business needs.
  2. Put your marriage first – If you let your business become the priority, you risk losing both your business and your marriage. Christian and Christine Brown viewed their marriage as their first business venture together–and the more important one to protect. They recommend that you set aside time for yourselves that doesn’t involve the business. Even make it a point to not discuss the business at all. “My wife and I will sometimes escape for a long weekend together and not bring up Jobbuh once” Christian Brown said. For the sake of the marriage, couples must resist the temptation to bring the company home and on vacation when they are together outside the office.
  3. Be open about your strengths and weaknesses and define your roles clearly –One of the advantages of being married is you know each other well, but in a business context be very open to each other about what you can and can’t do. Make a checklist of what you need to be successful, and then be clear about who is responsible for what aspect of the business. If you can’t agree or feel like your roles are not crystal clear, then consider hiring a business coach for the areas where you need the most help.
  4. Picking up the slack leads to resentment–Don’t try to do more than the other because you are married. By taking on roles that you established for your spouse, over time you will create resentment. “There are times where I feel I do more for Jobbuh than my wife does,” says Christian Brown, “and that isn’t a healthy feeling to have. Yes, you want to help because it’s your spouse, but you have to think of that relationship just as you would any work relationship”. And the last thing anyone wants to do at work is pick up the slack for someone else’s clearly defined responsibilities.
  5. Have a contingency plan – This will be the most uncomfortable discussion you will probably have with your spouse, but a discussion that must be had. You need to decide what to do in the event that one of you decides to leave the business as well as if one of you decides to leave the marriage. “My wife and I made the decision that if we were to divorce, we would not continue to work together and that my wife would forfeit all ownership of the business” says Christian Brown. “Not an easy conversation to have, but one you will regret not having if you don’t. And trust me, when you’re married to the President, you want to stay on her good side.”

This last point is particularly important. If you’re not willing to have the uncomfortable discussions up front before you start your business, how can you expect to have candid discussions when your business needs its two business partners to work through the inevitable challenges? By setting the ground rules up front, you will substantially reduce the tension when times are tough–and this may be the very thing that saves your marriage.

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Your Future Depends on Your Ability to Understand Big Data. Here’s What You Need to Know.

The global impact of big data is too important to be left in the hands of a limited number of highly skilled data scientists. Time to get in the game.

This is what today’s entrepreneurs need to understand. 90% of the world’s data is estimated to have been created in the past 2 years and most recently via mobile devices. Whether you know it or not, this data is impacting your business. More importantly, your ability to understand the available insights from this data and navigate through this real-time information will determine your future success.

Simplifying Big Data: What Entrepreneurs Can Learn from Law Enforcement

You might be surprised to learn, for example, that your local law enforcement is using big data to solve crime. What used to take weeks for highly skilled data scientists to sift through can now be crunched in minutes by non-technical law enforcement using software tools that dramatically simplify the ability to manipulate vast amounts of unstructured data.

I had an opportunity to speak with a former FBI agent, Louis Grever, who is now a board member of Wynyard, an advanced crime analytics company. Mr. Grever, along with his colleague Derek Brown, VP of Americas for Wynyard, walked me through specific use cases where local law enforcement (not data scientists) leveraged big data for pattern matching, real-time visualization, and the ability to deploy limited resources in a smarter and more efficient manner.

Sound familiar? Like local law enforcement, your business has limited resources and lacks the budget to employ the highly skilled data scientists you’d love to have on your team. However, your business is currently being disrupted by the impact of big data. Your customers expect you to listen to them via social media channels. They have given you permission to market to them, but expect you to use the data you’ve collected from them in intelligent ways.

So here’s what you need to do.

  1. Stop Expecting Others to Figure Out Your Big Data Solutions. If you wait until you have highly proficient engineers on your team to solve your big data challenges, chances are you will be eclipsed by your competitors. You don’t have to be a data scientist to leverage the power and impact of big data. Take that same entrepreneurial spirt that got you to step out of your comfort zone and start leveraging the vast amounts of data that will help you grow your business.
  2. Identify Your Biggest Information Needs. What insights could help shape your ability to better serve the needs of your best customers? This could be as simple as listening to what your customers are saying via social media channels or observing where they are getting lost on your website. Or perhaps it’s about better understanding the customer journey. How are your customers discovering you in the first place? Where do they want to engage with your brand? What’s their preferred way to transact and buy your products and services? And how do you help them become advocates of your offering?
  3. Determine What Data Provides The Best Insights You Need. Once you’ve identified your biggest information needs, determine what data best illuminates the information you seek. Google Analytics, for example, provides a treasure trove of data regarding how your customers engage with your website. While Facebook and Twitter provide all sorts of data about how your customers engage with your brand on your social channels. For every marketing problem you’re looking to solve, there is a plethora of available data just waiting to be tapped. There are also many third party suppliers ready and willing to help you access additional data you might need to solve your particular marketing challenge.
  4. Find the Software Tools You Need to Turn Data into Insights. This is where most entrepreneurs fall short. The expectation here is that you need to be a data scientist to extract the insights you need form the data. Yet, in most cases, there are several free and inexpensive software solutions out there that allow you analyze the data. For example:
    1. Google Analytics: http://www.google.com/analytics/ — The industry standard free platform for web and app analytics.
    2. IBM’s Watson Analytics: http://www.ibm.com/analytics/watson-analytics — A freemium platform for analyzing and visualizing your data automatically, built on the same technology that IBM used to beat humans on Jeopardy.
    3. Canopy Labs: https://canopylabs.com/ — Sales analytics and optimization platform.
    4. Swipely: https://www.swipely.com/ — An analytics tool for brick and mortar businesses, like restaurants and retail.
    5. Gephi: http://gephi.github.io/ — Gephi is an interactive visualization and exploration platform for all kinds of networks and complex systems, dynamic and hierarchical graphs. Runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Gephi is open-source and free.
    6. R: https://www.r-project.org/ — And if you’re feeling adventurous or have more engineering skills than you’d like to admit, R is a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics. It compiles and runs on a wide variety of UNIX platforms, Windows and MacOS, if you are looking to unleash your inner data scientist.

And I haven’t even scratched the surface of what’s out there. For every big data problem, there are free and relatively inexpensive solutions available to you. There are also companies like Wynyard who have started in one industry and are branching out into several others. So you can go it alone or you can find a partner to work with you, but whatever you do, get in the game. The longer you ignore the impact of big data on your business, the further you are falling behind. Instead, jump in and enjoy the discovery process as you listen to what your customers really want and find new ways to deliver it to them.

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3 Exponentially Better Alternatives to Banner Advertisi

With the average click-through rate at a historic low of 0.06 percent, banner ads are failing to deliver results 99.94 percent of the time. Here are 3 viable alternatives with proven results.

Having started my career in 1994 building some of the very first commercial websites, I have more than 22 years of digital marketing game footage to draw upon. I even placed MasterCard’s very first banner ad on Yahoo in early 1995. At that time, we were delivering click through rates north of 10% on a consistent basis.

My how times have changed. What astounds me, however, is just how ineffective banner ads are and yet how prolific they still remain. As the CEO of Trepoint, a digital marketing agency, I am often asked what we think of banner ads. My answer is simple, we don’t recommend them nor do we take on banner advertising business. Betweengrowing ad blocking technologies, massive ad fraud, and banner ad blindness, is it any wonder why the average click through rate is hovering at 0.06%? But because 63% of all digital media is bought programmatically, it’s understandable why banner ads continue to flourish despite all the evidence that they are ineffective. So what are the alternatives?

Alternative #1: Influencer Marketing
In case you missed it, earlier this month I reported on a groundbreaking Nielsen Catalina Solutions study which highlighted the incredible impact of Influencer Marketing had on WhiteWave Foods. In short the results of the study showed thatInfluencer Marketing delivered 11 times ROI over all other forms of Digital Media. The study further provided a direct attribution between Influencer Marketing and in-store sales lift. Specifically, for every 1,000 impressions delivered through Influencer Marketing, WhiteWave Foods received $285 of incremental in-store sales.

So what is Influencer Marketing and why is it delivering substantially higher ROI? Simply put, Influencer Marketing is about sponsoring and supporting the people who your customers look to as subject matter experts. Whereas digital marketers like me used to hire celebrity spokespeople, today your customers trust well-known bloggers and social media pundits who may only have tens to hundreds of thousands of followers (instead of the millions we used to focus on).

If you’re looking to learn more about Influencer Marketing, I recently did a keynote speech about it and have posted my presentation online. I’m a big believer in this methodology because it requires that the content come directly from the influencers you engage which, by definition, dramatically reduces the two largest expense areas in effective digital marketing: content creation and distribution.

Alternative #2: Native Advertising
Originally, I was NOT a huge fan of Native Adverting. The early pioneers of Native Advertising were not diligent about disclosing the advertising nature of native and there was a lot of unnecessary consumer confusion. While it’s still not perfect, the recent federal mandates along with industry self-policing have helped clean up its act and now we’re seeing a substantial rise of Native Advertising.

Like Influencer Marketing, Native Advertising is exponentially more effective than banner ads with 3rd party studies an overall 88.6 percent increase in brand awarenessamong those exposed to the campaign. As savvy digital marketers look for viable alternatives to banner ads, more and more of them are turning to Native Advertising. Moreover, programmatic native adverting networks such as Instinctive, are even exploring entirely new business models such as charging for time spent with your content rather than industry standard metrics of “impressions” which typically only require a partial view (i.e. 60%) of a banner ad for one second.

Changes in the way you measure the levels of engagement with your content will ultimately lead to better targeting and even better ROI from your Native Advertising investments, which are arguably already substantially more valuable than traditional banner ads.

Alternative #3: Give It Up For Free
Before anyone will buy from you, they must first know, like and trust you. How do you get someone who’s never used your product or service to do that? The answer is to give your ideal customers something of value before you ever ask for the sale. What you are giving up for free will, of course, be different for every industry, but the core idea is the same. By giving something of value that no one else is willing to offer, you will stand out in a world cluttered with “me to” offers.

By giving it up for free, you are being disruptive to the status quo. In fact, it should even feel a bit uncomfortable and scary because you are taking a leap of faith that when your ideal customer receives this value from you that they will want more and, having had a great experience for free, they will pay you for your product or services.

This model can be seen in every industry and is usually the start of a massively high-growth company. Netflix, for example, continues to give you 30 days free of their streaming video service before they every ask you to pay. This model ultimately brought down the powerhouse that was Blockbuster. Google’s Android operating system completely disrupted the mobile phone industry and knocked out several major players who had previously dominated the space (think Blackberry, Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericson, etc.) Successful restaurants give entire meals away for free, Zappos was the first to give away free shipping BOTH ways, Wix gives website design away for free, and the list goes on.

While every industry may have a slightly different variation on the theme, the act of giving it up for free tends to be a disruptive business model that forces the larger players to respond (or ignore at their own peril).

Stop Your Banner Advertising Addiction
Regardless of which one you choose, the only bad choice is sticking to what’s no longer working just because it’s what you’re comfortable with doing. Go to BAA (Banner Advertising Anonymous) if you have to in order to free your marketing dollars for something that actually works.

You’ve known for quite some time now that the banner advertising model is broken. It’s simply irresponsible as a digital marketer to stick with a broken model when there are substantially better and more viable options out there. If you need a “sponsor” to help you with your banner advertising addiction, you can find one on our Facebook group. Together, we can kick this addiction and build a better digital marketing future for everyone–especially your ideal customers.

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Biggest Problem With Big Data Management in 2016

According to a new study released by Experian, 97% of US businesses are looking to achieve a complete view of their customer, yet the biggest problem organizations face around big data management in 2016 comes from within.

Last week, Experian Data Quality released The 2016 Global Data Management Benchmark Report, and I found it to be incredibly insightful. “The biggest problem organizations face around data management today actually comes from within,” says Thomas Schutz, SVP, General Manager of Experian Data Quality. “Businesses get in their own way by refusing to create a culture around data and not prioritizing the proper funding and staffing for data management.”

Mr. Schutz explains that “a shift has taken place where businesses are using data for nearly every aspect of their organization” and that “the majority of sales decisions are expected to be drive by customer data by 2020.” No surprises there as businesses of every size look to use Big Data to drive the future of their companies. But what this benchmark report lays out is quite compelling.

For starters, where would you say your business lives on the data quality sophistication curve below?

It’s important to know where you are so that you may build a map towards your compelling future. If you’re not already looking at the many aspects of how Big Data will impact your business, here are a few compelling stats that should interest you:

  • 97% of US businesses are looking to achieve a complete view of their customer. Increasing customer loyalty, increasing customer sales, and improving strategic decision-making are the biggest drivers of creating or optimizing their single customer view strategy.
  • By 2020, US businesses believe data management will evolve to improve the overall customer experience, protect customer security and inform decision-making … businesses require data management to make better, smarter decisions.
  • 84% of businesses believe data to be an integral part of forming a business strategy, yet 79% of US organizations believe it is difficult to predict when and where the next data challenge will arise.
  • 94% of companies across all levels have experienced internal challenges when trying to improve their data quality.
  • 77% believe data management is driven by multiple stakeholders in their organization, rather than by a single data specialist.

And my personal favorite chart is below which answers the question, “What are the biggest drivers to turn data into insight?”

You should also take a look at the biggest drivers for achieving a single customer view, as this is what’s driving so much of the Big Data investments in 2016:

In a related article, I acknowledged that we are “Still Drowning in Big Data, and Starving for Insights.” I can safely say that Experian’s 2016 global data management benchmark report does a great job of identifying the shifts that have already taken place in many businesses. As Mr. Schutz so eloquently states, “Rather than relying on instinct, businesses are focused on using the power of analytics and the information they have before them to better serve customers and optimize business processes.”

And frankly, this is what the promise of Big Data always was. It’s great to see that we’re making process toward this outcome and that we have become clear on the biggest problem with Big Data Management in 2016: Ourselves! So if your business isn’t already creating a culture around data and not prioritizing the proper funding and staffing for data management, then you know why you’re still struggling with Big Data. It’s that person in the mirror who needs to better prioritize your Big Data initiatives and shifting the company culture around data.

What’s the ROI of your Big Data initiatives? How about the net worth of the sum total of you business? I can say that because if you’re not working diligently to keep the customers you have and get new customers, your competitors who can better leverage Big Data insights from a single customer view will ultimately provide a more compelling future and woo away your best customers.

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10 Things Every Salesperson Needs to Know About Marketing

When done correctly, marketing provides the air cover for the sales teams on the ground working hard to close deals and increase revenue. It’s a much needed partnership.

It’s wonderful when sales and marketing are working together and finishing one another’s sentences. Unfortunately, this tends to be the exception and not the rule. More often than not, the sales team see all that marketing isn’t and often struggle to see the true value that great marketing brings to the sales organization.

To be fair, not all marketing is great. But for the purpose of this article, I’m going to focus on effective marketing that actually drives sales. If your company’s marketing isn’t accountable and isn’t driving sales, then there is a bigger issue at play (and we can tackle that one separately).

  1. No one wants to be “sold,” but everyone likes to buy: High-pressure sales tactics never work, because even when you’ve “won” the sale, it’s at the expense of the relationship. Marketing creates the desire that makes it much easier for sales teams to add value to the decision-making process rather than aggressively trying to close the deal. When a qualified prospect is interested in buying, it’s ready for a knowledgeable salesperson to answer its questions.
  2. People buy on emotion and backfill with logic: Marketing provides the emotional “sex appeal” that tugs at a person’s heartstrings. Before you ever buy a car, your heart has to jump ever so slightly as you fall in love with the vehicle you now need to justify buying. This is true with any sale that’s not an impulse buy. Before a purchase decision is made, you first have to “feel” that the product or service is right for you. Marketing plays an important role in that emotional connection with the very thing you are looking to sell.
  3. Great marketing tells a great story: Behind every great marketing campaign was a simple story just waiting to be told and retold. This is part of why we survived as a species all these tens of thousands of years; it’s part of our survival instinct. From Subway’s story about Jared losing weight eating nothing but Subway sandwiches to Apple encouraging us to “Think Different” to De Beers reinforcing the idea that “Diamonds Are Forever,” these stories help us make buying decisions with confidence.
  4. Big data can help determine when a person is “sales ready”: It’s true that there has been a tremendous amount of hype around the concept of big data, but what you need to know is that your marketing team, when working with data scientists, can strip out all the noise and focus on the attributes that help you know when a potential customer is sales ready. Adobe has built entire ecosystems around these triggering events (which is why it spends a lot more of its resources on technology than on the creative suites that made it famous).
  5. There is science behind the art of persuasion; much of that is marketing: In his latest book, Robert Cialdini identifies 52 small changes you can make immediately to ignite big influence and the desired results for your business. While all of these small changes impact sales growth, most of them are about better marketing techniques that have a proven sales impact. Sales teams benefit, but much of the impact is based on approaches marketers take to persuade people about the product or service being offered.
  6. Word-of-mouth marketing can be grouped into six STEPPS: Jonah Berger wrote an incredible book, Contagious: Why Things Catch On, and explained why people choose to share both online and in real life. He researched and published the answer to why people choose to talk about brands, products, and services and provided tons of examples of great marketing that did just that.
  7. Marketing helps prospective buyers know, like, and trust you (or at least your company): Before anyone wants to buy anything from you, the customer first needs to know, like, and trust you. This is because, at the end of the day, everything is about people working with other people. If I’m going to buy anything from you, I need to feel like I know you, then I need to be sure I like you and ultimately trust you. Marketing helps get you closer to these goals by building the brand and providing the social proof needed to establish these core elements.
  8. When done correctly, marketing makes your job a lot easier: Marketing is like having a really great wingman (or wingwoman) who introduces you to someone at a party. Even if you’ve never talked to this prospect before, the marketing that preceded your conversation provided the emotional firepower to endear you to that customer long before you ever talked to him or her. Ideally, the marketing has provided the thought leadership and positioning that led this person to want to speak with you in the first place.
  9. Marketing people love and respect salespeople: When the marketing team understands that the sales team is driving the revenue that pays their salaries, they don’t want to do anything that would jeopardize your ability to drive sales. More than that, marketing people realize just how challenging it is to drive sales throughout the organization, and they respect the people who consistently deliver the results.
  10. You need each other: Marketing can’t do its job effectively without the support of the sales team. Working together is much more powerful than fighting for control. The flip side is also true. Sales without marketing is a much more difficult road to success. Without marketing, your focus is to make up for all that lost ground–telling the story, being persuasive, qualifying the lead, determining the emotional connection, objection handling, and everything else. It certainly can be done, but it’s a lot harder to grow the company without the support of marketing.

The bottom line is that, when done correctly, marketing provides the air cover for the salespeople on the ground working hard to close deals and increase revenue. It’s a partnership, to be sure.

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62 Actionable Ideas for Getting More Clients From 13 Top Marketing and Sales Leaders

Talk is cheap and great ideas without action are useless. Instead, here are 62 actions you can take today from 13 brilliant sales and marketing thought leaders.

If you missed one of the best eight-hour-marathon, virtual events of 2016, Amanda Holmes and her team at Chet Holmes International have summarized the key takeaways. Thirteen of the top marketing and sales masters reveal their secrets–from Ken Krogue, president of InsideSales.com, sharing his thoughts on reaching 4X more prospects to Tom Ziglar of Zig Ziglar on living a motivated life. You’re going to want to bookmark this page and come back often.

But don’t just read and absorb this content–make an action plan to implement this sage advice. As CHI teaches, “It isn’t about doing 4,000 things. It’s about doing one or two things 4,000 times.” So pick one or two initiatives and, with pigheaded discipline and determination, follow through on them until they become habitual. Intellectual curiosity does nothing to help your business grow. Taking massive action on great advice does. So put yourself in a frame of mind ready to drink from the proverbial fire hose of sales and marketing wisdom. Enjoy!

Ken Krogue, president of InsideSales.com–Reaching 4x More Prospects

  1. Most companies average 1.5 phone calls to a lead before they give up. Standard procedure should be at least six to nine.
  2. Teach your reps to ask specifically for direct dial numbers from prospects (make sure your web forms do as well). You will reach prospects much more efficiently.
  3. Forbid your salespeople to ask prospects about the weather: Mandate they find three less generic rapport-building topics (it takes two minutes to do a Google-Facebook-LinkedIn search).
  4. Teach your sales reps to use “reverse customer referrals.” Search the LinkedIn connections of prospects to find anyone they’re connected with whom your company has already done business with. Now your reps can mention that common relationship to the prospect–you have instant social proof.
  5. Have your sales reps read these articles and turn their LinkedIn Profiles into little lead-generation machines: “Epic List of LinkedIn Profile Tips.”

Chad Kirby, Infusionsoft–Seven Things You Forgot to Automate That Can Double Your Sales

  1. Know exactly who your customers are. Get specific: Write down descriptions of basic characteristics; pains, problems, and challenges; benefits they seek; why they buy from you; the most common objections; who is not your target customer.
  2. Once you know these traits, check whether your marketing messages appeal directly to these specific prospects. If you don’t have educational marketing collateral, build it to attract these ideal prospects to opt in to your lead system (e.g., create a free white paper: “Five Ways You’re [pain point of your target audience], and the Two Things You Can Do to [benefit of working with your company]”).
  3. Look at the places where your leads might be falling through the gaps and create a lead-capture process for each of these potentially missed interactions:
    1. Web traffic that leaves your site
    2. Walk-ins who walk out
    3. Telephone callers who hang up
    4. Networking contacts who leave
    5. Tradeshow visitors who walk by
  4. Look at what you’re doing to nurture your prospects (educating them, training them, building trust with them), and see if you can’t procedurize those processes.
    1. Make templates for those follow-up emails (and automate them in a CRM like Infusionsoft)
    2. Stop wasting the time of a live person by answering the same customer questions over and over. Create a PDF with the answers to the most common questions your prospects ask. Automate the system so that enquiring or new customers automatically receive this PDF.
  5. If you can’t guarantee that you’re asking for a referral with every sale you make, you must automate this process. (It can be as simple as an email that says, “Is there anybody you would recommend our services to?” along with a contact form to fill out.)

Amanda Holmes, Chet Holmes International, with Shane Hurley–The One Strategy That Increased Appointment Setting 5.5X and Sales Conversions by 38 Percent

  1. If your company is self-focused, you’re wasting 90 percent of your time, money, and energy. Stop with the me, me, me, me, me: “I want your business”; “I want to sell my product”; “My product is great!”
  2. Get the attention of the 90 percent of prospects that weren’t thinking about your product or service by talking to them about what’s interesting to them. For example: “Hey! This is a problem that you are facing, or this is something that you’ve been looking for. I can give you some information that will help you with that.”
  3. Put yourself in the shoes of your ideal prospect. What keeps the prospect up at night? (It may have nothing to do with your product or service, but can you grab the prospect’s attention by giving a solution to the problem or highlighting it?)
  4. Market data is way more motivational than product data. Example: Did you know that 75 percent of employees have stolen from their employers, and half of them steal repeatedly? (U.S. Chamber of Commerce). This market data creates a much more compelling reason to speak to Shane at Redfynn about protecting your assets than simply touting the features of his products and services.
  5. Create a presentation that educates your prospects about these pains. The presentation should also provide great solutions to those pains (hint: one, but not all, of these solutions is your product or service).
  6. Once this presentation is created, it becomes the ultimate vehicle for creating trust and rapport with your prospects before even pitching them on your product or service. Done well, such a presentation (CHI calls it a “core story”) establishes you as an expert and authority while simultaneously resetting buying criteria in your favor.

Keith Cunningham–Don’t Get Big, Get Rich: How to Avoid Dumb Tax

  1. Stop tolerating “below the line” culture in your company. You get what you tolerate:
    1. Backstabbing
    2. Smack talking
    3. Gossip
    4. Etc.
  2. Studies have shown that if a company is $10 million or less, there is a 90 percent chance that nobody on the executive team is consistently looking at the numbers! If you do not already, you must start paying attention to your metrics:
    1. The accounting: balance sheets, income statements, etc.
    2. KPIs: How does my profit compare with my revenue? How does my profit compare with my operating cash flow? Etc.
  3. Make sure you’re looking at the trends in these numbers over time. It is fundamental to running a successful business–trends over time tell you where you’re succeeding and where you need work. Without an eye on the trends, you’re just shooting in the dark.
  4. Stop making the same mistakes. Start keeping a log of lessons learned. Every time you make a mistake (or something goes better than expected), pull out the log and make a note of the lesson.
  5. Anytime you’re thinking about trying something new with your business, ask yourself these three questions:
    1. What’s the upside?
    2. What’s the downside? (What could go wrong? What if I’m wrong? And how would that play out?)
    3. Can I live with the downside?

Brendon Burchard–How to Get Millions to See Your Marketing Messages

  1. Content is the new currency. If you aren’t already, you need to start creating great free content for your audience. (Your only other option is to pay for every click.)
    1. You don’t need to create something every single day.
    2. Try creating one significant thing a week.
  2. Make sure when you’re creating content, you “particle-ize” it–that is, convert it to the proper format and disseminate it to all your media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc.). You shouldn’t waste your time creating unique content for each platform.
  3. Implement “circular viralocity” in your social media efforts. This means make sure all your platforms link back and forth to one another. This interconnectedness causes all your platforms to grow much more rapidly.
  4. If you are not using retargeting in your business, you need to start; it isn’t optional anymore. You are blowing through leads and money if you don’t have a strategic retargeting campaign running.
  5. Keep in mind that at the end of your life, you will probably reflect back and ask yourself these questions:
    1. Did I live?
    2. Did I love?
    3. Did I matter?
    4. Live each day with so much intention that when you get to the end of your life, you are happy with the answers to those questions.

Clay Collins–How Leadpages Went From Zero to 40,000 Clients in 2.8 Years

  1. Instead of going out and hiring salespeople, consider hiring content creators to own different marketing channels (e.g., someone just to operate your YouTube channel and someone just for your blog).
  2. Put your content creators on a quota like you would a salesperson. Define how much revenue you want generated from that blog or that YouTube channel.
  3. Make sure to turn literally every single piece of content that you create into a lead-generation opportunity.
  4. Measure the results of your content creators. Most companies underinvest in content, because they have no idea how to tell what the ROI is on that content.
  5. Here’s where many companies fall flat: They fail to realize the value of creating unlimited budgets for things.
    1. If you have a machine that for every $1 you put in, $1.50 comes out, you should hire people to just feed dollars into the machine all day long.
    2. The key to doing this is measurement. You can’t even think about finding these “machines” in your company unless you’re measuring the results of what you’re doing.

Stacey Hylen, Chet Holmes International–Best Buyer Strategy: The Fastest, Least Expensive Way to Double Your Sales

  1. Compared with all potential buyers, there is always a much smaller number of ideal buyers. So ideal buyers are cheaper to market to and yet bring much greater reward. These ideal buyers are called “best buyers.” In some cases, this smallergroup of best buyers account for the majority of a company’s revenue. In spite of this, most companies market the same way to everyone. It’s time to create a special initiative to specifically attract these best buyers.
  2. Determine who your best buyers are. Are you already working with some of these best buyers? They can act as a good example of what similar buyers will look like: What kind of businesses are they? What industry are they in? What size are they? Etc.
  3. Once you’ve determined what your best buyers look like, you should create a list of specific targets. (Don’t be afraid to put some of the big scary names on that list.)
  4. Now build a plan for how you’re going to market directly to these targeted buyers every month without fail. For instance, you might send them a cheap (extremely cheap–otherwise it may be construed as a bribe) but creative gift (such as a key chain) with a letter every month. Follow every letter with a call. Every month.
  5. Now you go after that list with pigheaded discipline and determination (#phd) until they are all your clients. You never stop.

Tim Paige, Leadpages–The Perfect Sales Funnel

  1. If you don’t already have one, make sure you create a simple and free one-page PDF for your prospects to download from your website. This easy-to-make lead magnet will often outperform more complicated offerings.
  2. Use “content upgrades” to increase opt-in rates on all your free content (a content upgrade is something that enhances the value of that content, but in order to receive the upgrade, visitors must supply an email address).
  3. If you have a lot of free content online, look at your analytics and determine your five top performing pieces of content. Start by creating content upgrades for those pieces.
  4. Go through your website(s) and replace all imbedded opt-in forms with pop-up opt-in forms so that you force visitors to make a decision. Read this twice: 100 percent of visitors who do not make a decision whether to opt in on your website will not opt in on your site.
  5. Consider creating an automated email lesson or video lesson series so that people who opt in to your web forms start receiving something of value from you immediately.

Gene McNaughton, Chet Holmes International–Secrets to Hiring Sales Superstars (Do this one wrong and it’ll cost you on average $60,000)

  1. The very first step to finding superstar salespeople is to make a commitment that you’re only going to hire superstars.
  2. Write sales job ads so that a “hungry” person will feel like that ad is speaking to him or her. No: “Sales representative wanted.” Yes: “Our top performers make X.” (Look at what your top performer is making. If your top performer is making $80,000, $100,000, $200,000, put that in the headline.)
  3. Quantify what it costs you to take people through your hiring process. You will likely be shocked at how much you’re really spending as a result of not getting the right person.
  4. Your ad should challenge those who read it (“Superstars only. Must have a burning desire to succeed,” etc.). A good ad will weed undesirables out.
  5. Try putting this in your job ad: “If you feel like you’re a superstar, call us and leave us a voicemail that’s two minutes or less and tell us why you’re a superstar. If we contact you, then that means you’ve made it to the next round.”
    1. Half of these voicemails will be terrible: Boom, you’ve eliminated half of your candidates.
    2. At the end of an interview for a sales position, reject all candidates regardless of how they did. Those who continue to sell themselves are worth a second interview. Remember, how they sell themselves in the interview is how they’ll sell your product or service. Somebody who folds after the first no will not be a star salesperson.

Guruji Sri Sri Poonamji, Divine Bliss International–How to Do the Same Work in Half the Time With Less Stress

  1. “Be aware that stress and even depression are a result of attaching yourself to an illusion or a dream.”
  2. “Failure happens when you are limiting yourself to the somebody else you want to become. When you simply are yourself, there is no failure.”
  3. Upgrade your intellect; start working through your super conscience (the 97 percent of your brain that you’re holding out on and not using currently).

Ari Sherbill, PowToon.com–Six Genius Video Hacks That Generate Leads on Demand

  1. We live during a crisis of attention. The average attention span has dropped from 12 minutes (1988) to eight seconds (today). Your audience operates in three learning modes (visual, auditory, and kinetic). Your best chance at capturing this fleeting attention is to appeal to all three simultaneously.
  2. Consider animated visuals for your marketing. Animation abstracts the meaning of what you’re communicating and can thereby enhance the entertainment and attentional value.
  3. You can use a simple video creation software like PowToon to create video templates for your salespeople to personalize and send to each prospect (with that person’s name and specific pains to be solved). The novelty of a personalized video is such that people must watch it. It’s great for follow-up strategies.
  4. Can you use a simple animated video to liven up your Thank You page (or any of your webpages)? Remember, 55 percent of visitors to your website only stay for 15 seconds, on average. By simply adding a video, that jumps up to two minutes!

Ryan Deiss, Digital Marketer–Three Proven Email Marketing Campaigns You Can “Swipe and Deploy” in Your Own Business

  1. Using a flash sale campaign (no more than once a month and preferably once every two months) is a great way to create a buying frenzy from your email list.
  2. Can you create a targeted reminder (Are you still/Have you yet) email campaign? Here is an example:
    1. Prospect opts in and downloads a PDF: “Six Easy Steps to a Six Pack.”
    2. Every month you can now send an email with a little copy and the subject line, “Do You Have That Six Pack Yet?” Chances are, he or she doesn’t. You can proceed to offer the person your assistance in the email and repeat this every month.
  3. A great way to increase the engagement of your email list is to send out a faux quiz or survey.

Tom Ziglar of Zig Ziglar–How to Close More Prospects, Increase Productivity, and Stay Motivated

  1. For setting a goal,
    1. Write down everything you want to be, do, or have.
    2. For each thing you wrote down, ask this question: Why?
    3. If you can’t answer the “why?” it’s not your goal or dream.
    4. Check and make sure you haven’t confused your “what” with your “why.”
  2. Are you specific about your goals? If you’re not, it’s time to put a lot of furniture in that goal (e.g., if your goal is to buy a house, what does it look like? Where is it located? What color is it? What’s in the house?).
  3. Once you have this goal, now you want to get really deep into the benefits of that goal. The longer the list of benefits is, the more likely you’ll stick to the goal.
  4. Take stock of your bad habits: The fastest way to success is to replace bad habits with good habits. Every week, pick a small bad habit and replace it with a good habit. Do this for 52 weeks and you’ll have the best year you’ve ever had.
  5. A great way to motivate employees is to find out what their dreams are and then help them attain those dreams. Tie those dreams in to their success in your business.

If you found these action ideas useful, I encourage you to check out the full recording of the day. Chet Holmes International has made it available here. While I can attest that this list provides an overview of many of the concepts covered, the full sessions take you a great deal deeper into these powerful concepts, strategies, and tactics. And again, remember, insights without action are useless. It’s what you do with this information that will grow your business.

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Former Facebook Data Scientist Explains How to Wrangle Your Data

While the deep technical expertise of a data scientist is necessary on some projects, you don’t need one to build a culture of data-driven decision making. Here’s how to empower your team.

Please allow me to geek out for a minute and I promise I’m going to empower you with the tools you need to put Big Data to work for you and your business. This week I got the chance to meet Tye Rattenbury, a veteran of Facebook’s core data science team. For a nerd like me, that’s more exciting than meeting Mark Zuckerberg himself. Sure Mark Zuckerberg is the celebrity, but Tye was the data guy in the trenches who built the data pipelines and analyses that fuel Facebook’s data-driven culture.

So you can imagine how awesome it was to meet a Silicon Valley legend who’s joined an incredible company called Trifacta–whose mission is to democratize Big Data for people like you. For far too long Big Data has been the exclusive tool of elite enterprises with deep pockets. So this article is going to show you how you can get started FOR FREE with incredibly easy to use tools like Trifacta Wrangler.

Pepsi Eliminated 90% of Their Big Data Wrangling Time And So Can You!
If you talk to any data scientist worth their salt, they will tell you that the first challenge of putting data to work for your business is getting it into a structured format so that you can analyze, interpret and make decisions around your data. This is lovingly referred to as “Data Wrangling” and it’s what sucks up the bulk of the unproductive (wasteful) time (4 out of 5 days, by most accounts). That’s because instead of spending time understanding the data, you’re wasting time trying to pull it all together in a useable format. This is what usually creates the bottleneck in any organization.

Think about it. You want to combine your customer data from your CRM (think Salesforce.com) and your Marketing Automation (think Marketo or Hubspot) with your social data (think Facebook and Twitter) and ideally your point of sale and/or ecommerce sales data (think Magento). Then you want to pull in 3rd party data (think Experian and Infosys) to round out your insights. Each of these data sets have a different format and therefore the first order of business is to combine them into a single source where you can begin to query the data.

“Trifacta was founded on the principle of enabling analysts to simply and easily pull in disparate data sources and to structure and cleanse them,” explains Joe Scheuermann, Vice President of Marketing for Trifacta. “We launched Trifacta for just this purpose and have even distributed a free version so that everyone can take advantage of our technology.”

“Pepsi uses our paid version of Trifacta Wrangler Enterprise ,” says Will Davis, Director of Product Marketing, “and in doing so they have cut their data wrangling time by 90%. You can imagine what their team of data scientists and analysts can do now that they don’t have to waste their time wrangling the data they want to analyze.”

Learn From Facebook: Build a Culture of Data-Driven Decision Making
“Facebook has a culture that demands data driven decisions at every turn” explains Tye Rattenbury, Director of Data Science at Trifacta. “Most of those decisions were fueled by on-demand analyses queued up by product managers and answered by a huge variety of people–analysts, engineers and even the product managers themselves. They were fast and rough, but had enough validity to stand on. To support the breadth of speed of these analyses, Facebook built a wide array of home-grown tools (some built from scratch, others extended from open source projects). Today, forward looking companies are finding off-the-shelf tools that give them the necessary breadth and speed to be data driven.”

Said another way, while the deep technical expertise of a data scientist is necessary on some projects, you don’t need them to build a culture of data-driven decision-making. Masking the complexity is what companies like Trifacta are doing so that the business analysts and strategic thinkers are empowered to ask better questions and probe for insights derived from their (near) real-time data sets.

Once you have used a tool like Trifacta to get all of your data into one location and in a usable format, you now have a plethora of other free or cheap tools you can use to empower your team to make data-driven decisions. These include:

  1. Data Robot: An invaluable website that is chalked full of incredibly powerful algorithms. You no longer need to even decide which algorithm to use. Simply import your data and the machine learning takes over. Specifically, it suggests what algorithms might work best to analyze the data you have.
  2. Qlik: If you simply want to visualize your data, this is the best place to start. Data visualization tools such as Qlik help you create charts and graphs so that you can see what you might have otherwise missed buried deep in your data.
  3. RapidMiner and H2O: More “off the shelf” machine learning models and algorithms in a box you can use to dig into your data–without being a data scientist.

The Cost of NOT Making Data-Driven Decisions
“Statistically minded data scientists often argue that the data outputs in many of these quick analyses are wrong because the data is low quality or your assumptions about the data are faulty,” says Dr. Rattenbury. “The key is to wrangle your data to improve its quality, and, in the process, improve your working assumptions. That’s what data scientists do.”

And here’s the thing. If you’re not using data to drive your decisions today, these insights are a quantum leap forward than the gut check that most entrepreneurs use to guide their businesses today. Can you get better insights with the help of those highly sought after data scientists? Absolutely. But if you wait until you can afford a data scientist, you will be losing opportunities and market share to all of your competitors who decide to dive in and begin experimenting immediately.

Therefore the cost of NOT making data-driven decisions is that you are flying blind and eventually will either hit a wall or simply crash and burn. On the contrary, the ROI of making data-driven decisions is that you are well informed and are empowered to know rather than guess what’s happening in your business. This, in turn, leads you to actually stay in business. Today, there simply is no excuse for making uninformed decisions. The tools are freely available to you and your team and you no longer have to be a data scientist to take advantage of them.

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