Better Business Blog

How To Close Big Business Deals

You don't climb the biggest hill in your neighborhood the same way you would tackle Mount Everest. Changes in scale require a big shift in tactics.

Let's start with the seven things that make your big sale different than your average size sale:

1. Size: Obvious, sure, but worth the mention. Adding a couple of zeros to the deal can change more than just the sweatiness of your palms.
2. Complexity: The bigger the deal, the more moving parts. Moving from 100 loaves to 100,000 loaves may not change the recipe–but it increases the logistical complexity of getting the bread to the market.

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Ever gone through PayPal reports hell? You will love SlowPal

 

PayPal claims over 100 million active user accounts, but a lot of people hate the company, for a variety of reasons. Love or despise it, it has become hard to ignore and avoid the e-payments juggernaut whether you are an online seller or buyer.

Enter Shoply, which aims to democratize online retailing of goods and services for small businesses worldwide. They hate PayPal too, but they realize that it’s become too big and powerful for them to sidestep the online payments giant.

One particular frustration of the Shoply team with PayPal is its slow and tedious transaction reports system. If you’ve ever used PayPal to peruse though and search for transactions in your account history, you will know that it is prone to crash and is often as slow as molasses in January.

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B2B Lead Generation vs B2B Advertising: What You Need to Know

Among paid media and advertising tactics, lead generation programs are a key source of leads for B2B marketers, especially in the enterprise technology space. Tell a B2B publisher that you are interested in lead generation and the majority will point to some form of white paper syndication program they offer.

For the sake of this post, lead generation programs refer to publisher programs that promote your content and capture registration. These are contacts or inquiries, not sales leads, but in keeping with the terminology publishers use, we will refer to this as lead generation here.

In enterprise technology, publishers like IDG, Information Week and TechTarget have nearly turned these programs into a science, with guaranteed leads volume and a myriad of filtering and qualification options driven largely by email and newsletter promotions.

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Baby Boomers: America's Hottest Group Of New Entrepreneurs

Aging in America has changed – and I for one, think it’s for the better. We are living and working longer and feeling good while doing it. Was it Oprah who first said, “50 is the new 40?” I see it at MBO everyday as I watch expert professional Baby Boomers leave corporate full-time positions to become America’s hot new entrepreneurs.

Rather than taking a bow with traditional retirement, many boomers today are forging fulfilling encore careers with independent work. Today, there are five million boomer independents in the U.S. and it has never been easier for these senior professionals to design a second solo act. Facilitated by the rise of cloud and mobile computing and social networking, boomers are easily able to leverage their intellectual and social capital to start solo businesses and earn continued income and professional kudos.

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6 Business Lessons From 50 Shades of Grey

Have you heard about 50 Shades of Grey?

If not, either you’re a guy who has no woman in his life, you’re living in a cave or you’re a guy living alone in a cave. Women everywhere are buzzing about this bestselling erotic novel, which tells the story of a wealthy entrepreneur’s affair with an innocent college student. First-time author E.L. James has been mobbed at book signings, interviewed on TV and given a seven-figure contract with Vintage Books. Ellen DeGeneres read snippets from the novel aloud on her talk show, Barbara Walters discussed it on The View and Time magazine named James one of its 100 Most Influential People of 2012.

As I read about James’ phenomenal success, I couldn’t help but draw some business lessons from her story.

1.  You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. James, a fortysomething TV exec, openly admits her books started off as “fan fiction” based around the characters in the wildly popular Twilight vampire novels. What plot there is also borrows elements from everything from Pretty Woman to Jane Eyre. When James published 50 Shades as a free e-book, she apparently struck a nerve, and the book took off. I can think of many business ideas that weren’t brand-new but became wildly successful by building on an existing product or service with a little tweaking. (Domino’s Pizza is one case. That company made billions by offering a 30-minute money-back guarantee.)

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12 Timeless Link Building Tips for Business Blogs

Link Building for Business Blogs Doesn't Need to Be Risky

As a key component of a hub and spoke online marketing strategy, blogs can be very effective for social media network engagement, online PR, customer service, and as search engine optimization assets. While there are numerous cases studies of business blogs (I like to think Online Marketing Blog is one) providing tremendous value, blogs are simply software tools and what you get out of them is in proportion to how well you know how to use them.  One of the common areas of lost opportunity with business blogs is link building.

Despite Panda, Penguin and maybe someday “Zebra?”, updates from Google to further filter out what constitutes useful content and links on the web, links will always be valuable for attracting traffic.  Some online marketers chase exploits, tricks or shortcuts only to get spanked by a black and white named-animal update from Google.  Why not spend that creativity on something of value and competitive advantage that withstands the advancing filters applied by search engines?

Here are a few timeless tips for building natural links that will attract and engage customers to your business blog:

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Three Requirements as Marketers, Agencies and Publishers Converge

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Communications, the publisher of BtoB Magazine, announced the creation of CrainsSocial, a new marketing services group offering social media solutions to marketers. This is one more introduction in a long line of changes that are blurring traditional roles in the marketing landscape.

Not only are the trends towards digital, social, mobile and content changing the B2B marketing landscape, the roles of agencies, publishers and marketers in that landscape are blurring as well.

As these lines move, the role marketers need to take is shifting as well. Here are three of the key changes marketers need to make. Please share your additions in the comments below.

1. Own It

More than ever, you need to own and enforce your overall strategy. Without traditional AORs as a natural lead for agency coordination and integration (AOR relationships dropped from 50% of companies to 15% in the last decade), you need to take on this role directly. Every provider will look to push the boundaries of your brand and marketing guidelines. You must ensure these pushes are coordinated and moving in the same direction.

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12 Essential Tools for the Content Marketer

 

One of the questions marketers get asked most often starts like this. “I think I get content marketing, but what kind of content works best?” The short answer is that there are at least twelve types of content you can utilize as part of any content marketing plan.

In this case, the focus is on content that can extend your brand’s reach, beyond your website or blog. There’s no single type that works best for all companies. In fact, diversification and having a portfolio of content you can pull from is key. Here are the twelve types of content to focus on, and how they can be used.

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5 Ways to Build a Solid Email Marketing List

Email marketing is a powerful tool that can extend your reach beyond your website and create new salesopportunities. If you simply sell to customers when they happen to visit your site, you have an all-or-nothing chance of making a sale. Should they leave without making a purchase, there's no guarantee they'll return later.

But when you build an email list of current and potential customers, you can reach out repeatedly to your prospects with targeted messages.

Here are five ways to integrate email marketing into your website and stay in touch with your best prospects:

1. Build an opt-in form on your home page.
Perhaps the easiest and most common way to create a list is to integrate an email opt-in form into your home page. To get attention, place your form "above the fold," so visitors can see it immediately and don't have to scroll down.

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3 Slick Analytics Dashboards to Monitor Your Business Website

If you’re running a company website without an analytics dashboard, you may as well be stumbling around in the dark. Building a viable and sustainable web presence in any industry is all about understanding the needs of your users and tailoring your service to fit their needs — how can you do that if you don’t even know what your users are looking at or how they got to your website?

The good news is that analytics dashboards simple to implement, and they also come in a variety of shapes and sizes to suit the needs and goals of your small business. While some people swear by Google Analytics or the tracking plug-ins found organically within their specific web hosting or content managing service (think WordPress analytics), there’s a lot of information you may not be getting from these sources. For example, while Google Analytics does a great job tracking individual page vies, it doesn’t necessarily break down any meaningful social sharing or referrals. You may want to know why a specific webpage on your site garners major traffic, but Google Analytics will only note that it comes from Facebook.

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Network Better Than Bill Clinton: 6 Ways To Build Bonds Faster

Do you like networking?

Me neither. I often want to run screaming from cocktail parties.

Yet I do like people–they are endlessly fascinating. And this, my friends, is how you can learn to love networking.

Here’s the key: The more you help people get what they want, the more they’ll help you. When you’re networking, you’re not just looking blindly for people who can give you stuff; you’re looking to create another kind of family—people you care about, people who will care about you.

“Palm Up”  Networking

Have you ever noticed there’s a physicality to the “gimme”? There’s a way people look at you when they want something: eager, impatient, and expectant. Sometimes they are leaning forward, as if preparing to grab. They’re watching for their moment, and if they don’t get it, their disappointment is reflected all over their face. Ick.

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Can Innovative Thinking Be Learned?

 

Disruptive innovators — the likes of entrepreneurial masterminds Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Pierre Omidyar — think and behave differently. They possess a suite of skills that enable them to connect dots that the rest of us don’t usually perceive.

But are some of us born innovators and the rest of us just hopeless? Hal Gregersen, senior affiliate professor of leadership at INSEAD and co-author of “The Innovator’s DNA,” believes that there are five key skills that disruptive innovator’s possess: the cognitive skill of associating and the behavioral skills of questioning, observing, networking, and experimenting. And yes, all of us can learn to flex these innovator’s muscles, Gregersen told me in a recent interview.

Gregersen and co-authors Clayton M. Christensen (professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School) and Jeff Dyer (professor of strategy at Brigham Young University’s Marriott School), believe that roughly two-thirds of the skills it takes to innovate can be learned. They point to historical research findings that concluded 25-40% of human innovation stems from genetics as evidence.

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How Much Should You Pay Yourself?

As raises go, this was a doozy. Andy Meadows, founder and CEO of custom software company Live Oak 360 in Austin, Texas, decided to increase his salary in the summer of 2010. He didn't bump it up by 5 percent, or 10 percent, or even 25 percent. Instead, he doubled it -- to what he calculated an outsider would charge to do his job. It was a stretch for his then eight-year-old company, but Meadows is now convinced it was the right thing to do.

"Raising my salary to a market level forced me to look at my company from an investor's perspective," Meadows says. "It helped me better understand the value of my own time."

As he began looking at the hours he was devoting to different tasks, he explains, he began asking if they were really tasks he should be doing, based on what the company was paying him, or if they were better suited to one of his employees. Often, the latter was the case, and he learned to cede those tasks to others. "It allowed me to turn myself loose from a lot of digging and hunting for information, and spend more time finding new and better business," he says now.

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Women: Are You Making Any Of These 5 Sales Sabotage Errors?

The topic of women in the workplace is one that typically stirs up impassioned debate and conversation. Primarily because, after all these years, we’ve yet to achieve full equality, whether in reality or perception (or both!). In fact, I recently read an article on Forbes titled, “Why Most Women Will Never Become CEO,” and it got me thinking – what are we doing wrong? So many times, women and society as a whole like to point the finger at external influencers for holding women back in the workplace. Those are surely at play. But is it possible that we are at fault, too?

I decided to take a closer look, focusing on a traditionally male-dominated area of business: sales. The interesting thing about sales is that while women are actually seen to be more successful in that profession, it is still seen as a predominantly male profession. But there are a burgeoning group of female sales professionals who are looking to empower women to take charge of their sales careers: Jill Konrath, Kim Duke and Kristine Scotto.

After speaking with them, I uncovered specific actions and behaviors that many women display that can unintentionally sabotage their success. The top five are listed below.

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15 Essential Twitter Chats for Social Media Marketers

Here are 15 hashtags that have created successful chats.

#Mmchat

Every Monday at 8 p.m. EST, @JeffAshcroft hosts a great chat with leading experts from successful firms in the marketing and social media industries at #Mmchat.

15 Essential Twitter Chats for Social Media Marketers

Setting up a Twitter chat is really easy, especially for social media marketers who already know how to utilize the power of a Twitter account. All it takes is a set date, a topic, and a hashtag. You let people know it is happening, and ask them to tell others who might be interested. Then you carry on a conversation at the set time with anyone using that hashtag.

SEE ALSO: 7 Tips for Better Twitter Chats

But knowing how to set one up isn’t always enough. If you want a few tips on how to best create a great chat, you should take a look at some that are already popular.

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Top 10 Reasons Businesses Don't Grow - Boiled Down to 2

I enjoy reading Jay Goltz’ musings on business. Though his posts focus primarily on small businesses, I often think his insights are useful for businesses of any size – and for individuals’ careers, as well.  Just read this recent post in the NYT where he opines about the 10 top  internal reasons small businesses fail to grow, and I think they really boil down to 2. (It seems I have a propensity for looking at things and reducing them to core elements.)

One of his 10 reasons stands alone in my mind: he calls it “the customer attitude,” and proposes that any small business where employees don’t respect the customers and don’t care about making them happy is doomed.  It may limp along, but it certainly won’t grow. I completely agree:  I’ve written before about good and bad customer service – and I don’t think a negative attitude toward customers is “hide-able.”  If employees think customers are generally difficult, crazy, dumb or irritating…it’s pretty obvious, and really off-putting.

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How to Make Money with Content Marketing

There’s been a lot of buzz this year around content marketing but no one is really talking about how to directly make money from a campaign.

If you want to generate revenue, it’s important to understand how information spreads on the internet. StumbleUpon and BuzzFeed recently teamed up to figure this out.

They found their most viral stories since 2007 were so popular because of cluster sharing. This means that the biggest hits were all shared lots of time among small clusters of friends instead of a few people broadcasting it to a large network.o figure this out.

Where is the best place to take advantage of cluster sharing? Studies confirm that email is still the most widely used medium for sharing information between small groups.

So how do you make more money with it?

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Marketing 2015: Be Prepared to Be Surprised. Very Surprised

Some steps marketers take are easy. They feel like baby steps, being a little shaky on the legs, but in retrospect they are not so difficult. For example, Facebook fan acquisition…. Many brands have mastered that. Read all about MTV’s journey to 100 million fans here, Disney’s here.

Social media marketing takes new skills, for sure, but the beauty of social media is that most of us can acquire those skills – it is a democratising medium. By definition it is accessible.

So I don’t imagine social will be a big differentiator going forward. It simply can’t be. My view, expressed elsewhere, is that the wrong data model lies behind social, anyway. 

Outside of social, a few marketers are taking on a much larger remit, like becoming the source of innovation for the enterprise.

In that role the marketer helps redefine the purpose of the business.  If marketers don’t do that, then CIOs will or innovation will be left to languish with the Chief Innovation Officer, a title without a strategic role in many organizations.

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Why Entrepreneurs Succeed - and You Can, Too

 

All it takes to become an entrepreneur is a big idea and a million dollars – right? Len Schlesinger, president of Babson College and co-author of Just Start: Take Action, Embrace Uncertainty, Create the Future, argues that’s a pernicious myth – and it may be harming your career. With lifetime employment long gone, every employee needs to take responsibility for their own career and develop an entrepreneurial mindset: “Entrepreneurship is a skill that enables people to effectively cope with the uncertainty and unknowability that exists in the modern workplace, and effectively take action.”

But if you believe starting a business – or simply being innovative within your current company – requires a huge amount of cash or a world-beating idea, you’re likely to feel overwhelmed. Instead, embrace the secret that successful entrepreneurs have discovered: “If you want to start an entrepreneurial activity, you don’t need a big idea,” says Schlesinger. “You just need something you want. You don’t have to wait for this magic to come to you in the shower; if you keep tinkering at it, something’s likely to happen.”

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10 Proven Ways To Market Your Website

So, you’ve taken the steps to create your company website…but what do you do now?

Now you face the challenge of actually bringing in new, qualified traffic. After all, that’s how you will make more sales and increase your customer base.

Check out these 10 ways you can pull in visitors to your website:

1. Search engine optimization

SEO is the process of increasing your website’s visibility in search engine’s organic results through optimizing your pages with the keyword phrases people are likely to search for. Think about it: when you search for something in Google, do you typically go beyond the first couple pages of results? Probably not, and neither will your potential customers.

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9 Easy Ways to Remember Your Presentation Material

One of the most common reasons we experience presentation anxiety is the fear that we will forget what we have to say and risk losing credibility. A method many use to address this fear is to create PowerPoint slides as a memory aid. However, this is short-sighted because nothing erodes your credibility as a speaker faster than signaling to the audience that you are dependent on your slides.

Seasoned presenters are able to announce a slide before showing it. At a minimum, they know their material so well that all they need to do is briefly glance at the slide to know what's coming next. You can achieve this by doing simple memory boosting practices to remember your presentation material and, in turn, reduce your anxiety.

Here are nine tips to help you remember what you have to say.

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The Secret to Landing Pages That Sell? Understand Your Unique Star …

Almost every big Hollywood blockbuster you’ve ever watched has a common factor.

There is the star, and then there is the supporting cast.

The star gets all the lines. The star gets to do most of the work. The star is the focus, and gets most of the glory. The movie is about the star.

So what does the supporting cast do?

The supporting cast have smaller roles, fewer lines. They have less work to do, but it’s crucial work.

Your sales page is a lot like that. And understanding how these two Hollywood factors work together can make all the difference in building landing pages that sell.

As every regular Copyblogger reader knows, a good sales page has features and benefits of a product or service. It has some fascinating bullet points. It has a strong headline. It has a compelling opening paragraph.

These elements are your supporting cast. They highlight the things that the customer needs and wants to know about your product or service.

But they’re not the star.

The star of your landing page is the uniqueness of the product or service. The star gets a lot more space. A lot more explanation. And in fact, the script writer (that’s you) may re-write the entire story to let a particular star shine more brightly.

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How to Attract Crowdfunding Investors Without Breaking the Law

As the potential returns from crowdfunding go beyond free T-Shirts and movie passes, the rules were bound to get more complex.

Last week, President Barack Obama signed into law the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, or JOBS Act. Though the law contains many parts that could free up funds for startups, the most anticipated measure among the entrepreneurial set is the crowdfunding provision that legalizes investing in startups by non-accredited investors.

Formerly, only accredited investors -- typically wealthy individuals who can afford to make riskier bets -- could invest in pre-IPO companies.

Though the prospect of being able to raise money from a bigger pool of investors is giving many entrepreneurs reason to salivate these days, the law stands to add a new level of complexity in the way companies market themselves to investors using crowdfunding.

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How to Tell if You Have a Great Idea

 

There's plenty of money out there for great ideas. How to tell if you've got one.

There’s plenty of funding if you have a good idea.

Somehow, a bunch of entrepreneurs got it into their heads that good ideas go unfunded. It’s just not true. Because part of what makes something a good idea is the fact that the founder can convey that it’s a good idea. And in the world of funding, there are rules about how one conveys a good idea. You need an addressable market. You need to solve a problem for that market. There needs to be a way to make money. A lot of it. And there needs to be a barrier to entry.

I’m blown away by how many founders think they can get away with not having one of these things. You could have a weakness, sure. But you have to have the essential components of a good company, or you don’t have a good company.

There are plenty of people who will give you feedback on your idea. It takes very little knowledge of the startup world to recognize a crappy idea, because most ideas are so crappy in so many ways and you only need to be able to see one of them.

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Why Most Brainstorming Sessions Are Useless

 

I confess, the prospect of gathering my team together for a group pow-wow to collectively generate new ideas and engage in problem-solving makes me feel all warm and fuzzy. The problem is, traditional brainstorming sessions are rarely the best way to ensure innovation.

Group work has been the norm across many industries for decades now, and schools have been placing students’ desks in clusters to ingrain this group-think tendency at ever earlier ages. Individual offices and cubicles have given way to collaborative workspaces in many offices, especially where creative work is the stock-in-trade.

Intuitively, this all makes a great deal of sense to me. Take down the walls, those silly barriers. Let the people come together and build a better tomorrow, with each contributing their unique strengths to the conversation. We’re stronger together. And to a large extent, I still believe all of this to be true.

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