Like it or not, our lives are curated. Yet some businesses believe they must rely only on content they’ve created themselves.

Walking down the aisles of my local supermarket the other day, it occurred to me that when it comes to groceries, the grocer plays a role similar to Google. In the grocery store, it is all about shelf placement – the prime middle spaces on the shelves are more likely to attract buyers than the bottom shelves. And the grocer demands extra merchandising fees for this prime real estate. In Google’s case, prime placement is at the top of the search results – and getting on the top is determined by who pays Google the most through SEO or Google Adwords. Both require pay-to-play – one for groceries, the other for content – and both are curators who are influencing buyer behavior to optimize their businesses. Nothing wrong with that – it is free enterprise in the most basic form. But it is worth considering how fundamental curation is in our daily lives.

Curation is critical because we are faced with a virtually endless list of choices – whether for canned soup, toothpaste, video clips, or news reports. Someone – or something – must put order in this chaos, whether it is your supermarket’s merchandising manager or Google’s content placement algorithms. Consider a museum, where a curator decides which small fraction of the museum’s countless artifacts will be displayed for public viewing. Or the librarian, deciding which of the millions of books in print will occupy the library’s precious shelf space. Often the curation comes with annotation – in the museum, annotation is obvious, as the staff goes to great lengths to explain why the pieces that they have chosen to display is important. Or the local book store, where often we see hand-written “staff picks,” intended to help the buyer purchase the right book.

Considering how fundamental curation and curators are in our daily lives, I find it curious that many businesses or brands insist on using only original content in communicating the intended messages to their prospective customers or constituents. This would be analogous to an art museum displaying only pieces that the museum contracted to have painted or sculpted. Not only would this lack variety, and make for a pretty boring viewer experience, but the museum would lack credibility, being seen as parochial and biased in displaying only the works they commissioned. As consumers, individual and business buyers want sufficent education to make the right choices. We want to believe that those we are buying from are the experts in their fields – the authority – but also that they are unbiased at some level. And to be unbiased, a business needs to supplement their own original content with respected third-party content – whether that third party content is Campbell’s soup as an alternative to the in-house brand – or a third party content in the form of a blog or research report relevant to a specific brand or product.

But as noted above, given these vast oceans of content we all swim in every day, how is a brand or business able to sift through all the noise and uncover third-party content that is truly relevant to the products they are promoting? Trying to find it by searching is futile, for as noted above, Google will find what makes Google the most money – which is not necessarily the content you want. And while social networks offer some spontaneity and serendipity, most of this content is recycled/re-tweeted, or re-posted from the same sources, creating a digital-social-content echo chamber. And when unique or interesting content does fly across the Twitter feed, you’d better be there – for this information is ephemeral, with Twitter information half-lives measured in minutes.

So, no surprise, Trapit offers an answer. Trapit will do the heavy lifting, tapping into massive streams of real-time information, grabbing the pieces that are relevant to your business or product, to your brand or your people. It serves up this content in an easily consumable display, allowing you or your team to continue the curation process Trapit has started by providing features to allow the section of media types (text, video, or both and, coming soon, audio content). Trapit allows curation capabilities like modifying the title, summary, or photo in the content synopsis, or adding your own value through annotation of the piece. And once you’ve decided which content is ready to publish alongside your original material, Trapit provides the widest variety of distribution endpoints – be it your web site, mini-site, social networks, mobile devices, or select applications. Trapit even offers a custom-branded iPad application as the vehicle to reach your constituents with the right content at the right time. And then Trapit proves the analytical capability that allows you to see which of your content is working – and that which is not.

In short, we live in a world of near constant curation. Trapit gives your business the power to curate – the tools you need to effectively and efficiently discover, curate, and distribute credible information that will help influence your audience while building your reputation as the authority in your field. Curate with Trapit and don’t worry about paying for prime placement…you will stand out through the delivery of compelling content that captures the hearts and minds of your audience.

– Gary

When I first started training and following my Pickles and Preserves trap, the blogosphere was alive with chatter of soon-to-happen, Can it Forward Day. An ad hoc holiday encouraging folks to not let any of their garden bounty rot on the vine. The holiday fell this past Saturday and with it came the maturation of a couple of preservation projects and plans for more.

Can it Forward Day was dreamt up by a Seattle based collective, Canning Across America (CAA) and sponsored by Ball (yeah the jars). In the tradition of small town fruit festivals that celebrate the harvest and preservation of a particular species (like upcoming huckleberry festival) the day comes at a time when many backyard gardeners are dealing with a sudden, and fleeting, overabundance. The day featured demos and talks by the CAA and was streamed live out of Seattle’s Pike Place Market to an Internet audience participating in nationwide canning events, workshops, and parties.

The founding ladies of CAA are an impressive bunch. Their ranks Include former Washington Post journalist Kim O’donell and author Lucy Norris whose book, Pickled: Vegetables, Fruits, Roots, More–Preserving a World of Tastes and Traditions, was the culmination of a three-year oral history project with the New York Food Museum. Their mission to “promote safe food preservation and the joys of community building through food” is sure to resonate with many in a country where small businesses catering to the DIY slow food crowd are opening in a steady march (Portland Homestead Supply Co, Bee Thinking and Portland U-Brew and Pub are all recent additions to the slow food and drink scene in Oregon).

I started my own Can it Forward day by consuming my first homemade dill pickle made from a garden grown cuke. And oh what a pickle. I’ve made kraut, kimchi, and other veggie ferments before, but never a straight pickle. Maybe it was beginners luck but it turned out so well that I spent the remainder of my day bicycling through the outskirts of the Mount Hood forest composing pickle haikus (ala the Shi Jing which contains the first known reference to kimchi in one of its odes):

Oh lovely pickle,
spicy, crunchy, and sour
with fizz full of life.

I love fermentation and while my trap was and is full of varied and interesting recipes for refrigerator dills and other vinegar brined varieties, I knew wanted to do a fermented dill. I learned that you could make half sours or full sours by varying the salt concentration of your brine, and that half sours were less fermented and wouldn’t keep as long. My pickles aren’t bound to last long in my pickle happy house, but I decided to go the full sour route anyway. These are the pickles I know and love and that my uncle gives out at Christmas.

Vegetable fermentation is a surprisingly easy and very rewarding process. At base all you need to do is pack a clean, non-leaching container (glass or food grade plastic no metal or unknown plastic) full of the desired vegetable, cover with a salt water brine (avoid iodine! so use kosher, pickling, or sea), weight the veggies down with a glass jar or a smooth, boiled rock, cover, and wait for fermentation to begin. Taste testing/eyeballing the process will let you know when it’s done. If something goes wrong, it’s generally pretty obvious.

Fermented veggies will keep for months in the refrigerator (or in a cold cellar or clay pot buried in the ground), and the process historically was a way to preserve fresh textured produce for consumption during the winter months. In the days before you could put a cabbage on a plane your only options for winter veggies were dried or fermented. Dried cabbage is not a lot of fun.

Fermentation does some pretty nifty things beyond preservation. Fermented veggies can be more nutritious than their raw counterparts and easier to digest. Cruciferous vegetables (cabbage, bok choy, cauliflower, broccoli…) are such an example. These veggies suppress your thyroid when eaten raw. This can make you feel sluggish and even gain weight. Most people never notice these problems because the cruciferous family is rarely consumed raw in large quantities. Cooking or fermenting these veggies mitigates this effect and fermentation maintains (and sometimes creates!) nutrients that cooking can kill. Fermented veggies are also full of live microbes that may aid the body’s digestive and immune systems.

Depending on how hot it is where you are and the kind of veggies you’re using, the process can take days to weeks. My pickles took about a week, and my pickled green tomatoes are looking half done at a week and a half.

I decided to try fermented green tomatoes to help me deal with overloaded tomato plants that were taking down their cages and resisting all my efforts to stake them. I used the same process as my cucumber pickles and expected to wait longer for fermentation to run its course. If it works out it will help me make use of any tomatoes left green on the vine when the frost starts to approach (which given the state of this mild Portland summer, there are bound to be plenty). At a week and a half they look promising, slowly turning a paler, yellower green and bubbling readily.

Not all veggies ferment well or easily in a salt brine. Beans, for example, contain proteins that make this kind of fermentation difficult if not impossible. So while I vastly prefer my pickles “live” I decided to take a gander at dilly beans (wax, green, or string beans blanched and set in a slightly sweetened vinegar brine with lots of dill and other spices). I’ve had a bumper crop of yellow string beans this year.

The process was pretty straightforward. To keep things “lively,” I selected raw apple cider vinegar for my base (although I ended up bringing this to a boil, killing any microbes) and used some hot peppers I’d picked up at the farmers market. I’ve yet to taste my dilly’s, but they look good. I’ve got another week or so until they’re prime. The nice thing about dilly beans is you can re-use the brine nearly indefinitely. As more beans come in I can simply blanch and add them to the jar (eating a not quite done dilly bean is just like eating a slightly cooked bean and absolutely safe).

If I get enough tomatoes (or if I find them particularly cheap at the farmers market) I’m hoping to try out this recipe for bourbon and tomato jam and get my holiday gifts out of the way well in advance. There’s something ridiculously satisfying about eating something in winter that started out as a seedling in your backyard in the spring (and knowing exactly what it contains and how it was made).

Canning and pickling may be the “it” thing right now, but among the dallying hobbiests and first timers Can it Forward Day probably made some lifelong converts. I mean these are arts that have been with us for thousands or hundreds of years and their products beloved to the point where they can even form part of a nation’s identity. Pickles and jam are just that good.

-Laura

Today’s buyers don’t become customers overnight. They need to self-educate and build trust with a company and its employees over time.

With the birth of marketing automation software, marketers filled in the temporal gap between when leads first show interest in a company and when they are ready to purchase. Through email and remarketing, marketers have tried to build relationships and trust with their potential customers.

But the times, they are a changin’. And it’s time to rethink lead nurturing strategies. To be more effective and improve conversion rates, marketers need to enlist the sales team to deliver nurturing messages. Here’s why…

Personalized vs. Personal: The Problem with Current Lead Nurturing Tactics

Marketing’s lead nurturing efforts have been quite effective. According to the Annuitas Group, nurtured leads make 47% larger purchase than non-nurtured leads. But to build a powerful nurturing program, marketers must acknowledge the limits of their efforts. Most notably, they must recognize that their lead nurturing efforts are personalized, but they aren’t personal. Here’s what I mean by that.

B2B buyers are savvy. They recognize automation when they see it. They know that many of the nurture tactics – especially emails – are being sent to large swaths of people. Sure, buyers can see some signs of personalization (e.g. you got my name right in the email; you saw that I downloaded another ebook), but buyers can tell that the message is not personal. It was not written specifically for them – and them alone.

Ultimately, that’s what modern buyers crave. They want personal messages more than they want personalized messages. In a world where it’s easy to send messages en masse, buyers have grown tired of bulk marketing messages. To really stand out from the crowd, companies need to get personal and enable their employees to develop human-to-human relationships with their buyers.

Getting Buyers to the Finish Line

The need for personal relationships is particularly strong for buyers who are self-educating. When you are learning, you need to have conversations to process information, and a series of automated messages will not lead your buyer to the purchasing table. That’s where your sales team comes in.

Think of the buyer’s journey like going on a tour of a historical site. Some tours give you a headset, tell you to press “Play,” and take you on an automated tour of the site. Your interactions with other humans are minimal, and if you have a question, you have to seek someone who can provide an answer.

That’s akin to automated lead nurturing.

But there’s another way. Other tours provide expert guides. These guides have personalities and make jokes. They get to know you, your friends, and your family during the tour. They make small talk. They ask you questions. If you don’t understand something, they can help you get unstuck.

This type of tour is like using your sales team for nurturing.

Right now, many companies are not using the second form of nurturing. They are not providing expert guides to their customers. Instead, they are guiding buyers through their journeys by pressing the “play” button. They create a set of rules and automated nurture campaigns. They cross their fingers and hope that their one-size-fits-many approach works.

Unfortunately, more often than not, their automated campaigns don’t work. 99% of a company’s leads never close, and that’s, in part, because buying committees are getting stuck. Specifically, buyers are getting stuck when they are trying to decide how to solve their business problems, irrespective of vendor selection.

To get beyond the hump in the chart above, buyers need a human tour guide who can help them build consensus and move towards vendor selection. They need an expert who will listen to them, discuss ideas with them, and suggest next steps for them along their journey.

Only a human being can provide that level of expertise and personal interactions. And your sales team can do that at scale.

Nurturing vs. “Staying Top of Mind”

Make no mistake. Teaching your sales team to engage in nurturing and relationship building will take time because sales reps need to change their mindset.

B2B sales reps like to “stay top of mind” with their buyers. This is a great instinct to have, but there’s only one small problem. Sales reps often go about it the wrong way. They typically send an email that says, “Just wanted to check in! Have you solved your data management problem?”

All buyers know what that means. It means, “I’m checking in to see if you are you ready to buy.” Always needing something – that’s no way to build a relationship, and ultimately, lead nurturing is about building a relationship. It’s about adding value throughout the entire buyer journey – not just when the potential customer is ready to purchase a product.

That is the fundamental mindset change that sales reps need to make. Constant reminders to buy won’t work. But constant conversations centered on engaging content will.

Increasing Win Rates

In the end, this mindset change will be worth it. With access to more information than ever before, buyers often take more time to explore their options and educate themselves before reaching a decision. As a result, it’s important for sales teams to engage buyers sooner so that they can influence a buyer’s mindset and purchasing criteria.

When sales reps position themselves as visible, helpful tour guides, buyers are more likely to engage with those sales reps – long before they normally would. As a result, sales teams are far more likely to hit their quota. Sales reps who engage earlier in the sales cycle are 56% more likely to hit their numbers.

Additional Resources

To learn more, you may want to check out these additional resources:

I was eleven years young the last time my jaw dropped that dramatically to the floor. Let’s turn back the clock, shall we? Enter summertime, 1997.

It was the first time in my life that I had voluntarily purchased a pay-per-view boxing match. Matter of fact, it was the first time I had purchased anything that didn’t have at least a dozen grams of sugar in it. There was no way to illegally stream anything online back then (did we even have AOL dial-up yet?), and certainly no neighborhood dive bar was going to allow a few snot-nose kids to catch a glimpse of the fight either.

I can’t tell you how many pop cans my buddies and I had to take back to our neighborhood Albertson’s grocery store down the street in order to save up for the epic Tyson-Holyfield rematch. It was one of the more hard-earned, accomplished purchases we had ever made. That was, until a chunk of Holyfield’s ear was spit out into the center of the ring, bloodying up a little spot on the canvas. (In case you need your memory refreshed, click here!)

Jaw, meet floor. Money, meet fire. Just like that, three measly rounds and it was over.

Fourteen years later, my jaw hits the floor with the exact same velocity, and go figure, its cause, a dramatic twist in a boxing match. And what do you know, another monumental waste of money.

Flash forward 14 years.

This past Saturday I order an HBO pay-per-view boxing match featuring one of the greatest pound-for-pound fighters to ever lace up boxing gloves. The heavy favorite, Floyd “Money” Mayweather (42-0) was set to take on a young gun Victor “Vicious” Ortiz (29-3-2) who was making his debut on a stage of that magnitude. Never had the lights shined so bright on the 24-year old Ortiz.

Although Mayweather was unquestionably in control of the fight for the first three rounds, the match started to heat up after Ortiz lead an impassioned charge toward Mayweather, causing the champ to back-pedal toward the ropes in a defensive stance. Ortiz was landing a barrage of punches, although none of them seemed to be fazing Mayweather as he was doing a proficient job of evading any solid contact from the wild strikes being thrown his way.

And then it happened.

Just when the fight seemed like it had a chance to balance out and become something special, Ortiz did something incredibly immature, and rather stupid. The young fighter was obviously flustered and as a result, sporadically decided to lunge at the champ with his forehead like a savage free-safety would to a defenseless wide receiver coming across the middle in a football game. The headbutt was bush-league, it was illegal, and it was an act of cowardice. Fortunately, it didn’t land solidly either, because if it had, the fight likely would’ve stopped immediately. Mayweather very well could’ve broken his nose, or had his teeth bashed in through that jabbering mouthpiece of his.

For his reckless actions, Ortiz was docked a point on the score card and it was clear as day that the young fighter had acknowledged that he made a poor choice the very moment after his head struck Mayweather. Ortiz apologetically chased Mayweather around the ring attempting to reconcile a sense of respect that he obviously had just lost from his opponent, the crowd and the millions of viewers at home watching. Although the headbutt from Ortiz was definitely a cheap shot, I found his reaction to be rather amicable, and you could tell he was legitimately remorseful for his spur of the moment decision to cheat the champ.

At this point, I honestly thought the fight was about to turn epic. Epic, in a positive way from a spectator’s standpoint. For a split second, Mayweather was on his heels and looked less nimble than the flawless boxer that fans have always known him to be. I wondered if the headbutt would anger Mayweather and take him out of his game, perhaps forcing him lose his poise and shoot for an immediate knockout blow. Nobody can dance and strike with Mayweather, but what if he didn’t want to dance any longer? In the process, would the champ let his guard down and give Ortiz the slightest opening that he was looking for?

I highly doubt it, yet we’ll never know…

The fighters were brought back together to meet up to finish what would be the fourth and final round. This is when my flashbacks to the Tyson-Holyfield saga swept through my brain. It had been 14 years since I had seen something this crazy unfold before my eyes.

Ortiz was not ready to fight. He understood what he did was wrong, and was adamant about finding a way to even things out like two grown men should do. For Ortiz, being docked a point in the score book wasn’t enough. He wanted to know for certain that Mayweather was willing to forgive him before he put his dukes back up. Ortiz understood he had lost a tremendous amount of respect from one of the greatest fighters to ever live, and he couldn’t throw another punch until Mayweather dropped the grudge and acknowledged that his opponent was sincerely apologetic.

Mayweather did the complete opposite. He suckerpunched Ortiz. He blindsided Ortiz, knocking him senseless with a blow that not only ended his opponent’s night, but also gave a deep black-eye to the sport of boxing in general. I was shocked that something more cowardly than Ortiz’s headbutt could occur just moments later. Again, my jaw hit the floor.

Mayweather backed up his actions by exclaiming that, “what goes around, comes around,” and that a fighter, “should protect himself at all times.” True. However, I believe there is an expected level of sportsmanship and professionalism that comes along with being the face of your entire sport. Yes, referee Joe Cortez lost control of the fight, absolutely. As you can see in the scene above, both Ortiz and Cortez are looking away from what Mayweather is about to do. You could also argue that Cortez was the one that distracted Ortiz from defending himself causing him to look away. Fighters are constantly warned not to touch gloves unless instructed to do so, because of the chance that the opponent could come in with an unexpected blow instead. But wasn’t this situation a little different? Weren’t the circumstances calling for a refresher, a moment to wipe the slate clean?

The debate about Mayweather’s actions swept like wildfire through my Pro Boxing Trap:

There were plenty of writers out there that took the conservative stance behind Mayweather, and preached that ethical point-of-views obviously don’t belong in boxing. “He should’ve been ready,” they insist. However, there was plenty of content that threw Mayweather under the bus, noting that not only did he cheat himself, but even more so, he cheated the fans and the sport of boxing. Even Juan Manuel Marquez–a current boxing title holder–slammed Mayweather for his actions, questioning whether Cortez even signaled for the fight to resume. Marquez–currently ranked the fifth best pound-for-pound fighter in the world by Ring Magazine–insists that a boxing ring is no place for a man to be “sucker punched.”

Marquez continues on to plead that:

Marquez was spot on. His quote adequately sums up my perspective for the entire blog post. Mayweather spoiled an expensive piece of entertainment for everyone. And then he had the nerve to curse out an old man in his post-fight interview, and proceed to thank the fans that paid to watch him fight. The same fans that were collectively booing him out of town.

In my book, Mayweather’s legacy is tarnished. He was quoted in the ring saying that this fight was just another addition to his “legacy,” and that is absolutely correct. He will go down as one of the greatest pound-for-pound fighters, but he will never earn the tag of one of the greatest champions.

Money Mayweather won’t ever receive another dime out of my pocket. You can count on that.

-Geoff

To be effective in social media, brands must create, curate, and share rewarding, relevant content. The buying public responds to quality content by consuming it, liking it, and sharing it. And low and behold, the brand is elevated, sales increase. But, when brand content isn’t relevant, or if strikes the wrong note (is it a pushy sales pitch? is it a poor attempt at humor playing on stereotypes?) the brand will be ignored, criticized, or even tarred and feathered by relentless detractors.

One scenario where the public is particularly sensitive to klutzy brand behavior is in the wake of a major crisis, either a domestic crisis as for US brands after the San Bernardino shootings, or an international crisis like the Paris terror attacks of November 2015.

Two mistakes that are commonly made by brands during crises are first, not reacting at all, which is to say, they act as if nothing has happened after the social media conversation has shifted focus to the crisis, and second, participating in the conversation in a way which makes it appear as if the brand is trying to promote itself (akin to clickjacking or hashtag takeovers).

Regarding the first, not reacting at all, the proper response for a brand usually is to pause normal social media activity for a time. As Kevin Pedraja wrote in the Sterling Communications blog

Regarding the second, reacting in a way that appears to be self-interested: Some brands are inherently involved in crisis relief efforts, as, for example, the Red Cross is involved in spreading information about food, water, and shelter after a natural disaster. For everyone else, any mention the brand makes of the crisis risks creating the perception that the brand is attempting to leverage the crisis for the purpose of making themselves look good – to sell, in other words.

For examples concerning the Paris attacks, this Adweek piece thoughtfully examines a range of brand responses and public perceptions of those responses. In a nutshell, it’s challenging to hit the right note. On one extreme, a tweet by Kenneth Cole that explicitly sought to capitalize on the tragedy in Syria to sell shoes garnered a good deal of criticism. And on the other end, brands who seemed to “get it right” still faced criticism, counterintuitively, for opportunistically acknowledging the victims of the Paris attacks while ignoring other crises.

With this context I can offer four pieces of advice to online brands about social media activity after a crisis.

1. Put in place a crisis plan that can be initiated 24x7x365, which is to say, it can be set in motion by someone who has authority to act even when the usual decision makers are asleep or on vacation. The plan should create the mechanisms needed to implement points 2-4, below.
2. When a crisis lands, pause “business as usual” social media activity, including posts which were scheduled for automatic posting before the crisis landed. Unless immediately notified, many community managers and social sellers and/or employee advocates will very likely continue to post content that may be insensitive to the crisis, or their social media tools (like Trapit and Buffer) will pump those posts out for them unless they are rescheduled. For this reason, brands should have email, SMS, or even telephone outreach in place and ready to notify all social media users that they should pause normal activity for a period of time.
3. When a crisis lands, send an advisory to both the company’s social account community managers and its social sellers and/or employee advocates regarding the sort of posts that are appropriate (or inappropriate) in light of what has occurred. Well meaning community managers or executives may create awkward sympathy posts that hit the wrong note with a hyper-sensitive public. For this reason all official sympathy posts should be carefully reviewed, or to be safe, it might be a better idea to simply remain silent. And although brands are generally better off not trying to direct employees’ personal expressions of sympathy during a crisis, individual social sellers and employee advocates may simply be advised to avoid posting company content for a period of time during the crisis. Perhaps an employer could say “You are free to respond to the crisis as you see fit, however, please refrain from sharing content from our library [such as a Trapit library] for this period of time.” The exception might be public service posts, as noted above, as with Red Cross employees who might be encouraged to retweet information about the availability of shelters after a hurricane, etc.
4. Steps 2 and 3 should be bounded by the scope of the crisis. For example, although arguably every brand would have been well advised to implement steps 2 and 3 worldwide after the Paris attacks, perhaps a brand would only want to reach out to social media managers and social sellers/employee advocates in a certain country after a personal tragedy affecting a beloved sports personality or political figure from that country, for example.

I’d love to read your examples of post crisis social media communication handled well and handled poorly, as well as your take on what should be included in brands’ crisis response. Feel free to share your comments below.

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The customer’s digital experience is at the core of today’s B2B marketing organization. In a short period of time, content marketing, social media marketing, and marketing automation have gone from “nice-to-haves” to “must-haves” and from “must-haves” to “givens.”

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for today’s sales organizations. By and large, sales teams remain digitally immature. Compared to their marketing counterparts, salespeople have not embraced the modern customer’s experience, and that has profound ramifications for businesses. Let’s take a closer look at what’s happening.

Mind the Gap: A Brief History of What Went Wrong

With the arrival of Google in 1998, the role of the buyer began to change. Suddenly, potential customers could search and find information about vendors. Marketing responded by focusing on search engine optimization (SEO) and creating great content that would attract their buyers.

Soon thereafter, social networking sites like LinkedIn (2003), Facebook (2004), and Twitter (2006) began to pop up, and marketers saw another opportunity. They could have conversations with buyers via social media, and quickly, social media marketing became a top priority.

Meanwhile, sales teams failed to take full advantage of the modern buyer’s journey. They continued to rely on the same techniques that they had used for years: cold calls and cold emails. And their preferred forms of content continued to be product fact sheets, cold calling scripts, cold email templates, and sales decks.

As a result, a gap exists between the digital maturity of most marketing teams and the digital maturity of most sales teams. As time progresses, the gap will only widen – unless marketing leaders partner with sales leaders to change the order of things.

Why Should Marketing Leaders Care about The Digital Divide?

It’s easy for marketing leaders to point fingers at the sales leaders. After all, marketers have done their part in adjusting to the digital era. Now, it’s time for sales teams to do their part, right?

Yes and no. Yes, sales leaders need to take initiative, but they need someone, preferably the marketing department, to guide them through the transformation.

In fact, by overlooking the digital transformation of the sales organization, marketing leaders are hurting their companies. Here’s how:

1. Inconsistent customer experience – Through dynamic content and optimized messaging, marketing leaders are responsible for shaping the buyer’s experience.

However, at many companies, a customer’s experience is fragmented and disjointed. Marketing engages with the buyer in one way, and sales engages with the buyer in a completely different way. This leave customers feeling confused because they’re receiving fragmented and (often times) contradictory communications from the same company.

Instead, a customer’s experience needs to feel “department-less” and “channel-less.” Buyers need to feel like they are having the same digital experience – regardless of where they are or who’s engaging with them.

Ultimately, marketing leaders – as protectors of a brand’s equity and positioning – are best suited to help sales teams achieve that goal.

2. Lost revenue – CMOs have fought to earn their seats at the revenue table. And as more and more revenue-related responsibilities fall on their plate, they must move beyond the walls of the marketing department and take a bird’s-eye view of revenue generation.

In part, that means diving into how the sales process works and understanding problem areas. For example, if your sales team is relying heavily on “smile and dial” techniques, it is clear that your company has not modernized its sales process.

Research study after research study shows that social media is a crucial channel for salespeople. If sales representatives are not socially adept, they are more likely to underperform and miss their sales quotas. Moreover, socially immature sales teams find themselves losing to their competition based on price because sales reps aren’t engaging with customers soon enough.

To remedy this problem, revenue-driven marketers must devise ways to empower sales teams on social networks. In so doing, marketing and sales leaders can help their companies grow their top line.

You can read more about how marketers can support sales reps’ social selling efforts in this blog post.

A Time for Change

It’s no longer enough for marketing departments to create a strategy that spans across digital channels (e.g. social, email, mobile, etc.). We must foster marketing teams that act across departments and enable sales teams to provide a seamless experience to customers across digital channels.

More specifically, we must help sales reps understand the mindset of the digital buyer. We must provide them with the right content and messaging that will speak to the digital buyer. And we must equip them with the right tool set to effectively spark conversations and measure results.

Across multiple industries, CMOs are realizing that, while driving change in the sales organization might be challenging, it’s even more frustrating to lose to your competitors due to a digitally immature sales force. So, find a way to partner with your sales team, transform their mindset, and adapt to the modern digital buyer.

If you don’t, your company will be left behind.

Additional Resources

A good sales technology platform is a huge asset to your sales organization. With the right tools, reps can accomplish things that couldn’t be done before, and sales leaders can scale best practices across the entire sales organization.

Unfortunately, finding the right tool isn’t always easy. When you’re researching your social selling options, it’s important to ask good questions so that you get the answers you need.

Here are seven key questions to ask your social selling platform sales rep. These questions will help you choose the right technology for your organization.

1. How does this software promote social selling best practices?

Social selling is about listening to buyers, engaging them, building relationships with them, and shaping the buyer’s journey. It is not about sending out as many cold pitches as possible. Discuss which social selling best practices are built into the framework of the software and how it will help your sales team succeed.

2. How quickly does your software scale?

Many sales teams find success with a pilot group of social sellers. But challenges arise when leadership tries to fold the larger sales organization into the program. Ask your sales rep how they work with customers to scale their programs, and request specific customer stories that illustrate the software’s ability to scale.

3. How will my company’s sales reps find content for sharing and shaping the buyer’s journey?

82% of B2B buyers indicate that the winning vendor’s social content had a significant impact on their buying decision. That’s why sharing content is so important for sales reps. But to change minds and influence behavior, sales reps must be able to find content to share. So, ask your vendor about the software’s social content library. For example, can you import your company’s content? Can you surface relevant third-party content so that your reps aren’t corporate parrots that struggle to gain buyers’ trust?

4. How will your tool help my reps listen at scale?

To learn about their buyers, reps don’t need to jump on a call. With social, you can know with greater certainty who your buyers are, what people think, and what’s going on in the industry around you. Listening is one of the most valuable skills a rep can develop. Check with your software provider to see how their solution will enable sales reps to gather intelligence on social.

5. Do you just offer software? Or can you help with the change management aspects of the implementation?

You’ve probably worked with CRM software. You know that implementation is key to getting the most out of your investment. A robust tool requires buy-in from the top of the organization to the bottom. Furthermore, implementation requires training and a change management plan. Ensure that your software provider provides sufficient support to get your team up and running and seeing results.

6. How does your software help us measure the success of our social selling program?

Organizing content and listening at scale are just two aspects of good social selling software. But you can’t forget about measuring what works and what doesn’t work. Ask your vendor how the software helps track and illuminate which tactics and content assets are helping your sales team achieve its goals.

7. How will this purchase maximize the results from our current technology investments (e.g. CRM, marketing automation, or specific social networks)?

Building your tech stack is a crucial decision, so it’s important to carefully evaluate how a new tool will sync with your current systems. For example, can you attach UTM codes to the content that your sales reps are sharing? This allows your sales and marketing teams to use marketing automation for tracking which assets are contributing to lead generation and pipeline growth.

What should you expect from social selling software?

The top sales reps, along with a best-of-breed social selling platform, will take your social sales game to the next level. By asking the questions above, you’ll find the best technology for your organization.

To learn more about social selling software, check out these data sheets:

Many B2B companies have created digitally enabled sales organizations, processes, and systems. Their goal is to remain competitive by building multichannel interactions with customers across email, mobile, and social. Simply taking a digital approach, however, is not enough. Even well-designed sales processes can be undermined by the sales team’s mentality and tactics, especially if sales reps cling to old prospecting techniques that leave buyers feeling peeved.

The majority of buyers find that gathering information on their own is superior to interacting with a sales rep. Ouch! In part, that’s because buyers are tired of receiving sales spam, communications that pretend to be relevant and personal, but are self-serving and impersonal. You know the type of email and InMail and tweet. You receive them every day.

To gain your buyer’s trust, reps need to take a leap of faith and stop communicating like it’s the 1990s. Let’s take a look at how to send better sales messages.

To better communicate with customers, you have to understand what irks them. That’s why we’re providing you with examples of what sales reps shouldn’t do:

Emails that are overtly copied and pasted

We always get a kick out of these emails. Internally, one of our favorites is a series of emails addressed to “Bruce.” The recipient was Kim Babcock.

Emails that are about the sales rep

“I’ve been trying to get ahold of you.” “I hope that you’re not annoyed with my professional persistence.”

Some emails mask as buyer-centric emails, but really, they are just good old-fashioned guilt trips. “You must not like a good deal, huh? Is that why you’re not returning my calls?” That has guilt trip written all over it.

Generic, templated InMails that sound personal, but clearly aren’t

“I reviewed your profile and was impressed by your experience in the high tech marketing space.”

How original! *Sarcasm light is on* Clearly, you’re sending the same message to anyone who is at the director level or above and works in technology marketing.

Every message needs to focus on the prospect – not you. You need to answer the question: Why should this individual prospect drop everything and speak with me?

To answer that question, you need to do research on your buyer. Great sales messages show a deep understanding of who the individual buyer is and what they care about. Before you send any sales communication, try to identify two or three key findings that you can mention and tie your value proposition to. Yes, that will take some research, but it will pay off in the end.

Marketers have learned how to create and curate content that add value, rather than annoy, buyers. And believe it or not, content assets work just as well in a sales context. To learn more about how content can help, check out 6 Ways Content Can Transform Your Sales Reps.

You’ve read the basic tenets. Now, it’s time to test your knowledge by taking a quick quiz. Read the subject lines, introductions, and calls to action. Then, determine whether they are good examples or bad examples of prospecting. Good luck!

To fully embrace social selling and digital sales requires companies to adopt new attitudes and new ways of working. Sales reps must come to terms with the fact that they are no longer the gatekeepers of information. With buyers taking the lead in the buyer-seller relationship, sales reps are now in the service industry, insofar as they must serve their customers. If they don’t, their sales messages will be deleted or wind up in the spam bin.

Recently we hired a new digital marketing manager named Mark, a PhD from Stanford who has brought with him not only a keen intellect, but also a wit and sense of humor that makes working with him fun, engaging and enlightening. When he joined, we spoke about what to do to create a truly impactful digital presence.

We discussed the value of social media in deciding which channels would provide the maximum results with our target audience. The website got top billing on our “must fix” list, and we also agreed that Google AdWords and retargeting were good places to invest some marketing budget. Our current results were benchmarked, the KPI’s set…and off we went – executing our new digital strategy.

It all seems so simple when put into a single paragraph. And it really is…this is not rocket science – or Artificial Intelligence. There is so much written about how to create and execute an effective digital strategy – the tactics are known – the list is extensive. The hard part is determining what to say and when to say it. CONTENT is the challenge. The effectiveness of any marketing strategy is the “stuff” you do to ensure that your voice is heard; not that your story makes your audience takes notice, but that they stand up and actively engage with you. The key is the content strategy – defining the right mix of created and curated content, and defining what content should go where – and when in the prospect lifecycle.

So let’s consider leads and their lifecycle. Today’s buyers are informed. Although it varies greatly with product complexity and market maturity, today’s buyers might be anywhere from 60 to 90% of the way through their journey before they reach out to a vendor ready to buy. Owning a much bigger piece of the lead-to-revenue journey is marketing’s job. We need to engage the customer through as much of this buying cycle as possible, focusing on delivering the right content at the right time during this lead-to-cash process. So, how do you start?

No, this is not a new Japanese restaurant, but Top of Funnel to Bottom of Funnel. It is an important way to think about your content strategy as it relates to where your buyer is along the purchasing cycle.

At TOFU there is a need to educate your buyers. Your content should be a mix of created and curated content. This is when your audience is researching and seeking knowledge. It is important to consider content that will educate, engage and enlighten them. Consider curated content about the industry, trends or statistics while creating thought provoking but easy-to-read white papers, eBooks, or infographics. The intent is to become their authority, their mentor, and their teacher – someone they can trust.

The middle of the funnel is time to start to introducing your offerings. The content should be original so that it can help your buyer differentiate your product from the competition. You can also use curated content here, but focus on third-party content that puts you in good standing. You want the prospective buyer to understand that not only can you be trusted, but that you are also offering a solution that is compelling and meets their needs. Consider using product webinars, product case studies, press releases, blogs, demo videos, buying guides, ROI calculators, etc. Just keep it crisp and digestible. Don’t overwhelm your future customers with tech jargon that may confuse them.

Once you reach BOFU, your sales team has completed their selling. But it is still important that the buyer has the information they need to make the final decision. You need to prove that you deserve the business. It is time to show how your customers feel about your offering through more customer success stories, videos, industry analyst feedback, more press, or even free trials.

The sales funnel is universal for any brand or business that is looking to sell products or services. Consider developing a marketing culture that positions your brand with content that is consistent with buyer needs depending on where they are along their purchasing journey. The results may surprise you.

– Pat

Here we are, living in an age where not only is information everywhere, but where the quality of that information is more important than ever. You’ve heard that “content is king,” and that’s never been more true than it is today. So you’re out there seeking the highest-quality content you can imagine, with well-researched information and facts, the nuanced opinion of an expert, and a unique voice and viewpoint, all without the false front of yellow journalism.

Under the umbrella of a high-quality and reputable publishing house, many of the best writers, journalists, and other content producers can be brought together: National Geographic for natural science, Here Media for LGBTQ issues, or Spin Media for entertainment.

It’s not just one voice that the audience wants to hear, no matter how valuable that single voice is; it’s a combination of as many of the A-list content creators as you can find. No matter how good, diverse and comprehensive the content in your publishing house is, no matter how many quality content creators you have on board, you’re never going to be the only source with something worth listening to. And unless you do something about it, when your audience goes to read an article that isn’t published under your brand, they’re not your audience any longer; they’re your competitor’s, at least for that moment.

You still might be the thought leader in your field; you still might be the first name that your audience thinks of when they think of your niche. After all, you’ve done all the right things: you’ve established your integrity, you’ve shown yourself to be honest, and you’ve been careful and thoughtful with the content you publish. Thanks to your commitment to quality, you’ve successfully earned your audience’s trust. But despite all that, they’re still going to want to hear viewpoints beyond the ones you bring them directly.

Well, what if you helped bring them those, too? What if you not only had a quality, branded app that brought all the superb content that’s under your umbrella to your audience, but that also found and delivered the best external content related to your topics of expertise as well? What if you could keep your audience within your branded app, even while they browsed the relevant non-native content that you brought to them? Throughout the whole process — the process of bringing them relevant stories, while they read the external content, and even once they finish the article — they’ll still be your audience.

Someone’s going to step up and take ownership of your topic and your set of issues, and position themselves as the #1 go-to source for your sector. In a world where publishing is changing faster than ever, fortune undoubtedly will favor the bold. Here at Trapit, we think we can give you a competitive advantage that lets you customize content on topics that matter, highlight your own native content, and hold on to your audience even while they peruse articles from external sources. What publisher wouldn’t want that?

-Ethan