• More than 95% of agencies plan to add to or expand their digital marketing services over the next 12 months
• 53% of respondents plan to add social media services to their offerings
• 50% of respondents would like to begin offering content services over the next 12 months
• The most popular bundles of services include social media, which is included in 89% of service bundles

What’s the takeaway? Clients don’t need a channel – they need results. They don’t want agency services in silos – they want their digital marketing agencies to be able to do everything from PR to SEO to social media to web design, etc. And agencies are responding.

We created the below infographic based on our findings from the study. Where do you see digital marketing services going in 2014 and beyond? If you’re an agency, are you prepared to meet the increasing client demands?

Embed The ‘Back to the Future’ Infographic

Copy the code below and paste it onto any webpage to display the Back to the Future: A Snapshot of Digital Marketing Agencies in 2014 infographic on your website.

<br /> <a href="http://www.optify.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/backtothefuturekeanan.edits6_.19.131.jpg?optify_r=infog&optify_rd=future-of-agencies"><br /> <img border="0" src="http://www.optify.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/backtothefuturekeanan.edits6_.19.131.jpg" width="610" alt="Future of Digital Marketing Agencies" title="Future of Digital Marketing Agencies" /></a><br />

The post [INFOGRAPHIC]: Back to the Future: A Snapshot of Digital Marketing Agencies in 2014 appeared first on Optify.

Let’s walk through them:

1. Form Alerts

We got your message–you want an email alert when someone fills out your form. But you don’t just want to get an alert saying someone filled out your form, you want the email to include what the heck they wrote in their form submission. Oh, and you want to be able to set this up on a per-form basis, so User A can get an alert when someone fills out Form 1 while User B gets an alert when someone fills out Form 2. And so forth…

Your wish is our command. Allow me to show you the new Form Alert.

The first thing to note is that this is a new type of alert (note the left side of the screenshot where you see that we are inside of Form Alerts). The next thing to note is that if you set the criterion to “is” or “is not” we automatically pull up a list of every form we’ve seen submissions from. If you just want alerts for submissions to Forms A, B, and C, it’s as easy as checking those boxes. One thing worth noting is that you can also set the criterion to “any”. This way you’ll get an alert on any form submission (this also keeps you from having to update your alerts if/when you create new forms).

Now for a look at the alert:

Pretty slick, eh? :) We hope you find these new alerts useful.

2. Many more fields for segmenting your contacts

Here’s the list before:

And now here’s the list after:

You’ve told us that you want to know which form was the first one a prospect submitted, or the latest one, or the total number of form submissions. And you want to know the dates associated with those form submissions. Now you can filter on this data to your heart’s content. So you’ll notice that we broke out form activity into its own section.

You’ve also told us that you would like to have more than one field for “Source”–you want to know the source of a contact’s first visit as well as the source of their latest visit. And of course you want date fields with these too.

Lastly, we introduced a field called “Origin” (under Properties). Think of this as the field that tells you how this contact became a contact. This will default to Import, Manual Add, or Form (as these are the three ways a contact can be created), but you can also set it to anything you want. For instance, you might import a list of contacts from a recent trade show, in which case you can set the Origin to be ‘June Trade Show’.

We hope these new fields make your segmentation that much easier and more powerful. It’s like all your Smart Lists just got smarter :)

The post 6/19 Deployment: Special ‘Form Alerts’ & Smarter Lists appeared first on Optify.

Redding CT and Seattle— June 19, 2013— More than 95% of agencies plan to either add or expand their digital marketing service offerings by next year, according to a study authored by Digital Marketing Depot and published today by Optify, a leading provider of digital marketing software for agency marketers.

The study, which was derived from a webinar that aired on May 15, includes audience poll results as well as original research from Optify and Digital Marketing Depot.

Because of the high demand and the nearly seamless integration with existing offerings, social media is the most popular choice for agencies looking to expand their services. The majority of respondents (62%) already offer some type of social media service, while 53% have plans to add social media to their offerings within the next 12 months. Additionally, 50% of respondents would like to offer content services in the near future.

“With so many agencies looking to expand their offerings, it’s clear that the future of digital marketing agencies is integration,” said Rob Eleveld, Optify CEO. “The siloed, standalone service approach isn’t working anymore, as more and more clients prefer the ‘all-in-one’ treatment when it comes to their marketing agency.”

“We are seeing the lines blur between formerly distinct and separate digital media channels, which is prompting agencies to add services,” said Karen Burka, author of the Digital Marketing Deport report, “The Future of Digital Marketing Services: Where Will Agencies be in 2014?”.

In terms of service combinations, 89% of agencies offer social media bundled with other services, followed by Website (86%), Web/creative design (85%), content (84%) and SEO (83%).

“Agency expansion is driven by client demand, but also by ease of integration and execution,” Eleveld said. “The challenge many agencies face is the ability to manage and execute these services in conjunction with one another. That’s where a comprehensive and robust digital marketing software solution like Optify can come into play.”

“The Future of Digital Marketing Services: Where Will Agencies be in 2014?” can be downloaded free here.

The post 95% of Agencies To Expand or Add Digital Marketing Services in 2014 appeared first on Optify.

With these potential pitfalls in mind, we came up with a structured technology evaluation process based on the following set of tips:

1. Have clear goals and evaluation criteria

Starting the evaluation process without a clear set of documented goals and evaluation criteria is a recipe for disaster. It’s easy to be biased by flashy demos and screencasts, well-written tutorials, and Hacker News comment threads. Documented goals and criteria are key to ensuring that you’re making a fair and unbiased comparison. Some ideas for evaluation criteria are:

• Developer productivity/happiness
  • Is your development team going to be happy working with the technology day to day? What pain points do they encounter with your old stack, and which of these will be lessened or removed by the new stack?
• Quality of IDE/Tools
  • This dovetails nicely with developer happiness. Any happiness you have due to a change in programming languages can quickly be wiped out by a poor experience with IDEs, debuggers, or build tools.
• Community support
  • How active is the community for your candidate technology stacks? Does the basic framework appear to be under active development? How many libraries, tools and controls are available? If you ask a question on StackOverflow, how likely are you to get an answer?
• Compatibility with existing application/tools
  • Is the new technology compatible with your existing code/tools? Are you able to leverage any existing code or are you starting from scratch? Don’t forget to consider deployment, monitoring and management.
• Recruiting and retention
  • Will the technology chosen help with recruiting and retention? It’s likely a mistake to chose technology because it’s hip and sexy, but making a poor choice here can harm your ability to recruit and retain talent. Another consideration is the availability of talent with expertise in a particular stack in your area. For example, engineers with C# and ASP.NET MVC 4 expertise are reasonably common in Seattle due to the proximity to Microsoft, but may be more difficult to find in other metro areas.
• Performance/Scale
  • Will the technology scale to meet your needs? How simple is it to scale horizontally?
• Existing Expertise
  • How much existing expertise in the new technology do you have on the team? It may be risky to start over with a new technology or programming language if your entire team will be starting from square one. Even one or two people with prior expertise can make sure you start off on the right foot. If your team doesn’t have expertise, you may be able to leverage consultants to help you get started.

2. Bake-off the technologies against each other

The most insightful part of our technology evaluation process was the technical bake-off, which I highly recommend. The goal here was to get past the screencasts and the slick tutorials and really dig in to the details of each technology. Start by writing a specification for a simple but non-trivial application that exercises essential pieces of functionality. In our process, we decided to build a reasonably simple facsimile of Optify’s Contact Manager with separate web and service tiers. Since we were also investigating CSS frameworks at the time, that was thrown into the mix as well. Developers then volunteered to implement the specification in their language/framework of choice.

After spending about a week on the prototypes, each developer presented a detailed walkthrough of their solution. Code was reviewed, and each of the evaluation criteria were discussed in detail. These sessions often yielded additional questions that required further investigation and prototyping in order to ensure we were making a decision based on the best available information.

3. Implement and deploy, then iterate

Once you’ve made a decision, it’s easy to immediately go heads down and start building things. Due to the ramp-up period and the time required to build necessary infrastructure, a sizable amount of time may pass before you’re ready to ship anything to production. If you haven’t planned for deployment and monitoring, you’ve just set yourself up for a fire drill. To avoid this, chose a small feature that can be built in a relatively short time period and deploy it to production. Once you’ve worked out the deployment kinks, you can quickly iterate adding new features with less risk.

Adding a new technology stack to your environment is always daunting. You can mitigate some of this risk by following the process I’ve described. Please let me know in the comments if you’re interested in a follow up blog post about the technologies we evaluated, and what we eventually chose.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/stolidsoul

The post 3 Strategies for Choosing a New Technology Stack appeared first on Optify.

And so here I sit, thinking back to my days before tech software. I was a submarine sailor back then aboard a fast boat, USS Batfish, which sailed with Submarine Squadron 6 out of Charleston (I’m a little to left of the banner in the picture below, found via Google Images, taken about 10 minutes before we flooded that dry-dock).

I am reminded where I learned the importance of making things repeatable. The US Navy hammered it into my skull.

What is repeatable on a fast-attack sub?

When I first crossed the brow of the boat in 1991, mighty wet behind the ears after 24 months of training, the chief petty officers – 12 to 18 year veterans – taught me that not much changed in the Standard Operating Procedures (also known as “the SOP”) unless absolutely necessary. Requirements like always maintaining “2-valve protection” against sea pressure, the minimum oxygen levels to keep in reserve tanks, or the fact that every single system on the boat had a manual override were almost literally chiseled in stone. Those lessons and were paid for in blood on the fleet boats of World War II.

After less than 6 months aboard at the ripe age of 23, I was qualified to operate the reactor power plant and propulsion train. In the Mediterranean at 24, I was in charge of the 5,000-ton ship and its weapons load.

How? Because if the Navy does anything, it makes things repeatable. I didn’t start up or shut down the reactor my way. I did it by a standard procedure that every other young officer followed aboard any of the 70 other boats in the fleet.

I was the only officer qualified as Tactical Weapons Handling Supervisor (TWHS) for my last year aboard. I remember being in charge of a 10-hour weapons load to get 18 Tomahawks and torpedoes, each with a 2,000 pound warhead, by crane from the tender to our torpedo room. I didn’t guess when I verified the gear at 0600 to start the day. I hand-over-handed every chain, rope, fitting, hydraulic stop, and harness just like the book said. I did it the same way every time. I did it the way every TWHS is still doing it 20 years on.

Repeatability saves lives

Sometime in 1993 on the mid-watch (midnight to 6am), I stood in Engine Room Lower Level with about 8 other guys, smoke everywhere, trying to figure out real fast what was on fire. Fire in an enclosed space submerged must be handled nearly immediately, or it doesn’t get handled. When the main lube oil pump four feet from where I stood shot a fireball (electrical fire), we called away the pump number and emptied a CO2 extinguisher into it.

The Electrician’s Mates in upper level had the fuses pulled and the pump’s power secured within 5 seconds. They did it the same way they did it on their qualification practicals in blindfolds. They did it the same way they had pulled those fuses 25 times in drills. They did it based on the exact repeatable procedure the chiefs had pounded them over and over again to memorize for “fire in main lube oil pump number 4”.

It’s been handed down since John Paul Jones sailed the USS Bonhomme Richard into harm’s way. Please forgive me if I’m rather passionate about making things repeatable.

What’s this got to do with marketing? While lives aren’t at stake, growing your business may well be.

I write a series called “Make It Repeatable”. I do it not because of the Navy. I write about repeatability because I’ve been in technology and business-to-business applications for nearly 20 years now. I’ve sold software and I’ve sold services. I’ve taken product to market in 10 or more verticals. And time and again, I’ve found that making it repeatable is an absolutely critical path to growing a business of any size. The Navy just taught me an appreciation for the consistent execution and to recognize the pattern.

Last month, we did a webinar “How to Develop, Create, Send and Sell a Customer Newsletter.” Sound simple? Good, because that’s by design in order to promote a repeatable offering that is high value and can be sold to the majority of clients as a baseline retainer-based service offering.

Tomorrow, June 19, I’m teaming with customer engagement and training guru Ting Van Osdol to provide another webinar in our digital marketing services series: “Lead Generation Campaigns That Rock: How To Create and Execute (and Sell) Them” (Ting and Darius Rucker rock, I’m an old guy with memories…). We’re going to talk about how to execute lead generation campaigns across many clients repeatedly. Just as important, we’ll provide co-branded tools to sell them repeatedly, and a framework for how to price them repeatedly. Join us if you can, or catch the debrief on our blog.

You’ll be seeing more from us on repeatable digital marketing services to deliver to clients. And I love promoting retainer-based services, because the nature of retainers is repeatability… in cash flow for an agency.

Thank you to my sponsors

Keep it real out there as the world shifts marketing budget to digital. Just be on the tracks, because the big train is rolling. I’ll leave you with a visual nod to the sponsors of this post ;-) Yes, that hat can be carbon-dated back to 1991! I’m out.

Be sure to check out the other posts in our ‘Make It Repeatable’ series:

• Part 1 of 4: How Do I Grow My Small Business? Make It Repeatable
• CEO Thoughts: Nate Silver and How to Hit Your Sales Quota Repeatedly

The post Submarines, Darius Rucker, and Making Digital Marketing Services Repeatable – What Do They Have in Common? appeared first on Optify.

Speakers:
Jonathon Colman, REI (@jcolman)
Vanessa Casavant, AdoptUSKids (@vancasavant)
Misty Weaver, Content Insight LLC (@meaningmeasure)

Moderator was Vanessa Fox (@vanessafox) from Nine By Blue.

Content Is An Experience

Jonathon Colman, REI

Jonathon argued that content is a full experience – not just the font, the design, the colors, etc. Content strategy is about creating quality content, planning for quality content, setting up workflows and systems for creating quality content – it is NOT about content marketing.

He also noted that a lot of our content is actually managed by our CMS so we don’t actually manage the content ourselves. We’re constrained to the restrictions of the CMS.

Content strategy = people strategy. Jonathon pointed to MailChimp’s voice and tone style guide, which MailChimp uses so that the entire company is always talking, writing, responding online in accordance with the brand.

He also encourages content audits, which tells you what content you have currently and what you’re missing. Often you have a lot more content and in a lot worse shape than you think. Content audits beg the questions: What content do you want? What content do users want?

Jonathon also touched briefly on content modeling, which is way for you to break down your content structurally into entities to make your content more findable, more structured, portable and reusable.

You can view Jonathon’s full presentation here: bit.ly/cssmx and check out some of the many content strategy resources he’s populated on his website.

Consistency in Content – It’s more important than you think

Vanessa Casavant, AdoptUSKids

Vanessa kicked off her presentation with this statement: If you have a strong process and a good strategy in place, you’re more likely to put out consistent, quality content.

She also noted that online brands are only as strong as the content they publish and what the audience consumes. (So true!)

Content is political.

For more resources: slideshare.net/reduxd/modeling-structured-content-ias13-workshop

Content Inventories

Misty Weaver, Content Insight LLC

When creating a digital experience (vs. a physical experience), you’re creating something that people are actually going to use.

A content inventory is absolutely necessary. There are four things you want to look for in a quantitative inventory: ID (to show you where it lives in relationship to other pages and also that there’s only ONE of each in the inventory), title, location (URL) and document type (text vs. image vs. PDF vs. HTML, etc.).

Misty offered content audit and inventory templates available for download here: meaningandmeasure.com/smx-content

Q&A

There were several great Q&As that I thought were worth including:

Problem content: keep, kill, revise?
When deciding what to do with problem content, you have to ask yourself: Is the content meeting the business goals? Is it performing? In general, it’s better to kill than to revise – less work for you.

How often should I perform a content audit?
Audits happen all the time – they’re cyclical. Organizations change, people leave, they launch new products – organizations have a limited memory. We’re constantly looking at fresh data and analytics, so we need to do the same thing with audits.

Best content & SEO resources?
Jonathon said he actually uses Slideshare a lot because there are really good style guides and audit templates, among other resources, that people have put together and published for free public consumption. I had never thought of using Slideshare for resource purposes before – I plan on checking it out next time I’m on the hunt!

The post #SMX 2013: Think You Know Good Content? Fuggedaboutit. Here’s What Really Counts. appeared first on Optify.

This session focused solely on paid social media tactics. Not only did the speakers discuss new trends, but there was an overall theme of proving why paid social is a great marketing investment. It seems a lot of marketers still aren’t quite sold on paid social (which is insane to me and my fellow Optify marketers), but this panel really did a great job providing an overview of paid social options across top channels like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. They also made sure to demonstrate ROI possibilities from each.

Speakers:
Jeffrey Jewett, Optify (@JeffreyAJewett)
Jennifer Wong, HasOffers (@JenerationY)
Marty Weintraub, aimClear (@aimClear)
Adam Berke, AdRoll (@adamberke)

Moderator was Greg Finn (@gregfinn), Content Editor for SearchEngineLand.com.

Twitter’s Keyword Targeting & New Lead Gen Cards

Jeff Jewett, Optify

If you read our recent blog post on Twitter’s new lead gen cards, you know that we at Optify are very excited about this new feature. Jeff focused his presentation on Twitter Promoted Products for a few reasons:

• LinkedIn’s display ads require a minimum $15k investment (not feasible for many marketing teams)
• Facebook’s retargeting require use of a 3rd party vendor (also not ideal for marketing teams looking to get started with paid social right away, or for teams with small budgets)
• We know from our B2B Marketing Benchmark Report that Twitter generates more leads for B2B than any other social channel

Jeff began by talking about Twitter’s newest targeting feature – Keyword Targeting in Timelines. As soon as this feature launched, it became the only targeting feature we used at Optify for our Promoted Tweets. Essentially, you can now target users who are Tweeting about specific keywords, hashtags or @handles – which gets your content in front of your target audience while they’re on-topic. Does targeting get much better than that?

He then jumped into the lead gen cards, which are a blessing to Twitter advertisers. Users can show interest in your content straight from the Tweet, because a card is essentially a mini-landing page that doesn’t require users to jump away from the Twitter platform – and it’s already filled out for them with their name, email and @handle.

The cards are completely customizable from a back-end, CRM standpoint – even though the user only gives you limited info, you can add custom hidden fields that update campaign name, lead source, lead source details, etc. And they integrate seamlessly with Salesforce and MailChimp, but can be configured for other software solutions (like Optify!).

For a complete, step-by-step guide to setting up the lead gen cards, check out our 10 Easy Steps to Twitter Lead Gen Cards.

Steps to Be Successful With Paid Social

Jennifer Wong, HasOffers

Jen outlined 5 steps to ensure success with paid social:

1. Define buyer profile – who is your target audience? What do they talk about on social? What are their demographics?
2. Set goals and metrics – what are your KPIs? Define these at different stages – new visitors, referrals, opportunities, closed deals
3. Choose networks and types – do you want to use Twitter? Facebook? LinkedIn? A combination? This decision should be made based on your target audience and where they live in the social sphere.
4. Execute your campaigns
5. Test, refine and start over – you’re not done yet! Test your campaigns, see what’s performing and what’s not and why, and use what you’ve learned for your next campaigns.

Takeaways

• Optimize for the bottom line
• Plan all elements of your campaign before getting started
• Keep testing and trying out new campaign ideas
• Find the right tools to help you scale – she suggested SproutSocial (which we use at Optify) and HootSuite, among others

You Need Paid Social

Marty Weintraub, aimClear

Marty stressed that you can only do so much with organic – you need paid on top of that to reach your entire possible target audience. Amplification on social is almost entirely paid now. Take a look at these screenshots of Facebook and Twitter to see just how prominent paid ads are compared to organic posts:

He also demonstrated how paid social amplifies organic social with this example from Facebook:

And you can do this all for not a lot of money!

FBX: Changing the Game

Adam Berke, AdRoll

AdRoll is one of the 3rd party vendors you’ll need to work with if you’re interested in using Facebook’s retargeting – called FBX. So this is what Adam focused on in his presentation.

FBX uses customer data to serve ads on Facebook to users who previously visited a site but didn’t convert. With all types of retargeting (standard web and social), user data is so valuable because it provides insight into user intent.

For example, if I search for “patio furniture” on Google, Google thinks I’m looking to buy patio furniture (good guess!) so it’ll serve me Shopping Results and ads for where I can buy patio furniture. FBX uses this data to serve users ads based on their intent (to buy patio furniture).

Here are some of the benefits of FBX over standard web retargeting:

An AdRoll study showed that, when running news feed and right-hand ads at the same time, click rate is higher and CPC is lower.

The post #SMX 2013: What’s Hot With Paid Social? appeared first on Optify.

Here’s a recap of the first SEO track session of SMX 2013 – The Periodic Table of SEO Ranking Factors: 2013 Edition.

This was a fantastic session with even better speakers:

• Matthew Peters (@mattthemathman) from Moz
• Jenny Halasz (@jennyhalasz) from Archology
• Marcus Tober (@linkvendor) from Searchmetrics
• Eric Enge (@stonetemple) from Stone Temple

The session was moderated by Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan), founding editor of SearchEngineLand.com.

The Periodic Table of SEO Ranking Factors is something SearchEngineLand publishes every year. This year’s can be found here. Essentially, it covers the most important factors that search engines consider when ranking pages and therefore what we as SEOs and marketers should pay most attention to, in general.

On-Page Factors: Relevance vs. Ranking

Matthew Peters, Moz

When a user enters a query string, search engines have to first determine which of the billions of pages on the internet are actually relevant to that query, and then rank those pages in order of most to least relevant. So how does Google determine which pages are actually relevant? It systematically computes relevance based on a number of different weight factors and rolls those scores up into one, big relevance score.

Relevance factors include word segmentation, spelling correction, language identification, tokenization & normalization, classification, query expansion, user intent, local, topic model and entity extraction.

Moz performs an annual study* on the correlation between ranking factors and rank improvements. This year they’ve found that the characteristics of sites that rank highly include:

• 14,000+ keywords
• Top 50 results
• 600,000 URLs
• Google-US, no personalization

In terms of ranking factors, the language model has the highest correlation, then TF-IDF, then BM25. With stemming (chopping off the endings of words and grouping them with the root word, i.e., review, reviewer, reviews all grouped as review), correlation increases – implying that Google is using stemming in its ranking algorithm.

Out of all relevance factors, page authority has the most correlation. So we’re seeing that SEO is less and less about on-page optimization and more about social sharing and overall brand reputation online.

Why Technical SEO Still Works

Jenny Halasz, Archology

Jenny is a huge advocate for technical SEO and encourages marketers to not make search engines’ lives difficult by having bad technical SEO. Her firm, Archology, has increased a client’s revenue by 800% in three months by simply cleaning up technical issues on their site.

What should you look for in Webmaster Tools?

• Consistent crawl patterns
• Increased crawling when changes are made, decreased crawling when site is static
• Big spikes or big drops can indicate a problem

When you update content, Google is more likely to crawl your content. So update your content!

Duplicate content

When you have pages that are all the same but different link authority, you’re distributing the amount of value you could have across several pages.

Load time

Three seconds is the optimal load time for a site. It’s also the average user’s attention span. So don’t waste those precious seconds on loading your webpage!

Takeaways:

• Google is your boss – get your agenda together, don’t waste time
• User intent comes first – build site architecture based on what users want
• Speed matters – grab the user’s attention in less than 3 seconds

How Google Battles Internet Spam

Marcus Tober, Searchmetrics

Two ways Matt Cutts and Google’s Webspam Team battle Internet spam:

1. Penalties
2. Algorithm changes

Link correlations with rankings:

• Backlinks have high correlation
• Visibility has a high correlation
• Anchor text has a low correlation

Marcus recommends deploying a good link building strategy and removing bad links.

Importance of Google+

Here’s a snapshot of the growth rate of shares from 2012-2013 on Google+ vs. Facebook. Wow. According to Marcus’ calculations, if this growth rate keeps up, Google+ will overtake Facebook by February 2016.

Social Indexing and Ranking

Eric Enge, Stone Temple Consulting

For me, Eric’s segment was by far the most interesting of this session. He presented a study by Stone Temple that sought to learn which methods Google uses to discover new content and which non-SEO (social) factors influence rankings.

The factors tested were a Google+ +1, a Tweet, a Facebook like, a share on Google/G+, Google Chrome and Google Analytics.

They made sure to isolate the above signals on individual pages of the participating sites.

After 4 days, the pages that had Google+ +1s were indexed and began climbing in rankings (for long-tail search terms). Even simple things from Google+ like having the +1 script on your page/site or using the Google+ API can improve ranking/indexing without anyone even +1ing your content.

The study also found that Google Analytics was not used for page discovery.

Other study results include:

• Rankings increased after first wave of Facebook signals
• Google+ and Facebook both impact indexing/ranking

*The full 2013 Moz study has not yet been published; they haven’t announced when it will be published but it’s been promised sometime this summer.

The post #SMX 2013: The Periodic Table of SEO Ranking Factors appeared first on Optify.

I was out on a date one time and got to telling about the great seats I had to a recent Red Sox game (editor’s note: Kurt is not shy about his Boston heritage). My date was not as impressed as I expected. It turned out she wasn’t into baseball. In fact, she didn’t like sports at all. Or watching sports. Or even sharing beers outside on a hot summer afternoon! I know it’s the rare woman who might share my affinity for America’s game, but the revelations quickly cascaded into a serious concern as to whether we were meant for each other at all.

Now, I have other interests besides sports. I take in art museums and listen to Beethoven from time to time (editor’s note: what a catch!), but no matter how many dates we spent trying to find a common interest, we already had a deal breaker. So why schedule a second date?

Oh, the deal breaker. It’s no coincidence that applying sales lingo to our dating lives comes naturally. Every time a rep picks up the phone, he or she has to be in the mindset that “this could be the one”. And it could! But as every rep knows, more often than not, it won’t be. And while it’s never fun to have the “I don’t think this is going to work out” conversation, if it’s not going to work out, don’t schedule the second call. It’s time to disqualify the lead.

It’s never easy. Your marketing department set you up with an attractive MQL (marketing qualified lead) who downloaded your whitepaper and is looking for a solution. While lead generation may have been the bond that brought you two together, if your strength is email marketing and your lead is focused on running social media campaigns, that’s where you need to ask for the check.

As a sales rep, you come armed to the date with questions to uncover these business needs and goals. They’re your icebreakers — basic probing questions that keep things comfortable and frame the conversation. Now it’s time to share about yourself, asserting upfront and plainly what your product does and doesn’t do. If you love the Red Sox, wear it on your sleeve! If it’s not a common interest on the first call, it’s not going to become one on the second or third.

This doesn’t mean you need to rush through dinner, but as soon as you start to feel “I don’t think this is going to work out”, address the issues outright on the first date. Because no matter how many dates I take or calls I schedule, I’m never going to sell a customer something they don’t need and that girl isn’t settling for a wedding in Fenway Park.

The post B2B Sales & First Dates: When You Just Know She’s Not ‘The One’ appeared first on Optify.

Without structure, some sales people may thrive because they love the autonomy of creating their own processes, but most sales professionals need the structure of predetermined processes, allowing them to focus exclusively on selling.

Even if you’re the only sales person in your company, some semblance of process and metric tracking will help you identify potential areas to improve. Don’t over do it, but here are three tips for small sales teams, even if they don’t have a sales manager:

1. Define each stage clearly and don’t create too many stages

While the stages themselves will differ depending on various factors, most companies have some variation on the following stages:

• Marketing Qualified Lead (they have taken some action, which makes them ready for sales)
• Sales Qualified Lead (Interest in proceeding past the initial call/conversation)
• Presentation
• Verbal Commitment
• Won/Lost

I recommend starting with descriptions of the stages, and not a percentage. Unless your percentage is based on data, it can be misleading to have stages represented by a probability to close. Which brings me to my next tip:

2. Track conversion rates stage by stage

Once you start tracking your deals by stage, you can see where deals fall off. You should have a sales funnel that looks something like this:

Observe this particular funnel each month and look at relative conversion rates from month to month, and sales rep to sales rep. If one rep is exceptional at converting sales qualified leads to presentations, but gets very few verbal commitments as a result, you could infer two things:

A. This rep is terrible at closing the sale
B. This rep does not qualify prospects enough before giving a presentation

Either way, you’ll never discover the issue that needs to be addressed if you don’t track conversion rates by stage, benchmark them, and track them on a regular basis.

Once you benchmark standard conversion rates from stage to stage, you can work backwards from your new business goals and determine how many deals you need in each stage at any given time to hit your number.

That brings me to my last tip:

3. Create a metrics dashboard and review it weekly

Staying on top of metrics on a weekly basis is important for a few different reasons. It requires sales people to constantly be thinking about their pipelines, how many prospects they have in each stage, and what they need to do to hit their number. A great example of metrics you can track weekly are:

• New opportunities created
• Presentations given
• Proposals sent
• Lost opportunities (and why)
• Won opportunities

By monitoring this these numbers, you can get a sense for where each rep is spending most of their time. If somebody has three times more presentations given than the rest of the reps, you can figure that they’ll likely have fewer new opportunities created that week.

After tracking this weekly for a few months, you’ll develop benchmarks for where each rep should be in any given week. If people are light on new opportunities, hopefully they’re heavy on other metrics.

By implementing these three tips, you’ll have much more insight into the health of your company’s sales pipeline. You’ll be able to help each rep identify and work on the portions of their areas of weakness, and accelerate the velocity of deals going through the pipeline.

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