Leaders Aren’t Telling the Stories Their People Care About

Are you a good storyteller? If not, it could be holding you back at work. Anyone with aspirations of being a great leader, someone who inspires others to work together and give their all to a joint mission, needs to be able to tell a good story. It’s one of the most proven and effective ways to explain something complex (and today’s business world is certainly that). Just consider the Epic of Gilgamesh (the oldest story ever written), the Bible, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Iliad … these are powerful stories dating back to the earliest days of humanity. Stories teach new ideas, entertain, challenge our thinking, and paint pictures in our minds. Movies, books, music, news, religion, art – you name it, the influences of storytelling can be seen across all aspects of life. A great story can bring you to tears. It can be passed down through generations or today, go viral in a matter of minutes.

Yet, despite the well-documented power of storytelling, far too many leaders and organizations are nothing short of awful at telling stories that make authentic connections to what people care about the most. Leaders commonly prep for change by creating catchy tag lines, slogans and rallying cries to communicate their ideas. These sound bites might be rich with data, numbers, statistics, and analytic driven acronyms, but they’re devoid of authentic meaning. The end result? Seventy percent of the workforce is left phoning it in because their leaders haven’t told a compelling story that makes them feel connected to their jobs or the company as a whole. Consider this: if engagement scores haven’t changed in 30 years and we still have the vast majority of people sleep-walking through their work-a-day-life, something is not working.

It’s time to change things up …

Great stories in today’s digital world spread like wildfire, quickly inspiring people to take action. Take the August 2014 ALS Ice Bucket Challenge for example. Everyone from Bill Gates to Ethel Kennedy to former President George Bush poured a bucket of ice water on his or her head, challenged others to do the same in 24 hours and made a donation to fight ALS.

The impact was huge. ALS raised $94.1 million from over 2.1 million new donors in just the first four weeks – compared with only $2.5 million for the same period in the previous year.

Why did we care so much about the Challenge? In a very compelling way – no flashy taglines required – it told us the story of ALS. It explained how there is currently only one drug approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to treat ALS, which only modestly extends survival by two to three months, and how the disease is 100 percent fatal.

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Another obvious example of captivating storytelling is the movies. How often have you watched your favorite movie without tiring of it? How well do you remember the plot details? How quickly could you recite the exact words that best captured the spirit of the story?

The academic world supports the power of storytelling as well. Jennifer Aaker, a professor of Marketing at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, notes that stories are 22 times more memorable than facts alone. Twenty-two more times! So leaders, listen up. When preparing to speak to your people, you must remember that stories are what make the difference, not facts, figures, lists or acronyms.

If storytelling is so unique to human history, and important to the way we live our lives, then why is it so poorly done in business?

Based upon personal experience (and the annual reports of pretty much every Fortune 2000 company out there), I’ve found that the following initiatives have been almost universally and unequivocally on repeat for decades:

• Cut costs
• Penetrate growth markets
• Expand organic growth where innovation will be the differentiator
• And the new favorite: create exceptional customer experiences

It’s not that these initiatives are wrong, as they are often the basics of good business, but they do not tell a compelling story that inspires people, causes them to think, or excites them to change the world.

While a business can’t be successful without sustainable, profitable growth that attracts investors – it is not the reason people make sacrifices to create and build something of value. To tell a powerful story, you must first ask yourself: What is it that we want to create, that does not exist, for which we would be willing to endure personal sacrifice to bring it to life?

After witnessing leaders and their storytelling tactics (the good and the bad) throughout my professional lifetime, I know effective storytelling at work isn’t about informing people about the bottom line. It’s about drawing them in through the possibility of being a part of something big. It’s inviting them to be on the team that is creating, building and going on an adventure. When you have this talent, you’re uniquely poised to be a powerful and engaging leader. If you’re lacking it, there’s no time like the present to work on perfecting this skill.

Author: Jim Haudan

Jim Haudan is a different kind of CEO. He has a passion that goes beyond building his own successful company, Root Learning. For more than 20 years, he has been helping organizations and individuals unleash hidden potential by fully engaging people in the critical changes of their business. Starting as... View full profile ›

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Leaders Aren’t Telling the Stories Their People Care About

Work Proactively and Turn Loyal Customers to Advocates

As a customer success manager, your number one goal is to keep your clients satisfied. After all, without keeping current clients happy, how can you continue to grow your business?

Take a look at the funnel below; this is typically described as a back-end marketing funnel. Essentially, it lays out the steps of what should happen after a client purchases your product.

However, those of us who work in customer success know that this funnel has less to do with marketing than it does with customer happiness. As a customer success manager, it is your job to keep clients grinning in order to help them through the funnel, from loyal purchasers, to active advocates of your product. This is no simple task. When leading a team of customer success managers, whose day-to-day activities help keep your current user-base happy and engaged, everything feels like an urgent priority.

Matrix-Based Prioritization

In order to balance your workload and transform your clients from loyal users to proactive advocates, try using matrix-based prioritization to facilitate your decision-making progress. This approach will help you determine where to focus your efforts, save you time, and allow you and your team to work more efficiently.

But, how exactly do you use a decision matrix? The most common decision matrix is called the Eisenhower Matrix; in this matrix, one uses the criteria “critical” and “urgent” to evaluate tasks in their to-do list and decide what to work on first.

Photo courtesy of: Priority Matrix

There are four quadrants:

1. Critical and Urgent: tasks in this quadrant require immediate attention. Deal with these items as soon as possible, no matter what else is on your desk.

2. Critical but not Urgent: these are important tasks that advance your long-term goals forward, but take the backseat to more urgent problems. Ideally, most of your effort should be focused here.

3. Not Critical, but Urgent: think of these things as the little interruptions in your day that pull your focus away from more important work. Do your best to deal with these quickly, so you can get back to more important work. Whenever possible, delegate these tasks to someone else.

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4. Not Critical nor Urgent: consider this “the rest”. Leave this tasks until absolutely everything else is finished. In reality, you may never get to them at all, but saying “no” to this works help you free up time for more important tasks.

Matrix-Based Decision Making in Customer Success

Often, it is difficult for people to understand the difference between Critical and Urgent, especially in the realm of customer success, where everything feels so pressing. Consider this quote from Seth Godin’s recent blog post, Deconstructing Urgent Vs. Important.

“Mollifying an angry customer is urgent, building systems and promises that keep customers from getting angry is important.”

In his post, Godin also describes how Critical and Urgent forge a cause and effect relationship:

“Important means: long-term, foundational, coherent, in the interest of many, strategic, efficient, positive… “ he says, “if you take care of important things, the urgent things don’t show up as often. The opposite is never true.”

Think of it Like This:

Critical and Urgent, are reactive. Often, work in this quadrant appears when you are trying to fix something that could be prevented.

On the other hand, Critical but Not Urgent work is proactive work. This is the sweet spot where a majority of your energy should be focused in order to ensure you are building a well-functioning process. A lot of work that you do in this category helps you to avoid those “reactive” dilemmas. This proactive work is what will allow you to make loyal customers into active promoters of your product.

Here are a few more examples of work that fits under Quadrant 2:

1. Creating a well-functioning “help” blog that answers customer questions.
2. Setting up and email newsletter for paying customers, to keep them up-to-date on your product and your company.
3. Implementing a customer rewards program, to show your current clients how much you care.

The Benefits of Working Proactively

When we work proactively, many good things happen. You and your team can accomplish more as you spend less time fighting fires, and more time focused on meaningful initiatives. This results in less stress, and more forward progress, no matter what your metric.

What’s more, your happy customers will become happier customers. This is step one to ensuring they become active advocates of your product.

How to Implement

Implementation of this strategy is as easy as 1..2…3 (…4).

1. Compile a list of everything your team is working on, from daily help tasks to long term initiatives.
2. Categorize items in the matrix described above.
3. Work hard and fast until you finish all Critical and Urgent tasks, then move on to your proactive quadrant, Critical but not Urgent
4. Repeat and reprioritize as necessary!

Customer Success Managers can encourage employees to follow this process by making it easier for them to carry it out. Priority Matrix is built around the Eisenhower Method of time management. Not only does it facilitate this style of prioritization, but also allows managers to delegate work at the touch of a button, and increase visibility across shared projects.

Customer success is not a department, it’s a company culture. Below you can download the full “Customer Success as a Culture” eBook series:

Customer Success as a Culture: Sales Leaders Edition

Customer Success as a Culture: Product Leaders Edition

Customer Success as a Culture: Marketing Leaders Edition

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Work Proactively and Turn Loyal Customers to Advocates

6 Ways To Spring Clean Your Content

With the official start of spring on Sunday, warmer weather, sunshine and longer days are finally upon us.

Another interesting thing that happens this time of year? Many of us tend to feel the pull to clean, declutter, purge and organize. It’s spring cleaning time!

Apply that same spring cleaning principle to your content! Set some time aside this month to take a look at your current content strategy and consider how you might improve it moving into the spring and summer months.

Ready to spring clean your content? Try these six ideas.

1. Conduct a content audit.A content audit sounds like a scary undertaking and while the process can be a bit long and daunting, it’s an important tactic to ensure that your content is actually working for you. A content audit essentially means taking a 10,000-foot overview of all of your content and making decisions about what to do with individual content pieces to ensure your current strategy is actually helping you achieve your goals.

This comprehensive Moz piece details the exact steps you should take to conduct an effective content audit. Moz recommends breaking your content into four major categories: leave as-is, improve, consolidate and remove. Yep, remove! Conducting a content audit sometimes means coming face to face with the idea that you may actually need to delete some posts to make it easier for folks on your site to find the content that actually matters.

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2. Edit and update archived posts. You likely have a ton of great content on your blog or website, written months, or maybe even years ago. Those pieces of content probably aren’t getting the attention or traffic they deserve, even though they may still feature relevant and useful information for your audience. The first step here is to go back and re-read those pieces. Consider editing and updating some pieces to ensure the information is still correct and up-to-date and add a new call to action (like an invitation to join your email list or receive a PDF of some kind) and then prepare to bring new life to these posts by re-sharing them.

The only way people are going to find your older content is if YOU take the time to send traffic their way; add them to your Facebook scheduler and draft and schedule a couple of new tweets for the next few weeks. I’m a big fan of saving my tweets in an Excel spreadsheet, so that I can sit down once a week and copy and paste tweets into my Hootsuite scheduler. Also, take another look at the graphics you’re using within posts and consider creating a new and more “pinnable” graphic for the post to pin on Pinterest.

3. Turn archived posts into a content roundup. Another great way to bring new life to archived posts is to create a content roundup. For example, say you’ve written a ton of posts about social media- create a post that links back to your best pieces about social media. Then, promote the heck out of the roundup post! This sends traffic to your post and entices people to click around the post, leading back to your older, yet still highly useful content.

Keep in mind that you can create multiple content roundups around the same topic. Going back to our social media example, if you’ve written enough content, you could create multiple roundups based on different social media sites. Brainstorm all the different ways you might organize your content to introduce your work to new readers.

4. Create a content upgrade. A content upgrade (offering bonus content to those currently on your site) is a great way to get people to stay on your page longer and to grow your email list.

To figure out what you should create a content upgrade about, take a look at your Google Analytics and figure out which pieces of your content receive the most traffic. The result may surprise you! For me, the most highly-trafficked post on my blog is something I wrote THREE years ago.

If your most popular post is something that’s still relevant to your audience and business goals, consider creating a content upgrade around that same topic. You could turn that topic into a Slideshare presentation, a video, a checklist, a guide or even an infographic. Then offer that content upgrade within the post as a way to capture email addresses and grow your list.

5. Reconsider what social networks you’re spending time on. Perhaps years ago someone told you that you needed to be on Google+ and dutifully, every time you publish a new blog post, you share that post to Google+ without much success. Why not just…stop posting on Google+?

It may sound a bit crazy to eliminate social media sites (especially when experts and those around you tell you it’s important) but ultimately, you need to look at where your traffic is coming from and decide if the time you’re spending on social media is worth the work you put in.

Figure out which social media sites work best for you and your content and choose to focus your efforts there rather than spreading yourself thin and spending time trying to be everywhere.

6. Scrub your email list. Similarly scary to dumping a social media site, my next piece of unpopular advice is to scrub your email list. Well, maybe not the *whole* list, but definitely those who aren’t opening your emails. As you likely know, depending on your email provider and the size of your list, you pay based on the number of people on your email list, no matter if they actually open your emails or not.

Make room on your email list for those who are actually opening and engaging with your content. Before removing dead emails from your list, consider a re-engagement campaign to give those who haven’t opened your emails in a while one last chance to stay on board.

Spring cleaning is all about getting rid of old clutter and creating space for new opportunities and possibilities. It’s never easy to eliminate comfortable strategies that may have once worked for your marketing, but just like it’s time to finally throw away that dress you haven’t worn in years, now’s the time to start fresh when it comes to your content, too.

Happy spring (content) cleaning!

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6 Ways To Spring Clean Your Content

Welcome to the Age of the Customer

Today’s customers are more powerful than ever, with the ability to shift markets and define a company’s success in a matter of seconds. They’re not looking for products, features, or gimmicks; they’re looking for a complete and effortless customer experience. They don’t just want to solve problems; they want to build a faster, smarter future — and they’re disrupting entire industries in the process.

We are all customers, and we are living in the Age of the Customer.

This is nothing short of a revolution — the fourth industrial revolution, a blurring of the physical and digital worlds — with customers at its center.

Amid this change and opportunity, the question for every business becomes: How will you adapt? How do you shift your entire strategy to create the connected experience your customers demand?

At Salesforce, that’s precisely the problem we’re helping companies solve. Salesforce Lightning connects your entire business around the customer, aligning your sales, service, marketing, community, analytics, and apps around a unified goal: customer success.

So what exactly does that mean?

The sales process is drastically shifting away from the linear model. Succeeding in selling means knowing where your customers are at all times, and being prepared to engage with them on their own terms. Your team needs selling tools designed for this faster, mobile, customer-first world. Sales Cloud Lightning puts the power of the lightning experience into every sales rep’s pocket for a faster, smarter selling experience.

But in the Age of the Customer, selling is only one piece of the puzzle. In this new era, customer service reigns supreme, and your agents need shareable, omnichannel, 360-degree views of every single customer. Service Cloud Lightning empowers your agents to make your customers love you, and Field Service Lightning expands this power to your field service technicians.

It’s crucial for your business to connect to customers, but also to leverage and build peer-to-peer relationships. With Lightning Community Builder, you can build a powerful community of customer evangelists and create more meaningful, one-to-one experiences for every customer. And with Lightning Trailhead, you can continue learning and building even more connection points to your customers.

The Age of the Customer is a powerful shift. The opportunity has never been greater, and every business needs to innovate and transform in order to succeed. But at Salesforce, where we’ve been focused on the customer for the past 17 years, we have the tools your business needs to succeed in this new era.

Get ready for a new kind of customer success — download the free Salesforce e-book.

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Welcome to the Age of the Customer

The Lost Art of the Email Follow-Up

Email marketing may not be the newest or most glamorous marketing channel, but it’s proven to be a solid long-term investment. These stats are pretty hard to argue with:

• For every $1 spent on email marketing, the average return is $44.25.
• When marketed through email, consumers spend 138% more than people who don’t receive email offers.
• 54% of marketers still rate email as the most effective digital marketing channel.
• Marketing emails drove 25% more online sales over Black Friday weekend in 2015 than the previous year.
• 70% of consumers have made purchases influenced by email marketing.

Both retail and B2B businesses are necromancing the lost art of the email, using it as a follow-up tactic in their multichannel marketing campaigns. Let’s explore 4 examples of this highly effective email tactic.

Visage: Engaging GIF Action

I’m a big fan of GIFs in pretty much any context, including email. I’m not alone in my preference for animated content: 1 in 2 marketers are using GIFs in their email campaigns.

For B2B brands, who often struggle with engagement, GIFs can be a great way to capture and retain your audience’s attention. Here’s a really nice example from visual content platform Visage.

The header image in this email is a simple animated GIF that says “Here we go!” and ends with a graphic of their platform. It’s cute, interesting, and conveys excitement without being overly flashy. It also contains all the information I’ll need for my account going forward so I don’t have to dig for it in separate messages.

Betabrand: Straightforward Discount Reminder

Incentivizing new shoppers with a discount can be an effective retail tactic. However, an onsite offer is immediately worthless if the consumer doesn’t convert on their first visit. That’s where email follow-ups can keep the magic alive.

Betabrand, which has one of my favorite email programs of all time, has mastered the art of the straightforward, friendly follow-up email. Shortly after I signed up on their site, poked around a bit, and left, I received this email:

The copy is short and to the point. It clearly tells me how much time I have to redeem my discount. And it gives me an easy way to get back to their website and continue shopping.

InVision: Getting Started Videos

Video plus email is a killer combination. Research has found that using the word “video” in an email subject line boosts open rates by 19%. Here at Ceros, we’ve seen a positive impact on both open rates and click-through rates on our emails with video content.

Prototyping software company InVision leverages the power of video in their post-signup email.

The content is helpful, delivered in a timely fashion, and features 4 useful videos to help me as a new user get up and running with the platform.

ModCloth: Abandoned Cart Follow-up

Scary stat: 90% of mobile shopping carts are abandoned. But retailers are getting smarter about retargeting shoppers who haven’t completed a transaction with email.

Take ModCloth, for example:

They use clever copy (see subject line) and photos of actual items from your abandoned cart to entice you back to their site to finish checking out. The style resonates with their brand tone, and the email provides a gentle reminder rather than a pushy “buy now” follow-up.

The Bottom Line

Whether you’re a retailer retargeting consumers who’ve browsed your site, or a B2B brand nurturing free trialers down the funnel to sales readiness, email follow-ups can help you seal the deal. These 4 techniques are great ones to test out in your email marketing program. We’ll be experimenting with a number of them ourselves this year!

Author: Ashley Taylor Anderson

Ashley Taylor Anderson is a writer and marketer who's spent her career knee-deep in the B2B technology space. She currently spearheads the content program at Ceros, an interactive content marketing software company. In previous professional lives, she worked as a science textbook editor, media producer, and pastry chef.... View full profile ›

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The Lost Art of the Email Follow-Up

4 Ways to Hack a Great Company Culture

4. Communicating culture is essential

Poor communication could be really costing you.

Ultimately, the company vision has to come from on high.

It’s important that your management team has a clear idea of what he wants your company culture to look like, but it’s even more important that they communicate that idea to the rest of the organisation.

This is the only way a company can unite around a singular purpose — Benioff was instrumental in driving the Salesforce vision forward, your leaders need to do the same for your company.

If communicated effectively, culture should form an important part of everyone’s workday.

Here’s a quick example:

To form a collaborative culture, organisations need to make working together a key part of every employee’s workflow.

There are a few ways to do this:

i) Use collaboration software like Asana or Trello to make sure everyone is on the same page

ii) Hold frequent brainstorming meetings to make sure everyone feels like their ideas are heard

iii) Try an open plan format to your office instead of hiding everyone away in separate offices

Some companies are prepared to take an unconventional approach to achieve an awesome level of collaboration.

Software developer Valve actually gives each employee a desk with wheels and encourages them to ‘roll around the office’ and get involved in projects that they can add value to. This whole process is documented in theiremployee handbook — well worth a read!

You may want to keep your desks firmly anchored in place, but ensuring effective communication flow from the C-Suite down will make your culture far more likely to stick.

Summary

At the end of the day it all depends on priorities. Creating an awesome company culture does require a certain investment, some companies go as far as appointing a ‘Chief Cultural Officer‘ to manage the process.

Providing your team with a great working environment is the best way I know of to get them to go consistently above and beyond the line of duty — it’s also the one of the best ways to attract top talent.

This post was originally published on the Beamery Blog

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4 Ways to Hack a Great Company Culture

Google Adds NEW Interactive Ad Format Targeting Gamers

As paid search advertisers, it’s our job to get the right information to the right people and the right time. We spend countless hours crafting super-specific keyword lists, setting negatives and writing clear ad copy to ensure we’re attracting a highly relevant, qualified audience. Yet, bad clicks still sneak their way through and can dramatically impact conversion rates.

When it comes to mobile devices, a few additional challenges come into play. Since there’s minimal ad real estate on the mobile SERP, advertisers have limited space to “explain themselves” to prospects. Google often serves fewer ad extensions alongside these ads and sometimes even ditches the second line of copy to make room for them.

On top of this, mobile users tend to click more hastily than desktop users. Consider the last few times you conducted a search on a mobile device—I’d be willing to bet that you were multitasking, on-the-go or needed something urgently. In these scenarios, you probably weren’t devoting much time to scroll down the SERP, read each listing thoroughly and select the one that was the best fit for your needs. Instead, most of us click on one of the first listings we see and, if the landing page doesn’t meet our needs, we head right back to the SERP. This is a troubling phenomenon for advertisers, who are paying a pretty penny to bring people their sites.

The search giants recognize that this is a problem and are exploring new, interactive ad formats to reduce the clicks from unqualified searchers. Interactive ads are golden because they allow advertisers to “run an interference” prior to the click. They have the opportunity to showcase their offerings and show users exactly how they can help them before they click through to the landing pages.

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In the past year, Google released dynamic ad formats for the automotive, finance and hotel industry and, just this week, they introduced their latest, most-innovative ad format for the mobile SERP—Trial Run Ads for gaming apps.

NEW! Trial Run Ads for Gaming Apps

When it comes to gaming apps, the goal isn’t simply to convince people to download your product. With most games ranging from $0 to $2.99, this certainly wouldn’t be a very lucrative game-plan. Instead, most app developers make a significant portion of their profits from in-app advertisements. So, their goal is to create games that people want to download AND engage with frequently over a long period of time.

Developers have step one of this process down; people are downloading games like crazy. According to Google, a whopping 41% percent of all apps downloaded in 2015 were games. However, not all of them manage to keep users hooked for the long-term. In fact, one quarter of all installed apps are never even used.

This past December, Google released a brand-new, interactive ad format just for game developers called Trial Run Ads. It’s now extending this format to appear on the Search Network, too (in beta)! With Trial Run Ads, searchers have an option to ‘Try Now’ directly within the ad and test drive the game in a 10-minute free trial before actually downloading it.

Although this isn’t Google’s first foray into interactive ads, it is, by far, the most interactive ad format we’ve seen released thus far.

Who’s Next?

Good question! Google has hinted that it is prioritizing new ad formats for the industries that spend the most in paid search and this new rollout falls directly in line with that strategy (consumer electronics companies are big AdWords spenders). AdWords has released unique ad formats for various other “big spenders” (buy buttons for online retailers, insurer ratings, credit card and mortgage ads for the finance industry, hotel ads for travel marketers and automotive carousel ads for the automobile industry).

So, if I had to place bets on who is next in line, I’d guess the home and garden industry. How cool would it be to peruse new houses or apartments from directly within an ad? That said, it’s impossible to predict what Google has up its sleeve! Stay tuned.

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Google Adds NEW Interactive Ad Format Targeting Gamers