Why Your Sales Force Needs Smarter Incentives
Building a sales team requires more than just recruiting great talent—it requires compensating that talent effectively. Research is showing sales managers how a data-focused approach can help identify which incentives will work best, which might be costing them money, and how they can find the right solution for each of their employees.
Content: Article | Authors: Alina Dizik, Harikesh S. Nair, Sanjog Misra, Øystein Daljord | Source: University of Chicago | Subjects: Compensation, Human Resources, Marketing / Sales
Which marketing strategies drive the highest-quality traffic with the lowest cost and effort?
From mailshots to influencers, all the basics and not-so-basics to boost your website traffic.
Content: Article | Authors: Inigo Gallo, Javier Segarra, Lorenzo Panlilio | Source: IESE Insight | Subject: Marketing / Sales
How Brands Can Win Big With Inclusion Strategy
Identity is an increasingly central driver of consumer purchases, even as diversity suffers backlash in some parts of the world. Here’s how brands can get it right.
Content: Article | Authors: David Dubois, Kanayo Ogodazi, Rachel Eva Lim | Source: INSEAD Knowledge | Subjects: Brand, Marketing / Sales
Images Define Your Brand: Five Stages of the Image Processing Maturity Model
Images have become a defining factor in how brands communicate online—from social media posts and e-commerce product galleries to blogs and digital ads.
Many organizations follow a set of stages in their use of images, beginning with simple image resizing, then gradually evolve into more sophisticated, data-driven strategies.
Understanding and embracing each phase of that “Image Processing Maturity Model” is essential for businesses looking to stand out … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Author: Craig McDonogh | Source: MarketingProfs | Subject: Marketing / Sales
Four Things You Should Know About Email List Validation
Letting go of contacts you’ve worked so hard to gather isn’t pleasant. Even more unpleasant, though, is getting bounces and seeing your engagement decline because your emails are going to the spam folder. Cleaning obsolete data from your email list is best-practice if you send mass emails.
Most marketers know that a high number of bounces indicates that it’s time for an email list cleaning. But … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Author: Liviu Tanase | Source: MarketingProfs | Subject: Marketing / Sales
Today’s relationship dance
What can digital dating teach us about long-term customer loyalty?
Editor’s Note: I thought the online dating angle was a bit of a stretch and not so useful, but there is actually a lot of god content for marketers and for understanding and thinking about customers in this article.
Content: Article | Authors: Rodney R. Sides, Stacy Kemp, Susan K. Hogan | Source: Deloitte Review | Subjects: Customer Related, Marketing / Sales
Five Best-Practices for Managing Digital Marketing Content and Assets
In today’s digital world, marketers manage thousands of images and videos. These digital assets consist of a variety of file types, from JPG and TIF to PNG, GIF, RAW, MPEG, MP4, and many others. Marketers use these digital files for e-books, whitepapers, infographics, social media, webpages, and other branded materials. Finding the right version of the right file—right when you need it—is key for staying … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Author: Leslie Weller | Source: MarketingProfs | Subject: Marketing / Sales
0-$5M: When, Who, and How to Make Your First Sales Hire
Expert advice from Dropbox, Figma and Stripe on timing your first sales hire, finding the right candidate profile and creating effective onboarding to successfully transition from founder-led sales to a scalable revenue team.
Content: Article | Author: Meka Asonye | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Hiring, Human Resources, Marketing / Sales
Five Marketing Strategy Frameworks to Choose From for Business Success
A marketing framework brings a structured approach that helps you to understand your business and its place in the market. It outlines how you’ll achieve your marketing goals. However, there are many types of marketing strategy frameworks. Unsure which marketing strategy framework to choose? Let’s explore some of the best options.
Content: Article | Author: Cynthia Kristensen | Source: MarketingProfs | Subject: Marketing / Sales
What to Keep In-House and When to Use an Agency: A Four-Part Decision Framework
What should I keep in-house (i.e., do with teams inside the company’s four walls), and when should I use an agency? That marketing/advertising dilemma may be one of the most persistent. The decision is hugely consequential, and so it would be ideal to apply some sort of lens that can help you make some sense of all the noise around this topic.
I’ve worked at agencies … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Author: Jared Belsky | Source: MarketingProfs | Subject: Marketing / Sales
How Companies Can Make Dynamic Pricing Fairer for Customers
Three actions are key as companies consider dynamic pricing models.
Content: Article | Author: Arnab Sinha | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Marketing / Sales, Pricing
Dynamic Pricing Doesn’t Have to Alienate Your Customers
Inflation-fatigued shoppers are witnessing prices fluctuate across categories with unprecedented scale and frequency — a trend often seen as yet another cunning commercial scheme. Is the extra profit companies see from dynamic pricing worth the risk of alienating customers? If done well, companies shouldn’t be making that trade-off — dynamic pricing.
Content: Article | Authors: Marco Bertini, Oded Koenigsberg | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Marketing / Sales, Pricing
How CMOs Can Lead Transformations in an Era of Change
Companies are responding to a number of headwinds by transforming their marketing organizations to achieve measurable improvement in performance and efficiency and to ensure future sustainable growth. Chief marketing officers (CMO) are pursuing long-term changes instead of short-term fixes by focusing on structure, talent, and operating models—in that order—as they reshape their organizations.
Content: Article | Authors: Joe Simon, Lachelle Trout, Raakhi Agrawal, Shelby Senzer, Siwei He | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subject: Marketing / Sales
The Psychology of Persuasion: Understanding Customer Behavior in Marketing
Customer behavior and the study of why people make the purchase decisions that they do can be a complicated landscape to navigate in marketing.
The psychological tool of persuasion and the use of established persuasion techniques can help cut through the nuance of customer behavior to influence purchase decisions. That influence shapes customer behavior by helping them form useful mental shortcuts during the buying process.
Content: Article | Author: Sam Bowman | Source: MarketingProfs | Subject: Marketing / Sales
The Unified Theory of Pricing
BCG has developed a unified pricing theory, manifested in a tool they call the Strategic Pricing Hexagon, by bringing all the disparate pricing ideas, and the drivers and forces behind them, into one master structure. This article shows how the Strategic Pricing Hexagon allows leaders to look beyond the numbers and develop a pricing strategy that can change the entire trajectory of their business and … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Authors: Arnab Sinha, Jean-Manuel Izaret | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Marketing / Sales, Pricing
Hyper-Personalization for Customer Engagement with Artificial Intelligence
Personalization based on customer attributes and behavior is a familiar concept among marketers, and artificial intelligence is making it increasingly effective. AI-based hyper-personalization employs both sophisticated methods and far more data than previous methods and is far more precise as a result. Thomas H. Davenport discusses the role of AI in personalization as well as the growing backlash against personalization fueled by data privacy concerns. … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Author: Thomas H. Davenport | Source: Management and Business Review (MBR) | Subjects: Customer Related, IT / Technology / E-Business, Marketing / Sales
Unlock the Power of Money Words: How Founders Can Write Copy That Converts
The words we use — or don’t use — impact decisions and, in turn, money. Money words are the execution arm of persuasion. If we can agree that the words we choose are persuasive levers — and our job is to pull those levers intentionally and strategically — then allow me to share with you two money words and one lose-money word. They are the … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Author: Joanna Wiebe | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Advertising, Marketing / Sales
Marketing appeals to consumers’ hearts, minds and past experiences — not necessarily in that order
Among advertising sequences, there’s a gold standard to build brand appeal in consumers’ minds.
Content: Article | Authors: Albert Valenti, Gokhan Yildirim, Koen Pauwels, Marc Vanhuele, Shuba Srinivasan | Source: IESE Insight | Subjects: Advertising, Marketing / Sales
Author Talks: Peter Fader and Michael Ross share their playbook for customer centricity
When is the last time you took stock of your customer base? Two marketing and data experts say it’s due for a systematic review.
Content: Article | Authors: Anita Balchandani, Michael Ross, Peter Fader | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Customer Related, Marketing / Sales
Stop Losing Sales to Customer Indecision
For decades, salespeople have been taught that there is only one possible reason for lost sales: that salespeople have failed to defeat the customer’s status quo. Perhaps the customer doesn’t fully appreciate the problem that their solution is designed to solve. Or maybe they don’t yet see enough daylight between their company’s solution and that of the competition. So, salespeople break out their arsenal of … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Authors: Matthew Dixon, Ted McKenna | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Marketing / Sales