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In News

15 Ways To Inspire New Enthusiasm At Work When You’re Feeling Apathetic

April 2, 2020 No Comments

Sourced from Forbes

When you start a new job, you’re usually excited about all the new possibilities and opportunities. But after a few years, it’s easy to lose that excitement—especially if you weren’t particularly thrilled about the job in the first place.

While in some cases this loss of enthusiasm can indicate a need to find another position, many cases simply warrant a change in attitude. Even the members of Forbes Coaches Council and their clients have experienced these slumps, but they’ve also discovered how to move past them. Below, they share 15 ways you can inspire new enthusiasm about your current job.

1. Be The CEO Of Your Career

Once you outgrow a role, no matter how much you try, it’s hard to make it exciting again as you hit a growth ceiling. The only way to still feel engaged again is to truly own it like its CEO. Ask yourself how this role could be more impactful and bring more value. This will give you lots of ideas to transform or expand or modify the role. With that you will learn something new, grow and love it. – Amy Nguyen, Happiness Infinity LLC

2. Cultivate ‘Stretch’ Challenges For Yourself

As humans, we thrive when we know our work has impact and when we grow and experience a healthy “challenge.” To inspire new enthusiasm about an old job, remind yourself why the work you do is important, valuable and how it connects to the bigger picture. In addition, cultivate new challenges such as cross-functional projects, as well as skill and community building to make things exciting. – Shefali Raina, Alpha Lane Partners

3. Reinvent Your Space

Start by asking yourself how you might recraft your current job to include more of what you enjoy doing—What would you be doing? What skills would you be using? Who would you be working with? Next, think about how you can use your current environment to do more of what interests you, develop and practice new skills and surround yourself with people who energize you. Experiment and reenergize. – Palena Neale, Ph.D, unabridged

4. Think About What Drives You

The first step is to critically and honestly assess what drives your motivation at work—independence, affiliation with a team, accomplishment, process, security, others seeing your value? Are your motivational drivers being fed? How can you or the organization feed them to keep you connected, engaged and motivated? Self-awareness first; nourishment second. – Bill Joy, The Joy Group

5. Talk To Those You Impact

Almost everyone has an impact on others through their work. Seek those people out. Even if your work plays a minor role in their success or the execution of their job, seek them out and ask how you might do better. The net result is likely to be complimentary. Just seeing where your efforts land can be gratifying. You would not be doing work unless it has some impact, somewhere. Go there. – Tom Kolditz, Doerr Institute for New Leaders

6. Do Things That Scare You

One way that I escaped the “Groundhog’s Day” experience at work was to think like an intrapreneur. What are the problems that need solving? What solutions can you bring to the table? Is it something that’s way out of your skill set or comfort zone? Have you been avoiding it because it’s scary? Do it! Taking on challenges that scare you will push your creativity and visibility up to level 11. – Joyel Crawford, Crawford Leadership Strategies, LLC.

7. List Out What You Like And Don’t Like And Compare

First, list out the things you enjoy about your role and the things you don’t enjoy. Assess if the “don’t enjoys” outweigh the “enjoys.” If you decide to recommit, meet with your manager and request more of the joys and share your career passions. If you are well beyond the concept of getting excited (or you have a poor relationship with your boss), then work on Plan B outside of work. – Dana Manciagli, Job Search Master Class

8. Look At Work As A Personal Branding Opportunity

Renew your enthusiasm in a couple ways. Think yourself into a new way of behaving or behave yourself into a new way of thinking. Both can spark enthusiasm and energy. After the new job starts becoming ho-hum, consider your work as a personal branding opportunity. Consider every interaction and work output a matter of brand. Develop a checklist of your reputation behaviors you want to be known for. – Thomas Larkin, Communico, Westport CT

9. Test The Market And See If Better Opportunities Exist

Sometimes people feel trapped in their job because the thought of finding a new one is too overwhelming. Test the market. Be curious with your network. It doesn’t mean you’re leaving, but you may see that what you have is better than you think. Chances are that if you’re not excited about your job, your employer may not be too excited about you. Don’t be a frog in a pot slowly dying! – Kimberly Roush, All-Star Executive Coaching

10. Get Clarity On Your Next Level Of Growth

One way to inspire new enthusiasm is to get clarity on where you want to go next. It’s crucial to have a vision so you can realize why you are “here.” Feel the gratitude for all that you’ve accomplished and the privilege of stepping further into your potential. It’s exciting thinking of all the possibilities that come with doing your job well, which leads to living your best life with enjoyment and impact. – Whitney Mullings, Whitney Mullings

11. Make Your Job A Platform For Your Purpose

Your current job has many benefits—you’ve already built rapport, you know how to get things done and you understand what your organization is capable of. What if you stopped thinking of it as a “job” and started thinking of it as a “platform” for you to accomplish your goals? If you define your own purpose and goals for this year, can you use your current platform to get there, faster? – Aric Wood, XPLANE

12. Focus On Relationships

Shift the lens through which you are looking. The strongest driver of happiness and longevity is the quality of our relationships. It is easy to forget that today’s enterprises are just large social networks. Renew focus on your relationships. Be outgoing, caring and authentic at work to drive your career progression as you have more people behind you. It will blur the line between work and play. – Laura Berger, Berdéo Group

13. Go Back To Learning Mode

Learning brings excitement! Instead of seeing everything as the same, being curious about how and why things are the way they are boosts our curiosity and invites us to learn more. There is always something we could work on. Developing a report or a relationship, putting your strengths more into work, networking, learning about how to feel better at work—these are just some ideas we can try to learn more! – Elif Suner, Elif Suner MBA, M.Ed, PCC – Consulting, Training, Coaching

14. Reassess What Your Job Actually Means To You

Yes, one can often tire of one’s job, and lose enthusiasm. So, what can you do here? First, I would say, it is good to reassess what the job is to you. Is it a means to an end? Did it serve a useful purpose? Is it now time to expand, horizontally, laterally? In other words, is it time to try to grow yourself? When you think of it this way, suddenly, more opportunities arise and it can be fun again! – Ash Varma, Varma & Associates

15. Consider Whether It’s Time To Go

When you have lost that lovin’ feeling for your job, it is time to go. You do a tremendous disservice to the company and your co-workers with lackluster performance—you also cheat yourself out of opportunity and financial potential. Doing a mediocre job sends a message to your core of self-doubt. Passion fuels performance, which propels opportunity. Don’t leave money on the table of your future. – Cynthia Howard RN, CNC, PhD., EI Leadership

Sourced from Forbes

In Jobs

Paid Media Lead, EMEA

April 1, 2020 No Comments

Qualtrics, Dublin, Ireland

Why Qualtrics?

Qualtrics is the technology platform that organizations use to collect, manage, and act on experience data, also called X-data™. The Qualtrics XM Platform™ is a system of action, used by teams, departments, and entire organizations to manage the four core experiences of business—customer, product, employee and brand—on one platform. Over 10,000 enterprises worldwide, including more than 75 percent of the Fortune 100 and 99 of the top 100 U.S. business schools, rely on Qualtrics to consistently build products that people love, create more loyal customers, develop a phenomenal employee culture, and build iconic brands. Qualtrics was recently acquired by SAP, and together we will accelerate XM and power the experience economy. Join us on this adventure that can open many doors! Join a company that is dedicated to your ideas and growth, recognizes your unique contribution, fills you with purpose, and provides a fun, flexible and inclusive work environment.

Expectations for Success

You will have a track record of successfully managing paid search, paid social, display, retargeting, media buying, & landing page optimisation. You will leverage that experience to build and manage programs on all relevant digital advertising channels. Through careful tracking and optimisation, you generate demonstrably ROI-positive leads and fuel Qualtrics’ growth in EMEA.

A Day in the Life

Execute, manage and oversee all digital advertising including PPC, display advertising, remarketing, paid social, and other online advertising channels.
Manage day-to-day optimisation activities including building and managing bidding strategies, quality score improvements, ad copywriting, testing and optimisation, keyword research, budget forecasting, campaign reporting and analysis, and continuous program improvement.
Own measurement and tracking requirements for all digital advertising ensuring we can track all stages of the funnel and effectively report on ROI
Analyse and report on key performance data to marketing and sales team leaders.
Own cost-per-lead and cost-per-sale optimization, focusing on conversion metrics to drive increased campaign ROI.
Manage any key 3rd party vendor or vendor relationships
Work closely with marketing team members (content, social, customer marketing, etc.) to deliver a collaborative strategy and drive high- quality traffic to core site and landing pages.
Work closely with the web development team to create and manage landing page optimisation tests to increase conversion volume and quality.
Build a strong relationship with the sales development team and assist in lead follow up processes through training and sales enablement materials about digital marketing

Skills/Experience Required:

Passionate about digital marketing and enthusiastic to learn
Bachelor’s degree in marketing, analytics or related subject
Passion for data analysis and working towards a clearly defined metric

Skills/Experience Desired:

3-4 years well rounded digital marketing experience
Agency experience will be a plus
Experience working with Marketo/Salesforce
Google Adwords Professional certification
Ability to speak additional languages a plus
Experience working with bid management tools a plus
Experience of running campaigns across multiple countries / languages
Experience working with Qualtrics a plus

Qualtrics is an equal opportunity employer

Qualtrics provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, disability, genetic information, marital status or veteran status.

To learn more about what we value read about it directly from our employees Qualtrics Life stories

Click HERE to apply for this job.

In Jobs

Digital Marketing Internship (Native French Speaker) Dublin 3-6 Months From May 2020

April 1, 2020 No Comments

Happythreads, Greenhills, Dublin

POSITIONS from MAY or JUNE in DUBLIN for 3-6 MONTHS

We are looking for a French intern to join our team in Dublin, Ireland. We would like to have a French speaker join us for a Stage/ Internship and learn about digital marketing and eCommerce through English while contributing a French influence to our team.

This is an opportunity to gain real experience right across the digital design, marketing and eCommerce customer service spectrum in Happythreads, an exciting eCommerce company

The intern will become a multitasking, collaborative, detail-oriented, dedicated and lets not forget fun-loving genius.

We offer a stipend of €577/month and free lunches, fruit, tea and coffee.

See testimonials from previous interns here

https://www.happythreads.ie/career-internships

The intern will gain valuable practical experience designing facebook ads, web pages and graphics for email and marketing campaigns.
You will get to practice and improve your English whilst learing all aspects of an eCommerce business.
You will learn how to drive business through all digital marketing channels (Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, etc).
You will gain experience in Google Shopping (Merchant Centre) and have the opportunity to gain experience in PPC, SEO and other digital marketing activities.
You will get opportunities to travel to UK and Paris for trade shows.
You will attend courses in Google HQ and gain Hubspot qualifications.
You will gain experience in POS materials (Posters, Flyers, etc).

Click HERE to apply for this position.

In News

4 Signs Your Company Needs to Rebrand

April 1, 2020 No Comments

By Tanya Hall

Branding is critical for any business to remain relevant. Does your brand need a refresh? Here’s what you need to consider before making that decision.

One of the most talked about commercials from Super Bowl LIV was the somewhat disturbing killing off of the aristocratic Mr. Peanut, a campaign run by Gary Vaynerchuk’s VaynerMedia. Many viewers were confused, and some were appalled, taking to social media to grieve (as intended). The mourning didn’t last long. In a later Super Bowl commercial, Planters graciously sprouted Baby Nut (complete with its own merch store) from Mr. Peanut’s grave to carry on the top-hat-wearing peanut legacy. Quickly, a #babynut hashtag was trending, memes were cranking, and people were talking about an anthropomorphic infant legume. That was the whole point.

Love it or hate it, Baby Nut will become a textbook case study of a brand refresh. Planters’ history with Mr. Peanut dates back 104 years when a grade school student designed him as part of a contest. By any measure, a 104-year-old brand icon is probably seen as outdated, even though Mr. Peanut did have the occasional update over his lengthy years.

Though the reaction was mixed, Baby Nut brought Planters attention, relevancy (consider the current popularity of Baby Yoda and Baby Groot), word of mouth, trending social media hashtags, and emotional connection. Is you brand doing that? Here are four signs you might need a brand refresh (or relaunch) of your own.

1. Your brand is stale.

Peanuts last six to nine months in the pantry, so Mr. Peanut’s 104-year run is impressive. Joking aside, there’s no hard rule for when a brand becomes stale. Effective messaging and design changes with time, and in some industries that change is faster than others. Make a practice of periodically scanning your competitors’ brands to make sure you’re on top of when a refresh might be in order.

2. You need a separation because of negative perceptions or opinions.

Often, a refresh isn’t enough. Brands are made up of multiple elements, including design, logos, messaging, mission, culture, and customer opinion. In some cases, a complete departure from the old brand is in order to remove lasting affiliation with a scandal, poor public opinion, or a huge mistake. As an example, one of the biggest rebrands in history was Philip Morris’s changing its name to Altria Group in 2001 to create separation from the negatives related to tobacco (this didn’t last, by the way).

3. Your customer base has shifted.

If dynamic market trends, a change in core offerings, or fresh growth initiatives serving new markets have shifted your customer base, a brand relaunch may be in order. It’s a big undertaking requiring extensive market research, strategy, and execution efforts. A good example is Google’s decision to rebrand as Alphabet. As Google eyed investments in other areas of technology like driverless cars and smart home tech, creating the Alphabet brand allowed a distinction between the larger organization and the search product we all know as Google.

4. Your brand never worked from the beginning.

Running a business means you’re all in. It also means your passion may bring the side effect of a blind spot around the efficacy of your brand. In this case, you love your brand and it excites you, but it’s not resonating with your target audience for reasons you don’t understand.

Keep an ear to the ground for cues your brand has issues, such as when customers confuse you with a competitor, can’t remember your name, misunderstand your offering, and so on. If that’s the case, prioritize bringing in an outside branding firm to lend an objective eye and recommendations to set you back on course.

Branding is a critical element of any business, and tinkering with it may feel like a dangerous and expensive risk. A thorough rebrand (and even a refresh) can indeed become expensive, and may certainly present uncertainties. However, considering the consequences of doing nothing and watching a branding mismatch continue to manifest in poor results, it may well be a risk worth taking.

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images

By Tanya Hall

Sourced from Inc.

In Jobs

Programmatic and Ad Ops Lead

April 1, 2020 No Comments

Balls Media, Glasnevin , Dublin

Following a record year in 2017 and a bumper start to 2018, Balls Media is now adding to the team.

As Digital Performance Manager you will be tasked with managing live advertising campaigns and building and maintaining relationships with your agencies.
The ideal candidate will have experience working with a publisher and have vast experience with programmatic campaigns

From DFP and Adx to PMPs and DMPs – the ideal candidate will have excellent organisational skills and will know DFP inside out.

The role includes the following responsibilites

Manage and service clients to ensure accurate ad trafficking, campaign fulfilment and performance across multiple mediums
Work directly with third party ad servers (Especially DoubleClick For Publisher), rich media vendors (all media suppliers and internal planning team on all elements related to creative specifications, ad trafficking, optimization and reporting.
Track, measure, and analyze the performance of multiple advertising campaigns, including creating detailed performance reports and proposing optimization strategies.
Operate budgets with Facebook marketing
Effectively track and communicate project timelines and deliverables to appropriate stakeholders
Assist with campaign set-up requirements as needed

Click HERE to apply for this position.

In News

15 Ways To Inspire New Enthusiasm At Work When You’re Feeling Apathetic

April 1, 2020 No Comments

Sourced from Forbes

When you start a new job, you’re usually excited about all the new possibilities and opportunities. But after a few years, it’s easy to lose that excitement—especially if you weren’t particularly thrilled about the job in the first place.

While in some cases this loss of enthusiasm can indicate a need to find another position, many cases simply warrant a change in attitude. Even the members of Forbes Coaches Council and their clients have experienced these slumps, but they’ve also discovered how to move past them. Below, they share 15 ways you can inspire new enthusiasm about your current job.

1. Be The CEO Of Your Career

Once you outgrow a role, no matter how much you try, it’s hard to make it exciting again as you hit a growth ceiling. The only way to still feel engaged again is to truly own it like its CEO. Ask yourself how this role could be more impactful and bring more value. This will give you lots of ideas to transform or expand or modify the role. With that you will learn something new, grow and love it. – Amy Nguyen, Happiness Infinity LLC

2. Cultivate ‘Stretch’ Challenges For Yourself

As humans, we thrive when we know our work has impact and when we grow and experience a healthy “challenge.” To inspire new enthusiasm about an old job, remind yourself why the work you do is important, valuable and how it connects to the bigger picture. In addition, cultivate new challenges such as cross-functional projects, as well as skill and community building to make things exciting. – Shefali Raina, Alpha Lane Partners

3. Reinvent Your Space

Start by asking yourself how you might recraft your current job to include more of what you enjoy doing—What would you be doing? What skills would you be using? Who would you be working with? Next, think about how you can use your current environment to do more of what interests you, develop and practice new skills and surround yourself with people who energize you. Experiment and reenergize. – Palena Neale, Ph.D, unabridged

4. Think About What Drives You

The first step is to critically and honestly assess what drives your motivation at work—independence, affiliation with a team, accomplishment, process, security, others seeing your value? Are your motivational drivers being fed? How can you or the organization feed them to keep you connected, engaged and motivated? Self-awareness first; nourishment second. – Bill Joy, The Joy Group

5. Talk To Those You Impact

Almost everyone has an impact on others through their work. Seek those people out. Even if your work plays a minor role in their success or the execution of their job, seek them out and ask how you might do better. The net result is likely to be complimentary. Just seeing where your efforts land can be gratifying. You would not be doing work unless it has some impact, somewhere. Go there. – Tom Kolditz, Doerr Institute for New Leaders

6. Do Things That Scare You

One way that I escaped the “Groundhog’s Day” experience at work was to think like an intrapreneur. What are the problems that need solving? What solutions can you bring to the table? Is it something that’s way out of your skill set or comfort zone? Have you been avoiding it because it’s scary? Do it! Taking on challenges that scare you will push your creativity and visibility up to level 11. – Joyel Crawford, Crawford Leadership Strategies, LLC.

7. List Out What You Like And Don’t Like And Compare

First, list out the things you enjoy about your role and the things you don’t enjoy. Assess if the “don’t enjoys” outweigh the “enjoys.” If you decide to recommit, meet with your manager and request more of the joys and share your career passions. If you are well beyond the concept of getting excited (or you have a poor relationship with your boss), then work on Plan B outside of work. – Dana Manciagli, Job Search Master Class

8. Look At Work As A Personal Branding Opportunity

Renew your enthusiasm in a couple ways. Think yourself into a new way of behaving or behave yourself into a new way of thinking. Both can spark enthusiasm and energy. After the new job starts becoming ho-hum, consider your work as a personal branding opportunity. Consider every interaction and work output a matter of brand. Develop a checklist of your reputation behaviors you want to be known for. – Thomas Larkin, Communico, Westport CT

9. Test The Market And See If Better Opportunities Exist

Sometimes people feel trapped in their job because the thought of finding a new one is too overwhelming. Test the market. Be curious with your network. It doesn’t mean you’re leaving, but you may see that what you have is better than you think. Chances are that if you’re not excited about your job, your employer may not be too excited about you. Don’t be a frog in a pot slowly dying! – Kimberly Roush, All-Star Executive Coaching

10. Get Clarity On Your Next Level Of Growth

One way to inspire new enthusiasm is to get clarity on where you want to go next. It’s crucial to have a vision so you can realize why you are “here.” Feel the gratitude for all that you’ve accomplished and the privilege of stepping further into your potential. It’s exciting thinking of all the possibilities that come with doing your job well, which leads to living your best life with enjoyment and impact. – Whitney Mullings, Whitney Mullings

11. Make Your Job A Platform For Your Purpose

Your current job has many benefits—you’ve already built rapport, you know how to get things done and you understand what your organization is capable of. What if you stopped thinking of it as a “job” and started thinking of it as a “platform” for you to accomplish your goals? If you define your own purpose and goals for this year, can you use your current platform to get there, faster? – Aric Wood, XPLANE

12. Focus On Relationships

Shift the lens through which you are looking. The strongest driver of happiness and longevity is the quality of our relationships. It is easy to forget that today’s enterprises are just large social networks. Renew focus on your relationships. Be outgoing, caring and authentic at work to drive your career progression as you have more people behind you. It will blur the line between work and play. – Laura Berger, Berdéo Group

13. Go Back To Learning Mode

Learning brings excitement! Instead of seeing everything as the same, being curious about how and why things are the way they are boosts our curiosity and invites us to learn more. There is always something we could work on. Developing a report or a relationship, putting your strengths more into work, networking, learning about how to feel better at work—these are just some ideas we can try to learn more! – Elif Suner, Elif Suner MBA, M.Ed, PCC – Consulting, Training, Coaching

14. Reassess What Your Job Actually Means To You

Yes, one can often tire of one’s job, and lose enthusiasm. So, what can you do here? First, I would say, it is good to reassess what the job is to you. Is it a means to an end? Did it serve a useful purpose? Is it now time to expand, horizontally, laterally? In other words, is it time to try to grow yourself? When you think of it this way, suddenly, more opportunities arise and it can be fun again! – Ash Varma, Varma & Associates

15. Consider Whether It’s Time To Go

When you have lost that lovin’ feeling for your job, it is time to go. You do a tremendous disservice to the company and your co-workers with lackluster performance—you also cheat yourself out of opportunity and financial potential. Doing a mediocre job sends a message to your core of self-doubt. Passion fuels performance, which propels opportunity. Don’t leave money on the table of your future. – Cynthia Howard RN, CNC, PhD., EI Leadership

Sourced from Forbes

In News

Making Customer Engagement The Common Scorecard For Growth

April 1, 2020 No Comments

By Stephen Diorio

Using big data and analytics to create better incentives for sales, marketing and service teams

Steve Lucas, the new CEO of iCIMS, a business that makes software that helps companies recruit talent, is set on doubling sales over the next 18-24 months. He’s done it before as the CEO of Marketo, where he doubled the revenue and tripled the value of the firm to $4.75B in 24 months.

One of the reasons he’s very likely to succeed is he understands how to lead sales and marketing transformation in an engagement economy where customers are channel agnostic and non-linear buyer behavior has blurred the lines between sales, marketing, and customer success functions.

In his book, Engage to Win: A Blueprint for Success in the Engagement Economy, Lucas explains how to grow a business in a market where changing customer buying behavior defies traditional notions of a linear “lock-step” customer journey and makes CRM based on customer, lead, and account ownership an outdated management concept. A key lesson from the book is that growing a business in the engagement economy will require teamwork, customer stewardship, and a highly orchestrated stream of never-ending customer engagement.

“I view my role as CEO as being the firm’s Chief Engagement Officer,” reports Steve Lucas. “My job is orchestrating the customer experience across many touchpoints and functions. This means developing a real-world strategy for customer engagement, which is something they don’t teach in business schools yet because it is different from a traditional marketing or sales approach. Executing a customer engagement strategy involves creating a vocabulary, culture, measurement system and model for orchestrating the engagement of sales, marketing and services with all the key customer stakeholders in ways that resonate and deliver a superior customer experience.”

Many organizations are putting a single leader in charge of marketing, sales, and service to gain more coordinated control over the entire customer journey. To succeed, this new breed of “CXO” will need a better set of financial incentives for these disparate groups to work together. A key success factor in this new growth equation is to create a common scorecard for customer success based on unified customer engagement metrics that provide go-to-market teams more incentives to work together. The holy grail is to create a common set of financially valid and data-driven incentives where the ultimate scorecard for marketing and sales is firm value, future profits and revenue growth.

Growth oriented investors like Vista Equity Partners (which owns iCIMS) and the Rock Ventures Family of Companies understand and exploit this new buying reality. These market leaders are generating outsized returns on the companies in their investment portfolios because they are mastering the science of growth by actively working with their leadership teams to help them apply advanced analytics to transform their go-to-market culture, processes, and incentives.

“One key to winning in the engagement economy is to develop a universal customer engagement quality score that defines engagement excellence to all the stakeholders in your organization,” according to Lucas. “That means defining as an organization what a 10 out of 10 looks like in terms of customer advocacy, quality of interaction, content sharing, and other relationship health metrics. And then using advanced analytics to build composite metrics that quantify and track customer engagement quality on a customer and account level”

Putting this scorecard for success into operation involves deriving customer engagement quality metrics from the customer data that exists in CRM, exchange servers, marketing automation, and content management systems. The secret is to develop a set of Key Performance Indicators using advanced analytics that track the behaviors and activities that define team success but ladder up to a common scorecard for winning.

Sports teams have embraced analytics in this regard in recent years and provide a model for sales organizations to follow. Like selling teams – sports teams have many different players that play many different roles in order to win the game. There are nine different positions on a baseball team. 11 in Soccer. And over 25 in the NFL. But there is only one scorecard for success – winning. And everyone on the team works together towards that goal.

For example, winning soccer teams can get all 11 players to work as a team because they all understand what it takes to win – score more goals than the opponent. A revolution in advanced analytics has allowed these teams to break down the performance expectations of each player on the team into discrete KPIs – goals saved, passes made, possessions won, and clean tackles – that help each player understand and measure their contribution to that overall goal. In baseball, advanced analytics have allowed GM’s to structure player contracts with financial incentives based on a coherent set of individual performance metrics – runs created, runs saved, errors avoided, hitting efficiency – that all add up in ways that increase the “win probability” of a team and “wins above a replacement player” for an individual.

Sales and marketing leaders need to push their analytics teams to do the same. They need to use advanced analytics and AI to turn their sales engagement data into a common set of measurements and financial incentives that get sales, marketing and services working as a team towards the goals of growing firm value, customer lifetime value, and profits.

For example, Steve Lucas pushed his team at Marketo to clearly define and quantify what a good client relationship looks like empirically on a scale of one to ten. He kept the bar high on engagement quality. Any account team with a customer engagement score less than 9 had to take a series of actions to improve customer health. In parallel, he created a tightly defined customer persona called an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). He created a vocabulary, criteria, reporting, and most importantly financial incentives for his go to market teams to develop relationships with these “ideal customers”. To enforce this discipline of delivering high quality customer engagement to the highest potential customers, his teams were paid 20% higher commissions when they engaged and developed “ideal” customers. They were paid 20% lower commissions when they spent their energies on less than ideal prospects.

Lucas plans to put the same formula to work at iCIMS once his team defines a vocabulary and metrics that best describe customer engagement quality and the ideal customer profile within their unique business model. “The scorecard for successful customer engagement is different for different business models. What worked at Marketo will be different from what works at iCIMS because it’s a different business. But the principles will be the same”, according to Lucas. “The key is to develop a universal customer engagement quality score that defines engagement excellence for all customer facing employees.”

Unfortunately, advanced engagement-based incentives like this are the exception rather than the rule, even though most go to market leaders have the customer engagement data they need to build them. This is a missed opportunity because traditional measures of marketing and sales performance based on a linear sales process are becoming outdated and dysfunctional. These measurement systems fail to reflect the complex variety of touchpoints, stakeholders, and hand-offs involved in the modern customer buying journey. This creates leakage, friction and conflicting agendas when sales and marketing spend too much energy negotiating credit for lead handoffs and not enough time engaging with customers as a team.

Sales leaders are missing a big opportunity by not using the customer engagement data available to them to create advanced measurement systems. Most organizations are sitting on top of large amounts of customer engagement data in a variety of Revenue Enablement systems – including CRM, exchange (email and calendar), content management, marketing automation, web sites, social media, customer engagement management systems. And that’s not counting data third party partners (like LinkedIn or D&B). This information needs to be used to track and inform the right sales behaviors, actions and performance incentives.

“Organizations are going to need to rewire their commercial engines to better reflect the new buying reality where customers are channel agnostic and buyer behavior is non-linear,’ reports Brent Adamson, distinguished Vice President in Gartner’s Sales practice. “It’s a big job. It’s going to be painful because it involves reworking the legacy commercial infrastructure, and creating new roles, processes and metrics. So, getting it right in the next several years is probably a reach. But companies that even start to make progress creating metrics, dashboards and incentives that are a more accurate proxy of the current buying reality are going to have a significant advantage over the competition.” According to Adamson, companies that align their metrics and incentives with customer buying behavior will give them a much more accurate picture of the cost of sales, the opportunity cost of selling time, and how different resources contribute to their commercial organizations in terms of commercial outcomes. This will allow them to make much better decisions about how to allocate people, technology, data and content resources based on what they are contributing to the top line, bottom line and value of the company.

Sales and marketing leaders like Marketo and DHL are taking the first steps to align their metrics and incentives with the activities and behaviors that lead to commercial outcomes, customer lifetime value, and account health. They are using advanced customer engagement analytics and sales AI to create customer engagement metrics to serve as the foundation for performance measurements based on real-time information about sales engagement, deal attractiveness, content usage, and persona-level interactions to provide management a more accurate proxy of the current buying reality.

For example, using advanced customer engagement analytics and sales AI to create measures of customer engagement quality were fundamental to helping DHL transform the way they sell, according to Ton Verleg, the VP Global Sales Development at DHL. “We changed the way we sell and for that you need to be armed with relevant data and insights,” relates Mr. Verleg. “The analytics and AI give us unprecedented visibility into the opportunities and provides actionable next steps for our sales executives to sell with the buyers perspective, helping customers be more successful.”

To help organizations develop more financially valid ways to manage their growth resources, I will be studying how leading organizations are creating a common scorecard for growth and presenting the findings at a Revenue Enablement Forum this summer. Reach out to me to participate in the research, and the forum.

Feature Image Credit: Customer Engagement Metrics, Getty

By Stephen Diorio

Sourced from Forbes

In News

10 Breakthrough Technologies 2020

March 31, 2020 No Comments

Sourced from MIT Technology Review

Here is our annual list of technological advances that we believe will make a real difference in solving important problems. How do we pick? We avoid the one-off tricks, the overhyped new gadgets. Instead we look for those breakthroughs that will truly change how we live and work.

We’re excited to announce that with this year’s list we’re also launching our very first editorial podcast, Deep Tech, which will explore the people, places, and ideas featured in our most ambitious journalism. Have a listen here.

Sourced from MIT Technology Review

In News

Advertising budgets could take a $3B hit over coronavirus

March 31, 2020 No Comments

By Keith J. Kelly

The coronavirus pandemic could slash as much as $3 billion from advertising and marketing budgets in 2020, according to a new report.

“This is a global human disaster that impacts every company,” said Jack Myers, who authored the report and who has been tracking the ad spend market since the 1980s.

On Monday, Myers released a new forecast on the ad spending impact of the COVID-19 outbreak — tripling his previous forecast of a $1 billion blow. Given how quickly the virus has been spreading — resulting in entire industries like Broadway shutting down — a decline of $3 billion is more likely, he said.

“What I saw a week ago as the worst-case scenario, I now see as the most likely scenario,” Myers told Media Ink.

Before the coronavirus forced retailers, restaurants and entertainment venues to close their doors, Myers was predicting $227 billion would be spent on advertising and marketing in the US this year— a 6.2 percent increase from 2019.

The $3 billion decline — to $224 billion — represents a 1 percent drop from the earlier forecast, meaning ad and marketing spending could still be up 4.8 percent from a year ago.

Because even as legacy media sees advertising grow 1 percent year over year, social media from platforms Facebook and Snap could see a 12 percent surge in ad spending to $30.8 billion, Myers said.

And as the coronavirus forces people to spend more time at home, streaming video platforms like Hulu, Pluto, Roku and Direct TV could see ad spending grow 42 percent, to $2.6 billion — up from his pre-coronavirus forecast for growth of 38 percent.

Broadcast TV may actually see a rise in ad spend due to increased demand for political ads leading up to the November presidential election — and the Olympics. Myers sees network TV ad sales up by 4 percent, or $100 million.

Of course, the Summer Olympics could also be canceled, Myers acknowledged, and sporting events have been put on hold.

Cable could see a decline in ad spending if it’s forced to halt production of popular dramas and resort to reruns.

Myers was already forecasting a 3.3 percent drop for cable before the coronavirus hit, but he now predicts a 6 percent decline of nearly $800 million to $27 billion.

Myers sees a 3 percent decline for digital news site advertising, but says the coronavirus may actually help newspaper ad spending, which he now predicts will be flat.

Feature Image Credit: JOHANNES EISELE/AFP via Getty Images

By Keith J. Kelly

Sourced from New York Post

In News

Maybe publisher cooperation is a path forward for news, but it shouldn’t be at the expense of public media

March 31, 2020 No Comments

By Joshua Benton

In Norway and Sweden, a survey finds some people won’t pay for online news because the news from their free public broadcaster is good enough. That’s a feature, not a bug.

When making just about any kind of international comparison around news media, one thing quickly becomes clear: The Scandinavians blow the curve for everyone else.

While the U.S. government spends a measly $3 per capita on public broadcasting, Sweden spends $95 and Norway $125.

What percentage of a country’s residents pay for online news? In Canada, that’s 9 percent. In the U.S., 16 percent. But in Sweden? 27 percent. Norway? 34 percent.

What countries finish No. 1, 2, and 3 in Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index? Norway, Finland, and Sweden. (The U.S. is No. 48.)

In the United States, there is roughly 1 copy of a newspaper printed each day for every 10.6 people. In Norway, it’s about 1 copy for every 2.6 people. The U.S. has roughly 33× as many people as Sweden, but only 13× as many daily newspapers. 80 percent of Finns read at least one print newspaper each week.

Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It’s almost embarrassing for the rest of us, to be frank.

But there can still be trouble in media paradise, at least according to this new report from the Tinius Trust. (It’s the largest shareholder in the Scandinavia-heavy media group Schibsted, which has negotiated the transition to digital as well as any media house worldwide. The Tinius Trust is designed “to ensure that Schibsted remains a media group characterized by free, independent editorial staffs, credibility, and quality and with long-term, healthy financial developments.”)

Here’s Kjersti Løken Stavrum, the trust’s CEO:

There is a limit to how many digital news subscriptions the public will want to pay for in the future — a ceiling that will impact media diversity…This is clear from the results of a new survey done in Norway and Sweden for the Tinius Trust — conducted by Norstat.

In Norway, 46% responded that they would only want 1-2 news subscriptions in the future. Almost half of the younger respondents aged 18-29 assume that they will not subscribe to digital news sources in the future at all.

The same trend has been identified in Sweden: 42% of respondents state that they only expect to have 1-2 digital news subscriptions, while 54% of 18 to 29-year olds say that they will not subscribe at all.

So even in the Asgard of Nordic media, lots of people say they either don’t expect to subscribe to any digital news outlets or, at best, only one or maybe two. (The actual numbers for Sweden: 45 percent say none, 28 percent say one, 14 percent say two. In Norway: 33 percent none, 27 percent one, 20 percent two. Shoutout to my fellow “six or more” news nerds.)

That most people will likely only subscribe to one digital news outlet (at most!) is a real issue we’ve written about before. It’s not that it’s different from what we had pre-Internet — after all, most people only subscribed to a single newspaper too.

But it is quite different from what we saw in the last decade-plus of the internet, when first blogs and then social media pushed people to see news sites as a neverending buffet, where it was totally fine to grab a couple cocktail shrimp from The Washington Post, some broccoli from Vox, some mashed potatoes from your local daily paper, and maybe a brownie from Vulture. As more of those sites go behind paywalls, we moved from an open buffet to ordering entrees off the menu — and normal people don’t order five different entrees to have a little bit of each. That’s as true in Oslo as in Orlando.

The Tinius Trust survey (of about 1,000 Swedes and 1,000 Norwegians) went further and asked what factors most keep their number of digital subscriptions low. The No. 1 response: “There is sufficient access to free, digital news,” in particular from those well-funded public broadcasters:

Almost half of the respondents in Norway (45%) pointed to the free content provided by the national broadcaster NRK. The figure for Sweden is somewhat lower but remains high, with 38% saying that they will not pay for content given that the Swedish national broadcasting agency SVT offers its content free of charge.

The figures are cause for concern.

Eh…is it? Depends how you view the mission of a public broadcaster, I suppose.

British media companies have long complained about the BBC crowding out for-profit media. Canadian media companies complain about the CBC. Some ill-informed Americans do the same about NPR or PBS. The underlying goal of public media, after all, is to make high-quality news and information available to everyone, regardless of their ability to pay.

By definition, that will reduce the number of people who want to pay for news. I call that a feature, not a bug. But the argument against public media seems to be gaining ground in some places. I would hope Scandinavia doesn’t become one of them. A study late last year found that, of Norwegians who don’t already subscribe to digital news, less than 10 percent of Norwegians say they’re even interested in someday doing so — meaning a trusted public broadcaster is critical to their information needs. Even in a country with the highest digital news subscription rate in the world.

The Tinius Trust report doesn’t specifically say funding for public broadcasting is bad, to be clear. (Though “Free news from public service broadcasters prevents subscription sales” gets close to that ballpark, if not quite in it.) But the trust does say the status quo is harmful:

The Norwegian government’s media policy seeks to promote diversity in the media. It is a fact that democracy thrives where information is freely available and of many kinds. However, diversity is currently restricted to those who can pay for media access individually. If this leads to a rise in the number of persons entering the category known as “news avoiders”, there is cause for concern. Such a development would create new inequalities based on insufficient information about societal development, something that will be detrimental to society at large.

The solution the trust is pushing is some sort of shared arrangement between publishers — something on the spectrum between a shared login system across sites to a sort of super-subscription like what Spotify offers for music. Bring back the endless buffet, in other words — just maybe charge for admission this time.

In Scandinavia, the transition to charging for digital news subscriptions has been a success. From the readers’ point of view, however, the requirement to sign in to the various publications often stops them from accessing the story they want to read. In practice, signing-in solutions mean that most people will limit themselves to one or perhaps two paid-for news sources…

Spotify’s payment solution for music has, for many years, been an obvious model for editorial content, although developments have failed to materialize. Most persons in the media industry have heard readers complain about how much they would like to access individual articles without having to pay for an entire month or even longer news subscriptions. Such statements must sound like music to the ears of a player like Spotify.

Because the issue is this: if creating a joint sign-in solution for content in the same category — such as digital, editorial news — is beneficial, someone will produce it. And if the media players themselves don’t take the initiative, someone else will.

The paradox is that the editorial media can, in fact, cooperate. They have done so by means of news services such as NTB [the Norwegian News Agency] in Norway for more than 150 years and Tidningsutgivarna [a Swedish publishers association] in Sweden for almost a century…But time is running out. They need to make a move.

A single sign-on can allow publishers to improve their data for ad targeting, however marginally, vis-à-vis the tech titans and allow for better customization and discovery. (Schibsted has had its own single sign-on for all its sites since 2013.)

I’m always happy to see these sorts of efforts, despite my skepticism — not only because they might help their home country’s news ecosystem, but because they could be proving grounds for ideas that can be replicated elsewhere. Cooperation is a good thing! Maybe there is a future for a common platform that people can use across an entire country to get news and information from lots of different commercial sources.

It’s a lot easier to arrange cross-publisher cooperation in a small country like Norway or Sweden than in a megalith like the United States. But even in smaller countries, the track record isn’t stellar. There have been attempts at creating something like a country-wide paywall before (like Piano Media’s attempts in Slovenia and Slovakia almost a decade ago, which failed because readers weren’t interested). And companies like Blendle have gotten lots of publishers to sign on to a shared, article-based platform, but they’ve struggled to scale.

Experience tells me that consumer demand for such a product usually trails its creators’ interests. And getting lots of different media companies to cooperate is hard work. Nónio, a Google-funded attempt to do something similar between Portuguese publishers, has had a slow go of it, with the newspaper Público dropping out of the alliance in December. There are a number of similar initiatives across Europe currently, but none (to my knowledge — feel free to inform me otherwise) has set the world on fire. And they’ve mostly been oriented toward improved user data for advertising — the better to fight Google and Facebook — not shared subscriptions, which is a different kettle of fish in a thousand ways.

Still, whatever efforts are made on that front, one thing is clear: They shouldn’t come at the expense of a country’s existing common platform for news and information, the one that in most countries is the most trusted source of news — public media. As our media ecosystems shatter into a million pieces, a public service broadcaster’s role as a trusted central anchor free to all is more important than ever.

By Joshua Benton

Sourced from NiemanLab