by Fronetics | Jan 31, 2017 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
Sales teams can use social media to cultivate relationships with potential buyers, a process called social selling.
With the dawn of the social media age and the exponential increase in choices and information available to buyers, we’ve seen a massive shift in the way B2B sales occur. According to the Harvard Business Review, a striking 84% of B2B sales start not with a salesperson, but with a referral.
As outbound sales become decreasingly effective, peer recommendations are influencing more than 90% of all B2B buying decisions. So how do we make the shift from outbound sales to this new reality? One of the more popular answers is social media.
It’s likely that your organization has some sort of social media marketing strategy in place. But making full use of these platforms requires a more nuanced, well-rounded strategy than blanket social media marketing. It’s time to introduce the idea of “social selling.”
Social media as a sales tool
In a basic sense, social selling is the strategy of adding social media to the sales professional’s toolbox. This means using social platforms to research, prospect, and network by sharing curated educational content and answering questions. The key is building relationships until prospects are ready to buy.
So what’s the difference between social media marketing and social selling, and why is it important? While both are necessary to an integrated marketing and sales strategy, the former is about engaging many — with the goal of increasing brand awareness or promoting a specific product — by producing content that users will ideally share with their networks.
Meanwhile, social selling means producing focused content, and providing personal communication between the salesperson and the buyer. Again, the key is building and cultivating a relationship using social media platforms.
How to start social selling
The benefits of social selling are numerous and significant. For example, according to a LinkedIn survey, B2B buyers are five times more likely to engage with a sales rep who provides new insights about their business or industry. Social media is a powerful engagement tool, giving sales people a platform for sharing these insights.
Here are some steps your sales team can take to implement social selling.
1) Put it in your calendar.
Allot a small portion of your day for social media. It doesn’t take a big time investment to reap the benefits of regular interaction with your prospects.
2) Integrate sales and marketing.
Encourage collaboration between sales and social marketing departments, to make the most of both efforts. HBR suggests that “marketing can train salespeople in social media systems, processes, and best practices.” In addition, sales and marketing should be regularly sharing information to make sure their goals are aligned, and efforts are dovetailing. According to a study by Data Room and Marketo, “sales and marketing alignment can improve sales efforts at closing deals by 67% and help marketing generate 209% more value from their efforts.”
3) Prioritize relationship-building.
Focus your business’ ongoing efforts to building and cultivating quality relationships with prospects. This means building in time every day for personal communication. Make your prospects’ needs your priority.
The bottom line here is building and maintaining relationships. Social media — and social selling — are powerful tools for doing just that.
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by Jennifer Hart Yim | Jan 26, 2017 | Blog, Strategy, Talent
The “Right to Disconnect” is combating round-the-clock email culture, but can better work/life balance help boost employees’ productivity?
This guest post comes to us from Argentus Supply Chain Recruiting, a boutique recruitment firm specializing in Supply Chain Management and Procurement.
Here’s a new frontier in work-life balance: For the past several years, work-life balance has been one of the biggest topics in employer and HR circles. Companies are recognizing the productivity benefits of flex time, childcare assistance, on-site stress workshops, and other initiatives designed to make employees happier. They’re also using work-life balance to help attract and retain the best candidates. Read any (good) modern job description, and you’ll see lots of language from companies recognizing the importance of having a life outside of work.
But anyone who’s worked at a few different companies knows that every company has a different track record in terms of actually implementing work-life balance initiatives, and not just paying lip-service to them.
The Right to Disconnect
So here’s an interesting solution from abroad: As of January 1, a new law in France affords workers the “Right to Disconnect” from their emails after hours. In France, a country long-associated with the development of rights, companies with more than 50 employees must now negotiate a new protocol with employees to make sure that their work obligations — like email — don’t carry over to after-work hours.
Europe has long been characterized in North America as laissez-faire when it comes to working hours, mandating more weeks of vacation than Canada (where 3 weeks is the standard) and the U.S. (which typically affords a stingy 2 weeks of vacation). There’s always been a stronger cultural attachment to leisure hours in Europe, where 35-hour workweeks are common, so it isn’t surprising that such a law comes from France.
It’s also not surprising that the idea of completely banning after-work emails has been ridiculed in North America, where many employees work long hours, take lunch at their desks, and answer emails around the clock to prove their value. But outlets like Time magazine have reported on how round-the-clock email culture has taken over France as well, which is part of what’s led to these guidelines.
Work/life balance = productivity?
The idea behind a “right to disconnect” is to restore some of the ever-blurrier boundary between work and life brought about by smartphones with email access. But the idea isn’t just to give workers a break — it’s that if you make sure people can turn off their phones when they leave the office, they’ll likely be more effective in the morning. In other words, a stronger boundary between work and life improves not only life, but work as well.
One interesting piece of Time’s reporting is that checking emails after hours isn’t always company mandated. It’s something that we all often know first-hand: In many cases, checking emails after hours is something we often bring upon ourselves — either out of a desire to get ahead, to be seen as busy and highly responsive, or, let’s admit it, out of boredom. But email begets email, and when everyone’s replying on an email chain after hours, suddenly you come into the office and you’re swamped. Time reports on how companies themselves are tackling the issue of after-work emails. Some companies are building time restrictions into their email clients. Others are formally discouraging using “reply all” to limit the number of unnecessary emails. Others are outright telling their employees not to email after hours.
So does the tendency to email around the clock begin with us, or our employers?
It’s a tough question. For our part, our policy as recruiters is that we should be responding to emails after work hours only for highly time-sensitive issues. We recognize the importance of downtime, even if it’s hard to mandate.
But what do you think? It’s unlikely that a law like this would catch on in the U.S., but is our after-hours emailing obsession making workplaces more productive, or is an always-on mentality leading to burnout and distraction?
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by Fronetics | Jan 25, 2017 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing, Strategy
To stay relevant following Google’s mobile-first approach, marketers need to examine their company’s mobile user experience.
Marketers, take notice: Google’s announcement that it is experimenting with a “mobile-first” search index is a reminder to examine your website content and configuration. The message from the search engine giant is clear: Now is the time to enhance your company’s mobile online experience.
A mobile-first society
The future is pointing toward increasing mobile device use. In 2015, mobile traffic accounted for more than half of internet traffic, and that percentage is growing. Google reported that more searches take place on mobile devices than on desktops. In response to this trend, Google’s new algorithms will rank mobile-friendly web pagers higher in search results than desktop pages.
These days, it’s pretty much a given that your clients and customers own a mobile device and use it quite often in their professional lives. Your site needs to meet the expectations of the viewer, which is to access content easily via mobile. If you fall short of this, you’ll lose credibility and, ultimately, income.
What do B2B marketers need to do?
Google currently uses two indexes to rank search results, 1. desktop pages and 2. mobile pages. If Google makes good on its promise to have a mobile-only index, websites optimized for mobile use will get higher billing at the top of search results, leading to more clicks, more brand recognition, and, ultimately, more sales.
Marketers need to prepare now to ensure a prominent place in Google’s search results. Here are three tips on how to do that.
- Develop a strong working relationship with your webmaster — they are in the experts on the technical side and can keep you abreast of updates and trends in website optimization.
- Conduct an audit of your websites to check for SEO. Use a website such as http://responsivedesignchecker.com/ to give you real-time feedback.
- Become familiar with these three methods of web development:
- Responsive web design – allows website pages to adapt to whatever size screen the viewer is using.
- Dynamic serving – the server responds with different HTML (and CSS) on the same URL depending on the user agent requesting the page
- Mobile-only URL – each desktop URL has an equivalent different URL serving mobile-optimized content
Check here to see how your site is configured.
Google’s tips
Google offers tips to webmasters to make their sites mobile-first. If your site is already optimized for mobile with RWD or is a dynamic-serving site, you shouldn’t need to make any adjustments. But if not, work with your webmaster on the following:
- Serve structured markup for desktop and mobile versions
- Make sure your site is accessible to Googlebot
- Verify both desktop and mobile sites in Google’s Search Console
Should your business website be optimized for mobile searching? The short answer is undoubtedly yes.
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![The State of Supply Chains: The Supply Chain Has Gone Digital [Infographic]](https://www.fronetics.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/virtual-reality.jpg)
by Jennifer Hart Yim | Jan 23, 2017 | Big Data, Blog, Data/Analytics, Logistics, Strategy, Supply Chain
2016 was the year of the digital supply chain — here’s a look at how things changed.
This guest post comes to us from Adam Robinson, director of marketing for Cerasis, a top freight logistics company and truckload freight broker.
2016 marched onward with a drive to improve the use of digital technology throughout the supply chain. In our first supply chain trends post, we surmised the previous year’s trends would continue. However, this prediction proved to only touch on how important the digital supply chain would become.
Within four months, the digital transformation had already reached most supply chain organizations. Per GT Nexus, 75% of executives surveyed recognized the digital supply chain as an important factor for the next five years. Meanwhile, 70% have also started processes to implement digital supply chain technologies throughout their companies.
Unfortunately, many supply chain entities continue to hope for a better tomorrow. In other words, the digital supply chain transformation has only been rated as very satisfying for 5% of respondents. In addition, just less than half (48%) of respondents report continued use of traditional technologies exclusively, which include the following:
- Fax machines
- Manual order entry and review
- Land-line phones, not voice over internet protocol (VoIP), which reduces overall costs and downtime
- Email, although beneficial, is susceptible to internet connectivity issues, security breaches and other problems
- Chaotic picking protocols
This infographic, created by GT Nexus, also shows other ways the digital supply chain evolved in 2016.
(Made with Canva)
Essentially, the digital supply chain is essential to gaining and maintaining competitive advantage. Digital technologies, reports Richard Howells of Forbes, including Big Data, analytics, the Internet of Things, social media, and point-of-sale reporting, enable business to know more about consumer needs and wants than ever before. Consequently, they can more accurately respond to changes in product demand across large distances and within infinitesimally small time frames.
Supply chain execs retained fundamentals throughout change.
Innovation is the driving force behind change and improvement in the modern world. Supply chains must evolve to meet an increasing number of omnichannel sales, and technologies must be integrated within existing systems to reach maximum efficiency and productive value.
As explained by Grant Marshbank of VSC Solutions, “The rate of change is not going to slow down. Technology will only delivery […] if it’s implemented with strategy and operations that adhere to best practices.”
Marshbank’s words highlighted the need to focus on fundamental concepts while responding to changes and improvements in the supply chain. For example, an optimized supply chain is good, but it opens more opportunities for errors. Simply putting all an organization’s proverbial eggs into one basket may be risky if appropriate auditing and review measures are not undertaken to ensure continued compliance and accuracy in all orders.
Change is a necessity for businesses, including the supply chain, to grow and expand. Yet many destructive forces can severely undermine a company’s progress. Bad weather, poor hiring practices or inefficient maintenance of consumers’ financial data can decimate a company. However, the response to hindrances in 2016 continued to showcase the importance of fundamental concepts, asserts Ryder, which include the following:
- Continually seeking the fastest, most cost-effective means of transporting products to consumers, including enhanced delivery optins.
- Expansion of global footprint while adhering to local, state, federal and international requirements
- Keeping companies accountable and focused on giving back to their domestic partners through reshoring or nearshoring
- Working with more outside agencies, also highlighted by Samantha Carr of Business 2 Community, including crowd-sourced logistics, warehouse optimization and outsourcing, and greater use of cloud-computing
Augmented reality found its place among consumers.
Augmented reality sounded amazing and far-fetched early in 2016, but the year has shown it to be one of the most successful product in existence. There tends to be more acceptance of technologies in the workplace once consumers can identify how they work.
For example, new hires are likely to pick up tablet-based systems more easily since they have been using them recreationally for some time. Essentially, the virtual-reality (VR), which is the precursor to augmented reality, hype of the 2016 Christmas shopping season is making more people excited about this new way to “see the world.”
While the VR hype may seem like it only emerged for Christmas, think about one of the hottest games of 2016, Pokémon Go! This app was built on augmented reality, combining the digital and physical worlds into one interactive environment. This technology, reports JOC.com, will be a key to practically eliminate extensive training courses and repair time requirements throughout the supply chain.
Ultimately, it translates into greater use of augmented reality in supply chains, which is growing by 100% annually, reports Barcoding Incorporated.
What’s next?
Clearly, technology dominated the conversation for 2016, but there are also changes in how supply chains operate that require a more in-depth discussion as well. In the next post of this series, we discuss the impact of artificial intelligence, agile processes and procurement expansion on the supply chain of 2016.
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by Fronetics | Jan 19, 2017 | Blog, Content Marketing, Data/Analytics, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
The chances are that your company is not tweeting as often as it should.
Each second around 6,000 tweets are tweeted. Each minute over 350,000 tweets are tweeted. The median lifespan of each of these tweets is just 18 minutes. After 18 minutes of being live, the chance of someone seeing your tweet is very low. The chance of someone interacting with that tweet — even lower.
Given the large volume of tweets and the short lifespan of each tweet, how often should you tweet?
To get the most value out of each tweet, tweet around five times each day. To get the most value out of your company’s Twitter presence as a whole, tweet up to 30 times per day.
At Fronetics, we recommend focusing on getting the most value out of your company’s twitter presence as opposed to getting the most value out of each tweet.
When developing your Twitter strategy, here are a few things to keep in mind:
Timing is everything.
Identify the time of day most of your followers are active and what time of day your tweets receive the highest level of engagement. Followerwonk and Tweriod are two tools you can use to conduct this analysis. Rival IQ takes the analysis one step further and shows you when your competitors are tweeting and when they are realizing their highest level of engagement.
It is important to conduct this analysis on a regular basis and to adjust your strategy accordingly.
Be relevant. Be strategic.
Every single tweet you send should be relevant and should fit within your strategic goals and objectives.
Don’t be annoying.
Tweeting when your followers are active and when you have the highest levels of engagement is important, but don’t go overboard. For example, if you learn that 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. are the best times of day for your company to tweet, do not schedule all 30 of your tweets to go live at those times.
Be creative.
Don’t tweet the same tweet over and over and over again. It’s ok to share the same article a few times, but change up the image and/or the tweet to make it fresh.
Be visual.
Tweets with images get more engagement than tweets without images. Analysis by Buffer found that tweets with images receive:
- 150% more retweets
- 89% more favorites
- 18% more clicks
Be realistic.
Determine what you can realistically do on a consistent basis. If you can only commit to tweeting 5 times per day, stick with that. It is better to have strategy that you can execute than to have a strategy that cannot realistically be executed.
Finally, remember you don’t need to go it alone. Tools such as Buffer, HootSuite, Sprout Social, and HubSpot allow you to schedule tweets. Scheduling tweets makes it easier to tweet more often so that you can realize the value of a Twitter strategy.
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by Elizabeth Hines | Jan 18, 2017 | Blog, Logistics, Strategy, Supply Chain, Warehousing & Materials Handling
Having a modern, flexible supply chain is important to finding the way out of inventory dilemmas.
Imagine your irritation when you try to place an order online and are greeted by the message: “We apologize for the inconvenience, but this item is out of stock.”
However, even if the item is in stock, your mood is likely to sour if delivery will take more than a few days — and, even worse, you also have to pay for shipping. If you’re anything like me, you will quickly find an equivalent product that’s available immediately and ready to be shipped that same day.
It’s in the light of this hyper-competitive environment that the current inventory crisis should be seen. To sum it up from the perspective of warehouse owners: these are good times. Warehouse rents are hitting new highs as vacancy rates sit below five percent in many major cities.
From the viewpoint of retailers, on the other hand, it’s a significant challenge. Excess inventory is building even as consumer demand remains relatively high. Well aware of the consequences of not meeting ever-rising consumer expectations, retailers have felt compelled to stock up to — at all costs — avoid that irritating “out-of-stock” disclaimer. On the other hand, a chock-full warehouse is not necessarily good for business or speedy fulfillment.
Modernity and flexibility are key
This is when the importance of having a modern, flexible supply chain really comes into play:
- How quickly can the supply chain adjust to changes in demand?
- What’s the visibility up and down the supply chain?
- How aware is each link of what others are doing?
- How fast can inventory be refocused?
Some companies like Nordstrom have invested in cloud-based supply chain services. In Nordstrom’s case, the acquisition of a minority stake in DS Co., a supply chain software firm, which links inventory management between retailers and suppliers, was designed to facilitate direct shipments from vendors to customers, thereby circumventing the need for more inventory space. When suppliers and retailers track the inventory of one another, the risk of out-of-stock disappointments is reduced and risk is shifted up the supply chain.
Put to practice, it means that an order placed on the luxury retailer’s website is routed to the manufacturer, which then ships the item directly from its warehouse to the buyer. The Wall Street Journal noted Nordstrom’s investment comes “as retailers are racing to compete with e-commerce companies such as Amazon.com Inc. to provide convenience and speedy delivery to customers while keeping costs down.”
J.C. Penney is also shifting gears to avoid inventory gluts. The new business model essentially turns part of the store into a showroom for one of its suppliers, Ashley Furniture. Instead of keeping inventory in store or in distribution centers, all orders will be shipped straight to the consumer from Ashley Furniture.
Drones are not surprisingly part of solving the inventory dilemma. Walmart, for example, is testing the use of drones to catalog inventory, finishing in one day what it takes employees a whole month to get done. The intent is partly to make the giant retailer’s supply chain more efficient.
Clearly, traditional retailers are exploring new territory to meet consumer demand.
What do you think is key to solving the inventory crisis?
This post originally appeared at EBN Online.
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