Initially, I set out a few rules for our team when I started BoxOnline in 1999 – we do our best to live by them even today. I was recently reminded to take a more hands off approach with operational tasks such as QA and content implementation and allow my people to lead the way. It was during that week that I decided to make our leadership guidelines more transparent by publishing them for all to see. In politically incorrect terms, they basically boil down to something like ‘Act like a leader or leave the firm’.

1. Business is an ecosystem, not a battlefield.
Business is a symbiosis where the most diverse firm is most likely to survive and thrive. At BoxOnline we create teams that adapt easily to new markets and can quickly form partnerships with other companies, Clients, users and even competitors in order to achieve our objectives.

2. A company is a community, not a machine.
BoxOnline is a collection of individual hopes and dreams, all connected to a higher purpose. It is my job to inspire employees to dedicate themselves to the success of their peers and therefore to the community and company at large.

3. Management is service, not control.
I set a general direction and then commit myself to obtaining the resources that our employees need to get the job done. I push decision making downward (using processes like KTDA) and allow teams to form their own rules – intervening only in emergencies.

4. My employees are my peers, not my children.
I treat every employee as if he or she were the most important person in the firm. Excellence is expected everywhere, from the tech benches to the boardroom. As a result, employees at all levels take charge of their own destinies.

5. Motivation comes from vision, not from fear.
I inspire people to see a better future and how they’ll be a part of it. As a result, employees work harder and smarter because they believe in the organization’s goals, truly enjoy what they’re doing and (of course) know they’ll share in the rewards.

6. Change equals growth, not pain.
I see change as an inevitable part of life. While I don’t value change for its own sake, success is only possible if employees and the organization embrace new ideas and new ways of doing business.

7. Technology offers empowerment, not automation.
I see technology as a way to free human beings to be creative and to build better relationships. Our back-office systems are tools, like smartphones and tablets, that people actually want to use.

8. Work should be fun, not mere toil.
I see work as something that should be inherently enjoyable–and believe therefore that the most important job of a manager is, as far as possible, to put people in jobs that can and will make them truly happy. At the same time, our focus is delivering value to each of our Clients.

OK, you’ve heard of open rates and click through rates and now, I’m suggesting that it’s time to consider reply rates.

What is your current reply rate?

What percentage of emails that you send out (in your role as a sales exec) generate a response? More importantly, how can you increase your reply rate?

You generally want to send out 20-50 prospecting emails a day, but sending them is not the important part. The important part is getting the readers to reply. If you can start a conversation with a prospect, even just over email, your chance to close the deal skyrockets.

So, if getting a reply is the goal, it’s absolutely worth taking an extra two minutes to customize your introductory emails. Getting someone to reply to your cold email is challenging. Here are five tips that will help.

1. Initiate a conversation based on something they do or just did.

Take a minute and look up the prospect online. Did their company do something recently? Did the prospect? Did their quarter just end? Did their local sports team just win? Find something relevant to them.

If you are responding to inbound behavior or a request, be as specific as possible about what triggered your email. Put this trigger in the subject line so they know you are writing about them.

2. Be timely.

The shelf life of any activity is getting shorter and shorter, and the value of being timely is higher and higher. If you can reach out within a minute after a prospect does something, that’s great. Within an hour—good. Within a day—OK. Within a week? That’s borderline. If your response time is longer than that, find something else to write about.

3. Give them value.

You made a first impression with the trigger event. Now build on that by giving them something of value. Share a great article, website, video, or cartoon.

In 99% of the cases, what you share should not be about your company. Your marketing department should be churning out collateral and white papers, but those reek of self-interest. In order to establish credibility, you have to offer something that doesn’t help you in any way. It’s all about them—your prospect. Go find something that would genuinely help them be more successful, and offer that.

4. Invite prospects into a conversation by asking a question.

Having offered your prospects something valuable, you can then ask them to engage.

The more specific and straightforward your question is the better. You want to make it easy to reply, and you want to make sure they clearly see the benefit of replying.

Ideally, your question links the resource you offered with the services you provide or are selling. But be careful: don’t be too obvious. If I sent out the consultant comic above, I might ask, “Have you had any success with bringing in outside consultants? We’re growing quickly over here and looking for resources or best practices to scale quickly.”

5. Follow up with recipients.

If you can track when the recipient reads or forwards your email, it is worth sending a follow-up email within 24 hours. Even without this insight, you should make it a practice to revisit your prospect list at least four times by email. The good news is that by continuing to offer something of value to the start of your messages, you’ll begin to be seen as a generous and trusted resource instead of just another salesperson.

It’s tempting to meet your daily goals by blasting through as many emails as you can. That’s short sighted. It burns good leads, and it burns you out. Think instead about how you can start a timely conversation and how you can provide something valuable. You’ll find yourself having more genuine conversations and, by extension, closing more deals.

A business purposed App exists to either
(a) sell something to a potential Customer or
(b) provide information or an experience that leads to an opt-in

IT REALLY IS THAT SIMPLE.

If the App does not help mobile device owners accomplish at least one of those two things, then the App provides very little benefit to the business and the device owner will likely ignore or delete the App after having the opportunity to share their thoughts about your brand and their experience with your App with the world on the same page where your prospects would be downloading the same App. The world has changed and, like it or not, social media plays a role in the new world order of marketing. The big difference between failing on a website and failing with an App is that your success or failure will be in plain view and nearly impossible to hide should something go wrong.

That’s basically all there is to it.
Buy, join, or delete.

There are no other options.

With that in mind, here are three things to consider:

a) Is your App optimized for converting prospects into paying Customers?

b) Do you already distribute an industry newsletter or other periodical that your prospects value?

c) If you answered yes to both (a) and (b) above, are you looking for more qualified traffic?

Most of our prospects ask us for help with conversions, traffic and process optimization. Here are a few things to get you started in the right direction:

a) Avoid the temptation to create the perfect App. There simply is no such thing. In business, especially small and medium sized businesses, the only thing that counts is leveraging the media to generate more sales. It really is that simple. Sure you can educate your target audience but the purpose of the ‘education’ is to increase the probability that the prospect buys from you. Thus, you may find it helpful to focus on building a screen that converts prospects into Customers on autopilot. Our Clients test such screen designs all the time looking to outperform their controls and improve conversions within their Apps.

b) Every business has some special knowledge (well… almost every business). If you consider that most prospects are not ready to buy from you when you first meet them. They need some time to get to know you better, time to digest the information that they received, time to compare offers, time to decide that they are now ready to actually make a decision. When a person discovers your App, do your best to capture their contact details to be able to follow up with them in the future with information that is relevant to the problem that they are trying to solve. If the average consumer needs to see an ad seven times before acting on it, then think about distributing something like a newsletter to your prospects with tips, ideas, strategies etc that help them move forward in their decision to do business with you by demonstrating your expertise, your Customer service principles and the reason why they should be doing business with you. Have you got a newsletter already? Are you building a list of prospects and Customers? If not, setting up an auto-responder would be a very good first step in the right direction. Always remember to use criteria elicitation and tap into benefit’s based selling methods like WIIFM to get the most out of your efforts.

c) Traffic… the holy grail of an App owner (also known as downloads after the initial conversion occurs). We love to help our Clients generate traffic BUT ONLY if they have reasonable conversions and the desire to build a list. Think about it for a moment, there are really only 2 important processes that you absolutely have to get right when you use Apps in your business and those are conversions and traffic. Hey, it’s not rocket science.. it’s basic maths. You need to track those downloads, keep good clean statistics and test what works best for your business every chance you get then rinse and repeat.

According to Verizon in the US, download volumes on the iPad are converging toward those of the iPhone.

In terms of revenue, the top iPad Apps generate almost four fifths of the total revenue generated by the top iPhone Apps.

It’s time to optimize your Apps for Tablets!

Siri is the voice assistant introduced with the iPhone 4S designed to make the user’s life easier. Through natural commands spoken into the phone, Siri jumps to provide assistance or information as required by the request. Siri isn’t able to do everything, nor to understand some requests, but the technology is imnpressive in how often it works as intended. I find myself using Siri more and more the longer I use the iPhone 4S, and have run across some useful things.

Reminders.
Siri works with the reminders in iOS5 to make sure you don’t forget to do something. These are the first thing that most iPhone 4S owners get familiar with, and the longer I use Siri the more use I get out of reminders. I use it all the time for simple things.

My wife asks me to repair an item before our guests arrive and I tell Siri to “remind me to repair the dishwasher in an hour”. Today I told Siri to “remind me to water the plants” She did, and the plants are grateful.

I am getting good at not just using Siri for timed actions like those above, but for lots of other functions. I often tell Siri to “remind me to note something I need to remember” for anything I would normally jot down on a post-it note. This is so easy to do I never forget simple things like this, now that I have a personal assistant.

Requests for Information.
Like most folks I have become dependent on web searches to get information I need. Siri has assumed a big role in my quest for information, both simple searches I used to manually type into Google and others that are less structured.

Sunday I wondered what Roger Federer’s schedule looked like for the rest of the year so I had said “Siri, show me Roger Federer’s schedule”. Siri delivered a Google serp that took me right to the schedule I needed. Lucky guess? Perhaps… Convenient? Hell yea!

These are very simple examples, but I am gradually coming to depend on Siri to get me more specific information through Apple’s integration with other services. Preceding a request with “wikipedia” instead of Siri tells Siri I want her to use that service to look for the information I am requesting. You can also preface a question with Bing or Yahoo, if you want those services to be used. Now, not a ingle day passes without at least 5 queries or Siri.

Sending text messages.
In the beginning I would tell Siri to “Send a text to person’s name” along with the line of text I wanted to send. As I used Siri, I realized she could learn how those who I text frequently are related to me. Now I simply tell Siri to “Text my wife I will be running late” and after once telling Siri which contact is my wife, Siri takes care of the rest. I’ve done the same thing with my assistant and a few of my best friends. Since getting the iPhone 4S I find I send more sms thn ever before often, due to how easy it is with Siri.

I also use Siri’s ability to send text messages to tweet occasionally. I set up Twitter to allow tweeting via SMS, and trained Siri what number that was. Now I tell Siri to “Send a text to Twitter” followed by a short tweet. Nice and simple and totally hands-free. You can also configure Google+ and Facebook to allow you to post updates using this method.

Making phone calls.
I use Siri more and more to initiate phone calls, especially in the car. It is so easy to tell Siri to “call my wife at home” and have the call initiated with no further action required from me.

The same method is good for getting contact information I need. Asking Siri “what is The address for Client X?” is a lot easier than manually finding it in the Address Book. I can even ask Siri what so-and-so’s birthday is and get the date. I’d be great if more apps like SalesForce.com were to support Siri, then such address queries would be much easier. Alas, SalesForce.com are not known for reacting quickly to such requests

Setting alarms.
I now use Siri to set alarms. This is as simple as “Wake me tomorrow at 5:30″ or “set an alarm for 6:30″. That gets the nagging iPhone alarm set to disturb me appropriately.

Scheduling.
Siri is especially good at scheduling meetings and events. “Meet with Peter today at 14:00 gets the appropriate event in my schedule. I really like the ability to ask Siri “What does my schedule look like on Friday?” and having it shown. This is where the natural language of Siri really shines.

Siri is far from perfect, but as I use it more and more I am getting better at figuring out what type of natural language commands work best. I can state confidently that I am using the iPhone 4S and Siri more than I have used any other smartphone, because I am finding more things Siri can do for me all the time. It’s also a lot of fun!

Business executives and sales managers frequently complain about the classic 80/20 performance of their sales teams, where approximately 80 percent of sales are produced by approximately 20 percent of salespeople. Of course, the ratio is not always 80/20. Sometimes it is 75/25, 70/30, 60/40, or even 90/10. However, the situation the ratio describes is always the same: the vast majority of salespeople produce a fraction of what top performers on the very same sales teams produce.
What are the reasons behind these performance disparities? What is it about top sales performers that enables them to achieve superior results? Can anyone achieve top performance in sales?

Certainly there are some sales skills that anyone can learn. For example, it’s easy to teach how to ask reflective questions.

Reflective questions begin with who, what, when, where, why and how. If you ask reflective questions instead of questions that can be answered with yes or no, prospects usually share more information with you. This increases your chances of uncovering “pain points” that can eventually lead to sales.

“Pain-point” is widely used business jargon, and a word that many investors like to use. They may ask you “so what is the pain-point you are trying to solve with this idea?” If you can identify a pain-point which many people (globally even) can relate to, but no-one has resolved previously, you are probably on to something big. So, in other words, you can find opportunities in the market by solving, what a sizable group of people would describe as a “pain”. For example, since the battery in your laptop dies fast and people tend to find this a “pain”, many companies are currently working on alternative ways to charge PCs and keep batteries running longer. These companies are effectively trying to resolve a well-known pain-point.

You can learn how to ask reflective questions by participating in a simple role play. In this role play, you’ll play the salesperson and I’ll play the prospect. Every time you ask me a yes or no question, I’ll answer “no.” Getting stonewalled with a bunch of “no” answers will break you of the yes/no questioning habit pretty quickly!

Other sales skills are tougher to learn. A good example is teaching salespeople how to ask questions and follow the thread; in the answers. To explain this concept, let’s use another role play. In this role play you’ll ask me reflective questions. I’ll respond with answers that contain some “pain points”. If you recognize the pain points and drill down into them deeply enough (by asking additional questions), you’ll eventually be able to “sell” me.

Do you know what my experience has been with this role play? Some salespeople learn how to “follow the thread” easily. Others struggle, but they eventually learn how to do it. However, some just never get it, no matter how hard they try!

Why can some people learn this critical skill, but others can’t?

I struggled with this question for 14 years. I used to believe that anyone could succeed at anything if they wanted it badly enough and were willing to work hard enough. However, my experience with the “follow the thread” role play made me start to question that belief. As I continued reading and researching over the years, I eventually uncovered two pieces of information that really opened my eyes.

KEY DISCOVERY #1

In their book, “Now, Discover Your Strengths”, Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton report that great managers and average managers have different expectations for their employees. According to Buckingham and Clifton, average managers assume that “each person can learn to be competent in almost anything”, while great managers assume that “each person&’s talents are enduring and unique”.

Most sales books and training programs seem to take the average manager point of view. In other words, they seem to assume that anyone can learn how to sell. Their unspoken promise is that all you have to do is invest enough time, effort and money to learn the skills they teach. If you put in the time and effort, you will learn the skills and eventually succeed in sales.

Unfortunately, there are countless examples of sales books and training courses not producing the desired improvement in sales performance. Think about some salespeople you know personally. How many of them are struggling to make their quotas? Why are they struggling?

Is it the state of the economy? (If other salespeople are making their numbers, blaming the economy won’t earn them much sympathy.)
Is it because they don’t work hard enough?
Is it because they don’t have enough product knowledge?
Do they need to work harder on their selling skills?
Do they need more coaching from their manager?
What if the “great manager” point of view is correct? What if everyone cannot become proficient in sales? What if success in sales requires a unique set of talents?

KEY DISCOVERY #2
Herb Greenberg, Harold Weinstein and Patrick Sweeney report this very conclusion in their book, “How to Hire and Develop Your Next Top Performer”. After correlating hundreds of thousands of assessments that were performed over several decades with actual sales performance measurements, they reached these startling conclusions:

55% of the people earning their living in sales should be doing something else.
Another 20% to 25% have what it takes to sell, but they should be selling something else

Wow! Those are some sobering statistics! They indicate that more than half of all salespeople are never going to make it in sales. Another quarter have some chance of accomplishing sales success, but only if they find the right job selling the right kind of product or service.

How can you identify whether salespeople have the talents required to succeed in your company’s sales positions?

One reason why companies suffer from 80/20 performance is because their processes for hiring, training and managing salespeople rely almost entirely upon subjective information. After all, what are resumes? They are an individual’s subjective portrayal of their capabilities and experiences. What occurs during an interview? Interviewees attempt to package their responses to questions in a manner that will make the best impression. Meanwhile, interviewers are forming personal opinions about candidates’ qualifications for the position.

I’m not suggesting that subjective information is useless. Subjective information is a valid and valuable component of any “people decision”. However, if decisions based solely upon subjective information produce an undesirable result 80 percent of the time, doesn’t it make sense to consider making a change?

One way to introduce objective information into sales hiring and coaching processes is through use of specialized sales assessment tests. I’m not referring to personality or behavioral tests like Myers-Briggs or DISC. Those types of tools are useful for learning how to communicate more effectively with someone, and may provide some insights into an individual’s motivations. However, they are not effective for predicting whether or not someone will succeed in sales.

The specialized sales assessment tests that I’m referring to identify how quickly an individual learns and how good they are at “reasoning”.

Reasoning – especially verbal reasoning – is a critical component of the talent for asking questions and “following the thread” in the answers. Plus, the most useful sales assessment tests identify an individual’s strength or weakness in a variety of other important sales-related attributes. These include the following:

Sales Drive: Does the individual enjoy presenting, persuading, negotiating, and motivating others? How much do they enjoy these activities?
Emotional Toughness: How rapidly does the individual rebound from rejection? Do they learn from their experiences and move on quickly? Or, do they suffer a sustained reduction in productivity?
Reasoning Ability: Does the individual ask good questions? Can they dissect answers and pick out the pieces that will help advance the conversation toward a desired end result?
Service Drive: How friendly and agreeable is the individual? How interested are they in building relationships and helping others?
Assertiveness: How self-assured is the individual? How effective are they at convincing others to take action?
Attitude: How positive is the individual’s attitude? Do they perceive a glass to be half-empty or half-full?
Communication Skills: How precisely does the individual communicate, both verbally and in writing? Are their communications clear and effective?
Competitiveness: How competitive is the individual? How does their competitiveness manifest itself?
Energy: How energetic is the individual? Are they always “on the go”, or do they need to be prodded into action?
Independence: How readily does the individual accept direction from others?
Learning Rate: How rapidly does the individual learn new information? What styles of learning are most productive for them?
Tolerance for Administration: How willing is the individual to perform administrative activities? How much attention do they pay to details?

The assessment test scores for the preceding characteristics can also be used to predict how effectively a salesperson or sales candidate will perform the following critical job functions:
Are they a Hunter or a Farmer? Do they prefer to pursue new business, or do they prefer to manage existing customer relationships? Or, are they capable of performing both functions effectively?
Are they Internally or Externally motivated? Internally motivated salespeople are capable of directing their own activities. Externally motivated salespeople require frequent direction and support from their manager in order to be consistently effective.
How effectively will they Prospect? How aggressively (and consistently) will they pursue new opportunities?
How willing are they to comply with Administrative Requirements? This may include updating records in your company’s customer relationship management (CRM) system and providing timely and accurate forecasts and opportunity pipeline updates.
Will they be a good Team Member? Will they work cooperatively with their fellow sales team members, as well as other departments?
How can specialized sales assessment tests help existing salespeople who are struggling?

They can help in two specific ways. First, they can determine which salespeople should be in sales. If an individual doesn’t have the talents required for success in your company’s sales job, there may be other roles in your organization where their talents and interests can be applied to mutual benefit. If there aren’t any such positions available, the kindest thing you can do is to let them go.

How can firing someone be kind? Because it is NO fun to struggle in a job that is a poor fit. If you share the assessment test results with these individuals, they can gain insights into their strongest talents and interests. The sooner they can migrate into roles that are compatible with their talents and interests, the sooner they will reap the benefits of improved productivity, motivation, and job satisfaction.

The second way these assessment tests can help struggling salespeople is by identifying their unique training needs. If you identify each salesperson’s individual training needs, and you supply targeted training to address these needs, you can dramatically improve their performance. Here’s an example:

Two fictitious salespeople, Beth and Bill, work for the same company. Beth is weak in Sales Drive, which makes her reluctant to ask for orders. Bill is weak in Emotional Toughness, which makes him sensitive to rejection and limits his prospecting effectiveness. If Beth and Bill go through the same sales skills training course, how much improvement in sales performance should they expect to see?

The answer is little or none. Why? Because Beth and Bill have completely different training needs that will not be addressed by basic sales skills training.

Beth would benefit most from attending an assertiveness training class. She also needs coaching to help her recognize that failing to ask for orders denies her customers valuable solutions to costly business problems.

Bill needs to learn to not take rejection personally. He might also benefit from attending a class that teaches positive thinking and other motivational techniques.

Unfortunately, unless these two salespeople are made aware of their unique training needs, and provided with targeted training to address them, there isn’t much reason to expect their performance to improve.

Conclusion

Many companies struggle with “80/20″ performance disparities in their sales organizations. These disparities usually result from an over-reliance on subjective information when making salesperson hiring and coaching decisions. The proposed solution is to add objective information gathered via specialized sales assessment tests to the “people decision” process. This one change can help companies increase the proportion of top performers on their sales teams and improve the performance of existing sales team members.

We spent many years answering letters, faxes, phone calls and emails and developed a philosophy regarding Customer Support that I’d like to share and encourage you to adopt.  Here is our take on Customer Service from the viewpoint of a marketer.

The purpose of a HelpDesk for a company like ours is to:

• Listen to our Client’s issues and respond in a timely manner with answers designed to resolve their issues.
• Delight our Clients and Users to such a degree that they recommend our products and services to others.
• Increase our own cycles of learning to improve our products and services faster than our competition is able to.

When you implement this in your business, the most likely end result is positive word of mouth marketing which brings in many more leads and that is something we really appreciate.

Here’s a simple recipe for QR code success.

If you are going to implement a campaign using QR codes, be sure that the codes
- are displayed in locations that have reasonable cell phone reception
- are clear and easy to read using a variety of devices including low resolution cameras

Instead of linking directly to a youtube video, consider creating a mobile friendly site or web page with the video embedded and a backup option with text instructions and images in case the video refuses to load.

Be sure to track those clicks and put analytics on your landing page to gauge the effectiveness of the campaign and the browser / device breakdown of people pinging the QR code.

Remember to include a couple of simple social media sharing options and you have the makings of a great mobile & social media campaign without too much effort.

It’s been more than a year now and my Macbook pro is traveling less frequently with me. Truth be told, I rely much more on my iPad when I’m out on the road. It’s light, it’s sturdy, it’s easy to use, it’s all backed up.. it’s a wonderful tool. As I gained experience, I learned a few tricks that help me be more productive and I’d like to share a few of them with you.

Tablets were simply not designed for major data entry tasks. That’s why so many of us have bought add-on keyboards for their iPads. Despite their compact size, lugging around a keyboard even if it is built into the iPad case defeats one of the main reasons for leaving your laptop at home (the weight). I really wanted a lighter load and now I can manage pretty well using the iPad’s onscreen keyboard along with these helpful shortcuts and tips. Let’s start with a two for one deal…

Extend your battery life AND ensure that there is enough free memory at the same time:
Double-clicking the Home button opens up the memory tray on the bottom of the screen. This shows you how many Apps are currently active on your device – the more active apps you have, the quicker the iPad’s battery will drain. To remove an App from memory, press and hold its icon until it wiggles and then press the minus sign in the top-left corner of the icon. Once an offending App is removed from memory, your battery will return the favor offering you more play time. If you even need to drain your battery, simply launch the Skype App and within a few hours your battery will be sucked dry.

Use Spotlight to launch Apps:
This habit took me a long time to break because I consider myself a highly organized individual and I like to know where things are. I use folders for my Apps to keep the screens uncluttered but, if you are like me and have more than 100 Apps plus the default Apps from iOS, then the quickest way to open an App is by typing its name in the Spotlight search box. To access Spotlight from the main iPad screen, press the Home button or swipe to the right. As you enter the App’s name in the search box, a list of Apps and files appears that match the word or phrase that you typed. (You can refine Spotlight’s search preferences in the Settings screens) Select the appropriate entry to launch the app or open the file.

Use the magnifying glass to make text corrections easier: The iPad’s magnifying glass feature often lets me position the cursor at your preferred insertion / deletion point more precisely.
I may not be the best typist in the world and my fingers may be a bit larger than the hand model’s used in the iPad TV ads but I no longer fumble to place the cursor precisely where I need it to be to add or delete text. Now I press and hold on text to activate the magnifying glass, which lets me slide smoothly through text to the required insertion/deletion point.

Ignore periods: When you get to the end of a sentence, press the spacebar twice to automatically allow iOS to insert a period and a single space.

Umlauts and accents: Press and hold various other letters on the keyboard to access such characters as ö,ü,é,ñ and more.

Modify keyboard defaults: In the iPad Settings screen, select Keyboard in the General category, and switch on / off the features that help you work faster such as auto-capitalization, auto-correction and the spell checker. This screen also allows you to add international keyboard layouts as well.

Quicker apostrophes: Instead of switching to the alternative keyboard layout, just swipe up on the comma key to insert an apostrophe!

Ditto for quotes: Swiping up on the question mark key inserts double quotes and on the exclamation mark key you get a single quote. That’s a great help for me.

Instead of retyping or backspacing and then retyping text, try using the ‘Replace’ feature:
Sometimes the iPad’s type-ahead suggestions are time-savers, but I just as often inadvertently insert the wrong word and have to back up to correct it. In many cases, I can avoid having to retype the entire word by selecting it, and then pressing and choosing Replace to see the iPad’s suggested corrections. The method is often quicker than retyping the entire word (if the word is longer than 8 characters.. It may just be my experience, but I think the suggested replacement text is getting better the more I use it.

If you start each marketing campaign, each landing page by addressing the following 3 questions about your expected outcome, your conversions will increase dramatically. This is best practice folks and it is very important that every marketer is able to address and implement several of the following concepts if they expect online marketing to pay off.

What exactly do you want your prospects to do when they receive your message?
Do you want them to click on a link? Do you want them to watch a video? What specifically are you’re trying to get them to do?

My next question is what do you want them to think?

The final question is how do you want them to feel?

Your responses to these three questions steer your ROI in dramatic ways.

Once you’re done with that, begin embedding emotional triggers that help to get commitment from your target audience.. Begin by asking yourself:

• How can I create an element of reciprocity to accomplish that outcome?
• How can I influence what they’re going to do… what they’re going to think… and what they’re going to feel?

Then ask yourself:

• How can I use elements of contrast to do that?
• How can I use social media ‘liking’ to do that?
• How can I use association to do that?
• How can I use expectancy to do that?
• How can I use consistency to do that?
• How can I use scarcity or urgency to do that?
• How can I use conformity or going with the crowd to do that?
• How can I use power and authority to go with that?
• How can I get them more engaged in the message?

The result is rather straight forward:
The more triggers you leverage, the better your page will perform.

Good luck and let me know how your campaigns are going via the comments below or email if you need to maintain confidentiality.