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marți, 3 iulie 2012

10 Reasons Why You'll Blow That Big Deal

Posted: 02 Jul 2012 07:56 PM PDT

Okay, maybe not you personally… I'm only speaking in hypotheticals here. But let's face it, some of us are better at closing than others, and that's okay. We can get better.

I've been meaning to write this post for awhile, but really wanted to frame it in a way that would allow everyone to pull value from it, regardless of your function. As I thought through that framing, I realized that there's no surefire way to close more deals, per se, but there's a lot of things that you need to avoid to better your chances.

That's what we'll focus on here.

A deal can be many different things, depending on your business -- really, I'm just using it as a placeholder. Whether it be a new client, a big partnership, a fresh distribution, a juicy link, even an acquisition, they're all in the same ballpark. From experiencing it first hand in my work to being on the receiving end of some really bad attempts, here's 10 reasons why you'll blow that big deal.

1) You Don't Understand What Drives Their Business

The most common screw-up is probably a lack of understanding or care to understand the business that you're trying to work with. I can't tell you how many times I've been pitched for services that are dependent on Moz being a consulting company. This obviously isn't relevant anymore, which means that you wasted my time and yours.

Each business has very different drivers that dictate the decisions they make. Before you can provide value, you have to take the time to truly understand what they find valuable and what will help their business. Sounds simple, I know. Yet, it's one of the most common mistakes, because it takes extra effort. Before pitching anyone, make sure you do your due diligence; dig through Crunchase or run a quick search.

2) You Don't Know How to Pitch and Maintain Brevity

Aaron Levie from Box said it best.

Email length is proportional to how much happiness you want to take away from your recipients.
— Aaron Levie (@levie) June 11, 2012

The same goes for pitching. The importance of distilling your message down to only the most important information is often times a deciding factor in the what gets ignored and what doesn't. As a rule of thumb, any email over two (very short) paragraphs and some bullets is likely too long. Distill your message down to the most pertinent points, and then refine it even further. It's not dissimilar from pitching press; the same concepts apply.

3) You Talk to the Wrong Person

If you're talking to the wrong person, you're done before you even get started. The organizational structure varies greatly from company to company, which of course makes it difficult to track down the right person to talk to. Just try to think about it as logically as possible -- your intuition is likely right. Typically, I like to start from the top and work down. I've found that more senior folks usually have a stronger vested interest in the company and thus help you navigate the waters a bit more efficiently.

I rely on tools like Rapportive (screenshot above) on a daily basis to help refine and guess the contact info of the people that I need to get ahold of, if it's not shown on Linkedin or a personal site.

Pro Tip: If you're trying to guess the right email address, start with first name @ domain.com and press tab, if it's correct, their profile will show up on Rapportive. If not, guess again. The folks at Distilled have some clever tricks, as well.

4) You Get Lost in Legal

Have you ever had anyone ask you to sign an NDA before you even know the context of the discussion? Me too, and it kills the conversation before it even starts. A lot of people let legal take precedence over the basics. Legal is a necessary evil, but it's something that rarely comes into play.

You've got to know where to give and where to take with legal, and less is always more if you can get away with it.

5) You Don't Lay Out Clear Action Items

People can't move forward if they don't know what they need to do. Some of the best folks that I've worked with on a deal are always action oriented. After every call, they lay out a clear list of action items in bullet format. Laying out next steps in this format allows both parties to stay focused on progression. Here's what a typical follow-up email should look like.

YOU Check in with your legal department to see whether the amendment has been approved
YOU Send over logo on transparent background for our announcement blog post
ME Coordinate with team on announcement timeline
ME Tell Jen Lopez she's awesome, and buy her cupcakes

Bullet format is usually more efficient than putting the action items in a long paragraph. Separate out what needs to get done, and keep on keepin' on.

6) You Drop the Ball

As the person initiating the deal, it's your job to make sure it doesn't fall off the radar. Agree on a check-in timeframe after each correspondence. If you don't hear back after that timeframe, it may not be because they're not interested -- it may mean they got busy. Life happens.

There are a lot of good tools out there for remembering where you left off and reminding you to follow-up, Stride is one of them that I helped create. Other good tools are task managers like Wunderlist or FollowUpThen (screenshot above), which is made specifically for email reminders.

7) You Don't Make It Clear Why They Should Listen

This is the #humblebrag portion of the list. I'm not one for name-dropping, Justin Beiber, but it's important to make it clear why others should listen. Use things like customer names, press coverage, usage numbers, success rates, etc. to shine your best light. Nothing wrong with making it clear that you're the real deal.

8) You Don't Walk The Persistence Line

There's a fine line between overly persistent and not persistent enough. When you're actively engaging with another company, it's important to walk the line. The reason why it's so difficult is that it varies on a case-by-case basis, but the signals you get back from the other side can likely direct you on whether or not you're being persistent enough.

As with not dropping the ball, some people need persistence to stay on top of things. It's better to be overly persistent than not enough. Walk the line, but don't overstep. If someone tells you that it can't happen right now or that they're not interested, that's not a cryptic message to keep bothering them.

9) You Look Like Hell (Or Don't Exist) Online

You may be the cat's pajamas offline, but if you're online life doesn't reflect that, who would know? As you're well aware, we all have access to the Googles, and we're likely to research someone before we engage with them. Take the time to clean up your Linkedin, set up a personal site and for goodness gracious, get to tweetin'.

Personal branding is a separate post in and of itself, but for the sake of this post, realize that it's one of, if not the most, important pieces to being able to do a deal with a person or company.

10) You Don't Make a Personal Connection

As with the last point, the personal side of a deal matters. We do business with people we trust. When you're looking to work with someone, you've got to take the time to make the personal connection. Follow on Twitter, friend on Facebook -- become top of mind. Don't make it all about business, find commonalities and make the connection.

Let's take the wonderful Sha for example. She saw on my Twitter feed that I was damning myself with trying to learn Ruby. So, she whipped up some Ruby on Rails Cookies to help me through the process. Awesomeness person award goes to... you guessed it. Next time I get an email in my inbox from Sha, guess who's getting an immediate response?

Conclusion

When you're in the sales process, the things that matter most are the subtleties, the tiniest bit of finesse is what separates winning from losing. Go about your business how you'd like, but keep these pitfalls in the back of your mind. Take the pain points that you experience while others are pitching you and learn from them -- don't inflict the same.

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The Affordable Care Act by the Numbers

Your Daily Snapshot for
Tuesday, July 3, 2012

The Affordable Care Act by the Numbers

Numbers tell the story of how the Affordable Care Act ensures hard-working, middle class families will get the security they deserve and protects every American from the worst insurance company abuses.

Find out more about how President Obama’s health care reform helps you and your family.

Seth's Blog : Usually, a lot is insufficient

Usually, a lot is insufficient

People don't care how much you offer them.

They care about whether you exceeded their expectations.

If you want to delight, if you want to create a remarkable experience, if you want people to talk about you or buy your stock, the secret is simple: give them more than they expected.

If I walk into your store and it looks and feels like stores I've been into before, my expectations are locked in. Now what? But if I walk into your showroom and it's like nothing I've ever experienced before, you get a chance to set my expectations, right? Marketing isn't merely bragging. Marketing creates a culture, tells a story and puts on a show.

In our rush to get picked or get noticed or build buzz, the instinct is to promise more. Perhaps it pays to promise less instead, to radically change expectations and to reset what it means to deliver on the promise of delight.

• Email to a friend •

luni, 2 iulie 2012

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Airbus to Assemble Jets in Mobile, Alabama; Start of a Global Labor War?
Faber Says Germany Should Abandon the Euro
US Manufacturing ISM Contracts for First Time in Three Years; New Orders and Prices Plunge; Perfect Miss: 0 of 70 Economists Polled By Bloomberg Expected Contraction

Airbus to Assemble Jets in Mobile, Alabama; Start of a Global Labor War?

Posted: 02 Jul 2012 04:19 PM PDT

Airbus is hoping to take US market share from rival Boeing by assembling jets in Mobile, Alabama. Airbus is a French-based company, jointly run by French and German management.

Senator Rick Shelby (Alabama) is supportive of the move. Boeing, as one might have expected, issued complaints of European subsidies, as if US defense contracts don't in essence amount to the same thing. Both sides have complained to the WTO.

Here are a few articles to consider.

Airbus Fires Shot in Labor War

The Wall Street Journal reports Airbus Fires Shot in Labor War

Airbus announced plans to start assembling passenger jets in the U.S. starting in 2015, a move likely to affect labor and trade relations on both sides of the Atlantic.

Airbus outlined the plan Monday at an event in Mobile attended by U.S. suppliers, airlines and politicians, carefully stage-managed amid potential negative reaction on both sides of the Atlantic. EADS shares rose 2% Monday in Paris.

The company said it would create 1,000 jobs at its Brookley Aeroplex in Mobile, doubling the company's U.S. workforce. One assembly-plant job typically supports up to four at suppliers, Airbus said. Parts for the aircraft will be shipped to Mobile from Hamburg, the site of an existing single-aisle Airbus assembly plant.

"We go where the talent is," Airbus Chief Executive Fabrice Bregier said in Mobile ahead of a parade of local politicians welcoming the $600 million investment. He didn't respond directly when asked whether the move would shift employment to the U.S. from Europe. The company's European unions have voiced concern about production moving overseas, according to French media reports.

He said labor flexibility afforded by a union-free facility in right-to-work Alabama helped drive the plan. So, too, did the opportunity to change the balance of dollar-generated revenue with costs that are generated mainly in euros.

About 40% of the average cost of producing Airbus planes is with U.S. suppliers. A senior executive said labor accounts for only 5% of an aircraft's costs.

"We're going to do everything [we can] to create the environment," Sen. Richard Shelby (R., Ala.) said at the Monday event.

Battle for Market Share

Just what are assembly costs in Germany if it makes economic sense to ship parts from Hamburg to Mobile, Alabama for assembly?

Clearly something more is at stake here, and that something is a hope by Airbus to capture more US market share.

But will it? Regardless, expect more battles in the WTO and more battles from Washington state, Boeing's headquarters. Washington in not a right-to-work state and is dominated by unions.

Airbus to Open Factory on Rival Boeing's U.S. Turf

Reuters reports Airbus to Open Factory on Rival Boeing's U.S. Turf

Flanked by local Gulf Coast politicians, top executives from European planemaker Airbus unveiled their plans to build their first U.S. factory -- a move they said that would help them take market share from rival Boeing Co.

The unit of EADS believes that opening a plant in Mobile, Alabama, which will assemble its narrow-body A320 aircraft, will help it take "more than a few percentage points" of market share from its prime rival in the world's busiest aviation market, according to Airbus sales chief John Leahy.

Due to open in 2016 and expected to create some 1,000 jobs, the company said it will be only the second Airbus plant outside Europe that builds its top-selling workhorse jet; the other one is in China.

Airbus currently has a 20 percent market share in the narrow body jet segment in the United States, compared with 53 percent of the market worldwide.

Airbus' announcement drew a lineup of heavy-hitters from U.S. airlines and suppliers, including American Airlines CEO Tom Horton, JetBlue Airways Corp CEO Dave Barger and Goodrich Corp CEO Marshall Larsen.

They arrived to the strains of the rock group Steve Miller Band's 1977 hit "Jet Airliner" -- that homage to Boeing's 707 is something of an anthem for the aviation industry, and Boeing last year hired Miller himself to perform it for workers at its Everett, Washington, factory.

Another Warning to Unions

This is yet another warning to unions. However, they will not hear the message. After all, this is just about "assembly", at least for today. Tomorrow it will be about actual production.

Production is returning to the US, but it sure will not go to California, Illinois, New York and other high-costs states.

Musical Tribute

Clearly this calls for a musical tribute.

Link if video does not play: Jet Airliner

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List

Faber Says Germany Should Abandon the Euro

Posted: 02 Jul 2012 10:21 AM PDT

Marc Faber, publisher of the Gloom, Boom and Doom Report, spoke with Bloomberg Television's Betty Liu this morning and said that, "If I were running Germany, I would have abandoned the eurozone last week."

Faber went on to say, "In the case of Greece, one should have kicked out Greece three years ago. It would have been much cheaper."

Link if video does not play: Faber on Europe

Faber on the eurozone crisis:

"If you put one or 100 sick banks in a union, it does not change the fact that they're sick. In my view the markets are rallying because they were grossly oversold. When markets are grossly oversold, especially markets of Portugal, Spain, Italy, France, then any news that is not disastrous news propels stocks higher. I think that combined with seasonal strength in July, the rally has carried on somewhat. But it is another cosmetic fix, a quick fix that does not solve the long-term fundamental problem of over investment in the euro zone. And what it does, basically, it forces Germans to continue to finance people in Spain and Portugal and Greece that are living beyond their means."

"If I were the Germans, if I were running Germany, I would have abandoned the eurozone last week…It is a costly decision, but losses are there and somewhere, somehow, the losses have to be taken. The first loss is the banks. In the case of Greece, one should have kicked out Greece three years ago. It would have been much cheaper."

On whether he's picking up European equities:

"Yes. In Portugal, Spain, Italy, and France, the markets are either at the lows of March 2009, or lower. Along with bad companies and the banks, there are also reasonably good companies. Stellar companies, but they have been dragged down. I see value in equities, regardless of whether the eurozone stays or is abandoned."

"[I'm buying] anything that has a high yield, or what I perceive to have a relatively safe dividend. In other words, I do not expect the dividends to be slashed by 90%...I am not buying banks, but maybe they could rally. I am just not buying them because I think there will be a lot of equity dilution and recapitalization. I'm not that keen on banks."

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List

US Manufacturing ISM Contracts for First Time in Three Years; New Orders and Prices Plunge; Perfect Miss: 0 of 70 Economists Polled By Bloomberg Expected Contraction

Posted: 02 Jul 2012 09:18 AM PDT

US Manufacturing contracted this month as reported in the June 2012 Manufacturing ISM Report On Business®

Economic activity in the manufacturing sector contracted in June for the first time since July 2009; however, the overall economy grew for the 37th consecutive month, say the nation's supply executives in the latest Manufacturing ISM Report On Business®.

"The PMI registered 49.7 percent, a decrease of 3.8 percentage points from May's reading of 53.5 percent, indicating contraction in the manufacturing sector for the first time since July 2009, when the PMI registered 49.2 percent.

The New Orders Index dropped 12.3 percentage points in June, registering 47.8 percent and indicating contraction in new orders for the first time since April 2009, when the New Orders Index registered 46.8 percent.

The Production Index registered 51 percent, and the Employment Index registered 56.6 percent. The Prices Index for raw materials decreased significantly for the second consecutive month, registering 37 percent, which is 10.5 percentage points lower than the 47.5 percent reported in May.

Comments from the panel range from continued optimism to concern that demand may be softening due to uncertainties in the economies in Europe and China."

New Orders and Prices Plunge

Drop Unexpected

A Bloomberg Survey shows the collapse in ISM was unexpected.

The median forecast in the Bloomberg survey called for a decline to 52. Estimates of 70 economists ranged from 50.5 to 53.5. The gauge averaged 55.2 in 2011 and 57.3 the prior year.

While an index below 50 indicates contraction in the industry, a reading greater than 42.6 generally indicates the economy as a whole is expanding, according to ISM.

Manufacturing is weaker in the rest of the world. The industry in the euro-area contracted for an 11th straight month in June as Europe's debt crisis sapped demand.

Perfect Score

All 70 economists polled by Bloomberg came in on the high side. Collapses are never expected.

ISM and Recessions

click on chart for sharper image

The above chart by Doug Short (annotations in red, green, and purple by Mish) shows the importance in not relying on a single indicator as strong evidence of a recession.

Since 1959, the ISM dipped substantially below the 50% mark on five occasions when there was no recession. Moreover, in the 70's oil crisis, a recession began with the ISM near 70. The reverse happened in the wake of the Dot-Com bust as a recession did not start until the ISM was near 40.

No US Decoupling

I am sticking with what I said yesterday in China Manufacturing Weakens 8th Month; Will the US Economy Continue to Decouple From the Rest of the World?

Nearly everyone but the die-hard hyperinflationists thinks the US will decouple from the global economy. This reverse-decoupling idea is primarily based on the absurd belief the Fed will not let the economy or the stock market down (when the Fed is in fact not in control). For further discussion, please see Is There a Limit on Central Bank's Ability to Inflate?

The debate on the Fed will remain, but the facts show that I disagreed with decoupling in 2007 and I disagree with reverse-decoupling theories now.

Please see 12 Reasons US Recession Has Arrived (Or Will Shortly) for detailed rational and further discussion.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List

Googlebot Crawl Issue Identification Through Server Logs

Posted: 01 Jul 2012 07:56 PM PDT

Posted by Dave Sottimano

Sifting through server logs has made me infinitely better at my job as an SEO. If you're already using them as part of your analysis, congrats - if not, I encourage you to read this post.

In this post we’re going to:

Briefly introduce a server log hit
Understand common issues with Googlebot's crawl
Use a server log to see Googlebot's crawl path.
Look at a real issue with Googlebot wasting crawl budget and fix it.
Introduce or reacquaint you with my favourite data analyzer.

It’s critical to SEOs because:

Webmaster tools, 3^rd party crawlers and search operators won’t give you the full story.
You’ll understand how Googlebot behaves on your site, and it will make you a better SEO.

I’m going to casually assume that you at least know what server logs are and how to obtain them. Just in case you've never seen a server log before, let's take a look at a sample "hit".

Anatomy of a server log hit

Each line in a server log represents a "hit" to the web server. The following illustrations can help explain:

File request example: brochure_download.pdf

A request for /page-a.html will likely end up with multiple hits because we need to get the images, css and any other files needed to render that page.

Image credit: Media College

Example hit

Every server is inherently different in logging hits, but they typically give similar information that is organized into fields. Below is a sample hit to an Apache web server, and I've purposely cut down the fields to make this simpler to understand:

50.56.92.47 - - [31/May/2012:12:21:17 +0100] "GET" - "/wp-content/themes/esp/help.php" - "404" "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)" - www.example.com -

Field Name	Value
IP	50.56.92.47
Date	31/May/2012:12:21:17 +0100
Method	GET
Response Code	404
User-agent	Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
URI_request	/wp-content/themes/esp/help.php
Host	www.example.com

In reality, there are many more fields and a wealth of information that can only be gained through web server logs.

Googlebot crawl issues you can find with logs

Specifically in regards to SEO, we want to make sure that Google is crawling the pages we want to be crawled on our site - because we want them to rank. We already know what we can do internally to help pages rank in search results, such as:

Ensure the pages are internally linked.
Keep important pages as close to the root as possible.
Ensure that the pages do not return errors.

This is all typically standard stuff and you can get this information easily without server logs, but I want more, I want to see Googlebot.

I want to look for Googlebot specific issues like:

Unnecesary crawl budget expenditure
Page it considers important / not important
If there are any bot traps
Is Google making up 404 errors by trying to make up URLs (think JavaScript)
Is Google trying to fill out forms? (Yes, it happens)

Using server logs to see Googlebot

Step 1: Get some server logs.

Ask your client, or download a set of server logs from your hosting company. The point is to try and capture Googlebot visiting your site, except we don’t know when that’s going to happen – so you might need a few days worth of logs, or just a few hours.

To give you a real example:

Example domain has a PageRank of 6, DA of 80 and receives 200,000 visits a day. Their IIS server logs will amount to 4gB a day, but because the site is so popular, Googlebot visits at least once a day.

In this case, I would recommend a full day worth of logs to ensure we catch Googlebot.

Step 2: Download & Install Splunk.

Head over to http://www.splunk.com, sign up and download the product – free edition.

Note: the free edition will only let you upload 500mb per 24 hours.

Step 3: Adding your server log data to Splunk

I would recommend that you put your server logs on you local machine to make this process nice and easy.

I've put together a quick few screencasts, I know they sound cheesy, but whatever.

Step 4: Only displaying hits containing Googlebot as the user-agent

Step 5: Export to Excel

Simply click on the Export link and wait for your massive CSV to download. (Note: If the link doesn't appear, it's because the search isn't finished yet)

The Analysis, problem & the fix

The problem

Every time Googlebot came by the site, it spent most of it's time crawling PPC pages and internal JSON scripts. Just to give you an idea of how much time and crawl budget was wasted, please see below:

The real problem is that we had pages on the site that hadn't been indexed, and this was the cause. I wouldn't have found this without the server logs and I'm very grateful I did.

A look into my Excel spreadsheet

How to confirm what you're seeing is actually Googlebot

It's possible to crawl or visit a site using the Googlebot user agent, and even worse - it's possible to spoof the Googlebot IP. I always double check a list of IPs to what I see in the server log report and I use the method officially outline by Google.

How did I fix this?

1) Crawling PPC pages

I checked that these pages weren't indexed or receiving any traffic first, then I used robots.txt to block only Googlebot from these pages. I was very careful about this since I wanted to make sure that I didn't block Google Adbot (the robot that needs to crawl PPC pages).

  User-agent: Googlebot  Disallow: /*/cppcr/  Disallow: /cppcr

2) Infinite GET requests to JSON scripts

This was just another simple robots.txt block because Google didn't need to request these scripts. Googlebot basically got caught in a form, over and over again. Realistically, there's no reason for any bot to crawl this, so I set the user-agent to all (*).

  User-agent: *  Disallow: /*/json/  Disallow: /json

Results

I'm pretty happy to say that a week later, there was an increase of 7,000 pages in the index as reported by Webmaster tools.

Rand wrote about some good tips to prevent crawling issues, so I recommend you checking it out, as well as special thanks to the folks at ratedpeople.com for being kind enough to let me analyze and experiment on their site.

Additional resources

Feel free to follow me on Twitter @dsottimano, don't forget to randomly hug a developer - even if they say they don't like it :)

marți, 3 iulie 2012

10 Reasons Why You'll Blow That Big Deal

10 Reasons Why You'll Blow That Big Deal

1) You Don't Understand What Drives Their Business