It all has started with Bring Your Own Device in order to work mainly with iPads. This has benefits for the company as the employees pay for their office tool and the company doesn’t need to invest. Still this BYOD has some security issues for the company.

Wondering if this ‘Bring Your Own’ could turn into an evolution for the employees:

BYOD – Bring Your Own Device
Your iPad, netbook, smart phone, … for using during work in order to work.

BYOO – Bring Your Own Office
Your own chair, desk, drawer, … to work at as you already have brought the computer and the telephone.

BYOW – Bring Your Own Work
Instead of your employer giving you work, you have to sell in order to have work – like most consultants and partners have been doing since many years.

BYOM – Bring Your Own Money
Just like partners of companies and associations you could be asked to fund the company in order to get or keep you employed. You fund in order to be able to use their brand name. To work under their umbrella. Similar to a franchise.

BYOS – Bring Your Own Social security
You pay your social security instead of the employer just like independent consultant, contractors already do. As you already sell and fund then you should pay also the social security instead of the company.

BYOR – Bring Your Own Retirement fund
That’s just one step beyond as the company nor the government will have a pension fund for you in the future. Hence you have to pay all social security and medical insurance yourself.

Will the future be like this ?

Data overload hinders decisions

Too much data disables the decision making as stated by Ron Friedman, Ph.D. in his blog post.
We live in a world where ever more data is available and we seem to crave for ever more information as if this would help us making better or more rational decisions. However it is not!

Proposition overload disables purchase decision

The same applies to the proposition you make to your customers. if you propose many products they will have the problem of digesting and processing all of your data.The purchase decision might not happen as the overload disables it.

In the end they might choose for solution of the competitor who proposes just three products, services or solutions. Making them easier to select and compare without getting confused.
The role of the salesman is to predict which product, service or solution is most likely suited or fitted for the potential customer and propose this product amongst two other solutions: one a bit higher on the solution scale – the other a bit lower on the solution scale.

Limit and target your proposition

This is why the salesman has not to ask questions but also have insight into the market and the business of his potential customer. He needs to understand the problems and issues of his customer allowing him to propose the best matching product. Still in order to give the customer the idea of choice two other products are added to the offering. Having only three products to compare the amount of data and information to be processed and digested is much lesser and thus easier to make a decision.

Decide what customers should buy

Don’t overload your customers with information and data by offering them too many choices. Limit yourselves to the strict minimum in your offering. Less is more.
Your sales will increase as you decide what your customer will buy.

Do you overload your customers with information and data about your entire product range ?
How successful has it made you ?

Competing with the market leader is hard to do. However it is feasible.

Features

Competing with the market leader on features is an impossible mission as the product of the market leader has all the possible features.
So instead of a full featured product go for number of features that suit a specific market segment or allow for competing on price with less features.

Services

In most cases the market leader will only offer a standard service or no service at all.
You can compete by offering personalized services for implementation, deployment, training or support. This is where the market leader due to its’ size can’t compete.

Positioning

Find a way to position your product or solution differently.
This doesn’t need to be the features or service, but how you market your product or service. Take a different approach to the market for your marketing by not copying the market leader. Make sure you and your marketing stand out
Else with marketing similar to the market leader you won’t be noticed.

Holes

Investigate in order to find what is missing in the offering of the market leader or what market segment has been neglected.
What has been overlooked or neglected by the market leader should be your opportunity.

Taking these approaches you won’t directly compete with the market leader but you can win a market segment from them or access a market segment that hasn’t been exploited previously because it was too small, to low cost, too complex, too specialized for the market leader.

How do you compete with the market leader – or are you working for the market leader ?

Leads

We all are eager to get more leads. Each lead gets us some kind of thrill or adrenaline due to the perceived projected revenues and great future each can bring.
If possible we would like to grab all opportunities to generate leads.

Leads Quantity

However the more sales leads that are generated the more sales people that are required to follow-up as a salesman can only handle a certain amount of leads. The number of leads a salesman can effectively handle varies from business to business in the same industry and from industry to industry. The lead handling number per salesman depends on the kind of business, industry and revenue size of deals.

In most cases and for most businesses hiring more salesmen is just not possible as they need to get searched, found, evaluated and hired. An once a salesmen is hired, he needs to get training and gather experience in the market and with the customers or potential customers.
There is a limiting capacity problem to the number of leads a company can handle due to the limited number of sales people a company can support financially and manage.

Lead Qualification

Generating more leads is a good start, but implies that each lead before it gets passed on to the salesman requires decent lead qualification. This needs to be done systematically and using a uniform method across all leads of a company. If not then the salesmen will waste their time on leads having less potential.
Hence lead qualification is utmost important for the success and sustainability of any company.

Lead Quality

Instead of generating many leads requiring a large capacity in processing, qualifying and following up on all those leads, generating just quality leads is much more profitable and more beneficial for the company as it creates less overhead for the sales team.
The quest is to generate quality leads instead of a massive amount of leads. This requires to tune and target your marketing in order to get the best leads only. In order to achieve this you will need to define your type of quality leads and trial and error in order to find out what will generate the quality leads you need.
However as markets and customer requirements change and your products change too over time, this tuning and targeting will be continuous process.
Less is more.

Are you generating massive amount of leads or mainly quality leads?

The perception that buyers or decision makers have of the salesman is important.
Besides the evident interest in the product or solution, people will also show interest in the image and external indicators of wealth and success.

The car of the salesman

If the salesman travels with an above average business-like car it indicates for most people the company and the salesman are successful. However if he parks his expensive saloon or sports car (Don’t posh with your Porche) in front of the building, people will associate high prices and possible rip-off. On the other hand if the sales rep drives a small budget car people assume business is not so good.

The clothes of the sales rep

The same applies to the clothing of the sales rep: just above average is good, whereas fancy, chic or expensive requires caution as the price will be too high. Way below average with cheap suits gives the perception of not so successful business.

The accessories of the business development manager

- Expensive watches versus normal or budget watches
- High end brands for portable computers vs common brands
- iPhones versus Android smart phones
- iPads vs a piece of paper

Subjects of interest

During the initial small talk more indicators for success or or lacking of success can be revealed by the use or comments on certain topics by the salesman. Even then he should be careful as people quickly get the wrong impression. Especially if there are several people present at the meeting: what please to one person or seems to please, can cause rejections amongst the other people in the meeting.
Not all people want to hear about the last golf holiday in an exotic location by the salesman as it can create jealousy and miss all possible sympathy.
If the salesman is into extreme sports he shouldn’t brag about as it will influence the perception for risk taking and being different.

The expected perception is required in the sales process

All these matters can generate a different perception by the influencers or by the decision makers leading to a change in the buying decision.
The image you portray of your self (and thus the company) should match the image your probable customer expects. Anything that differs from the normal expectation will be seen as an additional risk in the decision process.
Less can be more in sales.

Quality content looks better

Most if not all marketing guru’s preach quality content over quantity for your content marketing.

If you publish only quality content then you are faced with a number of problems:
- Quality content is hard to write / create – keeping the number of articles low
- Chances of interested parties finding your content will be low
- Limited number of keywords possible
- Low probability content matches the exact issues or problems of possible prospects
- Long pages of content that hardly anybody reads completely
- Chances of your long content pages becoming boring
- Information overload on one page
- You never what people are looking and searching now and in the future
Quality content is effective but your reach will be limited.

Quantity content is better

However the reverse could be true: Quantity with less quality.
Write as much as you can.
Instead by publishing massive amounts of content on your website, blog, articles, press releases, video and social media (Twitter, Facebook, Buzz) that are variations on the same theme but with different approaches you will:
- Create short comprehensive pages is easier
- Have higher message delivery success thanks the shorter pages
- Higher understanding as the message is clear and simple on the short page
- Be more present on the Internet: more pages – higher chance to be found
- Have a maximum number of keywords or keyword combination
- SEO optimization
- Optimize number of appearances in search result pages (being all over Google)
- Addressing each problem or issue separately in order matching as many issues or problems
- Write striking titles that catch
- Have higher likelihood of being bookmarked due to focus
- Communicate to each niche market
- Build authority due to your presence: the more people see you the more authority
- Convince the possible customer you are aware of his market and his problems

Quantity content might not be the best, but your reach will be much further and wider.
Less is not more – More is just better.

What do you have: quality or quantity content ?

What had the biggest reach at the least cost in your marketing budget ?
What marketing investment or effort for less than $200 gave you the biggest return ?

In our case it is a website:
- $12 for 2 years of domain name at GoDaddy
- $143 for hosting 2 years at Hostgator
- $14 for a design template from ThemeForest
- $0 for the Modx content management system
- $0 for Wordpress blog (download – but a hosted blog can too)
- $30 for paying someone to install all this software

Totals: $199
Of course we don’t count all the hours writing and editing the content.

What was your best spent $200 for marketing ?

The design of objects
This is a trailer video for “Objectified”: exploring the design of objects that we use every day.
The question posed is:
- How effective is the design of objects.
- How well expresses the design the functionality or purpose.
- How people interpret or assume the use of these objects.
- How much is going to cost.
- How much is the total cost of operations.

The goal of design is not just to make it look good or cool.
The main goals are:
- To let people make the right assumptions about the device or appliance
- To eliminate the unnecessary things or features

Eliminate or block functions or features when they are not needed for operating the device for a certain function or device status.

You don’t need the car key when you are driving: still sits always near you while driving in the ignition key lock: just don’t use it.
However the car doesn’t warn you about or prohibits not using it.

“Objectified” trailer of the movie by Gary Hustwit

Design of software – web services
What applies for devices and appliances should also apply for software and web services.
What a user doesn’t need at a certain moment in an application, he shouldn’t be able to use. Moreover the user should be explained why he cannot use it at a certain moment of operation or status of the device.

Great design of devices, appliances, software and web services is complex and should appear easy and logical to the user: less is more.
Great design will make marketing and sales easier (less) and generate more sales.
Great design isn’t limited to expensive devices or solutions.
Because:
- The design makes your product or solution stand out.
- The use has become more obvious through the design.
- The user can become your advocate promoting your product or solution.
Apple and Ikea know all about this.

How good is the design of your products or solutions ?

Although we believe in our product (and our customers seem to do so too), we feel the path from website visitor -> to free trial user customer is suboptimal and could / should be improved.
There are enough website visitors; still we have a feeling that the conversion rate could be higher. In order to know you need to measure and to compare different alternatives.

Most visitors either land on our homepage (about 24%), or enter our site through a landing page and pass in many occasions to the homepage during their visit. In any case their next visit will almost certainly start from the home page.

Due to this importance of the home page it is logical we try to enhance the home page. Thus a new home page layout was cooked up based on the original layout.

So far we only changed the top part (above the fold) to be more focused and clean:
- Less information thus more straightforward.
- Less distraction of too many items
- Less keywords in the top fold
- Less screen shots
We’re planning on taking small steps at a time, making sure each step can be measured.

Google Website Optimizer

We placed the 2 pages head to head using Google Website Optimizer, using the free trial page as the goal.

Google Website Optimizer is a free service from Google that enables you to test different pages or parts of pages and find out which converts better.
As you need to be able to make changes to your web pages, so some technical knowledge is required but GWO (as it’s often called) helps you through the process.

The Results

More than the double amount of visitors who passed by the new homepage went on to visit the free trial compared to the original homepage! (Though not sure how many of them will become paying customers – that we’ll see that later on)

When examining the difference between the 2 visitor segments in Google Analytics we were in for even more of a surprise:
The bounce rate has improved 12%: 63% vs 67% (vs 75% for the whole site) -> From 33% to 37% is a 12% improvement!

On the other hand the visitors entering by the new home page spend on average 44% less time during a visit, and visit 17% less pages! This is bizarre – does that mean they are less engaged? Or they understand faster the purpose of LEADSExplorer?
On the contrary, my dear Watson: New visitor rate: 74% vs 89% – a 15% improvement! This means visitors who see the new homepage are more likely to visit multiple times!

Conclusion

People watch less pages and leave our site earlier.
However a lot more of them come back later to continue visiting our site and eventually ask a free trial, or are convinced earlier in their visit to request a free trial.
This is reflected in the ‘Visitor Loyalty’ view of Google Analytics, which really shows a ‘long tail’ of repeat visitors for the new homepage.

Where should we focus next when optimizing our site?
How can we improve the flow from home page or landing page to the free trial?
What makes people decide to sign-up for a free trial?

What are your experiences with Google Website Optimizer?

Are you proud of the number of products or varieties you’re offering?
Are you convinced offering so many choices actually increases your sales?

You might be wrong!

Behavioural scientists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper conducted a (now classic) study in order to find out if offering too much choice made people indecisive. They set up a booth in a large supermarket, well known for it’s abundance of choice, where shoppers could sample a number of jam flavours all from the same relatively inexpensive brand.

During the study, the number of flavours were varied so that either 6 or 24 flavours were displayed. The selection was rotated hourly. After tasting, shoppers were given a discount coupon. So regardless of the flavours encountered at the booth, shoppers were eventually confronted with the full range of flavours in the aisle.

The results were surprising: of the shoppers passing the extensive selection of jams, 60% stopped vs 40% of those who passed the limited selection.

But from those who were able to sample the extensive selection, only 3% actually bought the jam compared to a staggering 30% from those who had sampled from the 6 flavours.

Overall result is that 6 times as much jam was sold when there were only 6 compared to 24 flavours to sample from!

The researchers suggested that too many choices, although highly appealing at first, might lead to frustration in the decision making process. Too many options to differentiate might result in the customer not being able to engage with the task at hand, leading to an overall reduction in interest in the product and a decrease in sales.

We think there might even be a fear of loss involved: ‘what if I pick the wrong choice?’

When Procter & Gamble reduced the number of Head & Shoulders varieties from 26 to 15, they experienced an immediate 10% increase in sales. Not as dramatic as Sheena and Mark’s jam study, but still too large to go unnoticed.

Offering a limited set of products or services for a market or as a solution will also make it more likely for people to retain the main features and differences.

Offering too few products however might mean you miss a part of the market you are addressing. As usual, finding a good balance is key here.

On the other hand your marketing collateral and website will be less complex as you only need to explain a few products and their differences.

Less products mean:
- Less product development
- Less product maintenance
- Less manuals to write or to keep up to date
- Less product changes in manufacturing
- Less inventories
- Less marketing costs
- Less sales trainings
- Less storage space
- Less raw materials

All of this leads to less overhead costs.
Your lower operational costs can be reflected by lower pricing.
And as a ‘bonus’, you might even make the decision for your customers easier, sell more and win market share!

Have you ever wondered whether you’re giving your customers too much choice?