Weekly Summary #6: 30 May — 3 Jun 2016

Welcome back to this week’s wrap-up and we hope you enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed writing it.

If you haven’t had the time (or energy) to check out the articles we have been sharing on social media this week, fret not! We’ve summarized the key takeaways from all the awesome content you may have missed!

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Mon, 30 May — Hacking The Buying Process

There is a growing trend amongst businesses nowadays — rather than being run top-down from C-suite to regular employee, businesses are now seeking out and rewarding “changemakers” in the organisation that can go out and find ideas, products, or services in the greater world that can brought into to the benefit of the business.

The benefit of this approach is that all levels of the organisation tree are driving innovation and improvement within the business.

As a B2B salesperson of the digital age, it is crucial to master the art of social selling — by using influence, authority, and engagement on social networks to find and interact with “changemakers” within target organisations, hacking this new buying process. Rather than working through a list of CxOs and attempting to engage them in endless pitches, the social salesperson finds the changemakers, builds social trust, and presents win-win deals.

Here’s the full article.

Tue, 31 May — Instagram’s Ad Carousel Meets Videos

If you’ve advertised on Instagram before, you probably know of their carousel feature. It allows you to display multiple images on the same sponsored post. But what you may not know is that the carousel now supports videos too!

Advertisers will now be able to add multiple videos to a single sponsored post and each video can be up to 60 seconds in length. The format was rolled out in mid-May and brands were excited because it gave marketers greater creative flexibility when it came to video advertising.

So what are you waiting for? Get creative with you Instagram video marketing today!

Here’s the full article.

Wed, 1 Jun — Empathy And Business Success

The best salespeople are the ones who realize the incredible power of empathy and can understand the other party without them explicitly stating it. Whether you’re a salesperson, a marketer or a businessperson, if you can understand what the other person is thinking and what their goals are, you can reverse engineer those aims and map it back to your goals too. That knowledge sets you up to win. You’ll both win.

Not only is empathy important during the business’ inception and product creation process, but it continues to be essential throughout the lifecycle of the business.

If you can understand why somebody doesn’t want to buy your product, you will understand how you need to adjust to boost sales. Customer service is also completely based on empathizing with the customer. There’s nothing that turns a consumer off more than a poor customer service experience and nothing that keeps customers coming back like excellent customer service.

Businesses love to say that the customer is always right, but their actions need to reciprocate that statement.

Here’s the full article.

Thu, 2 Jun — Give It Five Minutes

There are two things in this world that take no skill: 1) spending other people’s money and 2) dismissing an idea. Dismissing an idea is easy because it doesn’t involve any work. The hard thing to do is to protect it, think about it, let it marinate, explore it, riff on it, and try it.

It’s fine to disagree, and it’s fine to push back, it’s great to have strong opinions and beliefs, but give other people’s ideas some time to set in before you’re sure you want to argue against them. Spend five minutes thinking about it. There’s also a difference between asking questions and pushing back. Pushing back means you already think you know. Asking questions means you want to know. Focus on that.

So the next time you hear something, or someone, talk about an idea, pitch an idea, or suggest an idea, give it five minutes. Think about it a little bit before pushing back, before saying it’s too hard or it’s too much work. Those things may be true, but there may be another truth in there too: It may be worth it.

Here’s the full article.

Fri, 3 Jun — Build A Business, Not A Financial Machine

Mainstream media of today often paints a too-good-to-be-true picture of what entrepreneurship looks like with all the “unicorns” with quick exits and huge payouts. As a result, there’s a complete misunderstanding of what what it takes to build a business.

Too many people think they can become an entrepreneur overnight and establish a real business in a 1–2 year window, but to be honest — that’s not realistic. They approach investors looking to raise money for the “earth shattering” and “disruptive” idea they have. But a truly disruptive idea is one that has investors coming to you, not you chasing them.

Building a business isn’t easy. If you have the audacity to want to build something that’s going to set you up for the rest of your life, to provide you with the freedom of someone else not signing your paycheck, don’t disrespect what it takes to get there.

If you’re a true bred entrepreneur, you should be in it because you love the grind. There are no short cuts. No magic formulas that will make a successful business. No promises that VC funding will make your “earth-shattering” idea successful. There’s just the truth. And that’s hard work.

Here’s the full article.

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Hope you like this week’s content as much as we do and remember to tune in again next Saturday!

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