17 points out of a possible 100 – that’s all the search giant managed to get.  And at this moment, most sane people might start to worry – there’s no telling what could be going on at the Googleplex, right?

Yet a more accurate way of looking at it is that there’s no telling One World Trust what is going on – Google didn’t cooperate with the organization, and got blasted as a result.  The most telling example of this is the way in which Google scored exactly zero points in the “Environmental and Social Impact” category; we all know about the company’s RE<C initiative, its push to get “green” PCs into government buildings, and its solar panel-coated headquarters.

For anyone who would like to further explore the One World Trust’s inaccuracies, John Oates writes, “The whole report, or a summary, is available from here although ironically you will need to register – not very transparent is it?”

Crisis averted, then.  Google may still be creepy, but it probably shouldn’t be compared to an international police organization.

So are the folks that are reading your words.

Whether you write white papers, articles or blog entries, it is important to meet the needs of the skimmer.

What can I do?

In one of my recent teleclasses, the topic of engaging readers came up. One of the students said, “You are really making me work to go back through the white paper and reexamine and reassess what each section is actually doing and how the headings correlate to the information in the content!”

One important way to get your readers to actually move through your document is to use headers (also known as section titles or subheads).

Translating boring words into engaging headlines

Let’s assume you were writing a white paper about workplace accountability.

What follows are some boring and exciting ways to write section headers to pull in the skim reader:

• “The Problem: Poor Accountability” could be translated into “Destination ‘Acceptable Failure’ by Way of Aimless Goals” or “The Challenges of Poor Workforce Accountability”
• “The Solution” could be restated “Steps to Achieving Personal Accountability“
• “An Example” could be translated into “Accountability in Action: Corporate Example“

The trick here is to focus on descriptive words that create interest to the skim reader.

It is often helpful to create mental images, like a place named “Acceptable Failure.”

Spend time creating section headers that encourage your readers stay with your piece.

Ultimately those words will actually see the reflection of someone else’s eyes.

How do you satisfy the skimmer? Do you have any other ideas?

Comments

The phone rings, the copier jambs, the fantasy football stats need updating . . . see, the problem with marketing plans in general is that, left alone, they don’t create marketing results.

Now, I’m a big fan of marketing plans. This time of year you should pull out a big giant piece of paper, sit down with your staff and map out a month-by-month strategy for your marketing activities. (See calendar tool above)

What, you say you’ve done that before and it’s gotten you nowhere. If you’re like most small business owners then the problem isn’t’ the plan, the problem is the priority. Marketing seems to be one those activities that small business owners put on the “I’ll get to that on Friday” list. Come Friday though, that list is really big or you’re out of creative gas.

I suspect you may have guessed where I’m headed with this. In order to make anything a priority, to give it the attention it deserves, you must force yourself to focus on it. One of the best ways to do that is to schedule marketing work like you would an appointment with a client. Once an appointment is in your book you don’t schedule over it, you keep it. Of course, the only problem with this strategy is that many people simply lack the discipline to keep an appointment that they make with themselves.

The way around this is to find someone that you trust, someone that can advise you on marketing issues and schedule your marketing appointment with them. In other words, get a marketing coach. A good marketing coach, like a good anything coach, will help you develop a game plan and then hold you accountable for executing that plan. That accountability, more than any other aspect of a coaching relationship, is invaluable.

Imagine how far you could take your marketing efforts if you had a specific marketing assignment each week, the assignment was critiqued by an expert and then confidently acted upon by you and your staff.

Now imagine what six weeks or six months of this type of focus would mean.

I have been working with groups of small business owners in this very fashion for a number of years and I can tell you that results are impressive. And, I’m convinced that the primary reason is that they knew that I would be there to check up on their progress at the scheduled time.

It’s just a bit of human nature. When you decide to make something a priority, you can always get it done. I have tricked myself repeatedly into getting into running shape each spring by simply entering a race. That defined deadline and scheduled appointment had a powerful pull.

Want to get your feet wet in this whole marketing coach thing?

I have developed a five-week program based on creating a referral marketing system. Each week for five weeks up to 10 small business owners meet with me on the phone to receive lessons and examples on ways to build powerful referral systems. The group also receives and completes specific homework and both group and individual feedback. Participants tell me that they absolutely love this group format and sharing with other small business owners.

My current group is full but I still have openings in my upcoming group. If you sense that all your marketing really needs is big dose of accountability mixed with some proven marketing strategies and tools then a Referral Flood Power Group is just the ticket.

John Jantsch is a veteran marketing coach, award winning blogger and author of Duct Tape Marketing: The World’s Most Practical Small Business Marketing Guide published by Thomas Nelson – due out in the fall of 2006 He is the creator of the Duct Tape Marketing small business marketing system. You can find more information by visiting http://www.ducttapemarketing.com

The sentence that usually follows implies that without accountability, no one will do what it takes to meet deadlines, deliver quality products or succeed in general. Just below the surface, the assumption behind this thinking is that fear of blame — or at least fear of the consequences associated with blame — is an effective motivator.

If your goal as a manager is to enforce compliance with well-articulated policy and adherence to established procedures, this may be a reasonable way to think. But for most of us in IT, our goal is to help our staffs apply their knowledge and creativity to the broad array of problems presented to them.

Fear isn’t a particularly potent motivator when it comes to inducing creativity. If it were, editors would simply threaten to lock novelists in gulags until they produced Pulitzer Prize-winning prose.

As a manager, you must understand the difference between accountability and blame.

One morning back when I was managing a group of consultants, I received a call from Jim, a very conscientious senior programmer. Just from the way he said hello, I could tell he was in a state of near panic. “I’ve got a serious problem,” he told me. “I accidentally deleted the entire source- code library for the project I’m working on, and it turns out that the client wasn’t backing up the disk. I never thought to ask. What do I do?”

I asked Jim how much work he had lost, and he explained that he had been working on this particular project for about a month. I asked, “Given that you’ve already been working on this, how long do you think it will take to re-create the lost code?” He said he thought it would take a week, and then he asked again, “What should I do?”

I told him to do two things. “Go tell the client exactly what happened and that we will figure out a fair way to take care of the consequences of the problem. Get to work on re-creating the code.”

Less than 24 hours later, Jim called, sounding tired but relieved, to tell me that he had completely re-created the lost code. “Great,” I told him, “now go do two more things. Update the client and tell them that we won’t charge them for the lost day, and make sure that they start backing up the code library.”

There was a long pause, and finally Jim asked me, “That’s it? You’re not going to fire me?” I told him, “I don’t fire people for making mistakes. I fire them for making the same mistakes repeatedly. Do you know what mistakes you made?”

“Yeah,” he said, somewhat tentatively. “I assumed that they were backing up, but I didn’t check, and I deleted files without thinking.”

“Good,” I said. “Now don’t make those mistakes again. Next time, make better ones.”

Nothing more was ever said about the incident, and Jim remained a loyal and productive employee for many years.

For me, this event helped to draw the distinctions between accountability and blame. In my mind, accountability is the ability to discern and attribute individual and collective results. Blame is about who is going to pay the price for problems. If there’s no clear accountability (and even if there is), you can blame anyone for problems. But fear of being the whipping boy isn’t going to help you build a productive, learning organization.

That day, I learned that I didn’t need to blame Jim. With clear accountability, he learned what he needed to learn from his mistake. Beating him up over the error would only have made him more defensive and less likely to learn from the situation.

Both accountability and blame have roles to play in good management. If you think carefully about the distinctions between the two, your responses to problems can be much more nuanced and tailored to both the situation at hand and the needs of individual employees.

Paul Glen is an IT management consultant and the author of the award-
winning book “Leading Geeks: How to Manage and Lead People Who Deliver
Technology” (Jossey-Bass Pfeiffer,2003). He regularly speaks for
corporations and national associations across North America. For more
information go to: http://www.paulglen.com. He can be reached at
info@paulglen.com.

This is a very common problem for traders, I imagine everyone goes through it at some stage in their career. In working with student traders over the years, I have noticed a phenomenon that I think explains one of the reasons for this lack of discipline. When I watch student traders trade, they tend to sit very patiently and explain to me what they are seeing on the chart in front of them. When they see a valid setup come along, they can quite happily tell me what the setup is and how they plan to trade it, and subsequently they will execute the trade accordingly. When the same student is trading alone, they start taking all sorts of off-plan trades, setups that aren’t really setups at all. It seems that the difference when trading alone, is that the trader suddenly has no accountability. If they have someone looking over their shoulder keeping them in check, everything is fine. They know that if they take an off-plan trade then they will have to explain to me why they did so when it all goes horribly wrong. Trading at home alone, the trader is accountable only to themself, and they are probably not going to give themself the same hard time I would if they didn’t follow their trading plan to the letter!

So it seems that one of the benefits of trading for a living, that independence from the boss, can actually be a hindrance at times. Short of hiring a manager to stand watch over them, what can a trader do to overcome this lack of accountability in their trading? One method I recommend is to give a running commentary out loud throughout the trading session, as if talking to a mentor. Explain what you are seeing on the chart, where you think a trade is setting up and why, how you will enter, how you will manage the trade, and where you will be exiting wherever the price subsequently goes. When talking out loud you use a different part of the brain than when simply thinking to yourself, and that can have surprising consequences; it’s easy to talk yourself into a trade that you want to take even though you know it’s not quite right, but talk through it out loud and you’ll hear yourself making excuses and quickly see the error you are about to commit. I know talking to yourself sounds a little odd, but it really works.

Another option for making yourself more accountable for your trades is to join a chat room. There are loads of them about, plenty of free ones as well as some paid ones which call trades in real time (I wouldn’t recommend those by the way, they are often run by people front running their own calls). If you find a decent room and commit yourself to calling your trades in real time, knowing that you will have to explain to the room exactly why you just took that really stupid trade will really make you think twice about taking it in the first place.

These are two simple ways of making yourself more accountable for your trades and therefore enforcing more discipline. There are many more interesting ways of increasing discipline as a personal skill, and I hope this article will have given you some ideas to start developing your own methods.

Harvey Walsh is a full time day trader and part time trading tutor. He can be contact via his website www.day-trading-freedom.com.

It is time to go back to the business basics. You need to focus on accountability and improving the return on your marketing investment (ROI). What’s needed is a system to help you spend less money on traffic and consistently convert more clicks into sales. Enter the ESA/T marketing system.

ESA/T, which stands for Enhance, Select, Analyze, and Test, has been used with great success for several years by a select group of online marketers.

The four-step ESA/T cycle works like this:

1. Enhance the visitor’s experience of your web site. This will ensure the traffic being driven to the site can be converted into sales and actions.

2. Select traffic sources and marketing strategies wisely.

3. Analyze your website statistics and ROI tracking data using metrics appropriate for your business.

4. Test and tweak to improve performance. Using your metrics, find what isn’t working and fix it.

These four steps can be repeated over and over in a dialectic spiral towards optimum marketing performance.

Step 1. Enhance

Before spending another dime on driving traffic to your website, you need to make sure that your visitors will land in the environment that is professional, relaxing and does not make them think twice about doing business with you.

Good website usability is a process, not a state. Never stop improving yours. If you can’t afford an industrial strength usability makeover, use baby steps. Asking your grandmother to buy something on your website and watching her do it is an excellent budget alternative. You just need to put your mind to it.

The Neilson Norman Group studied the effects of usability on e-commerce conversions. They found that web sites that went from paying no attention to usability issues to making significant usability improvements doubled their sales or more.

Step 2. Select

The next step in ESA/T cycle is “S” – Select your advertising sources.

Let’s look at the possible marketing and advertising strategies. These may include: Pay Per Click (PPC), pay per action, paid search inclusion, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), link exchanges, email newsletter ads, sponsorships, article writing, press releases, affiliate programs, forum postings, and offline promotions.

Your goal is to develop the marketing mix that’s just right for you. The blend that brings you the right amount of sales for the right price.

Be creative and methodical. Try an advanced search on Google to find the sites linking to your competitors. This will seed your list of possible places to advertise.

Next, develop a list of your company’s internal resources – advertising budget, human resources, and time. Based on that, create a plan for working with the traffic sources from your list.

Step 3. Analyze

The next phase of the ESA/T cycle, Analyze, is about tracking and analyzing the visitor activity that’s relevant to your bottom line.

There are plenty of metrics to choose from. Be sure to avoid the “information glut” and use only the metrics that will help you improve your website usability and traffic quality. Some of such metrics may include: The number of orders placed, average dollar value per order, average revenue earned per visitor, number of registrations, number of specific page views like product detail pages, time elapsed between first visit and first order, visitors’ paths through the site, and so on.

Cumulative statistics for all visitors on your site are extremely important, but in order to be truly of value, stats should be tallied for individual traffic sources so you can compare and contrast their performance.

Step 4. Test

Remember the last time you wanted to buy something online and gave up? Remember the reason why? It was likely because the checkout process was confusing, didn’t answer your questions, or just took too long.

If that website’s marketing manager used ESA/T, especially Test, you likely would have completed your purchase and would be enjoying it today. Instead, that business not only lost a sale, but likely lost you as a customer forever.

Plot a bar chart showing the number of unique visitors and page reloads at each step of your checkout process. Suppose you observe a sharp drop in the number of visitors who moved from the second to third step of the checkout. At the same time, you note a high number of page reloads at the second step. This information could mean, among other things, that there is a consistent problem with the form validation algorithm — the system keeps on throwing visitors back to the previous step in the process.

The testing and tweaking you wind up doing to improve your site, your marketing campaigns, and ultimately your ROI, will be just as individual as your business and the metrics you choose to apply to it.

Even though we presented the four stages of ESA/T in sequence, you should return often to recheck and tweak any areas that need it. Your e-business will continue to evolve so constant monitoring of its vital signs is imperative.

As you can see, improving your ROI isn’t rocket science. It’s a simple matter of understanding these four steps and applying them to your daily marketing efforts. Those already using this system are reaping the rewards.

At Clicklab we provide subscriptions-based ROI tracking service for web
marketers. We can start tracking ROI for all of your advertising campaigns
immediately, and within a matter of weeks, show you the campaigns that are
working and those that are a waste of money and time.

http://click.clicklab.com/1519579

Not all assemblies of our team generates such quantifiable payoffs. But every time we meet, we gain more clarity, uncover hidden opportunities and come away with more resolve and greater confidence in reaching our individual objectives.

Sharing Goals, Celebrating Wins We each share our goals with the rest of the team. We’re questioned, advised, supported and encouraged by our team mates. I don’t know why it is, but a commitment to someone else carries more weight than a commitment to ourselves. In the Master Minds I’m involved with, we talk about what we want to accomplish and why. We gain more clarity and we develop more consistency in our action plans. We hold ourselves accountable.

We also post our successes so we can all celebrate our progress. At the same time, we review why and how some goals weren’t reached. We take responsibility, we learn and we move on–getting better and stronger all the time.

Perspective No matter how good you might be, you have blind spots. To see the bigger picture, to help eliminate your bias, you need to get OUTSIDE of what you’re doing. You need the better viewpoint of others who aren’t so close to your issues. You need a Master Mind team.

What about you? Do you have your own Master Mind?

It’s really not difficult to set up and the payoff is substantial. Companies have boards of directors. The President has his cabinet. Why not have your own group of advisors–at no cost?

The concept isn’t new. Benjamin Franklin had his Junto that met for over forty years and to which he attributed much of his success. Napoleon Hill, the author of ‘Think and Grow Rich’ created his Master Mind Alliance. It worked for them and it will work for you.

As I look back over the last thirty years, I can tell when I was part of a Master Mind and when I wasn’t by looking at my achievements. It tracks almost perfectly. When I was involved in a Master Mind, I always accomplished more–WAY more.

There’s no need to go it alone. Why WOULD you? Start or join a Master Mind today.

Turbo Teams If you’re interested in joining a Master Mind Team–only a few days and two spots left–you’ll find full details at http://SuccessNet.org/turboteams/

Related Articles How to Form Your Own Success Team: Make the Mastermind principle work for you. http://successnet.org/files/teams.pdf

Copyright Michael Angier. SuccessNet.org and
WorldClassBusiness.com help you and your business grow. Get
their fr*ee report 10 Pillars of a World Class Business by
sending an email to wcb@SuccessNet.org No-cost subscriptions,
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http://SuccessNet.org and http://WorldClassBusiness.com

InfoPlease@SuccessNet.org

Now the good news
There is a proven way to earn the respect of your senior management — resulting in bigger budgets, additional staff, job security and perhaps more money in your pocket. It’s called being “accountable” and it means proving to management that there is a favorable return on marketing communications investments.

Today, in order to keep or grow your budgets, department or salary, you have to talk management’s language (Return-On-Investment or ROI) and prove that investing your company’s limited resources in marketing and communications programs will bring a better return than hiring more people in the accounting department or buying a new piece of manufacturing equipment. You accomplish this by linking advertising, PR, trade show and other marketing communications investments to sales.

Start With Your Inquiries
So how do you get accountable? A great place to start is with your inquiries, matching them to actual orders. Or matching them to warranty cards. You can match by person’s name, company and location for an indisputable “hard match.” However, if both engineering and purchasing are involved, you might have to settle for a “soft match” of company and location.

Management usually wants the big picture, so simply add up all the matched sales and divide by the total spent to determine your ROI. (A hint: Rather than using the first order to determine the total sales, consider using the first year’s sales to the customer, or the average lifetime sales per customer.)

If you sell through distributors or dealers, you often can’t link sales directly to end-users. If this applies to you, consider inserting a coupon with the inquiry literature, redeemable for free accessories or dollars off. If a coupon is used, you know it is linked to an inquiry. I suggest you “code” the coupon with the source information, and, if possible, print the prospect’s name and company on it, to make it easy to find in your inquiry database.

If you can’t match inquiries to orders or warranty cards, and using a coupon isn’t appropriate, try conducting “Did you buy?” surveys instead. Mail or call a random sample of inquirers, about six months after they inquired. Ask them if they bought, how much, from whom and why. (Often the publication you advertise in will mail and tabulate a survey for you for free or at their cost.) If you get enough responses, you can “project” the results and show management the total sales, sales you got, the sales you lost, and why.

You might also try incentivizing your salespeople, reps, distributors or dealers to report back on sales from inquiries. Offer “spiffs” for evidence of inquiries followed up and turned into customers. Be sure to make the reward worth their time, or they won’t bother.

You Can’t Afford Not To Do It
If you don’t have the time or resources to link your marketing communications investments to sales, hire someone else to do it for you. Because if you don’t do it, your budget is at risk, not to mention your job.
Please don’t be afraid to measure your results. In my eighteen plus years in this business, I’ve never measured a program that didn’t work. Even awful or amateurish marketing communications programs work. And excellent programs get excellent results.

A Success Story
Accountability works. For example, by studying three years worth of inquiries, one client linked 60% of their orders to prospects that started as inquiries. By using past ROI information, the marketing communications manager projected the budget she would need to get 60% of the company’s sales goals for the upcoming year. The Final result? She got a 40% budget increase and another person for her department. She also got the biggest raise in her division!

In Conclusion
Simply counting inquiries or measuring image and awareness doesn’t cut it today. You have to link marketing and communications investments to sales and revenue. I urge you to invest the time and effort it takes to track and measure your return-on-investment. Then, rather than seeing your budget shrink and risking your job, you’ll get some respect and the budget you need to get the job done right.

M. H. Mac McIntosh is described by many as one of Americas leading sales and marketing consultants and an authority on inquiry handling and sales lead management. Visit his website at http://www.salesleadexperts.com, email Mac at mcintosh@salesleadexperts.com or call him at 1-800-944-5553.

The Problem

While marketing budgets are often being cut because they are seen by many executives as a superfluous expense item, marketing has evolved in some quarters to go beyond a discretionary item in the budget to being a critical component of tight budgets in the present economy. This evolution has been driven by several factors, a key one being a new perception of how important marketing is for growth. Simply understanding that better marketing is crucial is not enough, however. The impact of a company’s marketing programs is often poorly measured, so their full potential cannot be known nor fully realized. Given the current depressed economic climate, it is essential for a company to be able to measure its ROI. When a company cuts marketing spending, it cuts the one function whose sole purpose is to increase sales.

History

Over the past twenty four months or so, many high technology and other companies were blind-sided by the economic downturn and did not know how to react. When some firms finally figured it out, it was too late. Jobs were lost, budgets slashed, market share lost and company value diminished. Of all times to stop investing in activities designed to sell more, a recession or period of soft demand or uncertainty would seem the worst; yet companies do it all the time.

Further, limited internal resources are causing increasing competition between marketing and other departments. Companies are looking to increase their new prospects while shortening the sales cycle by improving the marketing efforts without increasing the budgets. When budgets are thus limited, it is important to know which tactics within the program are working and which are not, so strategies can be realigned accordingly. In effect, the push for ROI is intended to justify marketing and demonstrate its effect on the company’s bottom line.

The Solution

Yearly, semi-annually, and monthly audits in the sales and marketing organizations can help marketing executives, top management, and investors ensure they are doing the right things to help drive growth for their organizations. Information gleaned from these audits can align the marketing organization and put in place the scorecard to keep it on track.

A marketing audit is a thorough examination and evaluation of marketing practices and results. It offers a baseline for performance measurements and a framework for effective business planning to maximize positive external perception and demand generation. Many companies choose to measure the quality of marketing by the amount of generated leads as a means of determining marketing effectiveness. Measurements, an audit, must be based on marketing strategy and programs based on pre-established criteria that include factors such as quantity of leads, sales cycle reduction, and lower cost per sale. Periodically, this audit can be revisited to see if the changes have had a positive impact on company performance in the areas of sales growth and company value, or indicate where adjustments may be required, such as positioning, or demand generation on the sales cycles.

The audit helps the organization understand aspects of strategic importance in sales and marketing. Its results become the blueprint for strategic decisions, for future sales and marketing plans by tying funds for sales and marketing to direct sales and leads generated. For example, if the sales cycle is twelve months, the associated income must be discounted back to the date the marketing program funds were spent under the “time-value-of money” concept.

Additionally, an audit helps the company determine the value of a sale and a sales lead. Value of a sale itself is fairly easy to determine-income generated after all expenses incurred-but the value of a lead is trickier. Is the lead strong or weak, we ask. What is its income potential? Where is it in the buying cycle? What are the chances of closing the lead? Marketing measurement programs-audits-that factors in all of these variables provide a detailed picture of a marketing program’s ROI and are critical for a company to stay in business.

There are no permanent “right” answers in marketing. Customers’ needs and wants are moving targets, and marketing programs require testing and retesting to find the most profitable formula. A marketing audit is the way to achieve success by providing an interim report card to help you and your staff tap into inherent resource. Whatever industry your company serves, whether or not you work with a marketing agency, your company executives should insist on developing robust measurement practices to assess and demonstrate effectively the value of your marketing efforts.

George Schildge founded Matrix Marketing Group, Inc. As the company’s
president, his vision is to ensure top-notch sales and marketing firm to
Matrix Marketing Group’s clients. Schildge’s professional offerings focus on
the measurable skills, experiences and return-on-investment needed to
enhance a company’s value to its clients and drive business results.