As the leaders of product development and strategy, they’re tasked with building an application that simultaneously meets the high standards of fussy consumers and matches the philosophy of their CEO.

In a practical sense, this means identifying a need in the market with customer feedback, orchestrating teams of engineers and designers, and creating estimates — both temporal and financial — for executives.

ALSO READ: 5 of the Best Project Management Tools for (Almost) Any Task

Given these requirements, it makes sense that product management software has become such an important tool for product managers. It may be difficult to maintain your sanity without some type of centralized tool.

If you’re a product manager looking for a reliable tool to create roadmaps, estimates, and updates, you can start with these five options:

ClickUp

Say your team with juggling a dozen projects at once, each of them with dozens of moving parts. Managing every detail quickly becomes a time-consuming part of every day, and you’re looking for a way out. ClickUp’s fully-customizable, colorful, and simple collaborative boards take all of the guesswork out of project management. Everything is handled visually, so your teams can glance at their project boards and quickly take in all of the information needed to hit the ground running.

ClickUp is designed from the ground up to integrate seamlessly into any workspace. Task automation is simple to implement without needing to insert any code at all, and in our full review, you can learn more about its extensive features.

ProductPlan

Like most software, product management can be divided into two categories: best-of-breed and general use. ProductPlan falls into the best-of-breed category, with a particular focus on roadmaps.

In general, roadmaps use a series of horizontal bars to indicate spans of time. This makes them excellent tools for communicating estimates to stakeholders about the timeline for development.

Because ProductPlan’s entire software focuses on roadmaps, it’s no surprise they offer one of the best around. Users can easily build and adjust roadmaps through drag-and-drop functionality, update the details of individual time frames on the fly, and share roadmaps with stakeholders using a private link.

ProductPlan is refreshingly straightforward, which is both a gift and curse. If you need something more powerful for managing ideas or collaborating in a more specific way, you may want to look elsewhere.

If you’re looking to build lots of roadmaps, ProductPlan is probably your best option.

Wizeline

During the development lifecycle, ideas change, and the repository of data changes. With its idea management and user feedback features, Wizeline lets product managers continuously adapt to this progression. 

For example, Wizeline has a product survey feature that lets you gather user feedback, which you can store in the software’s idea management module. Once all the ideas gathered from users (and stakeholders) have been codified, you’ll can document feature requests in the backlog.

This one, two, three-style functionality aligns with how products are often developed —  i.e. users give feedback, that feedback is documented, and then if there’s a pattern in the feedback, it becomes a new feature.

Wizeline also lets you organize your feature backlog based on measures of cost, pervasiveness, and urgency. Arranging your feature requests in logical order will make it much easier to prioritize an urgent item mentioned by 500 users versus an executive’s random petition.

And yes, Wizeline has roadmaps, too.

UserVoice

Speaking of random executive petitions, you really want to make sure you have your data organized so you can judge all incoming requests under the microscope of user feedback.

If it doesn’t have data, it probably shouldn’t be built. That’s how feature prioritization works.

UserVoice is an excellent tool for both collecting and analyzing data from users. On the collection side, UserVoice can pull requests and feedback through in-app widgets, a dedicated customer portal, or through mobile. This software also gives your customer-facing teams user feedback forms so they can easily document customer input during interactions.

Once you have a reliable stream of customer data, you can manage it in UserVoice a number of ways. You can segment user feedback based on source, plan type, satisfaction score, or custom metrics that you create. There’s also a labeling system to help you can create custom filters, like which team the data is relevant to, customer type giving the data, etc.

To analyze all of your user data, UserVoice provides a substantial number of pre-built reports. You can watch trends in feature popularity over time with a line graph, or analyze the business impact of features by assigning estimated revenue metrics.

However you want to scrutinize or utilize the feedback your customers provide, UserVoice can almost certainly handle it.

Aha!

Developing a product means finding a place for it in the market, and that requires more than coding. Competitive analysis, forecasting, go-to-market planning — these are all part of the process. 

The first thing you see when you hit Aha!’s website is a roadmap, but this software offers a number of unique tools for the strategic part of product development, beyond just the management portion.

Under the Strategy tab, you’ll find tools for constructing a visual representation of your market, the goals you have for the development cycle (pictured above) and the initiatives that will operationalize your plan.

Aha! Does a lot of other stuff, too. There’s the roadmapping module as well as a card-based management system for keeping track of feature releases. There’s even a reports tab that lets users choose from pre-fab reports or build something from scratch.

You can compile different reports, strategy visualizations, and roadmaps into a “Story” and ship it to your executive team — which means you can skip the PowerPoint.

* * *

Given the technical requirements of collaborating with engineers and the political requirements of communicating with executives, developing products is far from straightforward. 

Choosing product management software that gives you a method for making informed decisions will alleviate some of the pressure and establish processes for making continuous improvements.

The post 4 Product Management Tools for Keeping Everything Together appeared first on TechnologyAdvice.

To find the advantages of one software over another, you have to look at how they execute their functions. Which solution has the most streamlined publishing? The more in-depth reporting?

Also read: Buffer vs. Hootsuite

To help you answer those questions for yourself, we’ll compare Sprout Social and Hootsuite based on dashboards, publishing, scheduling, collaboration, reporting, and integration capabilities. If you want to save time on research, use our Social Media Marketing Product Selection Tool to get a free shortlist of social media management software recommendations. We’ll ask you a few questions and then send you suggestions tailored to your needs.

Sprout Social vs. Hootsuite: Company overview

Founded in 2010, Sprout Social was built to help businesses and customers communicate more freely. In the six years since its inception, the company has raised over $100 million in venture capital and filed to go public in 2019.

Sprout Social was designed to give businesses an array of functionality while keeping the user experience inviting. Notable customers include Subaru, Ticketmaster, and Evernote.

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Hootsuite was founded in 2008 under the moniker BrightKit. Its mission was simple: help businesses manage their social media accounts in one place. BrightKit eventually became Hootsuite, and the company now has 18 million users, over 1,400 employees, and offices in Vancouver, Toronto, New York, Mexico City, London, Paris, Hamburg, Sydney, and more.

Notable Hootsuite customers include Marketo, Mailchimp, SXSW, and GE.

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Side-by-side comparison of Hootsuite and SproutSocial

Product	Bulk Scheduling	Platform Certification & Training	Social CRM	Chatbots	Optimize Send Times
Hootsuite
Sprout Social

Feed dashboards

Any true social media management tool will aggregate posts from multiple networks. The way the platform displays this information has a significant impact on usability.

Both Hootsuite and Sprout Social aggregate posts in a feed, but the way each product displays the feed is substantially different.

Hootsuite (pictured below) lets users build adjacent feeds across a single dashboard and customize the type of information that each feed displays. That means you can set up a feed for each of your social accounts and create more specific filters on each of those accounts — e.g., posts from Facebook or incoming tweets.

Once you have your feeds set up, you can interact with the content displayed in each one directly from Hootsuite, which makes responding to questions and comments across multiple networks a breeze.

Sprout Social (pictured below) forgoes the multi-columnar approach of its competitor and instead aggregates posts into a single feed. You can customize the information in the feed by checking and unchecking filters, and you can also move to a network-specific view (for example, everything from LinkedIn) with one click. One cool feature of Feeds in Sprout Social is that you can also add RSS feeds to help with sourcing content to share.

Like Hootsuite, Sprout Social lets you interact with and respond to messages directly from your feed. It also tracks which messages have been responded to and marks them with a green icon to prevent multiple users from responding to the same message. This is a minor feature, but it makes collaboration among team members much less complicated.

Publishing and scheduling

There isn’t much difference in the publishing functionality of these two platforms. Both allow you to compose a message, choose which account it comes from, attach photos, shorten links, and choose a target audience from the main feed dashboard.

Both products also offer a draft function, so you can save posts that aren’t ready for publication and return to them later. Hootsuite lets you schedule up to 50 posts at once by uploading a CSV file using the bulk schedule tool.

Sprout Social offers some extra data in the publishing department with its audience discovery function, which highlights people or accounts you should follow and spam or bot accounts you should probably unfollow. This is especially helpful for identifying relevant influencers.

Sprout Social also shows a brief history of your conversation with someone on Twitter if you’re about to respond to their message. It pulls this data from its social CRM functionality, which is covered in more detail in the Extras section below.

For scheduling, Hootsuite and Sprout Social both offer a content calendar so you can schedule posts ahead of time. If you want to automate your posts, each system can choose posting times for you.

Both platforms also use a proprietary algorithm to decide which times you should post to elicit the most engagement from your audience.

Collaboration

Collaboration in the context of social media software mostly refers to permission settings and publishing approval rules.

Hootsuite lets you assign users one of three roles: super admin, admin, and default. If you want to manage employee Hootsuite accounts, you can apply one of the three permission settings to an entire team. Additional collaboration features in Hootsuite include the ability to assign social media replies to team members. This helps to prevent awkward situations like accidentally responding to customers twice.

Sprout Social offers similar administrative functionality, with permissions set based on a user’s role and multi-step publishing approval. Users can also tag any post in the feed as a task and assign it to a person or team.

Tasks are divided into three types: general, sales lead, and support. You can view open and completed tasks under the Task tab.

To ensure two people don’t reply to the same post in the feed view, Sprout Social will show when another user is responding to the post. For larger social teams, this feature can save a lot of time and prevent awkward double responses.

Reporting

Hootsuite’s overview report divides your social accounts into four views: posts, followers, engagement, and metrics. This provides a broad view of your social channels’ performance, but the system also lets users dig into the minutiae of social data points. Hootsuite lets you create custom reports, which you can then export to PDF, PowerPoint, Excel, or CSV files.

One helpful feature is the chart showing which days and times your posts are getting the most impressions and engagement. This optimizes your post times to drive more traffic. Additionally, the ROI report highlights the impact your social media campaigns have on leads and sales.

With Sprout Social, you can dive into engagement on a single platform, or compare how your posts are performing across all of your social media accounts. Competitor reports help you identify new opportunities for engagement by comparing your social accounts with theirs. The filters and queries also let you create your own custom reports, so you can compare your fall social campaign against the revenue numbers for that period.

Sprout Social also includes a social listening feature as an add-on that tracks mentions of your brand across the web and pulls them into a single dashboard for review. With awareness of your customers’ feelings, you can add, subtract, or alter products or services to meet their needs.

How Do Sprout Social and Hootsuite’s Pricing Models Compare?

Hootsuite offers four pricing tiers to help you find the right option for your business. The lowest tier only allows one user and is great for small businesses. The base plan lets you schedule multiple posts in advance for up to 10 accounts, offers access to free app integrations, and has a social inbox to respond to customers.

However, the basic package caps your post boost spend at $500, and you won’t get access to advanced features like customizable reports or a content library. At the top two tiers, you also get access to special add-ons, like social listening and ad campaign management.

Sprout Social offers three pricing levels, but rather than including a certain number of users, they charge per user per month. For larger teams, this could get cost-prohibitive quickly. The basic platform offers scheduling for up to five social accounts along with a social CRM and review management to read and respond to customer reviews.

For competitor reports, optimal send time scheduling, and advanced reports, you’ll need to upgrade to a higher package. Add-ons are available at any plan level and include social listening and premium analytics.

Integrations and extras

Hootsuite has an upper hand in the area of third-party integration.

Hootsuite integrates with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. They also have an app directory stocked with over 150 native integrations — 127 of which are free.

As an extra, Hootsuite users can make a landing page and run social contests and giveaways using the Campaigns function.

Sprout Social is compatible with the major networks mentioned above and provides native connectors for Zendesk, Uservoice, Google Analytics, Feedly, HubSpot, and TripAdvisor.

What Sprout Social lacks in integrations, it makes up for in extras — namely, its social CRM. For every account that follows you or that you follow, Sprout Social creates a record that stores interaction history as well as basic contact information. This information can be immensely helpful for salespeople, another way to build marketing and sales alignment.

Should You Choose Sprout Social or Hootsuite?

Sprout Social and Hootsuite both license their products in tiered subscription models. Higher tiers are more expensive, but they also unlock more functionality and the ability to track more accounts.

From a design perspective, Sprout Social is much easier to look at and use. Hootsuite favors function over form. Hootsuite has the edge in reporting, though Sprout Social offers more extras, like social CRM and audience discovery.

In the end, it depends on what you’re looking for. Both solutions are excellent tools for managing your social media, but the difference lies in which capabilities are most important to your organization.

If you’re having trouble deciding, re-examine your requirements. Then use our Social Media Marketing Buyers Guide to get a free list of personalized vendor recommendations.

Top CRM Software Recommendations

The post Sprout Social vs Hootsuite: Social Media Comparison appeared first on TechnologyAdvice.

1. 123456
2. 123456789
3. Qwerty
4. Password
5. 12345

Even with the evolution of cybercrime, this list is almost identical to the top five most commonly used passwords identified in a study back in 2014. A contributor to this study, security consultant and researcher Mark Burnett emphasized the need for a password manager.

“The only solution is to stop trying to create and remember your own passwords. You cannot consider yourself secure on the Internet unless you are using some tool to manage your passwords.”

A lot of people heeded Burnett’s advice, and password managers have been growing in popularity. Over the past couple of years, LastPass has distinguished itself and moved to the head of the pack.

ALSO READ: 1Password vs. LastPass

Even though this software offers an excellent interface and intuitive browser integration, there are a number of LastPass alternatives that may better meet your requirements.

If you’re not sold on LastPass, we’re here to help. We want you to find the best password manager for your business. Start with these five:

1Password

1Password does the standard password manager stuff well—automatically storing your passwords and auto filling your logins with one click when you revisit sites. What sets 1Password apart is its ability to store credit card information and software licenses for added security.

When you download 1Password, you download it directly to your machine and host it there, which is really the ultimate security procedure. Hosting information in the cloud can open up new security risks, so keeping everything on-premise is an excellent way to protect your data.

However, the same thing that makes 1Password secure can also make it arduous for teams. Think of the fun you’ll have coordinating each individual license across your organization. To avoid that terrible fate, the software’s developer has released 1Password Teams to make coordinating password security more manageable. This version is remotely hosted.

Dashlane

Like 1Password, and several others on this list, Dashlane stores more than passwords. You can save anything from receipts to IDs in its document storage. On top of these practical features, Dashlane offers a pain-free, intuitive user experience. 

Setup and deployment is a cakewalk, which is important if you’re going to use this password manager for your business. Dashlane also lets you turn cloud syncs on and off, so you can choose whether your files stay local or get copied to the cloud.

If you use the Dashlane Business version, your employees will also have the ability to separate their personal passwords from their business passwords. That separation is not only useful, but necessary, considering the often thin line between personal and work devices. 

RoboForm

RoboForm is a password manager and automatic form fill tool that supports all major operating systems and their respective browsers. Users can share passwords by entering an email address and store everything from application passwords to credit card numbers.

The security features include centralized policy guardrails, that help IT enforce policies that keep your company’s information safe. And employees who hold a personal RoboForm account can rest assured, as business and personal RoboForm files stay completely separated.

RoboForm’s pricing is on the lower end, but comes with the same role control and sharing features as many of its competitors.

Keeper

Keeper’s claim to fame is its ability to transfer passwords between devices using a Wi-Fi connection. So if you have a file on your laptop or desktop, you can transfer it straight to your phone without having to pass the data through a main server.

This becomes really useful when you realize that Keeper also lets you store photos, documents, and even videos. Now you have a bit of secure file storage for important documents, and you can pass said files, securely, between devices.

Keeper’s business version includes role-based access, analytics, and notifications for password health. Keeper’s only downside is that storing passwords is a bit more manual than what 1Password and DashLane offer.

KeePass

KeePass has been around since 2006, and as open-source password managers go, there’s not another option with as much recognition. The software does all the standard password management stuff — automatically store passwords, auto generate complex passwords for new logins, etc. — but the beauty of KeePass is its number of plugins. 

For example, if you’re worried about keyloggers (hackers who log the keystrokes on your computer to learn your passwords), you can install a plugin that creates a virtual keyboard you can use to enter your master password whenever you login to KeePass.

There are tons of other plugins available for this app, and they’re all free. KeePass’s main drawback is that it’s not that pretty to look at, but then again, being pretty isn’t the point. 

StickyPassword

Like Keeper, StickyPassword gives the ultra-paranoid a way to move passwords across their home network using cloudless Wi-Fi. That way Big Brother will never be able to access your Dancing with the Stars audition tapes.

Other than the novel method of data transfer, StickyPassword performs all of the other password manager functions well — particularly in the login capture arena.

Many other password managers struggle when asked to record login information for unorthodox field setups. For example, when the password and username aren’t displayed on the same page or directly above one another.

StickyPassword captures the appropriate data nearly all of the time. That may sound like a minor perk, but it really does become a hassle when you have to manage mis-recorded credentials in your password library.

Cloud vs. local password management

The focus of a password manager is to safeguard your online privacy and security, so it’s important to decide where you want your passwords to be stored: on remote servers or on your own device.

Cloud-based password managers

Cloud-based password managers are services that store your passwords on remote servers. They create their software for multiple platforms and sync apps through their central servers.

LastPass and many other similar tools are cloud-based, making it super convenient for users to store and manage passwords from any device. Even if the user loses their device, the passwords are recoverable through the cloud. Set up is easy as new data is automatically synced.

Password manager databases have been hacked over the past few years. Since the majority of password management developers rely on third party servers to store data, security is a concern. When looking into a cloud-based password manager, look into the security measures that are taken to protect your data. A high-quality password manager allows users to sync data locally in addition to cloud sync.

Local password managers

A local password manager such as 1Password stores all passwords locally and offline, being kept on a user’s computer, tablet, phone, or even external storage unit. What’s great about local storage is that it forces hackers to resort to difficult malware-based approaches like using keyloggers. Since passwords are stored on the user’s device, the user has total control over its security.

Local storage does hamper the user experience. And it’s worth mentioning that since the user is the one that has total control, any flaw in their processes or methods may create a vulnerability.

LastPass export and migration

So you’ve decided to switch from LassPass to a different password manager. How do you do that without losing all your stored passwords?

Fortunately it’s pretty easy to pull your data from LastPass and migrate it to another password manager, as the tool allows you to export your data as a CSV or XML file. If you’re migrating your data to another system, it’s best to choose CSV.

Another note: the easiest way to export data from LastPass is by using its browser extension on a desktop or laptop. You can do it via LastPass’s website, but it’s a lot more trouble than it’s worth.

To export and migrate your data from LastPass to a different password manager:

1. Click the LastPass browser extension icon, then click Account Options > Advanced > Export > LastPass CSV File
2. Type in your master password
3. Save the CSV file to your computer. You’re now ready to migrate this data to another tool.

Depending on your chosen LastPass alternative, the process for migrating data varies. Whatever tool you choose, it will come with instructions for exporting and importing your passwords. Most password managers will have an option to import a CSV file, allowing you to migrate your data fairly easily.

Top business password management features

As we conduct an increasing amount of business activities online, robust features are needed in a password manager to combat the significant risks cybercrime poses.

Autofill

Autofill allows form fields to be automatically populated with your corresponding username and password. When you create a new username and password for a website, your password manager will ask if you’d like to store this information. When you return to that website to login, if you’re logged into your password manager, it will auto populate your credentials.

Strong password generation

A password manager will auto-generate highly secure passwords that are long, alphanumeric, and very hard to guess. This generator is typically built right into the app, so as soon as you need new credentials for a website, the password manager can create, store, and remember it for you.

Syncs data across devices

With a cloud-based password manager, all of your encrypted data is available across any device that uses the tool. This means you have access to all passwords whether at work, home, or elsewhere.

Password sharing

This feature is especially useful for companies. Users can grant, manage, and remove access to online accounts to other people. This is much safer than a spreadsheet of passwords, and in most cases, passwords can be shared in their encrypted form, meaning while the recipient can use the account, they won’t know the actual password.

Multi-factor authentication

MFA requires users to log in using both their password and a secondary method of authentication, whether a text message or email verification code. This ensures that even if a user’s master password is compromised, the account is likely to remain secure.

Since user login is one of the most significant points of vulnerability on a password management platform, MFA is one of the easiest ways to improve account security. For this reason, we recommend choosing a password manager with MFA capabilities.

Find the best password manager for your business

Everyone needs a password manager. It’s one of the most basic requirements for anyone interested in protecting their information. That necessity is only amplified for businesses that must manage password integrity for dozens of employees.

Any of these LastPass alternatives will get the job done, but if you have a bigger team, consider one of the options with a business version first.

The post Find the Best LastPass Alternative for Managing & Protecting Passwords appeared first on TechnologyAdvice.

Intrinsic motivation — which refers to a person’s internal drive to perform an action purely because of the enjoyment they get from it — plays a foundational role in Self-Determination Theory (SDT). It’s one of the key psychological theories for gamification designers, as well as many social psychologists.

In a broad sense, SDT posits that three psychological needs internally motivate humans to take action. These needs are not only essential for motivation without external influences, but also for mental well-being.

• Competence
• Autonomy
• Relatedness

In SDT theory, intrinsic motivation is the opposite of extrinsic motivation. As you might expect, extrinsic motivation refers to stimuli that originate from external influences, such as money or other types of rewards. While the two types are often painted as distinct entities, the reality is often more complex.

For businesses, understanding intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation is critical to implementing an effective gamification program. It’s also central to gaining a better understanding of what motivates your employees to engage with their work.

Intrinsic motivation for business

As mentioned before, SDT identifies three universal needs that intrinsically motivate all humans. Dan Pink, author of the influential book Drive introduces a fourth: purpose. In his 2009 TED Talk, Pink explains the need to understand and promote intrinsic motivation. As he says, “There’s a mismatch between what science knows and what business does.”

You can see the author’s entire speech here:

According to social science research, external rewards are not the best motivators for white collar workers. Of course employees want their basic needs like food and shelter covered, but once everyday comforts are addressed, pay raises, bonuses, and other monetary prizes don’t consistently encourage long term motivation.

Yet a majority of the business world still relies on extrinsic motivation to encourage their employees to be productive.

Traditional extrinsic rewards work well for motivating workers to perform repetitive tasks — studies have found that rewards don’t undermine internal motivation to perform uninteresting tasks — but when applied to job functions that require innovation, these rewards can actually harm intrinsic motivation.

If businesses want to move beyond the current landscape of employee malaise, identifying and catering to intrinsic motivation is the only way forward.

Real-world intrinsic motivation

If external rewards can harm intrinsic motivation, how do you encourage intrinsic motivation? This is where well thought-out gamification comes into play.

Games satisfy people’s needs for relatedness, purpose, autonomy, and competence. Consequently, gamification can successfully tap into people’s intrinsic motivation by emphasizing certain actions through a software-interface and workplace structure.

But enough with the abstract psychology. Let’s look at some examples.

#1: Quora

Need: Relatedness

Started by two ex-Facebook employees in 2009, Quora is a question-and-answer website with a heavy focus on technology. The site uses popularity to rank questions in users’ feeds, similar to how social media platforms display posts. Quora enjoys strong community participation and has grown significantly in the past several years, boasting 300 million monthly users in 2018.

This is the secret to Quora’s success — the community not only features notable experts from a variety of industries, it also has tons of incredibly active, engaged members. Quora users want to share their knowledge and interact with people who have the same interests as them, and the platform lets them do that, satisfying their need for human connection and relationship.

Quora reinforces this behavior by awarding credits (read: points) to users for participating in the community. Once users accrue enough points, they can use them to upvote a question so more people answer it or ask experts specific questions.

Instead of trying to encourage some new type of behavior through extrinsic rewards, Quora tries to understand why people come to their site in the first place so they can play to that motivation through gamification.

#2: Ecosia

Need: Purpose

After finishing university, Ecosia founder and CEO Christian Kroll traveled around the world to get ideas for a social enterprise. Christian spent time in Southeast Asia and South America, where he learned about deforestation and how it accelerates climate change.

Christian had already tried starting a nonprofit search engine in Nepal. He wanted to raise money for local NGOs, but the country’s unreliable electricity kept him from continuing the project. When he returned home to Germany, he pivoted his search engine idea to raise money for planting trees, and Ecosia was born.

Ecosia is a search engine that plants trees with profits generated from advertising revenue. Every time you perform a search on Ecosia, a tree counter in the top right corner of your screen updates. This shows you how many trees you’ve planted with your searches.

Using Ecosia makes doing good for the planet into a game of getting a higher tree count. The tree counter gives people a microdose of purpose while they perform a routine task. It may sound pie-in-the-sky, but Ecosia’s model works.

A recent blog post from the company’s COO announced their revenue nearly doubled from 2018 to 2019, allowing them to plant a tree every 0.8 seconds. To date, Ecosia has planted over 70 million trees with searches and has expanded its investments into solar power and permaculture projects.

#3: Toggl

Need: Autonomy

It’s human nature to try to control our surroundings, which is why autonomy is an important part of intrinsic motivation. But having control over even the basic habits of our lives, much less our entire environment, can be incredibly challenging, if not impossible.

This doesn’t stop us from seeking autonomy whenever we can. So it shouldn’t be surprising that granting employees more freedom in the workplace has been linked to several positive effects, including greater feelings of personal accomplishment and a reduction in emotional exhaustion.

At Toggl, an Estonian company that makes a handy time tracking product, ditching what CEO Alari Aho calls “Kindergarten Syndrome” is essential to helping workers be as happy and productive as they can be.

In an interview with Remote.co, Aho said, “If one’s daily routine is different and tasks do not require co-working with others, let the employee choose when and how they do their things. It’s about productivity, not hours spent in office Freedom of action combined with a lot of trust keeps away the ‘Kindergarten Syndrome,’ which would force managers to control and monitor many aspects of the team members’ lives. We don’t want to do that.”

Instead, Toggl uses a results-only work environment (ROWE). Taking this approach to culture and corporate organization means managers focus on measurable results, not traditional performance indicators such as hours clocked and days absent. Aho says Toggl tested this method out before taking the plunge, but since then they’ve seen improvements to employees’ happiness and productivity as well as the quality and diversity of talent Toggl hires.

Toggl’s ROWE approach doesn’t include any gamification, but it correctly targets intrinsic motivation.

#4: Duolingo

Need: Competence

Games and learning are inherently tied together. In fact, games can be optimal vehicles for learning. One of the reasons games (even educational ones) are so popular is that they combine the enjoyment of discovery with the natural desire to gain competency.

With this in mind, it’s no surprise that learning programs and applications — such as Lumosity, Khan Academy, and Coursera — are so prevalent. Using games to learn just makes sense.

The free language learning app Duolingo makes for an excellent example. In order to keep users engaged, Duolingo uses progress visualization (known as skill trees) to show users how far they’ve come after each lesson. As users complete lessons, they earn experience points which are used to unlock the next level.

Duolingo users also have four “lives,” which they lose each time they make a mistake in a course module. Lose all four and you have to start over.

Duolingo currently boasts some 300 million users and was named a Fast Company most innovative company for 2013, 2017, and 2018. Forbes also named Duolingo a next billion-dollar startup for 2019.

An aside for extrinsic rewards

Understanding intrinsic motivation should be the goal of every business. Finding out what makes your employees tick translates into a better, more fulfilling workplace culture. However, extrinsic rewards aren’t bad per se — they simply serve a different purpose.

As our understanding of what motivates humans improves, so does our understanding of how we should structure rewards, positive feedback, and other employee interactions. Seek out the intrinsic motivations of your employees and you’ll create a better platform for them to succeed.

Photo credit: OpenEye via photopin cc

Top Gamification Software Recommendations

The post 4 Real-World Examples That Explain Intrinsic Motivation appeared first on TechnologyAdvice.

Despite what you may have read from best practice pundits, lead generation is not easy. In fact, if we examine some statistics, we’ll see that generating leads is the biggest challenge for 63 percent of companies.

Consider the undertaking required to build and cultivate multiple lead sources: each channel requires its own strategy and continued optimization. While it’s more or less the ultimate goal for the demand generation department, it can be a painstaking, slow, and expensive process.

Consequently, building a holistic lead generation engine leaves many companies with fewer opportunities — at least in the short term. As evidence, BrightTALK found that supplying more leads was the top concern for 55 percent of B2B professionals — topped only by increasing the quality of leads.

via BrightTALK’s B2B Lead Generation Trend Report

When a majority of enterprises and nearly half of small businesses are turning to a particular service, it’s natural to ask: how does that actually work?

Although the amount of detail lead generation services give away in their branding varies, there are a few common denominators that most quality companies offer their clients. Here’s a breakdown.

1. Database marketing

Sheer reach is the primary value proposition that lead gen agencies offer to in-house marketing teams. Any agency worth your time will have massive databases of business and professional information. These information resources arm lead generation vendors with the means to target and personalize marketing campaigns on a level that’s simply out of reach for most in-house marketers.

As a result, lead gen agencies can customize campaigns they run for their clients using a relatively vast range of criteria, which translates into precise targeting.

Traditional inbound programs produce an amalgamation of opportunities and then use lead nurturing and other marketing techniques to obtain the information needed to identify leads who fit the right buyer personas. The databases lead gen providers have at their disposal expedite much of this information gathering and jump right to identifying which leads have buying intent.

How did these agencies obtain all of this information?

According to John Fedrick on Quora, lead generation services build their databases from a variety of sources, including social media marketing, email marketing, content marketing, and list acquisition.

2. Content syndication

So if the database does the targeting, then what actually makes people convert? This is where content syndication comes in.

If you’re unfamiliar with the term, content syndication is essentially pushing your content to other channels in order to increase brand awareness and drive traffic back to your own site.

Traditionally, this has been accomplished by taking posts that have already been published on your site and partnering with other blogs to get them to post the piece. RSS feeds are another common medium for syndication, but these are done with the hope that larger sites will find the content interesting and pick it up.

But even if you do get your content published on a partner site, there are still several degrees of separation between the blog post you’ve syndicated and the action you want visitors to take.

Also, you may be able to broadly ascertain the readership of the blog, but you’ll still need to put up sorting mechanisms (such as progressive profiling) to separate leads who will never meet your criteria from those that do.

Lead generation services may use some of the previously mentioned syndication techniques, but they’ll likely use email to disseminate your content throughout their gargantuan network. And each email campaign will be hyper-targeted — thanks to the powerful data infrastructure these organizations bring to bear.

Why do they use email? Because it’s still one of the most effective mediums for generating leads.

Via The 2020 Chief Marketer B2B Marketing Outlook Survey

3. Telemarketing

Yes, telemarketing. It may have a less than sterling reputation in the consumer market, but B2B telemarketing is usually viewed in a different light.

While consumer telemarketing is usually predicated on regional and demographic data, B2B telemarketing uses firmographic data to better target leads. In fact, an SCI survey of 200 department managers found that only four percent found sales calls at work to be annoying, compared to 35 percent who found telemarketing annoying outside of the work environment:

The difference in setting heavily influences the respondents’ perspectives. At work, department managers expect to field sales calls, and in some cases these calls may provide new product or industry information the manager wasn’t aware of.

This willingness to participate in sales calls is one of the reasons Marketing Charts ranked phone calls as the second-best way for B2B salespeople to reach prospects besides referrals.

The goal of telemarketing campaigns can vary, but the most common goal is to set appointments for conversations with your sales team. The scripts and processes associated with telemarketing programs are typically proprietary, so you’ll need to talk through the details of this strategy with your service provider.

4. Lead nurturing

The previous two strategies, telemarketing and content syndication, are both outbound strategies, but that’s not the only type of outsourced lead generation available. Certain lead generation vendors have inbound programs set up that nurture leads from the top of the funnel to toward the buying stages at the bottom.

Again, the details of lead nurturing programs are less clear, because agencies may use these programs as a means to develop leads to sell to their clients or they may simply do lead nurturing for their own internal purposes.

However, if you find a vendor who does offer this service to their clients, then you’d be wise to learn more about their product offering, because nurtured leads with detailed contact information are much more likely to convert than leads at the top of the funnel.

Of course, these four offerings only scratch the surface of what the outsourced lead generation market offers. However, they do supply you with a solid framework for understanding the types of services in which these organizations specialize. Make sure to develop standards for ROI and test the ability of a company to work within your specifications when choosing a vendor.

The post How Do Lead Generation Services Really Work? appeared first on TechnologyAdvice.

Ontraport vs. Infusionsoft is a comparison of two marketing platforms, but in between the feature face-off lies a commentary on the state of small business automation. Automation brings inherent complexities, but small businesses seem eager to use it for their sales and marketing operations.

ALSO READ: Hubspot vs. Pardot

Infusionsoft has been growing at a rapid pace for several years now. Ontraport is also establishing a foothold as a market leader. Their growth shouldn’t be a surprise. Automation is particularly well-suited for small business because it helps a small team eliminate manual tasks and streamline marketing and sales processes.

So, which of these systems is better for your growing business? This article will make the choice easier by comparing the two systems based on CRM, marketing automation, and e-commerce capabilities, as well as their pricing structure and integrations.

Marketing Automation

As digital marketing has evolved, the number of systems marketers use has proliferated. One of the main draws of systems like Infusionsoft and Ontraport is that they centralize the most important marketing functions and help you build automated processes based on certain actions your customers take.

Infusionsoft’s marketing automation functions all work out of the Campaign Builder, which lets users build sequences of events using drag-and-drop functionality and easy-to-understand symbols.

Infusionsoft’s Campaign Builder

Infusionsoft divides its automation into Traffic Sources, Goals, Sequences, and Notes, each of which have a set of options underneath. For example, Traffic Sources will have Facebook and Twitter, while Goals offers certain actions that someone takes, like filling out a form or clicking on an email.

Also Read: 3 Detailed Examples of Marketing Automation

By taking a visual approach to automation, Infusionsoft has created one of the most user-friendly systems on the market. It’s easy to keep track of what’s going on with each program and easy to make changes to program elements like landing pages or emails. Navigating to either of those modules only takes one click.

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Infusionsoft’s Landing Page Builder

Ontraport supplies comparable automation functionality, though it uses a more “traditional” approach. That means the construction of a process or campaign requires custom rules based on if/then logic. The text of these rules is listed in vertical form under one all-encompassing view.

This doesn’t mean Ontraport’s automation capabilities are less powerful than Infusionsoft’s, per se, but it does mean they’re more difficult to keep organized.

Ontraport’s landing page and email builder, on the other hand, are more user-friendly. Drag and drop functionality coupled with a large library of templates makes designing and deploying new emails or pages simple.

Ontraport’s Email Editor

If you can’t find the template you need in the default library, there’s always the Ontraport Market, where you can buy new templates or design your own and put them up for sale.

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Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

A CRM stores the contact information for potential and current customers. In the B2B world, sales teams use them to track the progress of complex sales, but they can also be used to house data from people who fill out forms on your website.

ALSO READ: How to Track Leads from Marketing to Sales

Both Infusionsoft and Ontraport have built-in CRMs. In both systems, the CRM module functions as the database that the marketing module pulls from during automated processes — like emailing everyone who made a purchase in the last six months.

Both CRMs include standard functionality for this type of software: default fields for collecting contact information, website activity, orders and account balances, and task management. Both CRMs also allow you to automatically distribute leads to your sales team as the contacts are entered into the database.

Ontraport’s CRM

Of course, each system does have its advantages.

Infusionsoft offers extensive sales pipeline and opportunity management features, which will be attractive to B2B organizations that manage a complex, multi-stage sales process.

Users can define their own sales stages, position them in the appropriate order, and run reports to see how long certain leads have been in a particular stage of the pipeline, how much revenue could be gained from deals in the pipeline, and so on.

Infusionsoft’s Opportunities Module

Infusionsoft’s CRM also includes a tagging system that assigns tags to incoming leads. This is very useful if you want to organize leads using custom criteria, like which product they’re interested in.

Ontraport lets administrators create custom objects in the CRM module, meaning you can create any kind of folder using any kind of fields to store information about your customers. In terms of CRM functionality, this is pretty impressive; there are numerous standalone CRMs that do not offer out-of-the-box custom objects.

You can also build custom reports inside of Ontraport, which makes it a breeze to assemble dashboards and track different metrics across sales and marketing.

Ontraport’s Report Dashboard

E-Commerce

The last major area to consider between these two systems is their ability to support online selling.

Both products support e-commerce functionality. Infusionsoft goes a bit further in this category by offering templates to help you build a complete online storefront. To its credit, Ontraport have a feature for building “members only” sites, which could be a strong selling point, depending on your business model. You’ll need a third-party integration to do the same thing with Infusionsoft.

Ontraport also offers a little more flexibility with coupon codes, but beyond that, both systems let you accept online payments, automate shipping, and perform other essential e-commerce actions.

Systems and Pricing

Infusionsoft offers its software in five subscription tiers: Essentials, Deluxe Sales Automation, Deluxe Ecommerce, Complete, and Team.

The Essentials package includes CRM and marketing automation, while the Deluxe subscriptions add either sales automation or ecommerce to the core feature set. Complete delivers all of Infusionsoft’s features, and Team builds on the Complete option by increasing number of users, contacts, and emails per month.

Ontraport divides its pricing into three levels: Basic, Pro, and Team. The Basic gets you the landing page and email builder, CRM, and marketing automation features. The Pro version grants you access to the full power of Ontraport, and the Team subscription increases the contacts, emails per month, and user limits.

Making Your Final Decision

Both Ontraport and Infusionsoft deliver a comprehensive set of marketing and sales automation features. Choosing between the two comes down to the details.

Infusionsoft is more expensive, but its campaign builder is exceptional. The ability to build and visualize automation programs is rare even when compared to larger automation tools. Infusionsoft also has formidable CRM and e-commerce modules, so its claim to be a true ,”all-in-one” automation platform is a strong one.

Ontraport may include less features as a whole, but the features it does include are more user-friendly than Infusionsoft’s. The email and landing page builder are as straightforward as it gets, and its CRM is equipped with a number of important features, notably custom objects.

If you’re still having trouble choosing between Infusionsoft vs. Ontraport or want to compare other marketing automation software, use our Product Selection Tool to get a shortlist of products that match your requirements.

Top CRM Software Recommendations

The post Ontraport vs. Infusionsoft: Small Business Sales and Marketing Automation appeared first on TechnologyAdvice.

Like their cousin, the article title, subject lines have been discussed ad nauseam in the marketing blogosphere — to the point where attempting to research the topic drowns you in a torrent of competing best practices.

This post is not the all-powerful-ultimate-marketing-secrets-guide to subject lines. It’s a story about how I achieved some dramatic results running a subject line experiment for TechnologyAdvice’s outbound email campaigns.

Given the importance of email for demand generation marketers, these results are something I wanted to share because I think they reveal an effective technique for creating subject lines.

When I analyzed the results of the experiment, one clear pattern emerged: people respond to headlines that show little to no marketing intent and instead vaguely preview the contents of the email.

Let me explain how I came to this conclusion and what I think it means.

The Catalyst

Like most B2B companies, email is a big part of our strategy at TechnologyAdvice. It’s part of our marketing mix at all stages of the customer journey, which means we’re using cold emails to bring people into our marketing funnel.

It’s easy to email people when they already know and like you. If brand loyalty is strong enough, just seeing the sender name can compel someone to open an email. But when people don’t know you, it’s substantially more difficult.

I was using lots of the best practices — value-focused words earlier in the subject line, mobile-optimized length, etc. — but the open rates were abysmal for almost every campaign targeting cold prospects.

I knew the content we had was relevant and that our value propositions were compelling, but I still couldn’t get people’s attention with our emails.

The Hypothesis

There’s a paradox regarding marketing email philosophy. Despite all the preaching about personalizing content and building a relationship with people, marketing emails almost never read like something a person would send another person — they read like something a marketer would send another person.

Marketing emails almost never read like something a person would send another person — they read like something a marketer would send another person.

I realized that everyone I was emailing knew I was a marketer. And because they didn’t know my company, this gave them a negative impression.

So, I began writing subject lines that didn’t sound at all like marketing. I shifted the focus from the value of the content to simply stating what the content was.

My theory was that people are so inundated with marketing messages that they’ve constructed mental filters to ward off unwanted marketing pitches and conserve their attention. The solution was an antithesis of the marketing best practices I read about across the internet.

Here are the tests I ran with this hypothesis in mind.

Test A

Control: Find your perfect software

Test: A Short Video

Context: This email was the first in a series targeted at engaging PPC leads who downloaded one of our buyer’s guides from a paid search ad but didn’t convert into a lead.

Results:

The test subject line produced a 115 percent increase in opens by promising less and plainly stating what to expect from the email. There was also an element of mystery involved in the test headline, which was a significant factor in why people opened the email.

Test B

Control: Join 4,000 B2B Companies

Test: Free product page for {{company}}

Context: This email was part of a campaign to convince people to sign their company up for a product page on TechnologyAdvice. The first email uses social proof to persuade people to open the email, while the second just states what the email was about.

Results:

Again, the test subject line is a recap of what’s inside the email. It’s not flashy — you might even say it’s boring. However, the added personalization from the merge field coupled with the allure of something free for your company conveys the offer inside the email without sounding too aggressive.

The percentage increase is more modest here (45 percent) than in Test A, but it’s still significant.

Test C

Control: Explore the TechnologyAdvice Library

Test: An Introduction

Context: This was the first email we sent to the audience segment that knew nothing about TechnologyAdvice. The test subject line implies that the sender is interested in making the recipient’s acquaintance, rather than beseeching them to read a piece of content.

Results:

These stats further reinforce the idea that people don’t want to be spoken to like prospects or members of a target market. What appeals to people in this sample of technology buyers is an understatement of what’s inside.

Also Read: Remember: B2B Leads Are People, Too

The subject line “An Introduction” gives little detail about the contents of the email (it even implies that the copy will be talking mainly about the sender), but it preserves the mystery that compels people to open emails.

The Implications

So why do people respond in greater numbers to copy that offers plain descriptions instead of value propositions?

I believe there are two reasons.

1. People are inundated with marketing

Most marketing is either poorly conceived or irrelevant, so people start ignoring it to preserve their sanity. This concept is similar to banner blindness, which explains why people ignore website elements that resemble ads.

There’s no good reason to think this wouldn’t happen with email. The fact that there are more than five million blog posts about subject line best practices is part of the problem. If email marketers collectively adopt the same techniques, then those techniques will become ineffective — just like the techniques used before them.

If email marketers collectively adopt the same techniques, then those techniques will become ineffective — just like the techniques used before them.

2. Short, descriptive subject lines build anticipation

Each of my test subject lines plainly communicated what to expect in the email while leaving room for curiosity. The most successful test, “A Short Video,” outlined the type of content someone would find in the email without providing any details of that content.

There was no teeth-grinding, neck-bulging declaration of value. This is similar to the email marketing strategy Loot Crate uses.

Loot Crate is one of several companies that more or less sells mystery in a box.

This works because people love being surprised. In fact, there’s a chemical in our brains called dopamine that anticipates surprises and rewards. It’s why people buy baseball cards, subscribe to Loot Crate, and mindlessly scroll through social media news feeds for hours.

An email subject line is an excellent medium for piquing someone’s curiosity. It’s all that most people see before they open an email, so if you add just the right amount of mystery, people will be intrigued. Hugely successful email newsletter companies such as the Morning Brew and the Hustle use the same strategy.

TechnologyAdvice can help.

Like I said, this technique isn’t the end-all-be-all of writing subject lines, but it is a tactic that helped me gain more engagement from marketing-wary cold prospects.

If you’re also struggling to get people’s attention, we can help you get in front of the people who want to hear from you. When you run a lead program through TechnologyAdvice, we guarantee to give you 100 percent accurate and up-to-date contact information for each lead, or we’ll replace it for free. We also provide you with free sales and nurture consultation at no additional charge.

Contact us today to get started, or visit our Partners page to learn more about our demand generation services.

The post Why I Stopped Following Subject Line Best Practices appeared first on TechnologyAdvice.

The foundations of persuasion were established in Greece thousands of years ago, and though many a young “content creator” may not know it, the principles Aristotle posited in the 4th century BC are still in use today.

Aristotle believed people could be persuaded using three rhetorical devices:

• Ethos — an appeal to the authority or credibility of the presenter (in this case the business)
• Logos — a logical appeal using facts and figures to support a claim
• Pathos — an appeal to the audience’s emotions

In modern times, marketers have gotten pretty good at using the first two devices. Ethos has taken the form of case studies and user reviews, and logos can be found in ROI calculators and feature comparisons.

Ethos in modern marketing

Pathos, however, has become remarkably rare, or at least ineffectual, in the B2B world.

Pathos has become remarkably rare, or at least ineffectual, in the B2B world.

The prevailing logic is that business people only need facts and figures to come to a conclusion. This ignores a great deal of research about how people make decisions.

Studies have found that as much as we’d like to think we make decisions based on data, we’re actually incapable of making decisions without emotional responses.

A lack of pathos (i.e., a lack of empathy) with the audience indicates an absence of understanding. And without understanding, it’s impossible to consistently persuade people to choose your brand over a competitor’s.

The Dilemma of Demand Generation and B2B Leads

The modus operandi of demand generation marketers is to increase conversion rates and hit lead generation numbers. As a result, we discuss our jobs in mechanical terms, like “driving traffic to landing pages” and “getting lists ready for email campaigns.”

We refer to the people we’re trying to persuade as “B2B leads.”

This language creates social distance, a scientific term that describes a cultural disparity between individuals and groups.

ALSO READ: The Art of Demand Generation vs The Science of Lead Generation

Tasked with improving numbers on a spreadsheet, marketers become divorced from their audience, and we delude ourselves into thinking we know what they want.

This is reflected in the flood of logos and ethos-backed marketing, while research consistently emphasizes the pervasiveness of emotions in our decision making — even in B2B buying groups.

Logos by the modern marketer

A message based purely on logic may make sense to the CEO, but it doesn’t resonate as deeply as a concerted call to people’s emotions.

This brings us back to the dilemma of the demand generation marketer.

Is demand generation the operational job of shoveling B2B leads to sales? Or is it a profession tasked with understanding the reasons why humans choose brand A over brand B and then using that understanding to turn the tide in your company’s favor?

The answer lies somewhere in the middle, but in its current state B2B demand is heavily skewed toward operations. This myopic focus on accumulating more B2B leads instead of discovering what motivates human beings is crippling demand generation (click to tweet).  

Rediscovering Empathy

If demand generation is flawed, how do we change it?

Begin by making the case for exploring the psyche of your customer. It’s actually a simple argument to make with a little bit of logos.

Customer experience can be the key differentiator among close competitors, and with its ever-expanding reach, marketing is the perfect repository of customer knowledge.

Marketing needs to know the most about customers because they control the most interactions with the audience (click to tweet). The better researched those interactions, the higher the chance of success.

Use Direct Quotes

Once you have leave to do some research, start by investing heavily in your personas. The quantitative side of personas can be useful, but it’s really the qualitative data you want. Direct quotes are excellent tools for encouraging empathy.

As we read someone’s honest feedback, it’s significantly easier to understand and identify with them. If you ask the right questions, there shouldn’t be much ambiguity in people’s responses. Ask them what you want to know, and they’ll tell you.

Appeal to Emotion

After you have direct quotes that attribute real emotions to your audience, you can use that information throughout the customer experience — from advertising campaigns that attract interest to the email campaigns that help grow that interest into intent.

Speaking to their audience on an emotional level is something Slack does brilliantly in their advertising. The company’s video spot doesn’t rely solely on logic to sell their product; instead, the campaign shows how cute animals (emotional cue) use Slack to work together and build an incredible product (emotional cue).

In this campaign, Slack appeals directly to the emotional needs of the audience. Everyone wants to accomplish something important at their job — to feel like they have meaning — so Slack positions their product as a gateway to achieving that feeling.

A narrower application of this strategy can also be found in the company’s banner ads. Instead of talking about features or pricing, Slack connects its product with a feeling.  

While advertising is an obvious outlet for pathos, empathy has a place in the operational aspects of marketing as well.

Every time you design a new email campaign, empathy plays a part. Marketing automation technology has given marketers an unprecedented ability to email their audience. But how closely the marketer empathizes with the recipients can affect how many messages are sent, how often they’re sent, and how useful they are.

Will the campaign be a “blast to a database of B2B leads,” or will it be a series of honest messages written for human beings?

It seems the former is more common, which is why nearly 45 percent of people wish businesses would email them less. It’s difficult to speak to someone on an emotional level when you’re blasting them three times a week with the same generic offer. 

*

Persuasion is a complicated art, and pathos isn’t the only way to successfully convince people. Aristotle identified three rhetorical devices, not just one. But marketers need to guard against losing touch with the powerful emotional cues that drive people to make decisions.  

The post Remember: B2B Leads Are People, Too appeared first on TechnologyAdvice.

• Productivity and efficiency are important, but the real measure of whether a tool such as CRM software succeeds or fails should be your company’s bottom line.
• Your CRM should benefit your customers by giving them better service and communication. In turn, this should benefit your organization through increased revenue, customer loyalty, and reduced costs.

Implementing a customer relationship management (CRM) product can be a precarious undertaking. Estimated failure rates for CRM implementation (defined as not meeting the business objectives of the project) are typically high. Which brings us to the first step in calculating the return on this software investment: set measurable, attainable business goals.

Without clear goals, it’s difficult to get a clear perspective on whether you’re making real progress or just substituting inefficiencies.

The CRM ROI Calculation

In the broadest sense, measuring return on investment can be boiled down to:

While simplistic, this calculation can work. The trouble is accurately measuring what constitutes a gain or cost from the investment.

Measuring Gain

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In order to measure gain, you’ll need to compare post-CRM metrics with pre-CRM metrics. In other words, you need to develop a baseline. This means you should be measuring how your business is performing before you implement a CRM. If you’re not doing that, you can still start now. Even though the sample size will be small, you’ll have a context against which to measure your team’s post-implementation performance.

There’s also a side benefit to calculating the ROI of your CRM we can’t ignore: just totalling up how much time/money/effort your teams spend on these processes might give you a little insight into where you can build in greater efficiencies within your processes now, before you even move to the CRM.

And now for the metrics. These are the factors you’ll want to consider when determining gain. To give all of these a common denominator, we have to view them in terms of revenue — which is where we’ll start.

1. Overall Revenue

This is the simplest and most important metric to measure. Compare your overall revenue from your measurement period before the CRM to the period when you’re using the CRM. Depending on the complexity of your product (which will control training costs) the first month with your new software may be best attributed as a sunk cost.

But hopefully not. Many cloud vendors are making training and implementation easier with every release.

Implementation of a new CRM can bring with it loads of changes in your processes, so the direct causal effect may not be fully attributed to the CRM software alone, but the correlation is pretty strong, so count it.

2. Revenue per Lead (RPL)

An increased RPL is all about information gathering. When you know more about your lead and can gather context before the touch, you’re more likely to make that lead feel known and give personalized attention. A CRM can provide you with the sales information for upselling, building trust, and increasing the value of each sale.

Tracking the revenue generated per lead can give you a great understanding of the lifetime value of your customer, as well as the efficiency of your marketing and sales tactics. It’s important to segment leads by their source so you can record all the details of your marketing efforts.

For example, perhaps your email marketing campaign generates a lot of leads, but the revenue you gain from these customers pales in comparison to what you gain from face-to-face personal selling. Your sales team then knows to focus more of their efforts on securing in-person meetings and upselling in those meetings.

Even if your organization doesn’t produce a ton of leads, but instead focuses on fewer customers with greater lifetime value, this measurement still holds up. You can tweak it slightly by measuring the success of your upselling attempts, and whether having a CRM increases the lifetime value of your customers. Be patient: it may take several months of data to understand whether the CRM has any effect on this metric.

3. Cost per Lead (CPL)

The most detailed metric yet, cost per lead assesses how much money you spend on acquiring new customers. This calculation takes into account the amount of hours spent acquiring a lead by both sales and marketing (and any other departments that contributed to the sale).

You’ll need to calculate the amount of time you spend creating the asset that converted a lead, such as a blog post, video, or social media. The source should determine the cost that you attribute to the lead, but the work that went in beforehand must be accounted for too.

Having a CRM can help reduce your cost per lead because these systems draw features from other software, like social media and email marketing, that can help sales teams convert more prospects with less effort and therefore less expense.

Compare your numbers from the pre-CRM age to the post-CRM time and look for a decrease in cost. Even if you don’t actually see a decrease, simply stabilizing your cost per lead can be seen as a victory.

Cost per lead doesn’t fit nicely into the classic ROI calculation, because the money you save per lead is already built into your overall revenue. However, calculating a cost per lead can be one of the most effective ways of measuring if you’re getting good value from your CRM.

Measuring Cost

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Your CRM ROI can be somewhat opaque but can be an easier measurement than gain. Subtracting the cost of the actual software is a natural starting place. In today’s market, a cost can refer to monthly subscription fees or one-time licensing fees. With these pricing models, measuring the total cost of ownership can often provide a clearer picture than looking at just upfront expenses. In addition to capital costs, you’ll also want to factor in training and any expected productivity loss during the implementation period.

Often, this number will be a rough estimate, and you’ll have to update it as you go along. The amount of training and length of implementation will certainly vary between products, which should also factor into any purchasing decision you make.

To recap how to measure the cost of investment:

• Measure the total cost of ownership rather than just subscription versus licensing fees
• This includes hardware fees, maintenance fees, and upgrade fees for the corresponding software
• Factor in productivity loss for training and implementation
• Set a consistent timespan to compare your estimate to actual expenses, such as 6 or 12 months.

On the Subject of Productivity

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In this context, productivity refers to your internal KPIs. These could be the number of phone calls made, the number of appointments set, and whatever other metrics you use to measure productivity on a day-to-day basis.

For example: track how much time your team spends in the tool logging contact information and using the features. Divide the time by the number of discrete tasks the team performs within the software. Hopefully, your team will complete more tasks in less time with your new CRM, although do account for the learning curve right after introducing the new tool. Most CRMs will provide this information to Admin users in reports.

Productivity is notoriously hard to accurately calculate because it’s difficult to prove what affects the quickness with which someone accomplishes a task. Additionally, CRMs may actually create more tasks for sales reps because of the increased amount of data entry. This might not necessarily translate into an increase in productivity.

Therefore, we don’t count productivity in the CRM ROI calculation, but it is something you should be developing an objective measurement for. Whether that measurement is task oriented or time-based is up to you and your specific business goals.

In the End, It’s About Cost

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Productivity and efficiency are important, but the real measure of whether a tool such as CRM software succeeds or fails should be your company’s bottom line. Qualitative features like productivity and even employee satisfaction can be tied to CRM usage, but not in an overtly quantitative fashion.

Your CRM should benefit your customers by giving them better service and communication. In turn, this should benefit your organization through increased revenue, sustained customer loyalty (if your business model prioritizes that), and reduced costs for generating new customers.

Decide a reasonable time period for recouping your initial investment, and measure before and after. There will always be externalities related to adopting new software, but focusing on revenue remains a sound business practice.

Looking for the latest in CRM solutions? Check out our CRM Software Buyer’s Guide.

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Photo credit 1: kenteegardin via photopin cc

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Not only does the Seattle-based company provide some of the best study material for SEO newcomers (and experts), but Moz also develops a suite of top-draw tools that have become integral to the actual work of search engine optimization.

ALSO READ: 5 Google Analytics Alternatives for Marketing

Having said that, there are a number of Moz alternatives worth considering if you’re in the market for SEO software. These products all feature some configuration of a standard SEO toolkit:  keyword research, link analysis, on-page keyword grading, and rank tracking.

Majestic

Majestic provides visibility into just about any kind of search data. Their software offers a suite of features for analyzing your (or your competitor’s) backlink profile, researching keyword opportunities, and tracking your keyword rankings.

They also claim to have one of the biggest link indexes in the world, which is useful because they update it several times a day. Search measurements are constantly changing, so having access to new data multiple times a day is invaluable for SEOs who need to monitor their rankings and link profiles.

Like Moz, Majestic has their own set of calculations for ranking domains and various types of links. Depending on how familiar you are with Moz’s standards, this could create a new learning curve, but that’s a small price to pay for the extra insight supplied by Majestic’s scoring system.

SEMrush

At one time, SEMrush was a free tool for calculating keyword difficulty and PPC prices that included paid tiers. The SEMrush of today is nearly unrecognizable. Instead of merely calculating keyword difficulty, the software now does everything from competitive domain analysis to reputation management.

SEMrush provides dashboards for keyword research and domain research. Called “overviews” these dashboards visualize data in a method reminiscent of Google Analytics. The domain overview delivers information about a website’s traffic, referring domains, paid search, and display advertising. The keyword overview gives you a closer look at keyword-specific metrics like difficulty, volume, and cost per click.

If you need to focus on a particular group of search metrics, you can build a custom report using drag-and-drop functionality.

There’s also a Projects feature, which lets you centralize data around one particular domain — great for agencies working with multiple clients or businesses that have more than one website to monitor.

Raven

Raven’s overriding purpose is to “end the pain of monthly reports.” To that end, the company has developed a platform of analytics and report-building tools aimed primarily at agencies that pass ongoing updates to clients.

You’ll find some powerful SEO tools included in the Raven platform. The software’s keyword research feature delivers metrics like global and local search volume, and global and local competition. Raven uses Moz, Adwords, Majestic, and OpenCalias as data sources, and each metric has a tag that identifies which source was used.

Raven’s also offers a site auditor that scans your domain and identifies changes you could make to either rank higher for certain keywords or structure your site in a more Google-friendly way. The site auditor is included in the marketing reports version of Raven, but it’s also available as a standalone option.

Ahrefs

Majestic claims to operate one of the largest link databases in the world, but Ahrefs claims to maintain the largest in the world — a database that contains over 15 trillion live links. This is important, because the larger a company’s database of links, the more closely they can monitor Google’s search results.

Ahrefs database is impressive in it’s own right, but it’s what the software does with all that data that should appeal most to SEO professionals. In nearly every aspect, Ahrefs supplies dependable data with a few important additions:

For example, the Site Explorer feature not only analyzes a domain’s organic traffic, but it also identifies which pages are the most popular on the site in terms of social shares and backlinks. Another example is Ahref’s Domain Comparison feature, which lets you compare up to five domains side by side based on their backlink profiles.

Because of its capabilities, Ahrefs should be considered an industrial-strength Moz alternative, which is great if your SEO projects are more expansive.  

Conductor Searchlight

Marketed as a “content intelligence platform,” Conductor Searchlight focuses on the intrinsic link between content marketing and organic SEO. From a purely SEO perspective, Conductor offers an array of features found in most of the other platforms, like domain analysis, keyword research, and page analysis.

What sets this platform apart is that it takes those search metrics and ties them back to revenue through content performance tracking. When you run keyword analysis, Conductor Searchlight lets you categorize what part of the customer journey any related content would address. 

You’ll also find an SEO ROI report that lets you model the return — in either traffic, leads, or even revenue — from investing in particular keywords. Click-through rate, on-page conversion, and relative keyword improvement are all inputs for this report, so it may take some work to structure it.

That same complexity applies to the entire Conductor Searchlight platform. This is a heavyweight product that blends content strategy and SEO, so if you’re focusing purely on links or paid traffic, this isn’t the best solution.

If you’re trying to tie inbound marketing to revenue, Conductor Searchlight is an excellent choice.

Screaming Frog

Yes, this is a real SEO platform, and no, searching “Screaming Frog” on Youtube is not specific enough to return relevant information . . . for obvious reasons. 

Screaming Frog is unique among the tools on this list for several reasons. First, it’s a scaled-back piece of software that essentially acts as a search “crawler” or “spider” used by Google to index websites. Screaming Frog is best used to find broken links, uncover duplicate content, and analyze page titles and meta data.

The second interesting thing about Screaming Frog is that it’s free to use as long as you don’t crawl more than 500 URLs. After that, you’ll need to upgrade to the paid tier called Howling Toad. Just kidding. It’s still called Screaming Frog.

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Moz deserves their reputation at the top of the SEO software list. Their content ranks among some of the most informative resources not just in SEO, but in the marketing industry as a whole.

However, this market is growing, and there are now a number of viable Moz alternatives to consider. They may not have the name recognition, but each of the products listed above can help you improve your rankings. 

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