How to Grow, and NOT, Grow Sales: SalesMemes 48 – Doing Good Can Pay

How to Grow, and NOT, Grow Sales: SalesMemes 43 – No, Really, It’s Your Fault

How to Grow, and NOT, Grow Sales: SalesMemes 47 Standing Out

Why Use Semantic Markup? Because Making Google Smarter Lets You Stand Out From the Competition

If you’re like most people, the standard markup language of the web-hypertext markup or HTML-is hard enough to learn and master. So the realization that there is a new, powerful kind of markup-semantic markup-gaining traction might make your eyes glaze over. This Growth Spurts blog post, however, will explain what semantic markup is and why you should very much care about, and start using it, now.
When you’re designing an HTML page, you are essentially telling a computer how to present or display your information: how many columns there are on the page, what font size, what words are italicized, and so on. So for example,

$9.99 is an instruction that tells the browser to italicize all the characters between the begin and end tags when it renders the page.

When you are using semantic markup on the other hand, you are telling a computer the meaning, or semantics, of your information, something ultimately much more powerful and valuable than simply how the info should display.

$9.99 is an instruction that tells a search engine like Google that the 5 characters between the begin and end tags should be definitively understood as the price of a specific product.

Without this markup, a search engine will likely use heuristics (i.e., using common formats or conventions to make educated guesses) to try to discern meaning, but this causes difficulty and errors when confronted with uncommon formats and ambiguous situations (e.g., $9, 00).

How is Semantic Markup Used Today?

Once the meaning of information is accurately known, there are nearly unlimited possibilities for how that may be constructively used by search engines. For example, if on Monday you ask Google the following question, it replies with a very appropriate, intelligent answer:

Notice that Google’s answer appears in a large font, right above the natural search results and below the ads-and this prominent placement, which very much draws your eye on the search result page, is completely free (unlike the pay-per-click ads).
The reason why Google can appear to respond so intelligently to this natural language question is because Sales Renewal has put the semantic ‘openingHours’ markup (from schema.org) on the Concord Flower Shop’s About page indicating to Google the meaning of the string of letters “Mo-Fr 9:00-17:30”

Hours:

 
Monday-Friday: 9:00 – 5:30

More competitive advantage from using semantic markup

Another real world example of the advantage you can gain from semantic markup involves e-commerce.
Another Sales Renewal client, MATsolutions, sells lab refurbished test & measurement equipment online. If you search for Agilent 53181A (a popular device manufactured by Agilent), the MATsolutions listing stands out as the only one that includes the price.
As in many other used markets, price is one of the first things prospects want to know and is an important buying criteria. And MATsolutions is the only firm conveniently supplying this info right on the search result page!

Now you might think you could put the price in the last two descriptive lines in the snippet, but Google builds these lines itself and you really don’t have any control of what Google places there. By semantically marking up the price on MATsolutions.com, you are guaranteed that Google will display price on its own, incremental line … which also results in the client’s snippet being a little bit bigger and a bit more noticeable than the rest.
And in case the above reasons haven’t convinced you of the advantages of semantic markup, a recent research report finds that helping Google understand your pages improves their rank: pages with semantic markup rank four positions better on average, compared to pages without semantic markup!
So do Google and yourself a favor: start using semantic markup to help Google get smarter and your snippets stand out from the crowd.

About the author: Keith Loris is currently the president and CEO of Sales Renewal but before he went over to the dark side of sales and marketing, he had lots of fun researching natural language understanding and neural networks, being awarded U.S. Patents 5, 642, 435, 5, 239, 593 and 4, 876, 731 along the way.

Client’s Collaboration with Sales Renewal Leads to New Strategies, Brand, Site, Marketing Programs and … a Blue Ribbon

It is generally rare for two different companies, let alone a client and its vendor, to work together so thoroughly, on so many levels, that the resulting whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

However, thanks to Sales Renewal’s revolutionary JointSourcing Solution (a unique hybrid combining elements of joint venturing with elements of outsourcing, in which shared risks and rewards align Sales Renewal’s economic incentives with those of its clients), such synergies are the norm.

If you’ve been wondering how JointSourcing and its three, Blueprint, Build and Sell steps actually works in practice, in the real world, this latest installment of our JointSourcing in Action Case Studies series is for you.

This issue provides a detailed, step-by-step view of how Sales Renewal partnered with our client MATsolutions to overcome their business, marketing and sales challenges to produce a marketing & sales system neither company could have developed as quickly or efficiently on its own. One result of the collaboration: MATsolutions receiving the prestigious Blue Ribbon Small Business of the Year for 2014 award from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

As Steve Wedler, VP Sales and Marketing, MATsolutions has said:

“Over the last year with Sales Renewal’s critical assistance, we’ve rebranded the company, launched a new e-commerce site and introduced marketing programs and supporting technologies that truly distinguish MATsolutions from its competitors. Having two highly dedicated and bright teams responsible for this transformation has allowed us to deliver something far superior than either team alone could have. This award is a great acknowledgement of the advances we have made.”

Read the JointSourcing in Action case study.

How to Grow, and NOT, Grow Sales: SalesMemes 13 – Friday the 13th Edition

Helping Google Understand the “Meaning” of Your Pages Improves Their Rank

A report from SearchMetrics finds pages with Schema.org markup rank an average of four positions higher compared to pages without semantic markup. Read it.

How to Grow, and NOT, Grow Sales: SalesMemes 41 – How to be a hero for $200

How to Grow, and NOT, Grow Sales: SalesMemes 39 – Teacher Stalking

4 Secrets to Making Project Management Work – The Magic Wand

Ahh, the perfect project management system.

It waves a magic wand and all your company’s tasks and projects are organized. It takes into account the availability of each member of the company and other resources needed. It lets everyone know what is due when, and can produce a schedule that is accurate to the day. Most important, it adapts to all the changes to strategy, project enhancements, client delays, new tasks, and new business that invariably make even the the most perfectly planned schedule obsolete before the weekend arrives.

Too good to be true? In a word, yes.

Sales Renewal recently invested in LiquidPlanner, a very powerful PM program, and, although we diligently tried to make it work for several months, its full potential was always just out of grasp. But then we had that “aha” moment, and things began to click.

Here are the four secrets we now know:

1 The schedule doesn’t update itself. Even though I might know when my task is complete, unless I check off “Done” next to that task, LiquidPlanner does not. This means it’s still waiting to schedule the next task.

2 New projects – or even tasks! – don’t add themselves. No project management system is a mind reader, so if there is a new task, or a new project, a human has to add it.

3 The program can only pester so much. Yellow warnings, red alerts, emails and on-screen notifications are all great for highlighting scheduling issues. But without a human in charge, that’s often all it is – a way to highlight a problem. Whether at the task, project, or sub-project level (and this can vary by project complexity!), a human has to take responsibility for using those warnings to follow up and get the project back on track.

4 The program has to accommodate multiple work styles. I may not always agree with how a particular project is structured, or how the tasks are broken down, but as long as basic structural guidelines are followed and tasks are assigned correctly, it is up to the person in charge of the project or task to set it up so it works for them.

Our Quest for the Perfect Project Management Program

When we were starting out, “project management” meant keeping a “to do” list with the tools we had on hand – mainly Outlook tasks, a spiral notebook, and occasional attempt at Microsoft Project. The work always got done, and done well, but nothing we tried seemed to be quite the right tool for guiding us through the process.

As our client list and company roster grew, it became clear that we needed a better way to maximize our efficiency and consolidate our hodgepodge of management tools. Our Director of Build Services took 23 online PM programs for a test drive before presenting her top 10 to the rest of us to take for a spin. Sales Renewal sales people, marketers, SEO experts, writers, and engineers tested the programs, and a clear winner – LiquidPlanner – emerged.

We invested time in setting up folders, tasks, appointments and tracking features for all our clients and projects. We watched the video how-tos and spent weekly meetings discussing structure and best practices. Then, because our work was all set up, we were good to go.

Well, not quite. Before the first day was done, the schedule was out of date.

The Magic Wand

We saw so much potential in LiquidPlanner and knew its magic wand capabilities were well within our grasp, so we were fully committed to making this work. Sure, there was internal resistance at the beginning, and many of us still use Outlook tasks, white boards, spiral notebooks and other ways to manage our own time. But since discovering and embracing the four “secrets”, we are now able to manage workloads, create realistic schedules and plan for future projects with relative ease.

We’d love to hear what works for managing your company’s projects and resources scheduling – let us know in the Comments below. In the meantime, gotta go check that “Done” box…