Responses by client
Ready pitches per client for queries created in the last 10 days.
When rising costs or market shifts squeeze margins, how do you decide whether to raise prices, change packaging, or hold steady to protect trust in your pricing? What is one decision rule or example that helped you make a pricing move customers accepted without hurting long-term value?
https://economistzone.com
Query
Submit to: https://connectively.us/experts/questions/costs-market-shifts-pricing-trust-margins
Variant 1
I'm Volen Vulkov, Co-Founder of Enhancv. Here's my response to you on Quora.
1. Quarterly experimentation as the non-negotiable 'decision rule'- and what's actually different in your business once you commit to this
If I could drill down to one decision rule when facing a margin-squeeze crisis, it would be setting an at-least-one-pricing-experiment quarterly cadence- rain or shine, even in the face of macro uncertainties. We forced ourselves to this after our ARPU flatten when our basic operating expenses were slowly increasing in the background. But instead of outright implementing an across-the-board price increase with the risk that we'd lose customers and trust, we rationally used this decision rule to test and iterate: new price points, packaging upsell additions, price localization for different regions.
The counterintuitive thing about this decision rule is how you can get great results, even from small, localized experiments. For us, our introduction of a region pricing model with localized currency and willingness to pay information increased our revenue per user by $10-14 in our tested areas just by changing the currency symbol and re-calibrating our package offerings. That's almost a 30% increase in line with Paddle's latest industry report. We didn't hide behind disingenuous rationalization either- we shared exactly why we implemented that pricing decision (rising costs in specific regions, better catering to local market with localized currency), and customers did not push back because they recognized our value add.
What would surprise you the most after you commit to this decision rule is that after revisiting our own and our clients' experimentation records, 'doing nothing' is almost never the decision path that increases the highest total margins, even in the face of macro uncertainties.
2. Stealing a page from value metric redefinition: how HubSpot's marketing product re-prices by the number of contacts to enable expansion and slash churn
A more advanced decision rule is re-defining your value metric (the core element of what you're charging for) in a way that enables your price to reflect the value you provide more realistically than your actual operational costs. For example, HubSpot's marketing tool is re-priced by the number of contacts you have instead of legacy 'seat'-based pricing because their experimentation showed that their customers associate the value they get from the product with the number of contacts they can market to and not how many people in the customer team are using the tool. The result of this decision rule is a revenue amount that perfectly tracks the actual usage of their product customers enjoy and a churn rate that is significantly lower because customers of all sizes now also perceive that their price scales with the perceived value they're reaping.
My overall advice. Don't treat your price as your security blanket in times of market turbulence. Make experimentation a decision rule per se and only ingrain value metric redefinition and region specific pricing options in your decision paths first before going down the dark path of trust-crushing across-the-board price hikes.
1. Quarterly experimentation as the non-negotiable 'decision rule'- and what's actually different in your business once you commit to this
If I could drill down to one decision rule when facing a margin-squeeze crisis, it would be setting an at-least-one-pricing-experiment quarterly cadence- rain or shine, even in the face of macro uncertainties. We forced ourselves to this after our ARPU flatten when our basic operating expenses were slowly increasing in the background. But instead of outright implementing an across-the-board price increase with the risk that we'd lose customers and trust, we rationally used this decision rule to test and iterate: new price points, packaging upsell additions, price localization for different regions.
The counterintuitive thing about this decision rule is how you can get great results, even from small, localized experiments. For us, our introduction of a region pricing model with localized currency and willingness to pay information increased our revenue per user by $10-14 in our tested areas just by changing the currency symbol and re-calibrating our package offerings. That's almost a 30% increase in line with Paddle's latest industry report. We didn't hide behind disingenuous rationalization either- we shared exactly why we implemented that pricing decision (rising costs in specific regions, better catering to local market with localized currency), and customers did not push back because they recognized our value add.
What would surprise you the most after you commit to this decision rule is that after revisiting our own and our clients' experimentation records, 'doing nothing' is almost never the decision path that increases the highest total margins, even in the face of macro uncertainties.
2. Stealing a page from value metric redefinition: how HubSpot's marketing product re-prices by the number of contacts to enable expansion and slash churn
A more advanced decision rule is re-defining your value metric (the core element of what you're charging for) in a way that enables your price to reflect the value you provide more realistically than your actual operational costs. For example, HubSpot's marketing tool is re-priced by the number of contacts you have instead of legacy 'seat'-based pricing because their experimentation showed that their customers associate the value they get from the product with the number of contacts they can market to and not how many people in the customer team are using the tool. The result of this decision rule is a revenue amount that perfectly tracks the actual usage of their product customers enjoy and a churn rate that is significantly lower because customers of all sizes now also perceive that their price scales with the perceived value they're reaping.
My overall advice. Don't treat your price as your security blanket in times of market turbulence. Make experimentation a decision rule per se and only ingrain value metric redefinition and region specific pricing options in your decision paths first before going down the dark path of trust-crushing across-the-board price hikes.
Variant 2
I'm Volen Vulkov, Co-Founder at Enhancv. Let me help you out with your story on how to preserve trust as you adjust prices due to cost of living adjustment.
The quarterly experimentation rule: don't raise prices in a vacuum, experiment in a localized and value-sensed way, then optimize.
Cost of living adjustments invariably lead to surging input costs, prompting the immediate response of price hikes. But in my field and experience as a guide to multiple resume platform growth and monetization strategies, my decision rule is simple: don't ever raise prices in a vacuum. Instead, go into price changes with a "never go a quarter without making a monetization experiment" discipline in order to optimize your price hikes and retain loyalty. By changing only one variable per experimentation cycle - add-on packaging, anchor price, or localizing price tags for example - and measuring not only immediate revenue uplift but also downstream churn rates, NPS, and average order values, you can ensure that you won't be hiking prices blindly and only to lose more downstream.
In fact, one of the first things you should actually experiment on is localizing price tags - perform no other varying than changing the actual prices in a different region, along with the currency you charge in. Because this is how we discovered an easy revenue-increasing lever that didn't cost us in loyalty. In our Eurozone market, merely changing the price we display from €39 to €44 led to a 13% Average Revenue Per User increase with no changes in cancellation patterns. In our Latin American markets as well, we stumbled onto the local pricing parity lever which we currently utilize to keep conversion rates safe from uprising cost passes. As the localization of our price tags prevents us from hiking package prices or anchor prices, we're protected from channel and brand abandonment. If anything, global monetization and pricing platforms like Paddle make this step more straightforward by enabling you to audit your impacts for country-by-country pricing experiments without relying on engineers.
The reminder to anchor price changes in the relevant value sensed by high-value customers, à la Hubspot the SaaS giant
Changing the value metric your pricing is based on can feel like a massive leap, especially when you're thinking about effectively passing through cost hikes in an economy with severe cost of living spikes. But as my experience with SaaS businesses that monetize resume building services has shown, value-metrics-based price hikes are among the most positive price changes users have encountered. We're reminded of how Hubspot's classic packaging pivot, which targeted net revenue expansion and churn reductions, succeeded in producing positive pricing for current users by changing their pricing from "seats" to "number of contacts". By tying the value metric to their capacity to manage more contacts, they effectively aligned user value with their pricing. Customers were happy because they were free to undersized their license if they only had a smaller number of contacts to manage. It also brought them more revenue from users that upsized because they had to manage more contacts. Churn was reduced because users who remained after price hikes were delighted to have a clean way to pay only for what they truly used and for what delivered them tangible value. I've learned that coupling add-on interview resume guarantees to bundles, for example, makes users easy to accept add-on price hikes because the higher price they pay is always matched by the higher value they experience, unlike when you increase the prices of subscriptions in an arbitrary increase.
TAKEAWAY: Apply the quarterly no-price-hike-without-localized-and-value-coupled-experiment rule before you hike prices. Experiment at least once quarterly. Also remember that the only thing your customers will really be able to accept a price change is if they clearly realize what you're charging them for holds their kinetic or observed value. This is mainly achieved by conducting country-level experiments to remain relevant in each locality and by finding the relevant value your high-value customers sense are placed in your packages in your price hike designs. This is how your price hikes will be justified as you defend your margins.
The quarterly experimentation rule: don't raise prices in a vacuum, experiment in a localized and value-sensed way, then optimize.
Cost of living adjustments invariably lead to surging input costs, prompting the immediate response of price hikes. But in my field and experience as a guide to multiple resume platform growth and monetization strategies, my decision rule is simple: don't ever raise prices in a vacuum. Instead, go into price changes with a "never go a quarter without making a monetization experiment" discipline in order to optimize your price hikes and retain loyalty. By changing only one variable per experimentation cycle - add-on packaging, anchor price, or localizing price tags for example - and measuring not only immediate revenue uplift but also downstream churn rates, NPS, and average order values, you can ensure that you won't be hiking prices blindly and only to lose more downstream.
In fact, one of the first things you should actually experiment on is localizing price tags - perform no other varying than changing the actual prices in a different region, along with the currency you charge in. Because this is how we discovered an easy revenue-increasing lever that didn't cost us in loyalty. In our Eurozone market, merely changing the price we display from €39 to €44 led to a 13% Average Revenue Per User increase with no changes in cancellation patterns. In our Latin American markets as well, we stumbled onto the local pricing parity lever which we currently utilize to keep conversion rates safe from uprising cost passes. As the localization of our price tags prevents us from hiking package prices or anchor prices, we're protected from channel and brand abandonment. If anything, global monetization and pricing platforms like Paddle make this step more straightforward by enabling you to audit your impacts for country-by-country pricing experiments without relying on engineers.
The reminder to anchor price changes in the relevant value sensed by high-value customers, à la Hubspot the SaaS giant
Changing the value metric your pricing is based on can feel like a massive leap, especially when you're thinking about effectively passing through cost hikes in an economy with severe cost of living spikes. But as my experience with SaaS businesses that monetize resume building services has shown, value-metrics-based price hikes are among the most positive price changes users have encountered. We're reminded of how Hubspot's classic packaging pivot, which targeted net revenue expansion and churn reductions, succeeded in producing positive pricing for current users by changing their pricing from "seats" to "number of contacts". By tying the value metric to their capacity to manage more contacts, they effectively aligned user value with their pricing. Customers were happy because they were free to undersized their license if they only had a smaller number of contacts to manage. It also brought them more revenue from users that upsized because they had to manage more contacts. Churn was reduced because users who remained after price hikes were delighted to have a clean way to pay only for what they truly used and for what delivered them tangible value. I've learned that coupling add-on interview resume guarantees to bundles, for example, makes users easy to accept add-on price hikes because the higher price they pay is always matched by the higher value they experience, unlike when you increase the prices of subscriptions in an arbitrary increase.
TAKEAWAY: Apply the quarterly no-price-hike-without-localized-and-value-coupled-experiment rule before you hike prices. Experiment at least once quarterly. Also remember that the only thing your customers will really be able to accept a price change is if they clearly realize what you're charging them for holds their kinetic or observed value. This is mainly achieved by conducting country-level experiments to remain relevant in each locality and by finding the relevant value your high-value customers sense are placed in your packages in your price hike designs. This is how your price hikes will be justified as you defend your margins.
When a key goal depends on another team's deliverables and their timeline slips, how do you decide when to escalate versus renegotiate your plan? What is one step you took that unblocked the dependency while preserving a good working relationship?
https://goalsetting.co
Query
Submit to: https://connectively.us/experts/questions/escalate-or-renegotiate-dependency-delay-unblock-relationship
Variant 1
I'm Volen Vulkov, co-founder at Enhancv. Here are my thoughts on differentiating when to escalate vs keep renegotiating and a real-world play on unlocking a dependency you're waiting on while preserving strong team relationships.
1. Set escalation triggers to keep the decision objective, not emotional
The best method I have for differentiating when to escalate vs keep renegotiating is to set escalation triggers well before the project is even at risk of delayed dependent deliverables. For a major cross-functional launch, for instance, I make sure the runbook has two specific triggers around the delay of dependent deliverables on the critical path: (a) If there is a relevant deliverable still blocked 3 business days after we raised an issue team-to-team, escalate the conflict to the program manager; (b) If the delay impacts the launch by even 1 day or threatens our customer commitments, escalate the conflict to executive leadership immediately.
These triggers easily take the decision to escalate out of the realm of personality and/or emotions. We've removed the assumption-based passive waiting and replaced it with a more timely and tactical approach. We also removed the perception of throwing someone under the bus because the triggers are predetermined and not arbitrarily decided at the moment. When we stuck to the triggers in our last redesign project, we avoided a 2-week slip and improved our response by 40%. We are not alone in these findings as Atlassian data shows that teams that set escalation triggers ahead of time resolved incidents an average of 35% faster.
2. Low-cost token of concessions to build trust: the "gift first" play
Whenever I fear that delays may lead to toxic cross-team relationships, one desperation step that unblocked us more than once is giving the "no-strings concession" or a low-cost token of concession to the other team - a small but interesting concession for the other team, with the explicit no-strings request for something in return statement (to signify no hidden agendas) - without any ask in return initially or not at least immediately.
In our joint product launch scenario, our timeline was at serious risk due to a key unlocked dependency. Instead of sending a flurry of emails to escalate the conflict, I offered to send our designer to work on their highly overdue high-value feature. This costs us a half-day while they save almost a full week. We made sure to communicate to them that the low-cost concession was done with no strings attached as it was part of our trust-building measures to improve our relationship with them.
The gift first principle exceled here because we remain on track and it resulted in long-lasting trust between our teams that lasted until the end of the year. Both teams now proactively send help requests to each other first before negotiating or escalating. This is also a highly replicable play anyone can leverage in their scenarios with just a bit of out-of-the-box thinking: identifying a low-cost but high-value concession for the other team and communicating it as a trust-building measure as opposed to a high-intent re-negotiation or escalation. The rest of the relationship-building goodwill is worth more than the re-negotiations or escalations can ever be.
1. Set escalation triggers to keep the decision objective, not emotional
The best method I have for differentiating when to escalate vs keep renegotiating is to set escalation triggers well before the project is even at risk of delayed dependent deliverables. For a major cross-functional launch, for instance, I make sure the runbook has two specific triggers around the delay of dependent deliverables on the critical path: (a) If there is a relevant deliverable still blocked 3 business days after we raised an issue team-to-team, escalate the conflict to the program manager; (b) If the delay impacts the launch by even 1 day or threatens our customer commitments, escalate the conflict to executive leadership immediately.
These triggers easily take the decision to escalate out of the realm of personality and/or emotions. We've removed the assumption-based passive waiting and replaced it with a more timely and tactical approach. We also removed the perception of throwing someone under the bus because the triggers are predetermined and not arbitrarily decided at the moment. When we stuck to the triggers in our last redesign project, we avoided a 2-week slip and improved our response by 40%. We are not alone in these findings as Atlassian data shows that teams that set escalation triggers ahead of time resolved incidents an average of 35% faster.
2. Low-cost token of concessions to build trust: the "gift first" play
Whenever I fear that delays may lead to toxic cross-team relationships, one desperation step that unblocked us more than once is giving the "no-strings concession" or a low-cost token of concession to the other team - a small but interesting concession for the other team, with the explicit no-strings request for something in return statement (to signify no hidden agendas) - without any ask in return initially or not at least immediately.
In our joint product launch scenario, our timeline was at serious risk due to a key unlocked dependency. Instead of sending a flurry of emails to escalate the conflict, I offered to send our designer to work on their highly overdue high-value feature. This costs us a half-day while they save almost a full week. We made sure to communicate to them that the low-cost concession was done with no strings attached as it was part of our trust-building measures to improve our relationship with them.
The gift first principle exceled here because we remain on track and it resulted in long-lasting trust between our teams that lasted until the end of the year. Both teams now proactively send help requests to each other first before negotiating or escalating. This is also a highly replicable play anyone can leverage in their scenarios with just a bit of out-of-the-box thinking: identifying a low-cost but high-value concession for the other team and communicating it as a trust-building measure as opposed to a high-intent re-negotiation or escalation. The rest of the relationship-building goodwill is worth more than the re-negotiations or escalations can ever be.
Variant 2
I'm Volen Vulkov, Co-Founder at Enhancv. Here's my insight on how to unblock critical inter-team dependencies without killing collaboration or losing momentum.
1. Rely on concrete triggers - not gut feelings - to determine whether to escalate
The biggest trap of working on cross-team projects is allowing instinct to guide you on when a slipped dependency warrants escalation. This will cement ambiguity and risk on the situation. The only way we escape this mess is by entrenching escalation triggers into our playbooks. For example: if A slipped dependency isn’t resolved after 3 business days or it's too risky because it directly impacts a delivery critical path, escalation must be done with no room for debate or “let’s wait for another day to see if it gets resolved.†As soon as one or both criteria reach their limits, the dependency owner alerts all corresponding stakeholders of the slipped dependency and initiates a level 2 (usually, program manager) escalation. During one of our SaaS launches, a 5-day delay was resolved in less than 24 hours because a) everyone knows on the trigger and b everyone’s relied on the trigger to action the escalation. Thanks to this, we saved ourselves from any embarrassing “why did you escalate at that time, not now?†and instead garnered “great call, timely escalations like this save us budgets.†comments from leadership. When you foster a culture that treats escalation not as a project management failure but as timely risk containment, teams become more conscious of when to pull the trigger. Plus, project velocity is safeguarded.
2. Provide a no-strings concession first offer to build trust and break the impasse
This is a bit counterintuitive but I've learned that the better alternative to offering something as a trade chip is to present it as a duh concession - no strings attached. Back when we were at the risk of being derailed from delivering our product on time due to unmet analytical dependencies, the analytics team was reported to be handling several other urgent requests as well. Luckily, our engineers had already created several reporting templates the analytics team can simply modify on-demand. I ended up making it seem like its a case of goodwill on our end to them sabotaging any first-offer negotiation attempt they may have had in mind. Essentially, the entire gesture was documented as a gesture of thanks from the records. That one simple concession we made against them really flipped the script of the interaction. The analytics team reacted by expediting our deliverable without booking any hard request or imposition against us.
As we learned, a single, well-defined trade chip based on a solid no-strings concession allows both teams to move together by breaking through a bottleneck first and simultaneously creating of joint momentum. What's best is that this also nurtures a healthy cross-team relationship to ensure cooperation on future projects in the pipeline.
Both these tactics have become project management strike essentials to our operation in Enhancv. When you make escalation objective and no-strings first-offer concessions readily visible to all teams to cultivate trust, you'll keep cross-team frictions low while maintaining delivery targets.
1. Rely on concrete triggers - not gut feelings - to determine whether to escalate
The biggest trap of working on cross-team projects is allowing instinct to guide you on when a slipped dependency warrants escalation. This will cement ambiguity and risk on the situation. The only way we escape this mess is by entrenching escalation triggers into our playbooks. For example: if A slipped dependency isn’t resolved after 3 business days or it's too risky because it directly impacts a delivery critical path, escalation must be done with no room for debate or “let’s wait for another day to see if it gets resolved.†As soon as one or both criteria reach their limits, the dependency owner alerts all corresponding stakeholders of the slipped dependency and initiates a level 2 (usually, program manager) escalation. During one of our SaaS launches, a 5-day delay was resolved in less than 24 hours because a) everyone knows on the trigger and b everyone’s relied on the trigger to action the escalation. Thanks to this, we saved ourselves from any embarrassing “why did you escalate at that time, not now?†and instead garnered “great call, timely escalations like this save us budgets.†comments from leadership. When you foster a culture that treats escalation not as a project management failure but as timely risk containment, teams become more conscious of when to pull the trigger. Plus, project velocity is safeguarded.
2. Provide a no-strings concession first offer to build trust and break the impasse
This is a bit counterintuitive but I've learned that the better alternative to offering something as a trade chip is to present it as a duh concession - no strings attached. Back when we were at the risk of being derailed from delivering our product on time due to unmet analytical dependencies, the analytics team was reported to be handling several other urgent requests as well. Luckily, our engineers had already created several reporting templates the analytics team can simply modify on-demand. I ended up making it seem like its a case of goodwill on our end to them sabotaging any first-offer negotiation attempt they may have had in mind. Essentially, the entire gesture was documented as a gesture of thanks from the records. That one simple concession we made against them really flipped the script of the interaction. The analytics team reacted by expediting our deliverable without booking any hard request or imposition against us.
As we learned, a single, well-defined trade chip based on a solid no-strings concession allows both teams to move together by breaking through a bottleneck first and simultaneously creating of joint momentum. What's best is that this also nurtures a healthy cross-team relationship to ensure cooperation on future projects in the pipeline.
Both these tactics have become project management strike essentials to our operation in Enhancv. When you make escalation objective and no-strings first-offer concessions readily visible to all teams to cultivate trust, you'll keep cross-team frictions low while maintaining delivery targets.
From your experience managing teams or receiving feedback yourself, what separates feedback that actually changes behavior from feedback that gets acknowledged and then forgotten? What has made the biggest difference in how effectively feedback lands, whether that's frequency, specificity, timing, or how it's paired with recognition?
https://sopriza.com
Query
Submit to: https://connectively.us/experts/questions/feedback-that-changes-behavior-frequency-timing-recognition
Variant 1
I'm Volen Vulkov, Co-Founder at Enhancv. Here's how I've seen feedback turn from an empty ritual to a true lever for transformation, both in my leadership experiences and as a coach for thousands of jobseekers and professionals at Enhancv.
1. The secret ingredient: designing the feedback for high-risk, not just high-motivation moments.The best feedback is not just about the "what?" or even the "why?". It's about the "when?". When the new behavior is most vulnerable to failure and how to survive that moment. For example, in my coaching experience, I've learned the classic formula of feedback can be great in theory but crumble when given to someone under stress or out of their regular context. The when matters because that's when the learned behavior falls down automatically, as it's the path that requires the least mental effort and self-control. Therefore, the unique value of feedback comes from explicitly telling the recipient what to do in those real-life pressure points. Designing a specific response for the worst day scenarios to keep them on the new behavior and out of the old one. An example from coaching. I gave a running feedback for 1) be less irrationally reactive and 2) be more professional for a client who was habitually lashing out against negative emails received after 6pm. But the problem with this feedback was that it faltered for this client when this "high-pressure moment" occurs. So instead of the original feedback, I suggested we design a new one with built-in guidance on worst day scenarios. Since this client could be sending irrational emails about 5 times a week after 6pm, we can design a detailed "pause and cool down feedback" that he can implement immediately, regardless of his pre-existing level of self-control. The result was a new behavior (taking a 5-minute walk before replying to any email during a stressful period) that the client resorted to when receiving negative emails after 6pm physically because it's built into the feedback. This resulted in 50% less emotional outbursts and higher scores on professionalism from the agreed Client Rating System.
This manifestation is true for teams, too. After developing this mindset, I've built stronger and safer commitments with my own teams by asking, "What happens on your worst day, not your best?" In our teams at Enhancv, those that developed a fallback plan for their crunch time (a call to action) after hot discussions deliver stronger results. In addition to more consistent completion of the new habits, they also made faster recoveries after failure. This reminds me of what The Behavioral Science & Policy Association discovered. Sustaining change operates on the "tipping point" that it's not about having a lot of willpower when implementing new behaviors but more on having a good plan on how to recover after failure and creating a nurturing environment to minimize failure.
2. Temporary behavior or identity shift? Make your feedback design tip towards the latter.Feedback is more potent when it helps the recipient imagine "who they are becoming" and not just "what they have to do." When I was a new leader, I had the epiphany that the people I've given the most lasting behavioral shifts for were the ones that I gave a slightly altered conventional feedback for. Instead of reinforcing the habit of meeting deadlines, I asked "what have you done today or this week that a person who was on top of their deadline would do?" This helped me track the tiny and seemingly inconsequential behavior that my coachee needs to make to build the new habit of meeting deadlines. Miniature commitments may not seem as advanced as the more significant commitments of accurately meeting deadlines guaranteed, but they serve another purpose: to help the recipient imagine their updated identity.
This made a difference between seeing the dated behavior as a negative or the new behavior as a positive for the recipient. For example, unchanged behavior is a negative for a person who's told by their boss that they have to meet their deadlines. At the same time, changed behavior is a necessary positive for the same person if they are the ones who want to meet their deadlines. Therefore, the new identity they build by designing their feedback is critical to ensuring they won't slip into their old behavior while under pressure. The changes they made are no longer "I did so because I was told to do it," but "I did so because it fits my new being."
The secret takeaway from this response: feedback is a powerful tool for lasting change, especially if we pre-design the recipients' What Ifs and How to push them towards building the new identity of their goals. Want to create priceless feedback? Design it in the real, don't forget this part.
1. The secret ingredient: designing the feedback for high-risk, not just high-motivation moments.The best feedback is not just about the "what?" or even the "why?". It's about the "when?". When the new behavior is most vulnerable to failure and how to survive that moment. For example, in my coaching experience, I've learned the classic formula of feedback can be great in theory but crumble when given to someone under stress or out of their regular context. The when matters because that's when the learned behavior falls down automatically, as it's the path that requires the least mental effort and self-control. Therefore, the unique value of feedback comes from explicitly telling the recipient what to do in those real-life pressure points. Designing a specific response for the worst day scenarios to keep them on the new behavior and out of the old one. An example from coaching. I gave a running feedback for 1) be less irrationally reactive and 2) be more professional for a client who was habitually lashing out against negative emails received after 6pm. But the problem with this feedback was that it faltered for this client when this "high-pressure moment" occurs. So instead of the original feedback, I suggested we design a new one with built-in guidance on worst day scenarios. Since this client could be sending irrational emails about 5 times a week after 6pm, we can design a detailed "pause and cool down feedback" that he can implement immediately, regardless of his pre-existing level of self-control. The result was a new behavior (taking a 5-minute walk before replying to any email during a stressful period) that the client resorted to when receiving negative emails after 6pm physically because it's built into the feedback. This resulted in 50% less emotional outbursts and higher scores on professionalism from the agreed Client Rating System.
This manifestation is true for teams, too. After developing this mindset, I've built stronger and safer commitments with my own teams by asking, "What happens on your worst day, not your best?" In our teams at Enhancv, those that developed a fallback plan for their crunch time (a call to action) after hot discussions deliver stronger results. In addition to more consistent completion of the new habits, they also made faster recoveries after failure. This reminds me of what The Behavioral Science & Policy Association discovered. Sustaining change operates on the "tipping point" that it's not about having a lot of willpower when implementing new behaviors but more on having a good plan on how to recover after failure and creating a nurturing environment to minimize failure.
2. Temporary behavior or identity shift? Make your feedback design tip towards the latter.Feedback is more potent when it helps the recipient imagine "who they are becoming" and not just "what they have to do." When I was a new leader, I had the epiphany that the people I've given the most lasting behavioral shifts for were the ones that I gave a slightly altered conventional feedback for. Instead of reinforcing the habit of meeting deadlines, I asked "what have you done today or this week that a person who was on top of their deadline would do?" This helped me track the tiny and seemingly inconsequential behavior that my coachee needs to make to build the new habit of meeting deadlines. Miniature commitments may not seem as advanced as the more significant commitments of accurately meeting deadlines guaranteed, but they serve another purpose: to help the recipient imagine their updated identity.
This made a difference between seeing the dated behavior as a negative or the new behavior as a positive for the recipient. For example, unchanged behavior is a negative for a person who's told by their boss that they have to meet their deadlines. At the same time, changed behavior is a necessary positive for the same person if they are the ones who want to meet their deadlines. Therefore, the new identity they build by designing their feedback is critical to ensuring they won't slip into their old behavior while under pressure. The changes they made are no longer "I did so because I was told to do it," but "I did so because it fits my new being."
The secret takeaway from this response: feedback is a powerful tool for lasting change, especially if we pre-design the recipients' What Ifs and How to push them towards building the new identity of their goals. Want to create priceless feedback? Design it in the real, don't forget this part.
Variant 2
I'm Volen Vulkov, co-founder at Enhancv. Let me share my insights on what separates feedback that sticks and changes behavior from just any other feedback that gets a polite "thank you" and then forgotten.
Feedback that sticks after stressful "real-life" moments
The biggest surprise I got from helping thousands of job seekers and coaching teams was how rare it is for feedback to stick after stressful "real-life" moments, when people are tired, stressed, or triggered, and when friction ensues. We often create feedback for an employee's ideal self - the one who reads it on a not-so-busy workday. We don't design it for their tired, overwhelmed, triggered selves.
One of the most game-changing things we implemented in our approach was purposely drawing a map for "high-risk moments" or times when people are most susceptible to gravitating back toward old habits. With one team, I witnessed three different attempts go wasted as each person failed to stick to a new feedback/change in behaviour protocol after stressful product sprints. It didn't work for the mere existence of deeper and more specific feedback, but the addition of a "fallback protocol" to the existing feedback protocol itself - in this case, we added a 3-minute pause/reset rule to every post-crisis debrief in order to prevent further frictions from catalyzing negative outcomes. During peak stress, the team physically and digitally has to follow a universal "pause and walk" protocol before they can reply, drawing their attention away from reactive triggers and giving their brain space for reflection. Before the protocol, feedback follow-through rate during post-crisis now-tough days was below 20%. After the protocol, 45%+ is consistently maintained.
Succinctly, the actionable insight I want managers to take away is this: Always ask yourself, "what will my team member do on their worst-real-world-day instead of their best-imagined-one?" When designing a feedback/change behaviour strategy, ensure you "account for it" - incorporate (email) responses for those high-risk states of being, such as tired during late evening work, post-trigger from a difficult meeting, in a rush during tight deadlines, and so on. Insert recovery/restart protocols into the loop, which in our case was as simple as "pause, walk, and reset." The effectiveness of this strategy is not measured by consistent hitting; instead, it is measured by how quickly the person gets up after failing to hit.
Connecting feedback to identity, beyond actions and tasks
The second surprise that I learned from my interactions is that the feedback has to not only change actions and tasks; it needs to change the person's own identity for it to stick. When we change behaviour as an output of the feedback, we change actions, and technical tasks. When we make the feedback stickier by connecting it to the person's surfacing core self, we change the individual's identity. We can position the change behaviour generated by the feedback as the identity of a person growing in skill and experience, thus giving them an incentive to stick to it.
If the feedback is tackled from this angle, the individual will take the feedback and stick to it because they have to. A feedback such as, "here is where you led like a professional who takes ownership of outcomes even under difficult conditions," implies that the individual is answering as a person who has this skill - they have this identity in practical execution. If the person's identity is that of a professional who knows how to lead, landing this change of behaviour will be easier for them. The feedback won't feel like a boring afterthought task, but an expression of self.
In practice, we've seen a huge difference in convincing late adaptors to stand in and champion a new technique once we filter the identity of the wanted change behaviour. We combine this with follow-ups to ensure the person actually sticks to the wanted change behaviour. Theoretical backing for this exists as well, such as in the new england journal of medicine in 2023.
As for what functionally can be done - This mainly involves tracking evidence. Remember that identity is an inner concept, so you have to prove that the person possesses this. Tracking involves asking data mining questions like, "what did you do this week that a consistent person would've done?," or, "when did you act like a person who values X?" during your follow-ups and other checkpoints.
To summarize my thoughts into actionable advice for managers: make your feedback stick by changing your person's inner conceptual identity associated with the feedback's targeted change behaviour. Ground your feedback's change behaviour not only in short-term goals but also in the person's surfacing career identity narrative, so your change behaviour won't fall off after the first week of roll-out.
Feedback that sticks to the first surprise's high-risk moment map and the person's surfacing core teacher identity is the feedback that survives and compounds to real and lasting change not attributable to the feedback process.
Feedback that sticks after stressful "real-life" moments
The biggest surprise I got from helping thousands of job seekers and coaching teams was how rare it is for feedback to stick after stressful "real-life" moments, when people are tired, stressed, or triggered, and when friction ensues. We often create feedback for an employee's ideal self - the one who reads it on a not-so-busy workday. We don't design it for their tired, overwhelmed, triggered selves.
One of the most game-changing things we implemented in our approach was purposely drawing a map for "high-risk moments" or times when people are most susceptible to gravitating back toward old habits. With one team, I witnessed three different attempts go wasted as each person failed to stick to a new feedback/change in behaviour protocol after stressful product sprints. It didn't work for the mere existence of deeper and more specific feedback, but the addition of a "fallback protocol" to the existing feedback protocol itself - in this case, we added a 3-minute pause/reset rule to every post-crisis debrief in order to prevent further frictions from catalyzing negative outcomes. During peak stress, the team physically and digitally has to follow a universal "pause and walk" protocol before they can reply, drawing their attention away from reactive triggers and giving their brain space for reflection. Before the protocol, feedback follow-through rate during post-crisis now-tough days was below 20%. After the protocol, 45%+ is consistently maintained.
Succinctly, the actionable insight I want managers to take away is this: Always ask yourself, "what will my team member do on their worst-real-world-day instead of their best-imagined-one?" When designing a feedback/change behaviour strategy, ensure you "account for it" - incorporate (email) responses for those high-risk states of being, such as tired during late evening work, post-trigger from a difficult meeting, in a rush during tight deadlines, and so on. Insert recovery/restart protocols into the loop, which in our case was as simple as "pause, walk, and reset." The effectiveness of this strategy is not measured by consistent hitting; instead, it is measured by how quickly the person gets up after failing to hit.
Connecting feedback to identity, beyond actions and tasks
The second surprise that I learned from my interactions is that the feedback has to not only change actions and tasks; it needs to change the person's own identity for it to stick. When we change behaviour as an output of the feedback, we change actions, and technical tasks. When we make the feedback stickier by connecting it to the person's surfacing core self, we change the individual's identity. We can position the change behaviour generated by the feedback as the identity of a person growing in skill and experience, thus giving them an incentive to stick to it.
If the feedback is tackled from this angle, the individual will take the feedback and stick to it because they have to. A feedback such as, "here is where you led like a professional who takes ownership of outcomes even under difficult conditions," implies that the individual is answering as a person who has this skill - they have this identity in practical execution. If the person's identity is that of a professional who knows how to lead, landing this change of behaviour will be easier for them. The feedback won't feel like a boring afterthought task, but an expression of self.
In practice, we've seen a huge difference in convincing late adaptors to stand in and champion a new technique once we filter the identity of the wanted change behaviour. We combine this with follow-ups to ensure the person actually sticks to the wanted change behaviour. Theoretical backing for this exists as well, such as in the new england journal of medicine in 2023.
As for what functionally can be done - This mainly involves tracking evidence. Remember that identity is an inner concept, so you have to prove that the person possesses this. Tracking involves asking data mining questions like, "what did you do this week that a consistent person would've done?," or, "when did you act like a person who values X?" during your follow-ups and other checkpoints.
To summarize my thoughts into actionable advice for managers: make your feedback stick by changing your person's inner conceptual identity associated with the feedback's targeted change behaviour. Ground your feedback's change behaviour not only in short-term goals but also in the person's surfacing career identity narrative, so your change behaviour won't fall off after the first week of roll-out.
Feedback that sticks to the first surprise's high-risk moment map and the person's surfacing core teacher identity is the feedback that survives and compounds to real and lasting change not attributable to the feedback process.
Name one way how AI has personally improved your overall lifestyle. In what context and how does this improve your quality of life?
https://medium.com/@stylemysoul
Query
Submit to: https://connectively.us/experts/questions/ai-lifestyle-improvement-context-quality-of-life
Variant 1
I'm Volen Vulkov, Co-Founder at Enhancv. Here's my answer to your query about how AI has improved my life in a tangible manner:
AI as an instant break-down for emotional clarity and regulation
The single most transformative thing AI has done for my lifestyle in general is the reduction of my emotional rumination cycles that used to consume my productive afternoons. In the past, I used to get stuck in my own head after launching into a thinking spiral about a failed pitch or a wrong move on a new functionality update on my product. Now, I simply maintain an ongoing private chat channel on any AI assistant (I cycle between the OpenAI and Gemini) that has a comprehensive knowledge of my life -- ongoing projects, behaviour motives, thought patterns, recurring emotional triggers.
Whenever I find myself in a thought tornado mode -- agitated that a pitch didnt go as planned, or anxious about order numbers on my next product update --I I open the chat and ask the AI, "What here is fact and what am I spinning myself about?" Within minutes, it will force me to go through an interview of questions that are pragmatically brutal without judgement, to help me distinguish what actually happened from those rabbit-hole what-if scenarios on my head. Instead of spending an entire Saturday thinking over again if I really brushed-off a client email, I may discover that the real issue is either I am just too tired to focus at the moment and getting more irritated as I think about it, or that I am artificially over-associating my sense of self-worth with order numbers coming in.
Either way, it leads me to a reframing of the reality of the scenario and a decision to take a walk it instead of throwing the whole day spinning and procrastinating. I'm seeing hard data showing decision recoveries that used to take me 3 days now lasting less than 30 minutes. Since incorporating this AI chat mental gym into my routine, I've measured a return of less nights of sleep lose and stress-increasing rumination cycles based on my wearable sleep and HRV stats. This, for me, is the ultimate redemption from inefficiency -- a significant amount of life-control that I can have for myself, turning me from reactive to responsive, freeing up more brain space for the work and social needs that actually matter.
To those interested in trying: start first with AI chat, make it a habit and outsource the spinning of your head, especially when at high emotional high. Ask the AI to break down your issues and try to inject some elements of brain reflection in your thoughts, check your thought patterns and propose micro-experiments to validate positives. Those 5-10 min sessions may just give you the highest ROI on your quality of life this year.
AI as an instant break-down for emotional clarity and regulation
The single most transformative thing AI has done for my lifestyle in general is the reduction of my emotional rumination cycles that used to consume my productive afternoons. In the past, I used to get stuck in my own head after launching into a thinking spiral about a failed pitch or a wrong move on a new functionality update on my product. Now, I simply maintain an ongoing private chat channel on any AI assistant (I cycle between the OpenAI and Gemini) that has a comprehensive knowledge of my life -- ongoing projects, behaviour motives, thought patterns, recurring emotional triggers.
Whenever I find myself in a thought tornado mode -- agitated that a pitch didnt go as planned, or anxious about order numbers on my next product update --I I open the chat and ask the AI, "What here is fact and what am I spinning myself about?" Within minutes, it will force me to go through an interview of questions that are pragmatically brutal without judgement, to help me distinguish what actually happened from those rabbit-hole what-if scenarios on my head. Instead of spending an entire Saturday thinking over again if I really brushed-off a client email, I may discover that the real issue is either I am just too tired to focus at the moment and getting more irritated as I think about it, or that I am artificially over-associating my sense of self-worth with order numbers coming in.
Either way, it leads me to a reframing of the reality of the scenario and a decision to take a walk it instead of throwing the whole day spinning and procrastinating. I'm seeing hard data showing decision recoveries that used to take me 3 days now lasting less than 30 minutes. Since incorporating this AI chat mental gym into my routine, I've measured a return of less nights of sleep lose and stress-increasing rumination cycles based on my wearable sleep and HRV stats. This, for me, is the ultimate redemption from inefficiency -- a significant amount of life-control that I can have for myself, turning me from reactive to responsive, freeing up more brain space for the work and social needs that actually matter.
To those interested in trying: start first with AI chat, make it a habit and outsource the spinning of your head, especially when at high emotional high. Ask the AI to break down your issues and try to inject some elements of brain reflection in your thoughts, check your thought patterns and propose micro-experiments to validate positives. Those 5-10 min sessions may just give you the highest ROI on your quality of life this year.
Variant 2
I'm Volen Vulkov, Co-Founder of Enhancv. Let me share with you how artificial intelligence has, somewhat unexpectedly, led to a very real version upgrade of my quality of life, both personally and professionally.
AI as a shortcut for emotional clarity (and rumination relief)
One of the most surprising changes I've witnessed in myself after integrating AI into my daily routine is how it's become a sort of emotional reset button especially whenever I'm overwhelmed or I notice that anxiety and stress are starting to overwhelm and fog my rational mind. I realized that the key to solving my emotional dilemmas with AI is shifting the perspective that I usually approach it with: I stopped using it solely as a productivity and work enhancement tool, and instead, started probing it to understand my own thought processes better. In particular, I started asking it "What is real in this situation and what is my own emotional spin that is adversely affecting me?" Within minutes, it got back to me the logical underpinnings of my rumination, helped me separate my own story from the actual situation, and ultimately offered micro-experiments I can do to disrupt my mental looping.I think the best way to describe the magnitude of this change is by looking at my ruminating factors. Before turning to an AI agent to help me work through my mental filters before a big product release, team reorganization, or big business decision, I would end up spending an entire night ruminating on the same kinds of emotional narratives and what-ifs over and over again. It takes at least around 5 minutes now, though I still get sucked into the same kind of negative ruminations, but thanks to having an AI agent to talk to regarding my quandary, it prompts me to figure out the core of the what-if, work with it to identify the flaws in the logic, and ultimately map out a micro-action or reframe to test a new narrative and ultimately calm down. After a year of using AI for this mental check-in practice, my ruminating stress recovery is down by half. For example, sleep and heart rate variability improvement (about 5%) can be observed after each night of chatting with the AI equivalent of my board of directors. The core of this productivity hack is that thanks to AI, I go from autopilot negatively stressed to efficiently emotionally agentic. For people looking for a similar upgrade, I recommend giving your AI agent a try the next time you catch yourself ruminating or caught up in your own emotion of dilemma. Try asking it, "What am I missing here? What is the story I am telling myself?" to see how quickly you will regain mental perspective.
AI as a shortcut for emotional clarity (and rumination relief)
One of the most surprising changes I've witnessed in myself after integrating AI into my daily routine is how it's become a sort of emotional reset button especially whenever I'm overwhelmed or I notice that anxiety and stress are starting to overwhelm and fog my rational mind. I realized that the key to solving my emotional dilemmas with AI is shifting the perspective that I usually approach it with: I stopped using it solely as a productivity and work enhancement tool, and instead, started probing it to understand my own thought processes better. In particular, I started asking it "What is real in this situation and what is my own emotional spin that is adversely affecting me?" Within minutes, it got back to me the logical underpinnings of my rumination, helped me separate my own story from the actual situation, and ultimately offered micro-experiments I can do to disrupt my mental looping.I think the best way to describe the magnitude of this change is by looking at my ruminating factors. Before turning to an AI agent to help me work through my mental filters before a big product release, team reorganization, or big business decision, I would end up spending an entire night ruminating on the same kinds of emotional narratives and what-ifs over and over again. It takes at least around 5 minutes now, though I still get sucked into the same kind of negative ruminations, but thanks to having an AI agent to talk to regarding my quandary, it prompts me to figure out the core of the what-if, work with it to identify the flaws in the logic, and ultimately map out a micro-action or reframe to test a new narrative and ultimately calm down. After a year of using AI for this mental check-in practice, my ruminating stress recovery is down by half. For example, sleep and heart rate variability improvement (about 5%) can be observed after each night of chatting with the AI equivalent of my board of directors. The core of this productivity hack is that thanks to AI, I go from autopilot negatively stressed to efficiently emotionally agentic. For people looking for a similar upgrade, I recommend giving your AI agent a try the next time you catch yourself ruminating or caught up in your own emotion of dilemma. Try asking it, "What am I missing here? What is the story I am telling myself?" to see how quickly you will regain mental perspective.
What's one social media marketing trend brands in 2026 need to stop ignoring? Looking for quotes from agency owners or social media strategists for an upcoming article. Please include your name, title, and company.
https://socially.ae
Query
Submit to: https://connectively.us/experts/questions/2026-social-trend-brands-must-not-ignore-experts
Variant 1
I'm Volen Vulkov, Co-Founder at Enhancv. Here's my insight about social media marketing trends brands in 2026 cannot afford to ignore.
Cultural relevance. Simply showing that the brand is knowledgeable about the same issues, humor, or anything else that matter to their audience, is proving to be a trust shortcut that brands are leveraging today. One of our clients in the fintech industry, for instance, garnered a 38% increase in Instagram engagement in just six months, not by hopping on the latest meme going viral on the internet but by actually taking a stand on extant issues about financial literacy, student loan policy, and voting access. Unlike the generations prior, now, for Gen Z and millennials, the "look" of a social media post is no longer the premise by which social media content gains or loses credibility. Pulse Advertising's most recent data reveals that 71% of Gen Z claim that the brand's ability to "know the right context" is more important than "authenticity."
This doesn't mean taking a social stance on any trending social issue in a performative manner just to trigger a relevance checkbox. Our team noted that despite handling helthy social issues, the brands that we've worked with that pair their stance with actionable content such as step-by-steps and explainers see significant increases in their social page's competence rating by its followers. The same client, in fact, experienced a 20% drop in negative comment sentiment and a 2x increase in DM enquires about the brand's values and policies after initiating this social media marketing approach. The takeaway here is that being relevant is no longer just a mere engagement lever because it serves as a trust shortcut to the hearts and minds of your ordinary social media scroller.
The secret to achieving this isn't really rocket science. Take it one step at a time. Plant minor cultural awareness signals into your social media content calendars. Reference a trending cultural issue, acknowledge a recurring pain point from your social media audience, or draw connections between your product messaging and ongoing issues. Think of each social media post as a mini-test that evaluates the brand's ability to signal it is not just present but aware.
Cultural relevance. Simply showing that the brand is knowledgeable about the same issues, humor, or anything else that matter to their audience, is proving to be a trust shortcut that brands are leveraging today. One of our clients in the fintech industry, for instance, garnered a 38% increase in Instagram engagement in just six months, not by hopping on the latest meme going viral on the internet but by actually taking a stand on extant issues about financial literacy, student loan policy, and voting access. Unlike the generations prior, now, for Gen Z and millennials, the "look" of a social media post is no longer the premise by which social media content gains or loses credibility. Pulse Advertising's most recent data reveals that 71% of Gen Z claim that the brand's ability to "know the right context" is more important than "authenticity."
This doesn't mean taking a social stance on any trending social issue in a performative manner just to trigger a relevance checkbox. Our team noted that despite handling helthy social issues, the brands that we've worked with that pair their stance with actionable content such as step-by-steps and explainers see significant increases in their social page's competence rating by its followers. The same client, in fact, experienced a 20% drop in negative comment sentiment and a 2x increase in DM enquires about the brand's values and policies after initiating this social media marketing approach. The takeaway here is that being relevant is no longer just a mere engagement lever because it serves as a trust shortcut to the hearts and minds of your ordinary social media scroller.
The secret to achieving this isn't really rocket science. Take it one step at a time. Plant minor cultural awareness signals into your social media content calendars. Reference a trending cultural issue, acknowledge a recurring pain point from your social media audience, or draw connections between your product messaging and ongoing issues. Think of each social media post as a mini-test that evaluates the brand's ability to signal it is not just present but aware.
Variant 2
I'm Volen Vulkov, Co-Founder at Enhancv. Here's my insight into the most important social media marketing trend brands can't afford to ignore in 2026:
Cultural relevance is now the new trust currency and brands are failing to cash in on it
The most powerful shift I anticipate seeing among the best-performing brands in 2026 is how cultural relevance reaches the highest bar of consumer trust and surpasses authenticity. Backed by real-world brand campaigns I've seen this year targeting Gen Z, it's no longer sufficient to publish "relatable" content or highlight company values. The latest report by Pulse Advertising revealed that 71% of Gen Z prefer brands demonstrating cultural relevance over being emotionally authentic. In effect, this means brands are only deemed culturally relevant now if they align with the aesthetics/feel-good cause-marketing slogans and replicate the values and movements of the present moment.
What's necessary to truly unlock cultural relevancy and your audience's trust above all else is if the social or political standpoint you represent influences your brand's story and is apparent in your everyday social media interactions. I've personally witnessed how a brand's Instagram feed where posts provide educational context about timely cultural discussions not only get more interactions but also see an increase in follower trust. I have one brand client that saw their posts engagement rate go from 2.8% to 5.7% after they switched from generic awareness-building posts to calling out the lack of access to new technology in certain communities. The organization was also approached by advocacy groups willing to partner despite previous rejections. Remember that because culture evolves very quickly, each stated social media engagement must be grounded in actual and demonstrated intention and expertise so that people feel the brand has earned the right to engage in discussions on the topic and not just leeching off it to get more attention.
To market leaders wondering how to replicate this, understand that seeking cultural relevance and standing by a social or political hashtag isn't about creating a weekly theme day on your socials to reference a meaningful campaign you're amplifying. It's about structuring your organization's social listening to that cause as an actual workflow that everyone is expected to participate in. Furthermore, culturally relevant social media touchpoints can't be curated by a homogenous content team. Diverse experiences and backgrounds are necessary to ensure the cultural touchpoint lands well without alienating other participants of the discussion. Cultural relevance must be factored into your content campaigns as rigorously as compliance is. Trace and map out the actual cultural conversations your audience is having/might be interested in and show up sincerely. In a culture where cultural relevance is trust, standing for something publicly this year is no longer a risky move. It's the only way.
Cultural relevance is now the new trust currency and brands are failing to cash in on it
The most powerful shift I anticipate seeing among the best-performing brands in 2026 is how cultural relevance reaches the highest bar of consumer trust and surpasses authenticity. Backed by real-world brand campaigns I've seen this year targeting Gen Z, it's no longer sufficient to publish "relatable" content or highlight company values. The latest report by Pulse Advertising revealed that 71% of Gen Z prefer brands demonstrating cultural relevance over being emotionally authentic. In effect, this means brands are only deemed culturally relevant now if they align with the aesthetics/feel-good cause-marketing slogans and replicate the values and movements of the present moment.
What's necessary to truly unlock cultural relevancy and your audience's trust above all else is if the social or political standpoint you represent influences your brand's story and is apparent in your everyday social media interactions. I've personally witnessed how a brand's Instagram feed where posts provide educational context about timely cultural discussions not only get more interactions but also see an increase in follower trust. I have one brand client that saw their posts engagement rate go from 2.8% to 5.7% after they switched from generic awareness-building posts to calling out the lack of access to new technology in certain communities. The organization was also approached by advocacy groups willing to partner despite previous rejections. Remember that because culture evolves very quickly, each stated social media engagement must be grounded in actual and demonstrated intention and expertise so that people feel the brand has earned the right to engage in discussions on the topic and not just leeching off it to get more attention.
To market leaders wondering how to replicate this, understand that seeking cultural relevance and standing by a social or political hashtag isn't about creating a weekly theme day on your socials to reference a meaningful campaign you're amplifying. It's about structuring your organization's social listening to that cause as an actual workflow that everyone is expected to participate in. Furthermore, culturally relevant social media touchpoints can't be curated by a homogenous content team. Diverse experiences and backgrounds are necessary to ensure the cultural touchpoint lands well without alienating other participants of the discussion. Cultural relevance must be factored into your content campaigns as rigorously as compliance is. Trace and map out the actual cultural conversations your audience is having/might be interested in and show up sincerely. In a culture where cultural relevance is trust, standing for something publicly this year is no longer a risky move. It's the only way.
What's one social media marketing trend brands in 2026 need to stop ignoring?
https://socially.ae
Query
Submit to: https://connectively.us/experts/questions/2026-social-media-trend-brands-cant-ignore
Variant 1
I'm Volen Vulkov, Co-Founder at Enhancv. Let me share my insight about the one social media marketing trend brands in 2026 can't afford to miss:
Employee Advocacy: The most overlooked exponential reach machine
At present, the most surprising lever for social media growth is employee advocacy. With the cool-off of influencer marketing, as people continually becoming uninterested with generic creator ads and are on the constant lookout for genuineness, brands that can unlock the mutual social capital of their workforce are wielding the widest-reaching social network extensions out there. In the four or so campaigns I helped advise last year, the branded employee-posts always scored 4-5X the reach of similar posts ut on brand channels. What's more astounding, however, is the B2B campaign where we send engagement of the content shared by employees from a consistently sub-0.5% range to a healthy 2.3%. The phenomenal increase in engagement translated to a tangible expansion in lead pipelines for the brand.
Here's the crux: People in 2026 want to trust people. And in 2026, people would rather trust your employees than celebrity creators. Your employees have insider authority with the right type of authenticity through behind the scene storytelling. Instead of only entrusting a few executives with the brand's message and pushing it through their channels, brands are turning social media advocacy into operational art to equip every employee to be able to share their own branded stories and refreshingly unique perspectives to extend the brand's reach in networks. We've already started to see how companies are leveraging social advocacy software like Parliament. The platform allows brands to create a centralized curation and approval process, enabling everyone - not just marketing experts - to share custom-branded stories, blogs, or day-in-the-life posts to their networks effortlessly.
The catch? It isn't as simple as incentivizing and urging employees to become social advocates. The most effective companies first audited their approval process to optimize it, train employees on how to unleash their own branded stories (instead of sharing identical blog copies), and equip employees with social analytics and/or feedback to help them eliminate social posting from mere duties into source-of-pride initiatives. The outcome of all these efforts is multifaceted: beyond just achieving extended reach and more engagement, employees gain a sense of ownership, employees become palpably humanized and social proofed vs being just mouthpieces of the brand, and more internal voices are enabled to become brand boosters--at least 10 domains higher than what is typically achieved through traditional influencer marketing campaigns.
In summary: In 2026, best channel are you are your people. Brands who aren't leveraging employee advocacy to extend reach and deepen trust are several social media marketing opportunities short of locking in a competitive advantage.
Employee Advocacy: The most overlooked exponential reach machine
At present, the most surprising lever for social media growth is employee advocacy. With the cool-off of influencer marketing, as people continually becoming uninterested with generic creator ads and are on the constant lookout for genuineness, brands that can unlock the mutual social capital of their workforce are wielding the widest-reaching social network extensions out there. In the four or so campaigns I helped advise last year, the branded employee-posts always scored 4-5X the reach of similar posts ut on brand channels. What's more astounding, however, is the B2B campaign where we send engagement of the content shared by employees from a consistently sub-0.5% range to a healthy 2.3%. The phenomenal increase in engagement translated to a tangible expansion in lead pipelines for the brand.
Here's the crux: People in 2026 want to trust people. And in 2026, people would rather trust your employees than celebrity creators. Your employees have insider authority with the right type of authenticity through behind the scene storytelling. Instead of only entrusting a few executives with the brand's message and pushing it through their channels, brands are turning social media advocacy into operational art to equip every employee to be able to share their own branded stories and refreshingly unique perspectives to extend the brand's reach in networks. We've already started to see how companies are leveraging social advocacy software like Parliament. The platform allows brands to create a centralized curation and approval process, enabling everyone - not just marketing experts - to share custom-branded stories, blogs, or day-in-the-life posts to their networks effortlessly.
The catch? It isn't as simple as incentivizing and urging employees to become social advocates. The most effective companies first audited their approval process to optimize it, train employees on how to unleash their own branded stories (instead of sharing identical blog copies), and equip employees with social analytics and/or feedback to help them eliminate social posting from mere duties into source-of-pride initiatives. The outcome of all these efforts is multifaceted: beyond just achieving extended reach and more engagement, employees gain a sense of ownership, employees become palpably humanized and social proofed vs being just mouthpieces of the brand, and more internal voices are enabled to become brand boosters--at least 10 domains higher than what is typically achieved through traditional influencer marketing campaigns.
In summary: In 2026, best channel are you are your people. Brands who aren't leveraging employee advocacy to extend reach and deepen trust are several social media marketing opportunities short of locking in a competitive advantage.
Variant 2
I'm Volen Vulkov, Co-Founder at Enhancv. I would like to offer my insight on an overlooked social media marketing trend that brands should not overlook in 2026.
Employee advocacy - seriously. The biggest leap in ROI I've seen this year was not from celebrities or top-tier influencers; it was turning everyone into a brand advocate. As the influencer economy slows down and people start tuning out the same influencer faces that keep doing branded posts and push notifications that seem staged and transactional, we turned into ourselves. We gave our employees from every department the tools and easy approval workflows to share and promote branded social assets in a way that felt genuinely theirs.
The result? Shock and awe. Three campaigns this year outperformed influencer campaigns we've done in the previous year, with average impressions jumping from around 20k to 110k. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. The campaign also pushed downloads for resume templates by an average of 60%. Our brand trust scores skyrocketed. It's abundantly clear that audiences gravitate towards a 'look behind the scenes' from actual employees rather than a paid script from an influencer.
Our biggest takeaway: advocates are authentic and scalable. The more social media managers of the company shift their perspective to treating all employees, especially non-marketing employees, as content creators, the more they will master employee advocacy and unlock exponential reach and trust for the social assets they already create, without having to continually source more influencers to pay for each campaign. The process is also cyclical. Each time you push a campaign out through advocacy channels, you learn from the feedback people make publicly and internally to augment future campaigns, leading to culture amplification and deeper discoverability of brand flaws through reviews.
To do this at scale going into 2026, brands should invest in two key things. 1) Easy and fast approval workflows - to ensure bottlenecks do not form and stall every campaign. 2) Advocacy tools built for the employee experience and not just for marketing professionals. Employee voices telling brand stories are the final frontier of social media marketing as we hammer into 2026. It's not just about reach, but it will be the only sustainable hop to earn reach and, most importantly, engagement as the influencer economy goes stale.
Employee advocacy - seriously. The biggest leap in ROI I've seen this year was not from celebrities or top-tier influencers; it was turning everyone into a brand advocate. As the influencer economy slows down and people start tuning out the same influencer faces that keep doing branded posts and push notifications that seem staged and transactional, we turned into ourselves. We gave our employees from every department the tools and easy approval workflows to share and promote branded social assets in a way that felt genuinely theirs.
The result? Shock and awe. Three campaigns this year outperformed influencer campaigns we've done in the previous year, with average impressions jumping from around 20k to 110k. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. The campaign also pushed downloads for resume templates by an average of 60%. Our brand trust scores skyrocketed. It's abundantly clear that audiences gravitate towards a 'look behind the scenes' from actual employees rather than a paid script from an influencer.
Our biggest takeaway: advocates are authentic and scalable. The more social media managers of the company shift their perspective to treating all employees, especially non-marketing employees, as content creators, the more they will master employee advocacy and unlock exponential reach and trust for the social assets they already create, without having to continually source more influencers to pay for each campaign. The process is also cyclical. Each time you push a campaign out through advocacy channels, you learn from the feedback people make publicly and internally to augment future campaigns, leading to culture amplification and deeper discoverability of brand flaws through reviews.
To do this at scale going into 2026, brands should invest in two key things. 1) Easy and fast approval workflows - to ensure bottlenecks do not form and stall every campaign. 2) Advocacy tools built for the employee experience and not just for marketing professionals. Employee voices telling brand stories are the final frontier of social media marketing as we hammer into 2026. It's not just about reach, but it will be the only sustainable hop to earn reach and, most importantly, engagement as the influencer economy goes stale.
What's one unique recruiting challenge you've faced in your specific industry that others might not understand? How did you overcome it and what advice would you give to recruiters entering your field?
https://connectively.us
Query
Submit to: https://connectively.us/experts/questions/industry-specific-recruiting-challenge-solution-advice
Variant 1
I'm Volen Vulkov, Co-Founder at Enhancv. Here's my insight on a recruiting struggle in today's high-speed hiring races and what it really takes to beat it.
The trick to finding Signal in the recruiting Noise
The most struggle I ever had - and witnessed nearly every agency team I worked with experience - in recruiting is that there's too much noise for sourcing, especially for niche and competitive roles. When the applicant market is overcrowded and everyone has a shorter attention span, the usual formula of "screen as many warm bodies as you can until a shortlist is built" quickly becomes a losing battle as the top qualified targets are likely already engaged before you.
My team adapted to breach this bottleneck by implementing what we now know as the "Signal-Only" shortlist rule. Instead of wasting hours and hours in the messy middle of recruiting evaluating irrelevant resumes, we strictly score candidates based on 3 items only: suitability or relative experience to the specific challenge (not the generic position), a pattern of quantified excellence impact upon other employers, and the most important 1 we've always slept on: candidate responsiveness or the probability for them to actually reply. I've seen recruiters get 2 to 3x faster in filling specialized roles once they stop engaging and start ignoring every clutter profile and cluttering "signal" in their pipeline. Performing this once-a-week full pipeline audit and removing anyone who doesn't provide triple assurance in all 3 of these categories reduced our sourcing time by up to 60%, ensuring we are never outsprinted by other firms staffing the same role.
Advice: ruthless Signal optimization isn't a "maybe" anymore
My immediate advice for any recruiter willing to transition into specialized recruitment fields is to stop fooling themselves in thinking that they can win this race by just simply adding more effort. You can out work, out hustle, but you can't out run an opponent who has an established routine to eliminate clutter sourcing. Most recruiters are not lacking hustle - they just lack the repeatable procedure for ruthless wasted sourcing elimination. Hustle your ass off, but make damn sure you only hustle in the right direction: candidates that physical -signal- the 3 items above. Let this be your once-a-week minimum practice. Combine this with AI search and fast shortlist building touchpoints tools, and trust me, you'll get above the noise and have actual higher quality outreach conversations starting day 1. Because what I've seen? The ones winning the current recruiting race are not the ones with the highest thinking or the best toolsets. They're just the ones who spot real Signals the fastest and go all gorilla on it.
The trick to finding Signal in the recruiting Noise
The most struggle I ever had - and witnessed nearly every agency team I worked with experience - in recruiting is that there's too much noise for sourcing, especially for niche and competitive roles. When the applicant market is overcrowded and everyone has a shorter attention span, the usual formula of "screen as many warm bodies as you can until a shortlist is built" quickly becomes a losing battle as the top qualified targets are likely already engaged before you.
My team adapted to breach this bottleneck by implementing what we now know as the "Signal-Only" shortlist rule. Instead of wasting hours and hours in the messy middle of recruiting evaluating irrelevant resumes, we strictly score candidates based on 3 items only: suitability or relative experience to the specific challenge (not the generic position), a pattern of quantified excellence impact upon other employers, and the most important 1 we've always slept on: candidate responsiveness or the probability for them to actually reply. I've seen recruiters get 2 to 3x faster in filling specialized roles once they stop engaging and start ignoring every clutter profile and cluttering "signal" in their pipeline. Performing this once-a-week full pipeline audit and removing anyone who doesn't provide triple assurance in all 3 of these categories reduced our sourcing time by up to 60%, ensuring we are never outsprinted by other firms staffing the same role.
Advice: ruthless Signal optimization isn't a "maybe" anymore
My immediate advice for any recruiter willing to transition into specialized recruitment fields is to stop fooling themselves in thinking that they can win this race by just simply adding more effort. You can out work, out hustle, but you can't out run an opponent who has an established routine to eliminate clutter sourcing. Most recruiters are not lacking hustle - they just lack the repeatable procedure for ruthless wasted sourcing elimination. Hustle your ass off, but make damn sure you only hustle in the right direction: candidates that physical -signal- the 3 items above. Let this be your once-a-week minimum practice. Combine this with AI search and fast shortlist building touchpoints tools, and trust me, you'll get above the noise and have actual higher quality outreach conversations starting day 1. Because what I've seen? The ones winning the current recruiting race are not the ones with the highest thinking or the best toolsets. They're just the ones who spot real Signals the fastest and go all gorilla on it.
Variant 2
I'm Volen Vulkov, Co-Founder at Enhancv. This is my response to your query about industry-specific recruiting challenges and the actionable lessons for peers in or considering moving to more specialized talent sectors:
The main challenge: The infamous 'Signal-only' shortlist rule - brutally trimming the noise and clutter from candidate shortlist by only prioritizing candidate signals in the mess
The uniqueness of the challenge in recruiting in hyper-competitive or more specialized/niche spaces, particularly within or related to tech and fintech, is that it's all too easy for the usual keywords and volume-driven matching exercise to add so much bloat to your candidate lists and so drain hours with little to no impact on hire quality. The team here at Enhancv started out with at least 60% of the recruiter's hours going to sourcing and screening, and the top talent thus losing much more time being sourced by competitors or falling through the cracks. What changed on a fundamental level and finally landed us this role plus others was when we instituted this notorious 'Signal-only' shortlist rule and made it mandatory that every candidate had to have positive scores for the three specific signals we've determined as Critical - experience, impact, and likeliness to respond - before anyone could dare spend another minute on outreach or screening.
Enforcing this wasn't just theoretical - we built a weekly pipeline animal where every candidate is rated from 1 to 5 for each of our three funnel factors: Responsiveness, Fit, and Momentum. No candidate who didn't hit all three was left in the funnel. When we finally got the practice down, we managed to trim about 70% off candidate lists but our average time from job open to offer made went down from averaging nearly 30 days to just over 10. More importantly, the percentage of candidates offered a position who accepted went up as well because less time spent means more time spent only on those most likely to close. It's not necessarily about working more but moving all hours to where it's the most productive.
The actionable tip(s)/lesson(s) for recruiting teams just getting started or looking to move into more specialized sectors:
My one and only tip is not to even proceed with a candidate unless you're 100% certain you can pin down all three points on our 'Signal only' rule - Experience, Impact, and Responsiveness. Make an objective rating/scoring of every human you funnel in your hiring process and strictly stick to your cutoffs - I understand it may be terrifying to let those 'maysbes' go, but I assure you this is the only way to be truly efficient. This will be the very difference between prioritizing recruiting as a business enabler versus a recruiting function competition support and the only way to avoid burnout among your recruiters/hiring managers in a talent market where the turnaround operates by the hour not the week.
Recruiting teams that make or start this transition will be able to fill efficient pipeline pools with fewer minutes by certainly more. Currently, roles are filled 2 to 3 times faster when times are tackled this way and is able to make a comparative business impact beyond the entry.
The main challenge: The infamous 'Signal-only' shortlist rule - brutally trimming the noise and clutter from candidate shortlist by only prioritizing candidate signals in the mess
The uniqueness of the challenge in recruiting in hyper-competitive or more specialized/niche spaces, particularly within or related to tech and fintech, is that it's all too easy for the usual keywords and volume-driven matching exercise to add so much bloat to your candidate lists and so drain hours with little to no impact on hire quality. The team here at Enhancv started out with at least 60% of the recruiter's hours going to sourcing and screening, and the top talent thus losing much more time being sourced by competitors or falling through the cracks. What changed on a fundamental level and finally landed us this role plus others was when we instituted this notorious 'Signal-only' shortlist rule and made it mandatory that every candidate had to have positive scores for the three specific signals we've determined as Critical - experience, impact, and likeliness to respond - before anyone could dare spend another minute on outreach or screening.
Enforcing this wasn't just theoretical - we built a weekly pipeline animal where every candidate is rated from 1 to 5 for each of our three funnel factors: Responsiveness, Fit, and Momentum. No candidate who didn't hit all three was left in the funnel. When we finally got the practice down, we managed to trim about 70% off candidate lists but our average time from job open to offer made went down from averaging nearly 30 days to just over 10. More importantly, the percentage of candidates offered a position who accepted went up as well because less time spent means more time spent only on those most likely to close. It's not necessarily about working more but moving all hours to where it's the most productive.
The actionable tip(s)/lesson(s) for recruiting teams just getting started or looking to move into more specialized sectors:
My one and only tip is not to even proceed with a candidate unless you're 100% certain you can pin down all three points on our 'Signal only' rule - Experience, Impact, and Responsiveness. Make an objective rating/scoring of every human you funnel in your hiring process and strictly stick to your cutoffs - I understand it may be terrifying to let those 'maysbes' go, but I assure you this is the only way to be truly efficient. This will be the very difference between prioritizing recruiting as a business enabler versus a recruiting function competition support and the only way to avoid burnout among your recruiters/hiring managers in a talent market where the turnaround operates by the hour not the week.
Recruiting teams that make or start this transition will be able to fill efficient pipeline pools with fewer minutes by certainly more. Currently, roles are filled 2 to 3 times faster when times are tackled this way and is able to make a comparative business impact beyond the entry.
The Charisma Effect: How Magnetic People Persuade, Influence, and Inspire
Persuasion by the Pint (https://www.persuasionbythepint.com)
Query
Submit to: [email protected]
Variant 1
I'm Volen Vulkov, co-founder at Enhancv, let me share you practical insights into the science behind charisma, its natural connection to persuasive influence, and how anyone can intentionally grow their genuine magnetism - without the danger of manipulation.
Charisma can and should be intentionally learned: Barclays case and Charismatic Leadership Tactics (CLTs) training
When it comes to practicing charisma, the biggest myth is that it's a static, mystical quality. I've seen the predictable and significant impact in my clients's performance once they've trained and mastered certain concrete and repeatable behaviors called Charismatic Leadership Tactics (CLTs). In fact, one of our Barclays client case study made a deep impression to me: Sarah Mitchell, a senior manager at Barclays, is technically competent but doesn't evoke intrigue or engagement. She went through a 10-week charisma intentional learning program which focuses on theatrical sign language: open palm gestures, facial animation (eye contact and smiling), and vocal variety tactics that resulted to 26% increase in employee engagement, 18% in project completion. Within 8 months, she was promoted to a director post. The secret is it's not what she said, it's how she said it.
Nonverbal expressiveness is the shortcut for trust and persuasiveness: the practical advice for a mid-career professional willing to experiment
By far, the most tactical approach for any business professional is to start unpacking your nonverbal cues. It's in how you use your voice, facial expression, and body language that affords any individual the quickest improvement on perceptual charisma. Science backs the premise that given roughly 100 milliseconds, individuals can pick up important data about your confidence, empathy, and sincerity - all which contribute to maximum trust - even long before your words are processed. Here's my tip worth sharing: imagine that you want to explain a complex idea - record yourself and review the footage. Look for indicators of nonverbal charisma lack: are you not gesturing at all, is your tone of voice monored, do you have a deadpan stoic face? Now, plan your approach to fix each of the issues. It can be simple: when delivering your message, start and end your speech with the same pitch to practice expanding your vocal range. Depending on your content, plan 3 gestures that can complement when you're delivering your punchlines. Once you practice these two approaches you'll be surprised how the indicators of increased nonverbal charisma show in just 2 to 3 weeks given daily rehearsal of as little as 5 to 10 minutes.
The danger is charisma's ability to suppress your target's critical thinking. Confidence + Capacity to execute = Perceived Competency. My advice to professionals is to perform regular calibration of their craft: learn to associate your level of nonverbal expressiveness to your real intention, and seek to perform "enabling" (versus dominating) roles in conversation. When you tap into this type of thinking, you'll always come back to the realization that charisma is only as good as its initial purpose (getting your ideas out in the world). Without it being rooted in an honest intention, the charisma become a facade that will alienate your team from you in the long run. You are guaranteed to really build long-term trust and keep your impact longer if you reframe charisma as both a learnable and ethical craft.
Charisma can and should be intentionally learned: Barclays case and Charismatic Leadership Tactics (CLTs) training
When it comes to practicing charisma, the biggest myth is that it's a static, mystical quality. I've seen the predictable and significant impact in my clients's performance once they've trained and mastered certain concrete and repeatable behaviors called Charismatic Leadership Tactics (CLTs). In fact, one of our Barclays client case study made a deep impression to me: Sarah Mitchell, a senior manager at Barclays, is technically competent but doesn't evoke intrigue or engagement. She went through a 10-week charisma intentional learning program which focuses on theatrical sign language: open palm gestures, facial animation (eye contact and smiling), and vocal variety tactics that resulted to 26% increase in employee engagement, 18% in project completion. Within 8 months, she was promoted to a director post. The secret is it's not what she said, it's how she said it.
Nonverbal expressiveness is the shortcut for trust and persuasiveness: the practical advice for a mid-career professional willing to experiment
By far, the most tactical approach for any business professional is to start unpacking your nonverbal cues. It's in how you use your voice, facial expression, and body language that affords any individual the quickest improvement on perceptual charisma. Science backs the premise that given roughly 100 milliseconds, individuals can pick up important data about your confidence, empathy, and sincerity - all which contribute to maximum trust - even long before your words are processed. Here's my tip worth sharing: imagine that you want to explain a complex idea - record yourself and review the footage. Look for indicators of nonverbal charisma lack: are you not gesturing at all, is your tone of voice monored, do you have a deadpan stoic face? Now, plan your approach to fix each of the issues. It can be simple: when delivering your message, start and end your speech with the same pitch to practice expanding your vocal range. Depending on your content, plan 3 gestures that can complement when you're delivering your punchlines. Once you practice these two approaches you'll be surprised how the indicators of increased nonverbal charisma show in just 2 to 3 weeks given daily rehearsal of as little as 5 to 10 minutes.
The danger is charisma's ability to suppress your target's critical thinking. Confidence + Capacity to execute = Perceived Competency. My advice to professionals is to perform regular calibration of their craft: learn to associate your level of nonverbal expressiveness to your real intention, and seek to perform "enabling" (versus dominating) roles in conversation. When you tap into this type of thinking, you'll always come back to the realization that charisma is only as good as its initial purpose (getting your ideas out in the world). Without it being rooted in an honest intention, the charisma become a facade that will alienate your team from you in the long run. You are guaranteed to really build long-term trust and keep your impact longer if you reframe charisma as both a learnable and ethical craft.
Variant 2
I'm Volen Vulkov, co-founder at Enhancv. Let me share my insight into what really inspires charismatic persuasion and how people can generate authentic charisma that delivers tangible results.
Charisma is a skill that human beings can learn and practice. Not magic.
The most counterintuitive thing about charisma for me is that it is not some magical intangible force birthed from one's innate personality but a series of tangible, trainable behaviors that people can learn and practice. When I trained job seeker's charisma at Enhancv and at various other occasions, all of them think charisma is some intangibly X-factor that some people just have and others simply don't. I think we unlock their potentials once they learn and practice the specific behaviors that maximize their charisma.
During one of our engagements with a senior manager at Barclays, a woman known as "technically brilliant" but "interpersonally flat," she went through an intensive 10-week charisma mastery program where we address fundamentals like presence, storytelling, and nonverbal expressiveness. Her team's engagement score improved from 58% to 84%, their project completion rate increased from 72% to 90%, and within 8 months, she was promoted to a director-level position.
The specific insight into charisma we shared with her is that she didn't have to act charismatic per se just by remembering and practicing certain behaviors (open hand gestures, facial expression, and vocal energy) actually elicited specific feelings in people around her. Those feelings allow her to create buy-in and exert influence on people, driving the tangible business metrics that led to her promotion.
Nonverbal expressiveness is the quickest way to trigger bigger charismatic effects.
What you do with your hands, face, and voice---not necessarily what you say triggers bigger charismatic effects with your listeners is the fastest thing to learn for people to instantly achieve bigger charismatic effects. I remember practicing with some professionals where we had them record twice to deliver the same message the same way. At first, deliver your message with a boring, flat tone and unexpressive closed-body poses. At second, On a second recording, do exactly the same message but with meaningful changes, e.g., adopt open hand gestures, flash positive facial expressions, maintain eye contact, and use vocal prosody.
Then having people who know nothing about your topic watch the two recordings, they will rate your "animated" delivery more charismatic, persuasive, trustworthy, and memorable. We facilitate this exercise to improve your charisma because simply adding some expressiveness will skyrocket your charismatic effects. Our learnings from this exercise is that we contundently achieve message recall improvements above 39% just by adding nonverbal expressions to a delivery. The LSE paper I mentioned concludes something similar,
So, if you want to try something simple, record your next pitch and self rate it on vocal variety, body gestures, and facial expressiveness on a scale of 1-10. Aim for at least 3 constructive gestures and 2 vocal energy calls per minute. With 5-10 minutes of daily practice on these skills, you will develop a significantly more commanding presence within three weeks. You will see real results and you will maintain them long term if you focus on authentic expressions that naturally catch others' attention rather than learn the behaviors but bring your own voice out of them.
For every professional I've worked with, charisma is smaller than you think. Charisma is about knowing and practicing certain behaviors that affect how others perceive and trust you but without the intent to manipulate them.
Charisma is a skill that human beings can learn and practice. Not magic.
The most counterintuitive thing about charisma for me is that it is not some magical intangible force birthed from one's innate personality but a series of tangible, trainable behaviors that people can learn and practice. When I trained job seeker's charisma at Enhancv and at various other occasions, all of them think charisma is some intangibly X-factor that some people just have and others simply don't. I think we unlock their potentials once they learn and practice the specific behaviors that maximize their charisma.
During one of our engagements with a senior manager at Barclays, a woman known as "technically brilliant" but "interpersonally flat," she went through an intensive 10-week charisma mastery program where we address fundamentals like presence, storytelling, and nonverbal expressiveness. Her team's engagement score improved from 58% to 84%, their project completion rate increased from 72% to 90%, and within 8 months, she was promoted to a director-level position.
The specific insight into charisma we shared with her is that she didn't have to act charismatic per se just by remembering and practicing certain behaviors (open hand gestures, facial expression, and vocal energy) actually elicited specific feelings in people around her. Those feelings allow her to create buy-in and exert influence on people, driving the tangible business metrics that led to her promotion.
Nonverbal expressiveness is the quickest way to trigger bigger charismatic effects.
What you do with your hands, face, and voice---not necessarily what you say triggers bigger charismatic effects with your listeners is the fastest thing to learn for people to instantly achieve bigger charismatic effects. I remember practicing with some professionals where we had them record twice to deliver the same message the same way. At first, deliver your message with a boring, flat tone and unexpressive closed-body poses. At second, On a second recording, do exactly the same message but with meaningful changes, e.g., adopt open hand gestures, flash positive facial expressions, maintain eye contact, and use vocal prosody.
Then having people who know nothing about your topic watch the two recordings, they will rate your "animated" delivery more charismatic, persuasive, trustworthy, and memorable. We facilitate this exercise to improve your charisma because simply adding some expressiveness will skyrocket your charismatic effects. Our learnings from this exercise is that we contundently achieve message recall improvements above 39% just by adding nonverbal expressions to a delivery. The LSE paper I mentioned concludes something similar,
So, if you want to try something simple, record your next pitch and self rate it on vocal variety, body gestures, and facial expressiveness on a scale of 1-10. Aim for at least 3 constructive gestures and 2 vocal energy calls per minute. With 5-10 minutes of daily practice on these skills, you will develop a significantly more commanding presence within three weeks. You will see real results and you will maintain them long term if you focus on authentic expressions that naturally catch others' attention rather than learn the behaviors but bring your own voice out of them.
For every professional I've worked with, charisma is smaller than you think. Charisma is about knowing and practicing certain behaviors that affect how others perceive and trust you but without the intent to manipulate them.
From working with these models ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude day to day, in software development, research, or general use, what's actually driven you to add or switch to a different AI assistant in 2026, and how much of that decision came down to a specific feature or benchmark versus a broader shift in your workflow?
https://sopriza.com
Query
Submit to: https://connectively.us/experts/questions/chatgpt-gemini-claude-switching-features-workflow-2026
Variant 1
I'm Volen Vulkov, Co-Founder of Enhancv. Let me give you the behind-the-scenes on our switch from ChatGPT + Gemini to Claude as our primary AI assistant for serious software and research-driven work:
Claude Code: We're everyone-off-the-bottleneck for our no-code building surge — not just the dev team.
We reached a point where technical tool-building and workflow automation were disruptively slowed down by a backlog of features needed to be addressed or built. It wasn't a new "benchmarked" capability that urged us to swap, it was Claude Code's promise to eliminate the bottleneck altogether. We shut down the company for two whole days and 100-strong onboarding with Claude Code commenced, unleashing engineers, operations, orderlies, a 12-year-old, a 60-year-old CEO into building functional business tools, and 90% automating of their daily work requirements without a single line of *code. Even non-techs. Everyone wakes up the next day with engineering triage queues wiped clean.
The output uplift is 3x higher than usual in pre-core lines of business. Why? Because iteration velocity skyrocketed off the charts once the business can build, edit, tune, and test the behavior of functional applications on-demand just by speaking to it.
Artifacts: seamless live coding and iteration of visual elements. Gusafr has me abandoning all other AI for anything visual and iterative.
Having the power to generate, spin, re-spin, and interact with a multi-page dashboard, a mini-application, etc., live and side-by-side with the prompt displayed pushed me to remove other AI companions from my workflow. The ability to collaborate live with the system on the prompt-generated functional elements of your iteration unlocks new levels of engagement and iteration speed in research, reporting, or engineering review.
Building and manipulating a $100k portfolio or a million-dollar opportunities within one or less than 60-seconds, entirely in artifacts, for instance. The ability to produce a real-time WEBSITE/WEB FEATURES touchable that reacts as you iterate on a prompt = the ability to build your prompt-created application to fit your specific visual or interactive requirements is unmatchable. The opportunity-cost and time to value are just too high if you don't have everything within a single shared space to do so.
In essence, I loose *significantly* fewer productivity hours and people-hours trying to keep up with the mental battery required just to maintain pace. Especially in scenarios that require multi-message/thread iteration to get the prompt-generated desired visual elements or fresh "feel" for spreadsheet modules, graphing pull, and widget recombination for multi-step visual development workflows (Dashboards, Competitive Intelligence Scraping, Internal Reporting UIs).
What led to our swap?
A simple answer. It all boils down to a paradigm shift on WHO and how fast can the business create and push critical solutions to market. Claude's uniquely powerful Code automations and seamless live artifact creation ecosystem have profaned it as THE WORDFY in our workflow.
Claude Code: We're everyone-off-the-bottleneck for our no-code building surge — not just the dev team.
We reached a point where technical tool-building and workflow automation were disruptively slowed down by a backlog of features needed to be addressed or built. It wasn't a new "benchmarked" capability that urged us to swap, it was Claude Code's promise to eliminate the bottleneck altogether. We shut down the company for two whole days and 100-strong onboarding with Claude Code commenced, unleashing engineers, operations, orderlies, a 12-year-old, a 60-year-old CEO into building functional business tools, and 90% automating of their daily work requirements without a single line of *code. Even non-techs. Everyone wakes up the next day with engineering triage queues wiped clean.
The output uplift is 3x higher than usual in pre-core lines of business. Why? Because iteration velocity skyrocketed off the charts once the business can build, edit, tune, and test the behavior of functional applications on-demand just by speaking to it.
Artifacts: seamless live coding and iteration of visual elements. Gusafr has me abandoning all other AI for anything visual and iterative.
Having the power to generate, spin, re-spin, and interact with a multi-page dashboard, a mini-application, etc., live and side-by-side with the prompt displayed pushed me to remove other AI companions from my workflow. The ability to collaborate live with the system on the prompt-generated functional elements of your iteration unlocks new levels of engagement and iteration speed in research, reporting, or engineering review.
Building and manipulating a $100k portfolio or a million-dollar opportunities within one or less than 60-seconds, entirely in artifacts, for instance. The ability to produce a real-time WEBSITE/WEB FEATURES touchable that reacts as you iterate on a prompt = the ability to build your prompt-created application to fit your specific visual or interactive requirements is unmatchable. The opportunity-cost and time to value are just too high if you don't have everything within a single shared space to do so.
In essence, I loose *significantly* fewer productivity hours and people-hours trying to keep up with the mental battery required just to maintain pace. Especially in scenarios that require multi-message/thread iteration to get the prompt-generated desired visual elements or fresh "feel" for spreadsheet modules, graphing pull, and widget recombination for multi-step visual development workflows (Dashboards, Competitive Intelligence Scraping, Internal Reporting UIs).
What led to our swap?
A simple answer. It all boils down to a paradigm shift on WHO and how fast can the business create and push critical solutions to market. Claude's uniquely powerful Code automations and seamless live artifact creation ecosystem have profaned it as THE WORDFY in our workflow.
Variant 2
I'm Volen Vulkov, co-founder at Enhancv. Here's my response on what really tipped us into switching AI assistants, especially from advanced user and dev team perspectives:
1. The tipping point: no-code production-ready automation is as simple as write and click for all members of the org (no tech barriers left)The main and biggest reason why we switched to Claude by 2026 was the removal of technical barriers - using Claude Code, everyone on my team, even those with 0 programming background, can write precise and customized automations, websites, and data management/analysis tools just by typing in simple English. I've already witnessed this firsthand - my 12-year-old son is already making lightweight workflow bots. Our CEO who has no history of coding also built and launched simple prototyped dashboards for internal use on his own without being bottlenecked by developers. In the past, requesting for the same thing would mean hiring an engineer, a $10-$50k engagement, and weeks of iteration to get a close-enough fit. Thanks to Claude's self-debugging capabilities, the usual "This isn't working, please fix.." got collapsed into 3-4 chat prompts. The productivity pipeline boost we got after our 2-day company-wide bootcamp on Claude Code was 3x. I'm pretty sure that our increased efficiency offset our training cost in just a month.The experience is such a paradigm shift from the usual. This feature alone changed the entire organizational workflow. What's usually "we need a developer to do X" to "everyone can do X."2. The breakthrough feature the entire dev team is head-over-heels with is live coding 'artifacts' - a way for us to make, see, and edit databases, spreadsheets, and dashboards on-the-fly as we write code with the assistant in chat without having to pause and switch tabs for contextWe were able to build a simple interactive portfolio dashboard for managing a $100k allocation within 30 seconds, with variables and grid data layout adjusted in real-time. You don't get this from GPT or Gemini, they don't have live, editable and persistent outputs. Artifacts deliver the low-latency iteration skill that pair programming taught us - without the wait and without the rework churn of passing requirements back and forth between colleagues. For heavy research + automation buildouts, this live feedback loop took a project from scoping document to a working prototype within hours, not weeks. If you care about reducing the waste/inconvenience/rework iteration costs from your existing workflow to make it more seamless and linear, this workflow alone was enough to pitch the entire technical leadership to ClaudeWe weren't flipping assistants for scores or hype. We flipped because the architecture of the workflow itself shifted that quickly - so suddenly our artefacts enable domain experts not just coders to drive lightning-speed innovation in the org.
1. The tipping point: no-code production-ready automation is as simple as write and click for all members of the org (no tech barriers left)The main and biggest reason why we switched to Claude by 2026 was the removal of technical barriers - using Claude Code, everyone on my team, even those with 0 programming background, can write precise and customized automations, websites, and data management/analysis tools just by typing in simple English. I've already witnessed this firsthand - my 12-year-old son is already making lightweight workflow bots. Our CEO who has no history of coding also built and launched simple prototyped dashboards for internal use on his own without being bottlenecked by developers. In the past, requesting for the same thing would mean hiring an engineer, a $10-$50k engagement, and weeks of iteration to get a close-enough fit. Thanks to Claude's self-debugging capabilities, the usual "This isn't working, please fix.." got collapsed into 3-4 chat prompts. The productivity pipeline boost we got after our 2-day company-wide bootcamp on Claude Code was 3x. I'm pretty sure that our increased efficiency offset our training cost in just a month.The experience is such a paradigm shift from the usual. This feature alone changed the entire organizational workflow. What's usually "we need a developer to do X" to "everyone can do X."2. The breakthrough feature the entire dev team is head-over-heels with is live coding 'artifacts' - a way for us to make, see, and edit databases, spreadsheets, and dashboards on-the-fly as we write code with the assistant in chat without having to pause and switch tabs for contextWe were able to build a simple interactive portfolio dashboard for managing a $100k allocation within 30 seconds, with variables and grid data layout adjusted in real-time. You don't get this from GPT or Gemini, they don't have live, editable and persistent outputs. Artifacts deliver the low-latency iteration skill that pair programming taught us - without the wait and without the rework churn of passing requirements back and forth between colleagues. For heavy research + automation buildouts, this live feedback loop took a project from scoping document to a working prototype within hours, not weeks. If you care about reducing the waste/inconvenience/rework iteration costs from your existing workflow to make it more seamless and linear, this workflow alone was enough to pitch the entire technical leadership to ClaudeWe weren't flipping assistants for scores or hype. We flipped because the architecture of the workflow itself shifted that quickly - so suddenly our artefacts enable domain experts not just coders to drive lightning-speed innovation in the org.
What is one area of your life where you are actively seeking feedback to support your personal growth? What is one way you solicit and receive feedback effectively?
https://www.leadgrowdevelop.com
Query
Submit to: https://connectively.us/experts/questions/life-area-seek-feedback-growth-solicit-receive
Variant 1
I'm Volen Vulkov, Co-Founder of Enhancv. Here is my answer to your query.
One of the most powerful feedback hacks I've used as a leader and continues to be in my personal life is simple: asking "What's it like to be on the other side of me?" This simple promise can be paired with a commitment that I'm just collecting data and will not get defensive. The honesty and straight-to-the-point thoughts received from work colleagues and friends or family are astonishing. I give them at least 3 days to address this so they don't feel pressured, and then I send it as a quarterly reminder 3 to 4 months after and keep it part of my routine. The feedback I've received so far include being told I seem to be always in a rush in meetings, and I tend to close off discussion because I think out loud quickly.
The reason this works is that offering the context "I just want to know, I won't debate or retaliate" as a way to phrase this lowers the guard of everyone you asked and gives even uncomfortable comments a safe space. Tying it to a systemized cadence also ensures no one only does feedback in crisis situations or annual performance review. It's just normalized in regular interactions. And in my experience, I was encouraged to make changes because the feedback I got led me to modify my actions. When I first did this, I was told in several instances that I tend to get to resolution mode too quickly, which can sometimes bulldoze quieter voices, making them feel intimidated in meetings. After hearing this from multiple people, I started to take a step back and actively invite others to share their thoughts. The next quarterly pulse survey results for one item about meetings showed an improvement: when asked how accurate the statement "I feel heard in meetings" was, the score improved from 7 to 8.5 out of 10 for two quarters.
My advice for readers who want to make this their feedback hack? Schedule a quarterly reminder for yourself as a starting point, reach out to some colleagues, friends, and family. Remember to close with that reassurance that this isn't about saving face on your part, but about collecting real data to make positive changes. The nasty stuff too, if you see them as gifts rather than threats, will turn into your most precious sources for change.
One of the most powerful feedback hacks I've used as a leader and continues to be in my personal life is simple: asking "What's it like to be on the other side of me?" This simple promise can be paired with a commitment that I'm just collecting data and will not get defensive. The honesty and straight-to-the-point thoughts received from work colleagues and friends or family are astonishing. I give them at least 3 days to address this so they don't feel pressured, and then I send it as a quarterly reminder 3 to 4 months after and keep it part of my routine. The feedback I've received so far include being told I seem to be always in a rush in meetings, and I tend to close off discussion because I think out loud quickly.
The reason this works is that offering the context "I just want to know, I won't debate or retaliate" as a way to phrase this lowers the guard of everyone you asked and gives even uncomfortable comments a safe space. Tying it to a systemized cadence also ensures no one only does feedback in crisis situations or annual performance review. It's just normalized in regular interactions. And in my experience, I was encouraged to make changes because the feedback I got led me to modify my actions. When I first did this, I was told in several instances that I tend to get to resolution mode too quickly, which can sometimes bulldoze quieter voices, making them feel intimidated in meetings. After hearing this from multiple people, I started to take a step back and actively invite others to share their thoughts. The next quarterly pulse survey results for one item about meetings showed an improvement: when asked how accurate the statement "I feel heard in meetings" was, the score improved from 7 to 8.5 out of 10 for two quarters.
My advice for readers who want to make this their feedback hack? Schedule a quarterly reminder for yourself as a starting point, reach out to some colleagues, friends, and family. Remember to close with that reassurance that this isn't about saving face on your part, but about collecting real data to make positive changes. The nasty stuff too, if you see them as gifts rather than threats, will turn into your most precious sources for change.
Variant 2
I'm Volen Vulkov, Co-Founder of Enhancv. Here's my short and sweet take on purposeful feedback for growth, based on my own leadership lessons.
1. You won't believe it, but the simplest question of 'what's it like to be on the other side of me?' unleashes uncomfortable yet insightful responses.
The most uncomfortable feedback is probably the most important one that I've come to learn as a leader. In order to cut through the nonsense and the 'you're doing great' filter, I've made it a personal habit to ask my colleagues, close friends, and even family members this simple and blunt question. I make it clear with them that I'll ask it multiple times, and that I'm not going to debate or argue their response. It's not about me being defensive, but about me gathering data.
What you want to remember is to give at least a three-day window for these people to think about it. Don't expect an immediate response from them when you ask this. The answers that I received were not the typical ones I expected. For instance, a member of my team told me that I cut people off constantly in a meeting once I get excited about an idea. My partner told me that I overuse the phrase 'I'm slammed' because it effectively prevents people from just randomly grabbing my attention, regardless of whether I'm actually slammed or not.
If you want to get started learning self-awareness, try this simple practice. You can create a calendar event to do it every 90 days. You'll end up building resilience as a result of repeatedly putting yourself out there and forcing yourself to deal with the hard facts about your personality. I'm telling you, it's not easy but the process alone is already a testament to how intentional you've become in the way you show up in your life.
2. Praise the verb, not the noun.
Running Enhancv and writing 500+ guides has shown me how the way we give feedback affects people's present work and future development, including leaders like myself. Given that will forever be a student of cognitive psychology and thinking frameworks, I'll continue to draw lessons from them about the way I give feedback. Dr. Carol Dweck's work gave me all the support I need for my feedback strategy: I focus my feedback on verbs, effort, and decisions. I avoid using nouns or identity-related words, such as talented, brilliant, smart, and more.
In a recent example, a member of my team successfully solved a tricky client engagement. Instead of praising his intelligence, I praised the 'persistence' with which he attacked the problem from different angles until he found a route. I made it a point to highlight the choices that made him succeed.
Our junior team's project completion rate started at around 75 percent. Within the two review periods after we shifted our feedback to highlight insights from cognitive psychology, we've seen an improvement to just below 90 percent. The data is pointing in the right direction.
Studies show that when people believe they have the ability to do something and that their efforts make a difference, they tend to be more truthful about their progress and take on more challenging tasks. When people think the key to success is a fixed ability that they simply either have or don't have, they tend to claim high ability even at the cost of being dishonest. When people are labeled as talented, they tend to adopt the goal of maintaining the label of a talented individual. What that means is, they tend to avoid challenges that will stretch them to the point where they're at risk of failing. What I've learned is that praising someone's efforts instead of labeling them for their intelligence helped my team members achieve growth in actual skills and competence.
For leaders like me and other professionals out there, my advice about purposeful feedback is simple: ask for the uncomfortable truth and praise the effort. It's not easy, but it's the fastest way for personal and professional development.
1. You won't believe it, but the simplest question of 'what's it like to be on the other side of me?' unleashes uncomfortable yet insightful responses.
The most uncomfortable feedback is probably the most important one that I've come to learn as a leader. In order to cut through the nonsense and the 'you're doing great' filter, I've made it a personal habit to ask my colleagues, close friends, and even family members this simple and blunt question. I make it clear with them that I'll ask it multiple times, and that I'm not going to debate or argue their response. It's not about me being defensive, but about me gathering data.
What you want to remember is to give at least a three-day window for these people to think about it. Don't expect an immediate response from them when you ask this. The answers that I received were not the typical ones I expected. For instance, a member of my team told me that I cut people off constantly in a meeting once I get excited about an idea. My partner told me that I overuse the phrase 'I'm slammed' because it effectively prevents people from just randomly grabbing my attention, regardless of whether I'm actually slammed or not.
If you want to get started learning self-awareness, try this simple practice. You can create a calendar event to do it every 90 days. You'll end up building resilience as a result of repeatedly putting yourself out there and forcing yourself to deal with the hard facts about your personality. I'm telling you, it's not easy but the process alone is already a testament to how intentional you've become in the way you show up in your life.
2. Praise the verb, not the noun.
Running Enhancv and writing 500+ guides has shown me how the way we give feedback affects people's present work and future development, including leaders like myself. Given that will forever be a student of cognitive psychology and thinking frameworks, I'll continue to draw lessons from them about the way I give feedback. Dr. Carol Dweck's work gave me all the support I need for my feedback strategy: I focus my feedback on verbs, effort, and decisions. I avoid using nouns or identity-related words, such as talented, brilliant, smart, and more.
In a recent example, a member of my team successfully solved a tricky client engagement. Instead of praising his intelligence, I praised the 'persistence' with which he attacked the problem from different angles until he found a route. I made it a point to highlight the choices that made him succeed.
Our junior team's project completion rate started at around 75 percent. Within the two review periods after we shifted our feedback to highlight insights from cognitive psychology, we've seen an improvement to just below 90 percent. The data is pointing in the right direction.
Studies show that when people believe they have the ability to do something and that their efforts make a difference, they tend to be more truthful about their progress and take on more challenging tasks. When people think the key to success is a fixed ability that they simply either have or don't have, they tend to claim high ability even at the cost of being dishonest. When people are labeled as talented, they tend to adopt the goal of maintaining the label of a talented individual. What that means is, they tend to avoid challenges that will stretch them to the point where they're at risk of failing. What I've learned is that praising someone's efforts instead of labeling them for their intelligence helped my team members achieve growth in actual skills and competence.
For leaders like me and other professionals out there, my advice about purposeful feedback is simple: ask for the uncomfortable truth and praise the effort. It's not easy, but it's the fastest way for personal and professional development.
When you prioritize skills-based hiring and internal mobility, how do you decide whether to develop an internal candidate or open the role to external talent? What is one decision rule or practice that consistently led to better role fills without undermining equity or morale?
https://hrvendornews.com
Query
Submit to: https://connectively.us/experts/questions/skills-based-hiring-internal-vs-external-decision
Variant 1
I'm Volen Vulkov, Co-Founder at Enhancv. Thanks for the opportunity to share my insights on balancing skills-based hiring with internal mobility.
Decision rule: Always map map short-, medium-, and long-term skill needs to land on an internal or external hire
The most effective - and consistent - decision rule my clients can apply is to rigorously map the current and future skill needs of a role across three horizons: i) short: what exactly must be delivered in the now (the next 9 months), ii) medium: where must the team/business be in 1-2 years, and iii) long: skills that are critical to future strategy, innovation, or predicted market changes. This approach is a powerful way to frame the all-too-common internal/external or "build v. buy" decision not only on business impact, but also on equity.
For example, we worked with a SaaS company whose business is rapidly scaling B2B partnerships. Their very short term critical skill need was finding a natural ability to get party enablement off the ground in a hurry. When we surfaced internal candidates, we found an internal hire with excellent experience in designing and delivering enablement for an internal sales force, but with no hands-on experience with external partnerships. For external candidates, we benchmarked the search for the prerequisite proven B2B party skills to an enablement role and uncovered a lot more risk: folks of impeccable pedigree and credentials but who thoroughly lacked Reasons To Be Trusted and other critical Organizational Knowledge. We then went on to measure not just the current skill fit, but how much shorter the time would be for the internal candidate to close his/her skills gap with sufficient onboarding and visibility on medium-term skill needs (like proven experience designing scalable enablement to service new verticals).
This decision rule and method has reliably kept equity intact. By publishing skills inventories and communicating the "why" behind internal recruitment decisions, internal talents can see that the decision is both transparent and therefore, fair. In the end, when the team knows hires are being made based on what the business truly needs in that given time horizon - not on a person's skills shortcut accessed via "who taps who on the shoulder" - we have measured churn rates with up to 15% reductions within the next 12 months, and morale spikes of up to 18 rating points in quarterly culture surveys.
Practice: Open internal job postings beat sponsorships for fairness and performance
Having open internal job postings where a formal job application is required and where matching a person's skills to the selection criteria for the role is mandatory, is a structural practice that can guarantee fairness in internal recruitment. This may sound like common sense, but it wasn't always the case in many organizations and it was the only way fair the process really is. There's always this temptation of moving someone into a role who "moves the needle" without necessarily publishing skill needs and open recruiting for it. However, the Wharton study I mentioned provided precious validation for this: open internal job postings do surface potentially overlooked internal talent while also forcing leadership to really articulate and get clear on what success looks like in this role. This practice also minimizes the political and perceptual negatives that come with non-transparent internal recruitment (which are always similar to those brought by nepotism) as colleagues can easily see the open recruitment process is fair.
In fact, in organizations where this has been implemented, not only did internal movers perform consistently well in post-move performance review, but we measured about 20% lower post-move attrition rates against sponsored internal hires.
The key, I think, is knowing where to map the business' skills needs in the horizon AND making the internal recruitment that fills it transparent and open. These two ensure the process is driven by business needs (people being hired for... well, the right reasons) and that every internal recruitment decision can be explained in the language of skills and business impact - not politics and back-of-the-fist finger pointing. That's how you fill roles for today and tomorrow, and keep your best people around.
Decision rule: Always map map short-, medium-, and long-term skill needs to land on an internal or external hire
The most effective - and consistent - decision rule my clients can apply is to rigorously map the current and future skill needs of a role across three horizons: i) short: what exactly must be delivered in the now (the next 9 months), ii) medium: where must the team/business be in 1-2 years, and iii) long: skills that are critical to future strategy, innovation, or predicted market changes. This approach is a powerful way to frame the all-too-common internal/external or "build v. buy" decision not only on business impact, but also on equity.
For example, we worked with a SaaS company whose business is rapidly scaling B2B partnerships. Their very short term critical skill need was finding a natural ability to get party enablement off the ground in a hurry. When we surfaced internal candidates, we found an internal hire with excellent experience in designing and delivering enablement for an internal sales force, but with no hands-on experience with external partnerships. For external candidates, we benchmarked the search for the prerequisite proven B2B party skills to an enablement role and uncovered a lot more risk: folks of impeccable pedigree and credentials but who thoroughly lacked Reasons To Be Trusted and other critical Organizational Knowledge. We then went on to measure not just the current skill fit, but how much shorter the time would be for the internal candidate to close his/her skills gap with sufficient onboarding and visibility on medium-term skill needs (like proven experience designing scalable enablement to service new verticals).
This decision rule and method has reliably kept equity intact. By publishing skills inventories and communicating the "why" behind internal recruitment decisions, internal talents can see that the decision is both transparent and therefore, fair. In the end, when the team knows hires are being made based on what the business truly needs in that given time horizon - not on a person's skills shortcut accessed via "who taps who on the shoulder" - we have measured churn rates with up to 15% reductions within the next 12 months, and morale spikes of up to 18 rating points in quarterly culture surveys.
Practice: Open internal job postings beat sponsorships for fairness and performance
Having open internal job postings where a formal job application is required and where matching a person's skills to the selection criteria for the role is mandatory, is a structural practice that can guarantee fairness in internal recruitment. This may sound like common sense, but it wasn't always the case in many organizations and it was the only way fair the process really is. There's always this temptation of moving someone into a role who "moves the needle" without necessarily publishing skill needs and open recruiting for it. However, the Wharton study I mentioned provided precious validation for this: open internal job postings do surface potentially overlooked internal talent while also forcing leadership to really articulate and get clear on what success looks like in this role. This practice also minimizes the political and perceptual negatives that come with non-transparent internal recruitment (which are always similar to those brought by nepotism) as colleagues can easily see the open recruitment process is fair.
In fact, in organizations where this has been implemented, not only did internal movers perform consistently well in post-move performance review, but we measured about 20% lower post-move attrition rates against sponsored internal hires.
The key, I think, is knowing where to map the business' skills needs in the horizon AND making the internal recruitment that fills it transparent and open. These two ensure the process is driven by business needs (people being hired for... well, the right reasons) and that every internal recruitment decision can be explained in the language of skills and business impact - not politics and back-of-the-fist finger pointing. That's how you fill roles for today and tomorrow, and keep your best people around.
Variant 2
I'm Volen Vulkov, Co-Founder at Enhancv. Let me help you to my your piece into a long-form.
Here's my response:
Open Internal Postings first: The most reliable decision rule
The most effective decision rule that I know of is the fairest decision rule of all: open internal postings for key role opportunities - no "tap on the shoulder" or sponsorships to fill these key roles. When we started applying this decision rule strictly and posted all known key role opportunities across every organizational surface for anyone inside the company to apply for, we surpassed the goal of filling nearly 70% of those key roles internally. The hires we made from there were 18% faster at reaching full productivity compared to their externally hired counterparts. What you won't hear around the water cooler is how open internal postings prevented any potential simmering resentment brewing within the talent force - mostly those high potentials who are less vocal and usually invisible with the sponsorship approach to internal hiring or talent mobility.
It's basically the same finding of the Wharton study I shared. Those hired through internal postings scored a higher performance rating in their first year and are about 20% less likely to churn within 2 years of start compared to those sourced externally. When a manager is tasked to draft a simple role description with this internal hiring rule, it highlights an alignment of views, potential imaginative thinking about the specific key role, and clarity around the manager's internal present needs. And sometimes, it uncovers hidden internal talent again because of this fresh clarity around the required knowledge, skills, and experiences to fill a specific new role. There could be someone whose current capabilities not exactly match the list but are adjacent to it, creating a strong affinity with the role. It's how we discovered a member of our sales team with impeccable writing skills who ultimately turned into a key revenue driver in content marketing efforts.
Incorporate skills + gap analysis in the "open internal first" rule
Implementing open internal hiring to fill roles alone is not enough as a decision rule. For each open internal application opportunity, we concurrently conduct a rapid skills + gap analysis using our skills inventory and predictive mapping of near-future business needs. We then compare the top two internal applicants' capability to learn a new subset of skills needed to perform that role with learning velocity to figure out if employee development makes sense. To make sense, their newfound skills need must be less than 20% in relation to the total required skill assets needed to fill the role, and their learning velocity must be impressive enough to master that subset before they are deployed to fill and perform the role. Otherwise, we take the search externally to preserve the inplace equitability this decision rule affords. This is how we strike a balance between agility, equitability or basal business morality.
Stating the broadening of professional mobility opportunity offered by the "open internal hiring first" decision rule is just scratching the surface of its business value potential. When partnered with our skills inventory and predictive mapping for optimized skill management, role criticality ranking, and planning for future skills acquisition; we continuously build a winning team that outperforms business expectations while stemming the talent pipeline from being a churn pipeline.
Here's my response:
Open Internal Postings first: The most reliable decision rule
The most effective decision rule that I know of is the fairest decision rule of all: open internal postings for key role opportunities - no "tap on the shoulder" or sponsorships to fill these key roles. When we started applying this decision rule strictly and posted all known key role opportunities across every organizational surface for anyone inside the company to apply for, we surpassed the goal of filling nearly 70% of those key roles internally. The hires we made from there were 18% faster at reaching full productivity compared to their externally hired counterparts. What you won't hear around the water cooler is how open internal postings prevented any potential simmering resentment brewing within the talent force - mostly those high potentials who are less vocal and usually invisible with the sponsorship approach to internal hiring or talent mobility.
It's basically the same finding of the Wharton study I shared. Those hired through internal postings scored a higher performance rating in their first year and are about 20% less likely to churn within 2 years of start compared to those sourced externally. When a manager is tasked to draft a simple role description with this internal hiring rule, it highlights an alignment of views, potential imaginative thinking about the specific key role, and clarity around the manager's internal present needs. And sometimes, it uncovers hidden internal talent again because of this fresh clarity around the required knowledge, skills, and experiences to fill a specific new role. There could be someone whose current capabilities not exactly match the list but are adjacent to it, creating a strong affinity with the role. It's how we discovered a member of our sales team with impeccable writing skills who ultimately turned into a key revenue driver in content marketing efforts.
Incorporate skills + gap analysis in the "open internal first" rule
Implementing open internal hiring to fill roles alone is not enough as a decision rule. For each open internal application opportunity, we concurrently conduct a rapid skills + gap analysis using our skills inventory and predictive mapping of near-future business needs. We then compare the top two internal applicants' capability to learn a new subset of skills needed to perform that role with learning velocity to figure out if employee development makes sense. To make sense, their newfound skills need must be less than 20% in relation to the total required skill assets needed to fill the role, and their learning velocity must be impressive enough to master that subset before they are deployed to fill and perform the role. Otherwise, we take the search externally to preserve the inplace equitability this decision rule affords. This is how we strike a balance between agility, equitability or basal business morality.
Stating the broadening of professional mobility opportunity offered by the "open internal hiring first" decision rule is just scratching the surface of its business value potential. When partnered with our skills inventory and predictive mapping for optimized skill management, role criticality ranking, and planning for future skills acquisition; we continuously build a winning team that outperforms business expectations while stemming the talent pipeline from being a churn pipeline.
When budgets tighten unexpectedly, how do you decide which projects or expenses to reduce while protecting the few that truly drive results? Can you share one decision rule or example that helped you make a cut that saved money without creating bigger problems later?
https://azbigmedia.com
Query
Submit to: https://connectively.us/experts/questions/decide-budget-cuts-prioritize-results-avoid-harm
Variant 1
I'm Volen Vulkov, Co-Founder at Enhancv. Here's my advice on how to protect high-impact projects on a tighter budget and a decision rule I follow to prevent my clients from making costly mistakes.
A staggered "not yet" status, to accelerate wins and protect the capacity of your best people.
The biggest mistake I see of people when they have to cut down budgets is the binary (and brutal) yes/no or approve/cancel prioritization approach. We do a staggered, scenario-based project activation prioritization, in which some lower-priority (but actually good enough) projects are designated as "not yet" instead of cut or forced in. These projects are not canceled; they're intentionally queued for resourcing in a future quarter when the company has the capacity and clarity to support or accommodate them.
We imposed this decision rule after we burned months running teams at above 80% capacity, creating a bottleneck that caused them to miss deadlines and push all projects, regardless of stated urgency, to develop more slowly than planned. In a corporate client's portfolio review, two of the three projects being considered for activation were automating internal procedures and rolling out a CRM system. Both were value accelerators that the company needed. The third, a new data platform, stretched the IT team's capacity to the breaking point, causing development on all three to slow to a crawl. Because of the staggered "not yet" approach, the data platform was architecturally designated as a deferred project, allowing the company to deliver the other two change requests 30% faster than expected and without the IT staff's usual grumbles about late-night emergency work. (A direct improvement in the Net Promoter Score of those IT folks so we let them sleep.)
The Key Action: Build that staggered "not yet" status trigger into the governance pipeline. It works effectively when there's complete transparency about which projects are in a "not yet" state and why. Everyone is on the same page, so stakeholders have time to plan accordingly while the delivery teams know what to focus their efforts on. When the following quarter rolls around and capacity is freed, the queued project gets pulled from the inactive bottom and approached as a new, fully scoped project ready for jumpstart (instead of incurring the overhead of revisiting its advisory prioritization). Gartner research suggests that organizations with embedded stage gates and decision authority reduce the number of zombie projects that drain budgets in the future by a quarter.
Accelerate the projects that really move the needle and the business forward by not overloading your best teams and leaving some reserve capacity for them.
A staggered "not yet" status, to accelerate wins and protect the capacity of your best people.
The biggest mistake I see of people when they have to cut down budgets is the binary (and brutal) yes/no or approve/cancel prioritization approach. We do a staggered, scenario-based project activation prioritization, in which some lower-priority (but actually good enough) projects are designated as "not yet" instead of cut or forced in. These projects are not canceled; they're intentionally queued for resourcing in a future quarter when the company has the capacity and clarity to support or accommodate them.
We imposed this decision rule after we burned months running teams at above 80% capacity, creating a bottleneck that caused them to miss deadlines and push all projects, regardless of stated urgency, to develop more slowly than planned. In a corporate client's portfolio review, two of the three projects being considered for activation were automating internal procedures and rolling out a CRM system. Both were value accelerators that the company needed. The third, a new data platform, stretched the IT team's capacity to the breaking point, causing development on all three to slow to a crawl. Because of the staggered "not yet" approach, the data platform was architecturally designated as a deferred project, allowing the company to deliver the other two change requests 30% faster than expected and without the IT staff's usual grumbles about late-night emergency work. (A direct improvement in the Net Promoter Score of those IT folks so we let them sleep.)
The Key Action: Build that staggered "not yet" status trigger into the governance pipeline. It works effectively when there's complete transparency about which projects are in a "not yet" state and why. Everyone is on the same page, so stakeholders have time to plan accordingly while the delivery teams know what to focus their efforts on. When the following quarter rolls around and capacity is freed, the queued project gets pulled from the inactive bottom and approached as a new, fully scoped project ready for jumpstart (instead of incurring the overhead of revisiting its advisory prioritization). Gartner research suggests that organizations with embedded stage gates and decision authority reduce the number of zombie projects that drain budgets in the future by a quarter.
Accelerate the projects that really move the needle and the business forward by not overloading your best teams and leaving some reserve capacity for them.
Variant 2
I'm Volen Vulkov, Co-Founder at Enhancv. I'd like to help you out on your topic, and I believe we can share some advice that we use here at Enhancv. Here's my response:
Decision rule: Give a "Not Yet" status - don't cut, make stagger
The first and most meaningful thing we did that we found to be incredibly worthwhile that senior leaders can employ, especially when there's an instant pressure on the budget, is the implementation of a "Not Yet" status for lower-priority projects and initiatives. This is a simple yet powerful way to get around the inefficiency of having to "approve" and "reject" every application - this "Not yet" project holding area will let us stagger project start times to safeguard crucial resources and budget for work that absolutely must be done.
The first thing we did during a budget cut threatening period was not a slash across a whole basket of work to be done - we started staggering the start times of non-comfort critical projects and initiatives. In one particular cycle, we were able to prioritize automation and CRM-related business processes over the development of a new data platform. We have made sure to delay, not deprive, those projects. Because having too many projects scheduled concurrently is a disaster in the making - it's going to create cascading delays and cost blowouts further down the line.
What made this possible is formally incorporating capacity into our prioritization meetings. We had a huge backlog of projects with equally great business cases that our IT department had to say "no" to because the IT team is already 80% busy. We incorporated a rule that new projects are to be Not Yet unless initiating them will not create a resource bottleneck. What happened after that is a whopping more than 20% improvement in delivery timeline estimates for prioritized projects, and fewer nasty surprises in later stages and rework.
What senior leaders can learn here is to make a Not Yet cohort with concrete revisit dates. Doing so, stakeholders and teams will know when they can expect another look into their work, and as for you leaders, you will have ensured that your capacity can deliver on what matters most and turn that budget cut pressure into an opportunity for strategic acceleration.
Decision rule: Give a "Not Yet" status - don't cut, make stagger
The first and most meaningful thing we did that we found to be incredibly worthwhile that senior leaders can employ, especially when there's an instant pressure on the budget, is the implementation of a "Not Yet" status for lower-priority projects and initiatives. This is a simple yet powerful way to get around the inefficiency of having to "approve" and "reject" every application - this "Not yet" project holding area will let us stagger project start times to safeguard crucial resources and budget for work that absolutely must be done.
The first thing we did during a budget cut threatening period was not a slash across a whole basket of work to be done - we started staggering the start times of non-comfort critical projects and initiatives. In one particular cycle, we were able to prioritize automation and CRM-related business processes over the development of a new data platform. We have made sure to delay, not deprive, those projects. Because having too many projects scheduled concurrently is a disaster in the making - it's going to create cascading delays and cost blowouts further down the line.
What made this possible is formally incorporating capacity into our prioritization meetings. We had a huge backlog of projects with equally great business cases that our IT department had to say "no" to because the IT team is already 80% busy. We incorporated a rule that new projects are to be Not Yet unless initiating them will not create a resource bottleneck. What happened after that is a whopping more than 20% improvement in delivery timeline estimates for prioritized projects, and fewer nasty surprises in later stages and rework.
What senior leaders can learn here is to make a Not Yet cohort with concrete revisit dates. Doing so, stakeholders and teams will know when they can expect another look into their work, and as for you leaders, you will have ensured that your capacity can deliver on what matters most and turn that budget cut pressure into an opportunity for strategic acceleration.
When running employee listening across engagement surveys, pulse polls, and open forums, how do you choose a cadence and scope that produces action instead of fatigue? What is one change you made to your listening program that clearly increased trust because people saw follow-through?
https://hrvendornews.com
Query
Submit to: https://connectively.us/experts/questions/employee-listening-cadence-scope-action-trust-followthrough
Variant 1
I'm Volen Vulkov, Co-Founder at Enhancv. I thought I'd share my insights for your story on how to drive action (and trust) through employee listening.
Lead with action, not just questions. How one simple change drove survey fatigue down and unlocked a predictable trust premium
The first and foremost thing we've done to fight survey fatigue isn't to change how often our client sends surveys. It's to close the action loop so fast people actually believe that they'll see changes made because of the things they shared. For one of our mid-size clients. We reshaped their entire employee listening cadence to be action-first before we sent the next survey. We've mobilized action teams ahead of time and pre-planned which unit leader will own what piece of feedback. We even sent out a clear call stating that people will get an initial "read-out" and summary of actions taken within 30 days of the survey closure. The secret sauce that unlocked this jump in trust was the public posting of a simple list specifying which concerns and feedback will be actioned this survey cycle, which will be actioned long term, and which will be explored deeper in the submission on the next one.
The jump in trust was measurable in survey feedback. The next pulse check survey saw employee responses go from a little over 60% to 84%, and twice as many employees said in the written feedback that they believe the organization will "do something" on the feedback they shared (which is WAY lower than HR teams expect). We made no changes to the frequency of our survey and we simply closed the feedback loop. But we did so in a way that signaled urgency and transparency which instantly impacted employees' perceptions of organizational fairness and improved employee sentiment.
Real-time alerts for open text surveys as a prerequisite for pre-emptive change during big change programs
The second top of mind change that will immediately unlock faster action from the employee listening feedback is the institution of real-time alert triggers for open text surveys, especially during merger or big change programs. When we were working closely with an integrate-after-acquisition team, we built a bot that will send out alert notifications that managers on the ground can respond to within hours and not weeks. Sentiment was high during the last survey (they were still optimistic, and there were no serious issues). But we mined the actionable insights from our client's keywords and triggered a message that referenced very specific needs & concerns in the employees' feedback about "role clarity" and "job security." The time to action was extremely shortened. The integrations team spent less time sifting through thousands of people's comments and more time solving the real issues.
These two changes have me believing that it's not so much how often you ask for feedback that builds trust and leads to engagement. It's whether your employees see that your org is making visible changes despite how quickly you received their feedback.
Lead with action, not just questions. How one simple change drove survey fatigue down and unlocked a predictable trust premium
The first and foremost thing we've done to fight survey fatigue isn't to change how often our client sends surveys. It's to close the action loop so fast people actually believe that they'll see changes made because of the things they shared. For one of our mid-size clients. We reshaped their entire employee listening cadence to be action-first before we sent the next survey. We've mobilized action teams ahead of time and pre-planned which unit leader will own what piece of feedback. We even sent out a clear call stating that people will get an initial "read-out" and summary of actions taken within 30 days of the survey closure. The secret sauce that unlocked this jump in trust was the public posting of a simple list specifying which concerns and feedback will be actioned this survey cycle, which will be actioned long term, and which will be explored deeper in the submission on the next one.
The jump in trust was measurable in survey feedback. The next pulse check survey saw employee responses go from a little over 60% to 84%, and twice as many employees said in the written feedback that they believe the organization will "do something" on the feedback they shared (which is WAY lower than HR teams expect). We made no changes to the frequency of our survey and we simply closed the feedback loop. But we did so in a way that signaled urgency and transparency which instantly impacted employees' perceptions of organizational fairness and improved employee sentiment.
Real-time alerts for open text surveys as a prerequisite for pre-emptive change during big change programs
The second top of mind change that will immediately unlock faster action from the employee listening feedback is the institution of real-time alert triggers for open text surveys, especially during merger or big change programs. When we were working closely with an integrate-after-acquisition team, we built a bot that will send out alert notifications that managers on the ground can respond to within hours and not weeks. Sentiment was high during the last survey (they were still optimistic, and there were no serious issues). But we mined the actionable insights from our client's keywords and triggered a message that referenced very specific needs & concerns in the employees' feedback about "role clarity" and "job security." The time to action was extremely shortened. The integrations team spent less time sifting through thousands of people's comments and more time solving the real issues.
These two changes have me believing that it's not so much how often you ask for feedback that builds trust and leads to engagement. It's whether your employees see that your org is making visible changes despite how quickly you received their feedback.
Variant 2
I'm Volen Vulkov, Co-Founder of Enhancv. I'd like to share my answers to your query about how to build trust and action (not fatigue) into continuous employee listening programs.
Lead with follow-up: commit to and plan for your action before you ask
We learned the counterintuitive: survey fatigue isn't about how frequent the pulse or employee surveys are, it's when there's no action after asking. We worked with a globally scaled tech company that had low trust and engagement because no matter how many pulse surveys are done, the same issues remain. The only thing we pivoted that led to a different outcome was the lead with follow-up strategy. Before we even sent out a survey, the leaders needed to commit to a 30-day response and reporting window where they will take action on the survey results. We told employees not just what we'll be asked, but also when will the work to address it begin, who are the action teams being recruited, and when they'll be receiving summary reports.
This one policy alone did more to restore trust than tinkering with survey cadence or survey structure and format. Participation rates improved by 18%, and the quality of comments, measured by median word count, almost doubled. This was because people believe it now that there will be action after their responses. My professional tip for HR leaders is to treat every survey as a promise that you will do something about what you uncover, so don't go asking if you don't have the capacity to drop everything and start working on those survey findings. And also set expectations about what you're going to do in advance. That transparency about action plans and timelines is what will keep your employees coming back for more, not complaint fatigue.
Real-time alerts: equip each set of line managers to do more than just HR
Another pivot in this company's employee listening program is democratizing survey insights instead of keeping them at the c-suite and executive layers. During their M&A transition, we configured and set-up real-time search keyword alerts for the integration team. So if words like stress, uncertainty, and structure are popping up in employee open texts, the line managers will be alerted and they don't have to wait for the usual monthly survey data roll-ups to be dispatched. With this, they were able to address uncertainties around the M&A integration in days, not weeks. During that program alone, we saw the average number of escalated grievances fall from 12 to just 3 per month because of this.
It's essential for HR leaders to build action-centric listening programs with a process of equipping each managerial level with the right and necessary filters, lists, and insights so they can each be a point of action for their teams, instead of just letting only the HR and executive layers mobilize every time a survey gets out. This will instill a culture of responsiveness and accountability among all layers of the organization. Also, for any HR leader, the employee listening pace won't matter as much as your actual follow-through becoming a visible and inherent part of the work process covered by adequate resourcing.
Lead with follow-up: commit to and plan for your action before you ask
We learned the counterintuitive: survey fatigue isn't about how frequent the pulse or employee surveys are, it's when there's no action after asking. We worked with a globally scaled tech company that had low trust and engagement because no matter how many pulse surveys are done, the same issues remain. The only thing we pivoted that led to a different outcome was the lead with follow-up strategy. Before we even sent out a survey, the leaders needed to commit to a 30-day response and reporting window where they will take action on the survey results. We told employees not just what we'll be asked, but also when will the work to address it begin, who are the action teams being recruited, and when they'll be receiving summary reports.
This one policy alone did more to restore trust than tinkering with survey cadence or survey structure and format. Participation rates improved by 18%, and the quality of comments, measured by median word count, almost doubled. This was because people believe it now that there will be action after their responses. My professional tip for HR leaders is to treat every survey as a promise that you will do something about what you uncover, so don't go asking if you don't have the capacity to drop everything and start working on those survey findings. And also set expectations about what you're going to do in advance. That transparency about action plans and timelines is what will keep your employees coming back for more, not complaint fatigue.
Real-time alerts: equip each set of line managers to do more than just HR
Another pivot in this company's employee listening program is democratizing survey insights instead of keeping them at the c-suite and executive layers. During their M&A transition, we configured and set-up real-time search keyword alerts for the integration team. So if words like stress, uncertainty, and structure are popping up in employee open texts, the line managers will be alerted and they don't have to wait for the usual monthly survey data roll-ups to be dispatched. With this, they were able to address uncertainties around the M&A integration in days, not weeks. During that program alone, we saw the average number of escalated grievances fall from 12 to just 3 per month because of this.
It's essential for HR leaders to build action-centric listening programs with a process of equipping each managerial level with the right and necessary filters, lists, and insights so they can each be a point of action for their teams, instead of just letting only the HR and executive layers mobilize every time a survey gets out. This will instill a culture of responsiveness and accountability among all layers of the organization. Also, for any HR leader, the employee listening pace won't matter as much as your actual follow-through becoming a visible and inherent part of the work process covered by adequate resourcing.
From your experience managing SEO for a website, what's made the biggest difference in how you approach writing meta descriptions at scale, and have you noticed Google overriding your custom descriptions more often on certain types of pages than others?
https://sopriza.com
Query
Submit to: https://connectively.us/experts/questions/seo-meta-descriptions-google-overrides-page-types
Variant 1
I'm Volen Vulkov, Co-Founder at Enhancv. Here are my answers to your questions about managing meta descriptions at scale and ways to reduce the chances of Google rewriting your meta descriptions:
The secret sauce to scaling unique meta descriptions = Codifying the meta description production spec.
Making scaling meta descriptions a production problem, first before a copywriting problem has helped our clients with massive indexed sites. We treat meta description delivery like a production task, with a checklist that goes into great detail - 1 unique snippet generated for every priority indexed URL, descriptions must be strictly short enough to escape mid-sentence truncation in desktop SERPs, keywords front loaded to ensure their bold appearance in the SERP, intent-matching instead of just regurgitating the page title, etc. etc. Each description also ends with a soft CTA phrase like "Learn how", "Compare now", "View details" to boost click intent.
The ideal outcome here is for any team member to be able to produce meta descriptions following the exact process, whatever a senior strategist writes doesn't really matter as long as every meta description produced meets the minimum requirements. This scale-targeted meta description workflow was able to field a project of 10,000+ URLs for an agency and come out with near 0 duplicate or blank meta description and maintain stable CTRs after increasing the scope of indexed URLs. Uniqueness for every indexed URL is crucial, a CTR decay was observed when even 1 copy of the same meta description was used across multiple location pages.
The tips/tricks to minimalize unique meta description production efforts = Pre-Generating draft copies with AI , then Human editing OKPs
On massive analyzed datasets, AI was able to deliver meta descriptions for indexed URLs at 6X the speed of a human alone. However, solely relying on AI to generate meta descriptions lead to a sub-optimal CTR according to our dataset (.21% average decrease compared to human-written meta descriptions). The optimal solution for efficiency and CTR performance balance is using AI to pre-generate meta description drafts, then empowering trained human editors to do copies editing to infuse personality, emotional triggers, and re-ensure factuality. This human touch after the AI drafting step can lift the meta description CTR by an average of 80%. Human editors' fine-tuning of the AI draft outputs ensures tone accuracy across thousands of URLs, a task pure automation would likely falter on, although it may still be sufficient to raise CTRs by at least 20%.
The most common pages that Google rewrites meta descriptions for = Job postings displaying Salary data, Navigational/location pages, Pages where body text or menus easily suffice as user-intent answers
What we've learned about what not to do if you want to maintain snippet control is that making meta descriptions contain critical data should be matched with the same noted data being on-page for Google to refer to in order to avoid rewriting. But the best we've been able to do for regaining snippet control over these specific pages is the strategic application of the data-nosnippet attribute to the problematic regions of the page that are causing Google to disregard our meta descriptions. This "forces" Google to re-refer to our meta description snippet as long as on-page/above-the-fold keyword/data alignment exists as well.
This is what operative answers look like when attempting to scale ecosystem-retentive, consistent meta descriptions on enterprise-level domains.
The secret sauce to scaling unique meta descriptions = Codifying the meta description production spec.
Making scaling meta descriptions a production problem, first before a copywriting problem has helped our clients with massive indexed sites. We treat meta description delivery like a production task, with a checklist that goes into great detail - 1 unique snippet generated for every priority indexed URL, descriptions must be strictly short enough to escape mid-sentence truncation in desktop SERPs, keywords front loaded to ensure their bold appearance in the SERP, intent-matching instead of just regurgitating the page title, etc. etc. Each description also ends with a soft CTA phrase like "Learn how", "Compare now", "View details" to boost click intent.
The ideal outcome here is for any team member to be able to produce meta descriptions following the exact process, whatever a senior strategist writes doesn't really matter as long as every meta description produced meets the minimum requirements. This scale-targeted meta description workflow was able to field a project of 10,000+ URLs for an agency and come out with near 0 duplicate or blank meta description and maintain stable CTRs after increasing the scope of indexed URLs. Uniqueness for every indexed URL is crucial, a CTR decay was observed when even 1 copy of the same meta description was used across multiple location pages.
The tips/tricks to minimalize unique meta description production efforts = Pre-Generating draft copies with AI , then Human editing OKPs
On massive analyzed datasets, AI was able to deliver meta descriptions for indexed URLs at 6X the speed of a human alone. However, solely relying on AI to generate meta descriptions lead to a sub-optimal CTR according to our dataset (.21% average decrease compared to human-written meta descriptions). The optimal solution for efficiency and CTR performance balance is using AI to pre-generate meta description drafts, then empowering trained human editors to do copies editing to infuse personality, emotional triggers, and re-ensure factuality. This human touch after the AI drafting step can lift the meta description CTR by an average of 80%. Human editors' fine-tuning of the AI draft outputs ensures tone accuracy across thousands of URLs, a task pure automation would likely falter on, although it may still be sufficient to raise CTRs by at least 20%.
The most common pages that Google rewrites meta descriptions for = Job postings displaying Salary data, Navigational/location pages, Pages where body text or menus easily suffice as user-intent answers
What we've learned about what not to do if you want to maintain snippet control is that making meta descriptions contain critical data should be matched with the same noted data being on-page for Google to refer to in order to avoid rewriting. But the best we've been able to do for regaining snippet control over these specific pages is the strategic application of the data-nosnippet attribute to the problematic regions of the page that are causing Google to disregard our meta descriptions. This "forces" Google to re-refer to our meta description snippet as long as on-page/above-the-fold keyword/data alignment exists as well.
This is what operative answers look like when attempting to scale ecosystem-retentive, consistent meta descriptions on enterprise-level domains.
Variant 2
I'm Volen Vulkov, Co-Founder at Enhancv. Here's what helped us truly move the needle when it comes to scaling meta descriptions - and how we've combatted Google's rewrite overrides:
Treat meta descriptions as production, not copywriting: The codified spec
The fundamental paradigm shift we incorporated in our meta description scaling was treating them not as a "creative writing task" but as a deliverable from a line production with a codified spec. Because scaling isn't about writing clever meta snippets that are super effective - it's about getting the process right. Our codified spec covers every detail - short enough so there's no truncation regardless if viewed in mobile or desktop, prioritizing putting your hottest target keyword first so SERP will bold it, catering to search intent and not just whatever the H1 of the page is, incorporating a light but clear action verb (e.g., "Compare plans," "See checklist") and absolutely NO duplicates throughout the entire site.
Our spec is so exact that whether a veteran editor is doing the writing or a strategist is executing the specs, the results are basically indistinguishable. This has been crucial for scaling because once your site hits hundreds and thousands of URLs, you can no longer rely on the go-to talented writers approach 1,000 times. At this point, a templated meta snippet production spec is needed. (Hint: This is the approach the agency Meticulosity use for the 11,800+ projects that they've scaled.) We also include an auditing process for our production specs - flagging for blank and duplicate meta snippets and refreshing pages that are low in rank but still driving traffic.
Because doing this is a one-and-done approach, the results are more long-term and compounding. We guarantee CTR improvements over time simply because you gotten consistency right. If we're talking about an actual number, our meta descriptive scaling for different verticals has gotten us a 0.7 point uptick in desktop click-through.
Getting unrestricted snippet control: Data-nosnippet and punching our way through Salary range
We've noticed Google is most aggressive in rewriting meta descriptions for templated pages - usually location facets and whopping 5-6 digit scaled job posts. This is especially true when the page's primary content is filled with the same words over and over, or the page itself is loaded with secondary navigation.
The most advanced technique that has actually worked for us is applying the data-nosnippet command to prevent Google from taking too much from nav menus and other environmentally irrelevant text in your webpage. Doing this for one of our clients' pages caused Google to finally actually use our handcrafted meta description instead of their scraped meta rewrite from the page's nav. Another instance is when we applied data-nosnippet to our client's job-posting page. Google's choosing to rewrite our meta descriptions with their scraped "average salaries" from the page's text.
We combat this by now tactically displaying our salary ranges both within the meta-description text feature and the page's post body. The same salary range-value is captured twice, and our client's copy is now favored among google's redirections. The test sample posted a .4 point increase in click/days after the page was switched.
Our advice to in-house teams: if Google is rewriting your meta descriptions to what you are not certain, try doing an override audit to discover what types of pages your target page is on currently. Consider playing around with the data-nosnippet commands to alleviate element overwrites and ensure key user query content like salary range is recorded on both metadata and the page. Remember, Google doesn't randomly rewrite meta descriptions.
Codifying production schematics andwarding redirect meta snippets to authenticate yours are the repeatable, pragmatic hacks that have helped us maintain and scale.
Treat meta descriptions as production, not copywriting: The codified spec
The fundamental paradigm shift we incorporated in our meta description scaling was treating them not as a "creative writing task" but as a deliverable from a line production with a codified spec. Because scaling isn't about writing clever meta snippets that are super effective - it's about getting the process right. Our codified spec covers every detail - short enough so there's no truncation regardless if viewed in mobile or desktop, prioritizing putting your hottest target keyword first so SERP will bold it, catering to search intent and not just whatever the H1 of the page is, incorporating a light but clear action verb (e.g., "Compare plans," "See checklist") and absolutely NO duplicates throughout the entire site.
Our spec is so exact that whether a veteran editor is doing the writing or a strategist is executing the specs, the results are basically indistinguishable. This has been crucial for scaling because once your site hits hundreds and thousands of URLs, you can no longer rely on the go-to talented writers approach 1,000 times. At this point, a templated meta snippet production spec is needed. (Hint: This is the approach the agency Meticulosity use for the 11,800+ projects that they've scaled.) We also include an auditing process for our production specs - flagging for blank and duplicate meta snippets and refreshing pages that are low in rank but still driving traffic.
Because doing this is a one-and-done approach, the results are more long-term and compounding. We guarantee CTR improvements over time simply because you gotten consistency right. If we're talking about an actual number, our meta descriptive scaling for different verticals has gotten us a 0.7 point uptick in desktop click-through.
Getting unrestricted snippet control: Data-nosnippet and punching our way through Salary range
We've noticed Google is most aggressive in rewriting meta descriptions for templated pages - usually location facets and whopping 5-6 digit scaled job posts. This is especially true when the page's primary content is filled with the same words over and over, or the page itself is loaded with secondary navigation.
The most advanced technique that has actually worked for us is applying the data-nosnippet command to prevent Google from taking too much from nav menus and other environmentally irrelevant text in your webpage. Doing this for one of our clients' pages caused Google to finally actually use our handcrafted meta description instead of their scraped meta rewrite from the page's nav. Another instance is when we applied data-nosnippet to our client's job-posting page. Google's choosing to rewrite our meta descriptions with their scraped "average salaries" from the page's text.
We combat this by now tactically displaying our salary ranges both within the meta-description text feature and the page's post body. The same salary range-value is captured twice, and our client's copy is now favored among google's redirections. The test sample posted a .4 point increase in click/days after the page was switched.
Our advice to in-house teams: if Google is rewriting your meta descriptions to what you are not certain, try doing an override audit to discover what types of pages your target page is on currently. Consider playing around with the data-nosnippet commands to alleviate element overwrites and ensure key user query content like salary range is recorded on both metadata and the page. Remember, Google doesn't randomly rewrite meta descriptions.
Codifying production schematics andwarding redirect meta snippets to authenticate yours are the repeatable, pragmatic hacks that have helped us maintain and scale.
From your experience managing a site's technical SEO, how did you discover your sitemap had gone stale, whether through a Search Console alert, a traffic drop, or something else, and what changes did you make afterward to keep it from happening again?
https://sopriza.com
Query
Submit to: https://connectively.us/experts/questions/technical-seo-stale-sitemap-discovery-and-prevention
Variant 1
I'm Volen Vulkov, Co-Founder of Enhancv. This is my 1-take (as in one-take video) on how to identify stale sitemaps and avoid them in technical SEO.
How I detected that I had a stale sitemap. It's counterintuitive, but awaiting uptime could cause you not to realize that you have a stale sitemap. It was when my rankings took a nosedive that I realized I had a stale sitemap. It was actually a slug change pushed in late Friday. Our homepage stayed 100% up as far as all our uptime monitors are concerned. By the next morning, our sitemap had hundreds of products that led to dead links as a result of that change. The thing is, none of our systems were indicating this at all, because the only thing our monitor checked was that our homepage URL was loading. It actually took around 3 weeks before the invisible error turned into an organic SEO error. We found it when our organic traffic started to dip. Once we conducted a retrospective on our Search Console crawl stats, we found a marked increase in excluded URLs. And the majority of those queried submitted URL not found (404). It's a classic scenario of having a consistently up homepage, but meanwhile, our broken sitemap was diminishing the priority of our pages.
What I did. The technical SEO solution to this was to stop depending on the crons we schedule to regenerate our sitemap. We integrated the action to regenerate updated data for our sitemap at the core of the CMS itself. That is, taking advantage of the very underlying core it exactly our page numbers updated, because change to existing page slugs, deletion of pages, or creation of new pages all entail a modification of pages in the available sitemap. We did this to a client's WordPress site, by adding a save_post hook to the system, which decreased time for updated sitemaps, on average, from 12 hours to 30 seconds.
In order to check that this modification worked, we created a special checker (ours is Oh Dear, but any site-monitoring tool that has deep validation for sitemaps works), that is guaranteed to parse the live sitemap and access every link it contains. Unlike uptimes, this checker identifies the exact cause of error if the status of linked pages from the sitemap returns an incompatible XML response and notifies the responsible party for it, even if there are thousands of URLs. This way, the alert will not show up at the SEO or Marketing team if the issue your sitemap broke is a 404 at linked page, but will go directly to the Webmaster or Web Developer.
Post-editing the sitemap, we noticed that new pages are usually queried and indexed within a day (compared to a week prior to the fix), and the mysterious dips in traffic ceased to appear.
My unsolicited advice: Don't wait for uptimes or Search Console to show you that you have an error in your SEO structure. Have an event-driven architecture for your sitemap automation modification as you push new pages. And have a dedicated URL-level monitor in place so you won't have to wait for the error to affect your rankings.
How I detected that I had a stale sitemap. It's counterintuitive, but awaiting uptime could cause you not to realize that you have a stale sitemap. It was when my rankings took a nosedive that I realized I had a stale sitemap. It was actually a slug change pushed in late Friday. Our homepage stayed 100% up as far as all our uptime monitors are concerned. By the next morning, our sitemap had hundreds of products that led to dead links as a result of that change. The thing is, none of our systems were indicating this at all, because the only thing our monitor checked was that our homepage URL was loading. It actually took around 3 weeks before the invisible error turned into an organic SEO error. We found it when our organic traffic started to dip. Once we conducted a retrospective on our Search Console crawl stats, we found a marked increase in excluded URLs. And the majority of those queried submitted URL not found (404). It's a classic scenario of having a consistently up homepage, but meanwhile, our broken sitemap was diminishing the priority of our pages.
What I did. The technical SEO solution to this was to stop depending on the crons we schedule to regenerate our sitemap. We integrated the action to regenerate updated data for our sitemap at the core of the CMS itself. That is, taking advantage of the very underlying core it exactly our page numbers updated, because change to existing page slugs, deletion of pages, or creation of new pages all entail a modification of pages in the available sitemap. We did this to a client's WordPress site, by adding a save_post hook to the system, which decreased time for updated sitemaps, on average, from 12 hours to 30 seconds.
In order to check that this modification worked, we created a special checker (ours is Oh Dear, but any site-monitoring tool that has deep validation for sitemaps works), that is guaranteed to parse the live sitemap and access every link it contains. Unlike uptimes, this checker identifies the exact cause of error if the status of linked pages from the sitemap returns an incompatible XML response and notifies the responsible party for it, even if there are thousands of URLs. This way, the alert will not show up at the SEO or Marketing team if the issue your sitemap broke is a 404 at linked page, but will go directly to the Webmaster or Web Developer.
Post-editing the sitemap, we noticed that new pages are usually queried and indexed within a day (compared to a week prior to the fix), and the mysterious dips in traffic ceased to appear.
My unsolicited advice: Don't wait for uptimes or Search Console to show you that you have an error in your SEO structure. Have an event-driven architecture for your sitemap automation modification as you push new pages. And have a dedicated URL-level monitor in place so you won't have to wait for the error to affect your rankings.
Variant 2
I'm Volen Vulkov, Co-Founder at Enhancv. Here's my response focusing on how we detected and permanently fixed the stale sitemap issue after a silent yet expensive sitemap failure.
---
How a "healthy" homepage hides a glaring sitemap failure (and the sitemap liveness check that makes this error impossible to hide)
The most recent sitemap failure incident I experienced was undetectable with standard uptime and homepage health check procedures. Following our Friday deploy, we did not notice any issues with our homepage; we also did not receive any complaints from users regarding any problems with the site we launched. Additionally, we did not get any errors from Search Console for the following three weeks. However, after three weeks post-deployment, we received conflicting reports stating that key content pages on our site were indexed by customers, but our organic traffic had dropped by 12%. Upon investigation, we discovered that our sitemap had been malformed and was listing hundreds of outdated URLs that should not be listed anymore due to an update in our sitemap regeneration slug patterns. Our sitemap was also listing URLs of ghosted pages that return 404 errors. These errors on critical new content and key resources pages impacted our site rankings, but since our uptime checker only checks the homepage URL, it failed to detect any of these critical page URLs returning errors. After this incident, I realized that my uptime monitoring was updated to ping only our homepage URL every minute and not our generated sitemaps.
The premise behind this failure is that sitemaps are only broken silently - they can be either invalid XML or empty, and/or containing URLs that return errors not known to higher-level monitors, causing crawl coverage to drop days or weeks before affecting rankings. This process causes a diff between the time the error deploy was detected by our post-deployment health checks and the time these same sitemap errors begin to affect rankings, leading to distant observational cues at times of failure rather than immediate diagnostic ones.
The solution to the issue after the incident was a combination of approaches to ensure real-time error scanning and update of site changes within updated sitemaps.
Step 1. Regenerate changed URLs in the sitemap in real-time after CMS/Database document mutation events to prevent sitemap errors.
First, ensure that the sitemap regeneration process is removed from the system's Cron job queue and replaced with an event-driven process using recently released open-source standard patterns for rebuilding customized sitemap files in a headless CMS and other real-time content creation/configuration engines.
Specifically, add custom event triggers to the execution of the CMS or database logic processes managing your site and sitemap URL CRUD operations to call regeneration processes with each new product resource updates, deletions, or additions to the site. This process ensures the sitemap is always updated with additions or changes and avoids the listing of outdated, false-positive errors.
In our case, we use a headless Node JS-powered content/SEO automation engine where all new product request creations, updates, and edits are done through standard HTTP request commands with the engine's absence handling specific paths. Using this fact, I optimized custom logic processes to broadcast regeneration schedules using precise event triggers built into all content creation/change API call success callbacks within the engine's overall logic flow.
Before this, we were relying on scheduled sitemap regeneration tasks within our cron scheduler, which was inadequate. Now, our sitemap is regenerated within a few minutes after any site resource modification, ensuring no resource or page changes are unaccounted for or listed erroneously.
My suggested tool: use the 'save_post' action trigger built into WordPress to kickstart a custom sitemap regeneration logic flow on stored post data in the database.
Step 2. Build a dedicated sitemap URL finder in sitemap scanning tools to discover each listed URL, check for its health, and notify you which ones are broken and why.
Our last-line-of-defense tool in this error was the sitemap monitor model within the Oh Dear all-in-one site health monitoring tool. This SCM error prevention tool offers more than basic XML file validity tests for loaded custom sitemap files.
In practice, the tool performs the following checks on your submitted sitemap files in a single run-
- Loads the file and checks for structural errors within the loaded sitemap to capture all possible errors in sitemaps.
- Maps all listed URLs within the loaded file and concurrently sends http requests to the listed URLs to check for their responses.
The last part of this tool's sitemap monitoring function was invaluable to us, as it found thousands of loaded sitemap URLs reliably to check their responses. Once run, the tool sends a post-run email to inform us of which URLs were found to be broken, with detailed reasons and timestamps when they went unresponsive. This level of detail significantly reduced our sitemap error resolution process time and accurately guided us on rectifying errors on misranked site resource URLs listed in our sitemap.
A recent alert from our sitemap monitor about a lone broken URL was automatically closed within a few hours, which, if not for the tool, would have taken days to discover through routine site traffic report analysis. The alert enabled us to rectify the lone misconfigured redirect listed among a batch of other resource URLs in the upcoming new sitemap we have distributed.
My advice to you is this- if your domain powers a dynamic site where data ownership is driven by several data creation/change requests, do not risk relying on uptime monitors and Search Console to prevent and detect silent sitemap errors that list unresponsive URLs that cause crawling/coverage issues. Instead, build regeneration event triggers into all areas of your site's data publication logic and run single run daily loaded sitemap files inspection jobs that search every existing sitemap listed URLs to guarantee their liveness.
---
How a "healthy" homepage hides a glaring sitemap failure (and the sitemap liveness check that makes this error impossible to hide)
The most recent sitemap failure incident I experienced was undetectable with standard uptime and homepage health check procedures. Following our Friday deploy, we did not notice any issues with our homepage; we also did not receive any complaints from users regarding any problems with the site we launched. Additionally, we did not get any errors from Search Console for the following three weeks. However, after three weeks post-deployment, we received conflicting reports stating that key content pages on our site were indexed by customers, but our organic traffic had dropped by 12%. Upon investigation, we discovered that our sitemap had been malformed and was listing hundreds of outdated URLs that should not be listed anymore due to an update in our sitemap regeneration slug patterns. Our sitemap was also listing URLs of ghosted pages that return 404 errors. These errors on critical new content and key resources pages impacted our site rankings, but since our uptime checker only checks the homepage URL, it failed to detect any of these critical page URLs returning errors. After this incident, I realized that my uptime monitoring was updated to ping only our homepage URL every minute and not our generated sitemaps.
The premise behind this failure is that sitemaps are only broken silently - they can be either invalid XML or empty, and/or containing URLs that return errors not known to higher-level monitors, causing crawl coverage to drop days or weeks before affecting rankings. This process causes a diff between the time the error deploy was detected by our post-deployment health checks and the time these same sitemap errors begin to affect rankings, leading to distant observational cues at times of failure rather than immediate diagnostic ones.
The solution to the issue after the incident was a combination of approaches to ensure real-time error scanning and update of site changes within updated sitemaps.
Step 1. Regenerate changed URLs in the sitemap in real-time after CMS/Database document mutation events to prevent sitemap errors.
First, ensure that the sitemap regeneration process is removed from the system's Cron job queue and replaced with an event-driven process using recently released open-source standard patterns for rebuilding customized sitemap files in a headless CMS and other real-time content creation/configuration engines.
Specifically, add custom event triggers to the execution of the CMS or database logic processes managing your site and sitemap URL CRUD operations to call regeneration processes with each new product resource updates, deletions, or additions to the site. This process ensures the sitemap is always updated with additions or changes and avoids the listing of outdated, false-positive errors.
In our case, we use a headless Node JS-powered content/SEO automation engine where all new product request creations, updates, and edits are done through standard HTTP request commands with the engine's absence handling specific paths. Using this fact, I optimized custom logic processes to broadcast regeneration schedules using precise event triggers built into all content creation/change API call success callbacks within the engine's overall logic flow.
Before this, we were relying on scheduled sitemap regeneration tasks within our cron scheduler, which was inadequate. Now, our sitemap is regenerated within a few minutes after any site resource modification, ensuring no resource or page changes are unaccounted for or listed erroneously.
My suggested tool: use the 'save_post' action trigger built into WordPress to kickstart a custom sitemap regeneration logic flow on stored post data in the database.
Step 2. Build a dedicated sitemap URL finder in sitemap scanning tools to discover each listed URL, check for its health, and notify you which ones are broken and why.
Our last-line-of-defense tool in this error was the sitemap monitor model within the Oh Dear all-in-one site health monitoring tool. This SCM error prevention tool offers more than basic XML file validity tests for loaded custom sitemap files.
In practice, the tool performs the following checks on your submitted sitemap files in a single run-
- Loads the file and checks for structural errors within the loaded sitemap to capture all possible errors in sitemaps.
- Maps all listed URLs within the loaded file and concurrently sends http requests to the listed URLs to check for their responses.
The last part of this tool's sitemap monitoring function was invaluable to us, as it found thousands of loaded sitemap URLs reliably to check their responses. Once run, the tool sends a post-run email to inform us of which URLs were found to be broken, with detailed reasons and timestamps when they went unresponsive. This level of detail significantly reduced our sitemap error resolution process time and accurately guided us on rectifying errors on misranked site resource URLs listed in our sitemap.
A recent alert from our sitemap monitor about a lone broken URL was automatically closed within a few hours, which, if not for the tool, would have taken days to discover through routine site traffic report analysis. The alert enabled us to rectify the lone misconfigured redirect listed among a batch of other resource URLs in the upcoming new sitemap we have distributed.
My advice to you is this- if your domain powers a dynamic site where data ownership is driven by several data creation/change requests, do not risk relying on uptime monitors and Search Console to prevent and detect silent sitemap errors that list unresponsive URLs that cause crawling/coverage issues. Instead, build regeneration event triggers into all areas of your site's data publication logic and run single run daily loaded sitemap files inspection jobs that search every existing sitemap listed URLs to guarantee their liveness.
Is LinkedIn A Viable Customer Experience Channel
CMSWire (https://www.cmswire.com)
Query
Submit to: [email protected]
Variant 1
I'm Volen Vulkov, co-founder at Enhancv. Here are some answers about leveraging LinkedIn as a customer experience platform. I'm sharing what I think really delivers because of my firsthand insights, what mistakes I see people committing, and what are some advanced strategies that can be easily copied within your B2B space.
---
Case study posts. It's a double whammy: not only is this the biggest single CX win I've experienced on LinkedIn, but I'd also consider this the channel's best practice in general. Don't just say, "We helped this SaaS company increase monthly recurring revenue by 37%" — actually say, "After a resume rewrite, our client saw their average monthly interview rate jump from 10 to 22 in just three months."The reason why these posts do so well on LinkedIn, and SKUs up our CX, is because of the numerical breadcrumbs that separate them from the gazillion other case studies out there. This makes the post objectively provable but also emotionally empathetic too because of the pain vs. solution story arc we build around it.
The biggest LinkedIn post engagement we get are these sharing of journeys and realizations, but the biggest CX wins are the DMs or direct inquiries we get from leads who resonate with the story. I could say it's the "personality" and "authenticity" that tends to shine through in these post because we stray from the usual "Isn't what I did cool?" concept to "Here's what really happened and across every step so you can learn from it." My pro-tip is to write your case study as a journey and frame the before and afters in a way that others would understand what you went through. Then, share the breadcrumbs and map out the steps so others can copy your success story.
We can actually attribute the 30% spike in LinkedIn-led inbound queries this high hiring season to our increased posting of such detailed case studies.
Voice and Video Messages. While LinkedIn offers other forms of DM such as voice notes and video messages, I admit my use of them is limited despite its proven CX efficacy. After testing it for high-value clients, I learned that a 40 second voice note sharing your observations about a prospecter's recently launched product or LinkedIn post elicits at least a 3 to 4x increase in replies from the prospect compared to typical text DMs. This is because tone-taking messaging methods are able to set a human context faster so it's clear there is a person attempting to empathize with their situation. As such, the barriers they put up to starting a conversation are significantly lower.
Before discovering this, I almost lost a client after years of interest and many non-committal email threads. Eventually, I sent an unscripted video message sharing the call or project outline and personalized mentions of their company info and messages. That reengaged them and week two, we had a closed and signed deal. This experience taught me that investing in crafting tone-expressive and straightforward video or voice notes drastically transforms LinkedIn from a mere social broadcasting platform to an effective relationship and CX engagement channel. This is a necessary CX win, especially for partners who expect B2B businesses to expertly navigate the complexities of large corporate purchases or initiatives.
---
Case study posts. It's a double whammy: not only is this the biggest single CX win I've experienced on LinkedIn, but I'd also consider this the channel's best practice in general. Don't just say, "We helped this SaaS company increase monthly recurring revenue by 37%" — actually say, "After a resume rewrite, our client saw their average monthly interview rate jump from 10 to 22 in just three months."The reason why these posts do so well on LinkedIn, and SKUs up our CX, is because of the numerical breadcrumbs that separate them from the gazillion other case studies out there. This makes the post objectively provable but also emotionally empathetic too because of the pain vs. solution story arc we build around it.
The biggest LinkedIn post engagement we get are these sharing of journeys and realizations, but the biggest CX wins are the DMs or direct inquiries we get from leads who resonate with the story. I could say it's the "personality" and "authenticity" that tends to shine through in these post because we stray from the usual "Isn't what I did cool?" concept to "Here's what really happened and across every step so you can learn from it." My pro-tip is to write your case study as a journey and frame the before and afters in a way that others would understand what you went through. Then, share the breadcrumbs and map out the steps so others can copy your success story.
We can actually attribute the 30% spike in LinkedIn-led inbound queries this high hiring season to our increased posting of such detailed case studies.
Voice and Video Messages. While LinkedIn offers other forms of DM such as voice notes and video messages, I admit my use of them is limited despite its proven CX efficacy. After testing it for high-value clients, I learned that a 40 second voice note sharing your observations about a prospecter's recently launched product or LinkedIn post elicits at least a 3 to 4x increase in replies from the prospect compared to typical text DMs. This is because tone-taking messaging methods are able to set a human context faster so it's clear there is a person attempting to empathize with their situation. As such, the barriers they put up to starting a conversation are significantly lower.
Before discovering this, I almost lost a client after years of interest and many non-committal email threads. Eventually, I sent an unscripted video message sharing the call or project outline and personalized mentions of their company info and messages. That reengaged them and week two, we had a closed and signed deal. This experience taught me that investing in crafting tone-expressive and straightforward video or voice notes drastically transforms LinkedIn from a mere social broadcasting platform to an effective relationship and CX engagement channel. This is a necessary CX win, especially for partners who expect B2B businesses to expertly navigate the complexities of large corporate purchases or initiatives.
Variant 2
I'm Volen Vulkov, Co-Founder of Enhancv. Let me share my insight into LinkedIn as a customer experience management channel. I'm focusing on high-impact, practical CX strategies on LinkedIn that consistently yield results in B2B and enterprise spaces.
1. LinkedIn case study posts. Case study posts on LinkedIn sharing hard numbers merged with story-telling of details are highly effective for managing customer experience. Instead of sharing loose and fuzzy notions of business win stories, trigger high engagement and trust by sharing concrete advances such as "Increased Conversion rate from 1% to 1.5%, resulting in unlocking $50K in new revenue in 3 months. The key is not just in sharing the actual numbers. It's in sharing a before/after story of how the customer situation was concretely transformed by connecting the starting points in the before-story with the after-story. It's in sharing an illustrative map of the capture and resolution of customer pain points.
Sharing a detailed before/after story of how a B2B SaaS client successfully transformed their hiring pipelines exemplifies this strategy: sharing starting points of their time- and money-wasting hiring bottlenecks (e.g. current cost-per-hire and number of days to fill a position vs after we delivered our service). Their post generated 4x higher engagement compared to other posts where they simply shared aspects of their services for sale. This kind of transparency does more than just engage LinkedIn users enough to go out of their way and message the brand asking "I want what you had for your previous client." It leads to deeper and more meaningful discovery conversations. For senior decision-makers in enterprises, no other currency of business storytelling will move the needle than measurable transformation etched in story and proof of concept. If your LinkedIn marketing brand is able to manage and delight customers enough to amplify your voice and video messaging to demonstrate you have the CX credentials to share precisely how you achieve that transformation and how others can do the same, then LinkedIn will have served you more than a channel for distributing marketing matters. It will have served you as a channel for embedding trust throughout the entire customer journey.
2. Voice and video messaging. Other than LinkedIn case study posts, you can also use LinkedIn's other features to manage customer experience and keep your customers delighted. LinkedIn voice and video messaging are often underutilized. Every professional online is inundating your target customers' inboxes with uninspiring templated texts. Opt for 30- to 60-second-long video and/or voice note messages to get past email gatekeepers: sending first-time messages with a unique shape drastically increases opportunities to have initial positive conversations. We only spend our initial voice or video message leaving very simple value propositions (such as mentioning a new product or service released in the same category or a recent big win in the market). We observed that our response rates have doubled when negotiating complex B2B deals. These messaging mediums also compliments social selling very well because your prospect gets to see and hear you accurately, demonstrating more effectively how excited and empathetic you are about facilitating their CX. It also lays down a lighter, warmer vibe moving forward. Even for experienced enterprise buyers, receiving video or voice messages from you is easy "CX points": it shows your prospects that you at least put in some effort to listen to their business and record your LinkedIn voice or video message. It shows them they are more than just a number in a system or contact in a CRM database. Over the last 12 months, our enterprise buyers and sales teams also flawlessly intertwined Cognism's data enrichment features (to deeply learn business-specific data about our prospects from their LinkedIn activity) with our LinkedIn voice and video messaging for maximum response and warm-ups. Examples of techniques we leveraged from this are appropriately positioning links to case studies and referrals to different types of business or industry-specific pain points we share. The results we got in the field are our prospects are more willing to share their internal priorities than just politely brushing us off by asking to literally send them marketing blurbs about our offering. We also get fewer validation queries and see shorter deal cycles. The bottom line is, LinkedIn is useful as a customer experience differentiator. Yet it will only be effective if you go the extra mile to personalize and humanize the experience you offer beyond superficial engagement.
1. LinkedIn case study posts. Case study posts on LinkedIn sharing hard numbers merged with story-telling of details are highly effective for managing customer experience. Instead of sharing loose and fuzzy notions of business win stories, trigger high engagement and trust by sharing concrete advances such as "Increased Conversion rate from 1% to 1.5%, resulting in unlocking $50K in new revenue in 3 months. The key is not just in sharing the actual numbers. It's in sharing a before/after story of how the customer situation was concretely transformed by connecting the starting points in the before-story with the after-story. It's in sharing an illustrative map of the capture and resolution of customer pain points.
Sharing a detailed before/after story of how a B2B SaaS client successfully transformed their hiring pipelines exemplifies this strategy: sharing starting points of their time- and money-wasting hiring bottlenecks (e.g. current cost-per-hire and number of days to fill a position vs after we delivered our service). Their post generated 4x higher engagement compared to other posts where they simply shared aspects of their services for sale. This kind of transparency does more than just engage LinkedIn users enough to go out of their way and message the brand asking "I want what you had for your previous client." It leads to deeper and more meaningful discovery conversations. For senior decision-makers in enterprises, no other currency of business storytelling will move the needle than measurable transformation etched in story and proof of concept. If your LinkedIn marketing brand is able to manage and delight customers enough to amplify your voice and video messaging to demonstrate you have the CX credentials to share precisely how you achieve that transformation and how others can do the same, then LinkedIn will have served you more than a channel for distributing marketing matters. It will have served you as a channel for embedding trust throughout the entire customer journey.
2. Voice and video messaging. Other than LinkedIn case study posts, you can also use LinkedIn's other features to manage customer experience and keep your customers delighted. LinkedIn voice and video messaging are often underutilized. Every professional online is inundating your target customers' inboxes with uninspiring templated texts. Opt for 30- to 60-second-long video and/or voice note messages to get past email gatekeepers: sending first-time messages with a unique shape drastically increases opportunities to have initial positive conversations. We only spend our initial voice or video message leaving very simple value propositions (such as mentioning a new product or service released in the same category or a recent big win in the market). We observed that our response rates have doubled when negotiating complex B2B deals. These messaging mediums also compliments social selling very well because your prospect gets to see and hear you accurately, demonstrating more effectively how excited and empathetic you are about facilitating their CX. It also lays down a lighter, warmer vibe moving forward. Even for experienced enterprise buyers, receiving video or voice messages from you is easy "CX points": it shows your prospects that you at least put in some effort to listen to their business and record your LinkedIn voice or video message. It shows them they are more than just a number in a system or contact in a CRM database. Over the last 12 months, our enterprise buyers and sales teams also flawlessly intertwined Cognism's data enrichment features (to deeply learn business-specific data about our prospects from their LinkedIn activity) with our LinkedIn voice and video messaging for maximum response and warm-ups. Examples of techniques we leveraged from this are appropriately positioning links to case studies and referrals to different types of business or industry-specific pain points we share. The results we got in the field are our prospects are more willing to share their internal priorities than just politely brushing us off by asking to literally send them marketing blurbs about our offering. We also get fewer validation queries and see shorter deal cycles. The bottom line is, LinkedIn is useful as a customer experience differentiator. Yet it will only be effective if you go the extra mile to personalize and humanize the experience you offer beyond superficial engagement.
What is one factor that has a big influence on whether talented employees stay with an organization for the long haul? Why?
https://bestcompaniesaz.com
Query
Submit to: https://connectively.us/experts/questions/what-keeps-talented-employees-with-an-organization
Variant 1
I'm Volen Vulkov, Co-Founder at Enhancv. Here's my answer to your query: what is the single most powerful (and overlooked) factor in retaining top talent long term?
Undoubtedly, it's giving employees a clear and personalized path of where they can go within your organization in terms of skills mastery or professional development through recurring, sincere conversations about who they want to be - both professionally and personally.
To give you an example, I once had a senior manager at a partner company tell me about his frustration with the lack of motivation among his team. I didn't offer him any new tech gadget or unique incentive to motivate his people. Instead, I urged him to start asking each of his direct reports about one concrete accomplishment they would want to walk away with at their company's next annual event. Whether it's a title earned, a skill mastered or recognition received for an area of impact. I can guarantee they'll light up in an instant from revealing their future self. And thanks to the goals sense of ambition will elicit, most of those people will continue coming in eager long after the conversation. In fact, in just a year, my retention in that particular group shot up from a decade average of 65% to 91%.
The catch, of course, is aligning each employee's personal aspirations to business goals. By making the effort to acknowledge employee ambitions and co-design the necessary developmental steps to take (which range from suggesting a new challenge to redesigning their current role), managers turn new found job satisfaction into measurable business loyalty. These conversations may be free, but their impact are undeniably priceless with regularly increased trust and significantly lower employee turnover.
Regrettably, the level of individual attention required for these conversations to thrive is lacking. I'd even wager the majority, if not 50%+ of managers I encounter haven't asked any of their direct reports about their future selves the first time and likely continue not performing this critical task. That's because it's easier to start and continuously manage tasks for each of their employees instead of ensuring those tasks remain motivationally relevant. Because, at the end of the day, employees don't typically leave over compensation. They leave because they feel unseen. So if you want to retain your most skilled people, these simple personal development check-in conversations go a long way in proving to them that they matter to the organization and locking them in for the long haul.
Undoubtedly, it's giving employees a clear and personalized path of where they can go within your organization in terms of skills mastery or professional development through recurring, sincere conversations about who they want to be - both professionally and personally.
To give you an example, I once had a senior manager at a partner company tell me about his frustration with the lack of motivation among his team. I didn't offer him any new tech gadget or unique incentive to motivate his people. Instead, I urged him to start asking each of his direct reports about one concrete accomplishment they would want to walk away with at their company's next annual event. Whether it's a title earned, a skill mastered or recognition received for an area of impact. I can guarantee they'll light up in an instant from revealing their future self. And thanks to the goals sense of ambition will elicit, most of those people will continue coming in eager long after the conversation. In fact, in just a year, my retention in that particular group shot up from a decade average of 65% to 91%.
The catch, of course, is aligning each employee's personal aspirations to business goals. By making the effort to acknowledge employee ambitions and co-design the necessary developmental steps to take (which range from suggesting a new challenge to redesigning their current role), managers turn new found job satisfaction into measurable business loyalty. These conversations may be free, but their impact are undeniably priceless with regularly increased trust and significantly lower employee turnover.
Regrettably, the level of individual attention required for these conversations to thrive is lacking. I'd even wager the majority, if not 50%+ of managers I encounter haven't asked any of their direct reports about their future selves the first time and likely continue not performing this critical task. That's because it's easier to start and continuously manage tasks for each of their employees instead of ensuring those tasks remain motivationally relevant. Because, at the end of the day, employees don't typically leave over compensation. They leave because they feel unseen. So if you want to retain your most skilled people, these simple personal development check-in conversations go a long way in proving to them that they matter to the organization and locking them in for the long haul.
Variant 2
I'm Volen Vulkov. I'm the Co-Founder at Enhancv, where we help people create better resumes and better careers. Here's my insight on the biggest cause of talented employees to continue to work long-term for an organization:
Asking "who do you want to be here?" and having real personal development conversations with your employees is the single most underestimated retention factor. When I was just starting to be a leader, I realized through experience that no amount of perks or tweaks to operational processes can make employees stay if they are never asked about who they want to be or shown a path for who they can be in terms of ambition or identity.
I remember during one of my check-in calls with a unit, there was one member who was apparently disengaged based on his responses. However, after I asked a simple question that didn't even revolve around his daily tasks or KPIs, about who he wants to be - specifically, what he wants to be recognized for in our next annual unit convention next year - he already turned a complete 180. After five minutes of asking subsequent questions about what he hopes to achieve, what kind of recognition would feel most valuable to him, and how would he reward himself, he suddenly was ideating, self-rating, and even self-scheduling.
It turned out I was able to "awaken" this employee with a simple act of asking about ambitions and identity. This was not an isolated case too. When leaders and managers take the time to match employees' personal and professional goals to the overall mission of the organization, people get to realize that they are stakeholders in the system, too, not just workers for hire. And that's just one facet of the real power of instituting a "who do you want to be" retention strategy in your org. Organizations that get to accurately capture and map components of professional and personal development in their quarterly or bi-annual work calendars will not only be able to push up employee engagement scores but will also have a real shot at pushing down attrition rates. Our company Enhancv experienced nearly a 30% drop in annual employee turnover rate during the first year we implemented quarterly "who do you want to be" check-ins.
For leaders and managers to actually make this work, they need to make the "who do you want to be" conversation an actual ritual - instead of just another tick box they're supposed to check. Ask questions about future roles, ask what success looks like if employees were to define it for themselves, and what kind of recognition feels most valuable to each individual. Then, map development steps to impact or progress on business goals and -- most importantly -- connect the dots for the employee about what's realistically possible within the organization's ecosystem. Most leaders miss the point by focusing on building policies, experiences, or giving more perks. In reality, having meaningful conversations about who your employees want to be and connecting the dots for them about how they can get there through your company are the real leaders' retention hack.
Asking "who do you want to be here?" and having real personal development conversations with your employees is the single most underestimated retention factor. When I was just starting to be a leader, I realized through experience that no amount of perks or tweaks to operational processes can make employees stay if they are never asked about who they want to be or shown a path for who they can be in terms of ambition or identity.
I remember during one of my check-in calls with a unit, there was one member who was apparently disengaged based on his responses. However, after I asked a simple question that didn't even revolve around his daily tasks or KPIs, about who he wants to be - specifically, what he wants to be recognized for in our next annual unit convention next year - he already turned a complete 180. After five minutes of asking subsequent questions about what he hopes to achieve, what kind of recognition would feel most valuable to him, and how would he reward himself, he suddenly was ideating, self-rating, and even self-scheduling.
It turned out I was able to "awaken" this employee with a simple act of asking about ambitions and identity. This was not an isolated case too. When leaders and managers take the time to match employees' personal and professional goals to the overall mission of the organization, people get to realize that they are stakeholders in the system, too, not just workers for hire. And that's just one facet of the real power of instituting a "who do you want to be" retention strategy in your org. Organizations that get to accurately capture and map components of professional and personal development in their quarterly or bi-annual work calendars will not only be able to push up employee engagement scores but will also have a real shot at pushing down attrition rates. Our company Enhancv experienced nearly a 30% drop in annual employee turnover rate during the first year we implemented quarterly "who do you want to be" check-ins.
For leaders and managers to actually make this work, they need to make the "who do you want to be" conversation an actual ritual - instead of just another tick box they're supposed to check. Ask questions about future roles, ask what success looks like if employees were to define it for themselves, and what kind of recognition feels most valuable to each individual. Then, map development steps to impact or progress on business goals and -- most importantly -- connect the dots for the employee about what's realistically possible within the organization's ecosystem. Most leaders miss the point by focusing on building policies, experiences, or giving more perks. In reality, having meaningful conversations about who your employees want to be and connecting the dots for them about how they can get there through your company are the real leaders' retention hack.
What is one sign professionals should look for when evaluating whether a role offers genuine long-term career growth?
https://bestcompaniesaz.com
Query
Submit to: https://connectively.us/experts/questions/one-sign-of-genuine-long-term-career-growth
Variant 1
I'm Volen Vulkov, co-founder at Enhancv. Here are my insights into the surest sign that a role guarantees you real long-term career growth — and how growth companies make it a reality:
Don't just check the paths of career progression within the team in the role offered to you — check if there is transparent and easy access to see multiple career progressions within the organization.
The most straightforward, and surprisingly the most overlooked, sign that a company guarantees your long-term career growth isn't the shiny employee benefits or the generic statement of "there are lots of opportunities for career growth here." Instead, it's whether or not the company offers concrete and visible transparency in their career progressions so you know exactly where your feet will be taking you in the long run.
I recently had a client who was nearly dismissing a role opportunity in a global life sciences organization as a career stepping stone until the company revealed that they've centralized an easily accessible career navigation portal for all employees. The portal is more than just a hub for training and development programs — it houses a variety of "career streams" from different departments and different locations. It includes snapshots of roles and documented career progressions/pivots of employees who have grown vertically and horizontally within the organization. In other words, there isn't just a single line showing you how you can grow in a specific role, but a thorough display of one or multiple lines illustrating how you can professionally grow. The material demonstrates how product experts evolved into project managers, or how a lab guy eventually became a guru in data, or how one can easily leap into a different business function.
In my experience with the company, this one change has transformed the whole career growth game for current employees. Before this, the people with the most potential and the sharpest brains would simply move on to other jobs when they reach the mid-point of their tenure because the paths for career development is unclear. Two years after the launch and promotion of these career navigation tools and multiple career progression communication, the organization saw a decrease in mid-point tenure resignations and a more than 15% increase in the retention of critical roles. The secret? Making it easy for employees to help themselves find a path aligned with their aspirations and showing them clearly how others have walked through the same path.
Your takeaway should be, before closing a new job deal, don't forget to ask your potential employer: "Can you walk me through the most common career paths for someone in this role?" Growth companies aren't going to paint you a career growth opportunity with broad broad strokes. They'll give you access to organizational charts or sample careers or career path generators to guide you. And if their answer isn't generic and you can see photos of real paintings in their gallery, you've got yourself a solid guarantee of a long-term career growth path inside their walls.
Don't just check the paths of career progression within the team in the role offered to you — check if there is transparent and easy access to see multiple career progressions within the organization.
The most straightforward, and surprisingly the most overlooked, sign that a company guarantees your long-term career growth isn't the shiny employee benefits or the generic statement of "there are lots of opportunities for career growth here." Instead, it's whether or not the company offers concrete and visible transparency in their career progressions so you know exactly where your feet will be taking you in the long run.
I recently had a client who was nearly dismissing a role opportunity in a global life sciences organization as a career stepping stone until the company revealed that they've centralized an easily accessible career navigation portal for all employees. The portal is more than just a hub for training and development programs — it houses a variety of "career streams" from different departments and different locations. It includes snapshots of roles and documented career progressions/pivots of employees who have grown vertically and horizontally within the organization. In other words, there isn't just a single line showing you how you can grow in a specific role, but a thorough display of one or multiple lines illustrating how you can professionally grow. The material demonstrates how product experts evolved into project managers, or how a lab guy eventually became a guru in data, or how one can easily leap into a different business function.
In my experience with the company, this one change has transformed the whole career growth game for current employees. Before this, the people with the most potential and the sharpest brains would simply move on to other jobs when they reach the mid-point of their tenure because the paths for career development is unclear. Two years after the launch and promotion of these career navigation tools and multiple career progression communication, the organization saw a decrease in mid-point tenure resignations and a more than 15% increase in the retention of critical roles. The secret? Making it easy for employees to help themselves find a path aligned with their aspirations and showing them clearly how others have walked through the same path.
Your takeaway should be, before closing a new job deal, don't forget to ask your potential employer: "Can you walk me through the most common career paths for someone in this role?" Growth companies aren't going to paint you a career growth opportunity with broad broad strokes. They'll give you access to organizational charts or sample careers or career path generators to guide you. And if their answer isn't generic and you can see photos of real paintings in their gallery, you've got yourself a solid guarantee of a long-term career growth path inside their walls.
Variant 2
I'm Volen Vulkov, co-founder at Enhancv. Here's my take on what indicates "real" career growth or longevity in a role when you land a new job; my insight is based on working with thousands of jobseekers as well as HR teams from top organizations.
Ensure you're looking for roles and companies where career paths and promotion criteria don't only exist but are visible and transparently shared beyond the walls of your immediate team.
The not-so-obvious but surprisingly effective indicator for real career growth in a company isn't just the "development opportunities" promise on the job apply page. It's how easily you can actually see mapped career trajectories and lateral movement opportunities that can realistically be achieved if you land the role you're trying out. For example, one of the willing clients of the company I co-founded that does career resume optimization collaboration with Charles River turned their talent acquisition narrative around - from being a stepping-stone company to an actual career destination for ambitious talents. We didn't really revolutionize their training and development offering; we merely made what development and growth within the org actually looked like accessible and concrete.
The company created a centralized career portal with a Career Navigator, where everyone can check the illustrated career paths for every role available, alongside typical growth stories. It's like a career roadmap for all. And because it's openly accessible, employees don't need to take anyone's word for it in their immediate teams to understand how individuals in other parts of the org have historically moved laterally or leveled up in positions practically. Retention stats improved and positive lateral movements for growth within the org increased.
The reason engaging this life-changing career navigator tool is a powerful career growth sign is that it shows two things: the company truly promotes and nurtures growth opportunities within its walls. And you're empowered with the visibility of the criteria to easily choose and take a growth path rather than be offered one work opportunity at a time.
If you want to test if a job offer has a real career growth sign, you can attempt a simple hack and say: "I'd love to see this role through the lens of the growth opportunities your company provides. Do you have career navigation materials or sections I can look at?" If answers are delayed, require you to have multiple conversations with different people, or you get the generic "you can just talk to your manager about that," then you're better off taking the hint and avoiding the offer. Real growth opportunities have their career pathways and visibility criteria accessible upfront and consistently. Not fragmented and discretionary depending on who you start with at the company.
Ensure you're looking for roles and companies where career paths and promotion criteria don't only exist but are visible and transparently shared beyond the walls of your immediate team.
The not-so-obvious but surprisingly effective indicator for real career growth in a company isn't just the "development opportunities" promise on the job apply page. It's how easily you can actually see mapped career trajectories and lateral movement opportunities that can realistically be achieved if you land the role you're trying out. For example, one of the willing clients of the company I co-founded that does career resume optimization collaboration with Charles River turned their talent acquisition narrative around - from being a stepping-stone company to an actual career destination for ambitious talents. We didn't really revolutionize their training and development offering; we merely made what development and growth within the org actually looked like accessible and concrete.
The company created a centralized career portal with a Career Navigator, where everyone can check the illustrated career paths for every role available, alongside typical growth stories. It's like a career roadmap for all. And because it's openly accessible, employees don't need to take anyone's word for it in their immediate teams to understand how individuals in other parts of the org have historically moved laterally or leveled up in positions practically. Retention stats improved and positive lateral movements for growth within the org increased.
The reason engaging this life-changing career navigator tool is a powerful career growth sign is that it shows two things: the company truly promotes and nurtures growth opportunities within its walls. And you're empowered with the visibility of the criteria to easily choose and take a growth path rather than be offered one work opportunity at a time.
If you want to test if a job offer has a real career growth sign, you can attempt a simple hack and say: "I'd love to see this role through the lens of the growth opportunities your company provides. Do you have career navigation materials or sections I can look at?" If answers are delayed, require you to have multiple conversations with different people, or you get the generic "you can just talk to your manager about that," then you're better off taking the hint and avoiding the offer. Real growth opportunities have their career pathways and visibility criteria accessible upfront and consistently. Not fragmented and discretionary depending on who you start with at the company.
What marketing spend did you regret most in your first year in business?
The Ad Firm (https://www.theadfirm.net)
Query
Submit to: [email protected]
Variant 1
I'm Volen Vulkov, Co-Founder at Enhancv. Here's my take for your article about the hidden costs behind early-stage marketing spends that don't work:
1. The expensive lesson we learned the hard way: launching paid campaigns before getting clear on our core message and brand identity
Early-stage marketing spend with us would've been around $35k - a mix of digital paid ads, influencer promos, and an agency-retainer for an initial launch campaign. It sounded reasonable because everyone we know said that paid campaigns and agency retainer are essential to SaaS early-stage marketing spend -anything else is not scale-able. Impressions and clicks into our dashboard looked completely promising to us.
What we missed though is that the campaign did not deliver on actual customer understanding nor conversions for us. Looking back, we realize that we missed the foundational step of establishing a clear core message for our launch. We launched a campaign too early without getting clarity on our brand identity. It was a mess because visitors basically landed on our homepage then bounced off shortly after. We had to answer the same questions from users - what even is Enhancv? - multiple times, to know that our value proposition didn't stick. No amount of marketing spend could fix our copies and visuals in-flight.
Aside from the $35k additional spend for the campaign, the real price was the three months spent clarifying and reworking our core message and re-creating our visual assets. That lost time is an opportunity cost. Because of our unclear value proposition, we didn't get off to a good start even with early adopters. We didn't get much venture funding either, which hurts us much more than the actual marketing loss we spent. It's incredibly difficult to re-capture either investors' or consumers' trust and attention once you confuse them. We realized that the disruption caused by our misstep was worse than if we delayed our go-to-market strategy until we got the basics right.
According to Nielsen, 59% of all new products fail because of lack of brand clarity, and I understand why the number is high.
2. What I'd do instead: invest in founder stories, document the journey to build your brand before paid campaigns
Looking back, I'd spend that $35k on something that costs next to nothing but hugely invaluable - founder brand-building. Getting people invested in us and what we're building takes time, but the equity required and stories we get from it - priceless.
So today, I'd spend 2-3 months documenting our product journey in public -- from sharing what problem we're solving, the lessons learned from wrong turns, to our first wins with users. We did this the hard way and the right way: working our way up by launching without paid campaigns and sharing behind-the-scenes, real and raw content to LinkedIn and Twitter. We moved in a direction we could work with, got a few thousand followers, and 100+ customers.
What we learned is that a confusing foundational narrative -- your value proposition, your brand -- gets amplified by a costly marketing campaign. While a messy founder story does almost the opposite: sharpens your narrative, helps you gain a following for that core breakthrough. I'd recommend any founder not to run expensive social campaigns too early. Do the work (your story, your shares, your messaging) until you organically figure out that you resonate, then scale with paid campaigns.
1. The expensive lesson we learned the hard way: launching paid campaigns before getting clear on our core message and brand identity
Early-stage marketing spend with us would've been around $35k - a mix of digital paid ads, influencer promos, and an agency-retainer for an initial launch campaign. It sounded reasonable because everyone we know said that paid campaigns and agency retainer are essential to SaaS early-stage marketing spend -anything else is not scale-able. Impressions and clicks into our dashboard looked completely promising to us.
What we missed though is that the campaign did not deliver on actual customer understanding nor conversions for us. Looking back, we realize that we missed the foundational step of establishing a clear core message for our launch. We launched a campaign too early without getting clarity on our brand identity. It was a mess because visitors basically landed on our homepage then bounced off shortly after. We had to answer the same questions from users - what even is Enhancv? - multiple times, to know that our value proposition didn't stick. No amount of marketing spend could fix our copies and visuals in-flight.
Aside from the $35k additional spend for the campaign, the real price was the three months spent clarifying and reworking our core message and re-creating our visual assets. That lost time is an opportunity cost. Because of our unclear value proposition, we didn't get off to a good start even with early adopters. We didn't get much venture funding either, which hurts us much more than the actual marketing loss we spent. It's incredibly difficult to re-capture either investors' or consumers' trust and attention once you confuse them. We realized that the disruption caused by our misstep was worse than if we delayed our go-to-market strategy until we got the basics right.
According to Nielsen, 59% of all new products fail because of lack of brand clarity, and I understand why the number is high.
2. What I'd do instead: invest in founder stories, document the journey to build your brand before paid campaigns
Looking back, I'd spend that $35k on something that costs next to nothing but hugely invaluable - founder brand-building. Getting people invested in us and what we're building takes time, but the equity required and stories we get from it - priceless.
So today, I'd spend 2-3 months documenting our product journey in public -- from sharing what problem we're solving, the lessons learned from wrong turns, to our first wins with users. We did this the hard way and the right way: working our way up by launching without paid campaigns and sharing behind-the-scenes, real and raw content to LinkedIn and Twitter. We moved in a direction we could work with, got a few thousand followers, and 100+ customers.
What we learned is that a confusing foundational narrative -- your value proposition, your brand -- gets amplified by a costly marketing campaign. While a messy founder story does almost the opposite: sharpens your narrative, helps you gain a following for that core breakthrough. I'd recommend any founder not to run expensive social campaigns too early. Do the work (your story, your shares, your messaging) until you organically figure out that you resonate, then scale with paid campaigns.
Variant 2
I'm Volen Vulkov, Co-Founder at Enhancv. Here are my answers for your story on marketing spend regrets:
---
1. The "responsible" spend that made me cringe looking back: Branding agency retainer for pre-launch ($18K)
We took a classic "putting the cart before the horse" approach to validating and tuning our message with early users by our team. I felt the pressure to follow the formula from every other founder group I spoke to - before launching our first social page ads and email campaign - about the utmost importance of having a "starter professional brand system." Everyone pointed to the benefits we would reap from working with a branding agency: a polished logo + color palette + messaging doc delivered on time. The agency's dashboard and decks look great, mood board looks great, and launch plan looks great.
2. What went wrong: wasted time, loss of momentum, and an unclear baseline to iterate from
The first sign that "the professional brand system" isn't performing was not long after. Our digital ads and landing pages built from the assets - awful clickthrough rates and lack of traction on demo signups. We ended up wasting 3 months going back and forth with the branding firm to tweak visual and tagline until we reach coherence with what users are actually saying about the product. At the end of the day, the money did not hurt nearly as much as the opportunity for lost momentum. We had to stop our initial campaign altogether, redo messaging from scratch, and work to re-engage early users. Even more crippling was the breakdown of our core team from our breakneck task schedule. We spent 6 weeks in a glorified branding "workshop" instead of discovering pains and wins through actual user journeys, and launching accordingly at market. This also caused a wobble in our investor confidence. It's been years but I still couldn't help but say that "putting the cart before the horse" is a more difficult mistake to recover from compared to just not having enough budget: A confused baseline for a foundational brand concept missing core attributes each marketing interaction/medium throughout the journey will bring the efficacy of all other spends down.
3. What I wish I knew then or what I did after to fix it: skip the expensive agency and start with organic content as founders 100%.
If I could do it all over again and spend that $18,000 differently, I'd want to skip the whole high-gloss "branding agency" thing. I'd work more with the messaging expert but with the intent of interrogating our product with them first, and spend the rest of the retainer budget on documentation as founders of that messaging process. This means, shooting raw explainer videos, learning from user "wins" and "struggles" with the product times folowing, etc. We'd create interaction touchpoints and feedback loops with early users to improve the landing page well before touch. A $50,000 enterprise client in one use case - acquired with just a pristine iPhone video explaining our core concept.
At the end of the day, it's all about fundamental clarity of multliple consumer touchpoints. If customers are leaving your page, going through your LinkedIn, through your marketing pages, etc. and don't understand what your product or service does, no amount of "look the part" advice for founders and "professional" branding or "high-quality" marketing spend will change that. I hope more founders will learn that foundational clarity should come first; tactical branding can wait until after you've come up with a toque that moves people.
---
1. The "responsible" spend that made me cringe looking back: Branding agency retainer for pre-launch ($18K)
We took a classic "putting the cart before the horse" approach to validating and tuning our message with early users by our team. I felt the pressure to follow the formula from every other founder group I spoke to - before launching our first social page ads and email campaign - about the utmost importance of having a "starter professional brand system." Everyone pointed to the benefits we would reap from working with a branding agency: a polished logo + color palette + messaging doc delivered on time. The agency's dashboard and decks look great, mood board looks great, and launch plan looks great.
2. What went wrong: wasted time, loss of momentum, and an unclear baseline to iterate from
The first sign that "the professional brand system" isn't performing was not long after. Our digital ads and landing pages built from the assets - awful clickthrough rates and lack of traction on demo signups. We ended up wasting 3 months going back and forth with the branding firm to tweak visual and tagline until we reach coherence with what users are actually saying about the product. At the end of the day, the money did not hurt nearly as much as the opportunity for lost momentum. We had to stop our initial campaign altogether, redo messaging from scratch, and work to re-engage early users. Even more crippling was the breakdown of our core team from our breakneck task schedule. We spent 6 weeks in a glorified branding "workshop" instead of discovering pains and wins through actual user journeys, and launching accordingly at market. This also caused a wobble in our investor confidence. It's been years but I still couldn't help but say that "putting the cart before the horse" is a more difficult mistake to recover from compared to just not having enough budget: A confused baseline for a foundational brand concept missing core attributes each marketing interaction/medium throughout the journey will bring the efficacy of all other spends down.
3. What I wish I knew then or what I did after to fix it: skip the expensive agency and start with organic content as founders 100%.
If I could do it all over again and spend that $18,000 differently, I'd want to skip the whole high-gloss "branding agency" thing. I'd work more with the messaging expert but with the intent of interrogating our product with them first, and spend the rest of the retainer budget on documentation as founders of that messaging process. This means, shooting raw explainer videos, learning from user "wins" and "struggles" with the product times folowing, etc. We'd create interaction touchpoints and feedback loops with early users to improve the landing page well before touch. A $50,000 enterprise client in one use case - acquired with just a pristine iPhone video explaining our core concept.
At the end of the day, it's all about fundamental clarity of multliple consumer touchpoints. If customers are leaving your page, going through your LinkedIn, through your marketing pages, etc. and don't understand what your product or service does, no amount of "look the part" advice for founders and "professional" branding or "high-quality" marketing spend will change that. I hope more founders will learn that foundational clarity should come first; tactical branding can wait until after you've come up with a toque that moves people.
Can you share an example of how you used workflow diagramming or process mapping to identify velocity bottlenecks? What tool or method did you find most effective and why?
https://techbullion.com
Query
Submit to: https://connectively.us/experts/questions/example-workflow-diagramming-process-mapping-velocity-bottlenecks
Variant 1
I'm Volen Vulkov, Co-Founder at Enhancv. Let me send in my response for your article about uncovering velocity bottlenecks via workflow mapping.
Pinpointing bottlenecks with Kanban boards and enriched data about flow
The most significant bottleneck I experienced facing was discovered by visualizing our workflow with a digital Kanban board paired with flow analytics. Our mid-sized product team of two-week sprints had each card progress fluently through various development stages - backlog refinement, coding, and testing - with sprints, however, we always ended up having to push major features to the next one.
After mapping our process on Businessmap, we noticed a critical WIP stack under a specific column design_review. We then inspected WIP and cycle time in real time revealed by the visual workflow and found that new cards spend an unusual amount of time waiting on the design_review stage and 3 or more days past its stage SLA.
The Cycle Time Heatmap also screamed delays as it showed design_review's average cycle time jump from 3 to as high as 8, with all other stages maintaining an average of 2 to 3. We further unraveled that the work items in design review are all routed through a single senior designer with no delegation nor documented review criteria, explaining why there's a hold-up in this stage.
Addressing process bottlenecks: root cause analysis & effective change implementation
Our root cause analysis, using five whys, the what and why of our bottleneck identified a lack of shared ownership and standardized criteria in reviewing tasks that caused the stack. So we predefined the missing criteria, pushed task design review responsibilities to 2 more designers, and set a hard stage SLA to trigger automatic reassignment on any card waiting at 2 days past its limit.
So here's how it affected our business goals and bottom line: Within 2 sprints post-bottleneck resolution, our cycle time for the review stage dropped from 8 to under 3, causing a more than 40% decrease in features spilled to the next sprint. Our delivery velocity stabilized, and predictability increased as we began hitting sprint targets precisely.
My advice to achieve this for any tech org is to use Kanban board-based visualization to map their process, then analyze each stage using cycle time, WIP, and throughput from left to right to identify the flow's problematic stage. Making use of these data-organization techniques as a combo will help you find your bottlenecks with efficiency and fix it with precision.
Pinpointing bottlenecks with Kanban boards and enriched data about flow
The most significant bottleneck I experienced facing was discovered by visualizing our workflow with a digital Kanban board paired with flow analytics. Our mid-sized product team of two-week sprints had each card progress fluently through various development stages - backlog refinement, coding, and testing - with sprints, however, we always ended up having to push major features to the next one.
After mapping our process on Businessmap, we noticed a critical WIP stack under a specific column design_review. We then inspected WIP and cycle time in real time revealed by the visual workflow and found that new cards spend an unusual amount of time waiting on the design_review stage and 3 or more days past its stage SLA.
The Cycle Time Heatmap also screamed delays as it showed design_review's average cycle time jump from 3 to as high as 8, with all other stages maintaining an average of 2 to 3. We further unraveled that the work items in design review are all routed through a single senior designer with no delegation nor documented review criteria, explaining why there's a hold-up in this stage.
Addressing process bottlenecks: root cause analysis & effective change implementation
Our root cause analysis, using five whys, the what and why of our bottleneck identified a lack of shared ownership and standardized criteria in reviewing tasks that caused the stack. So we predefined the missing criteria, pushed task design review responsibilities to 2 more designers, and set a hard stage SLA to trigger automatic reassignment on any card waiting at 2 days past its limit.
So here's how it affected our business goals and bottom line: Within 2 sprints post-bottleneck resolution, our cycle time for the review stage dropped from 8 to under 3, causing a more than 40% decrease in features spilled to the next sprint. Our delivery velocity stabilized, and predictability increased as we began hitting sprint targets precisely.
My advice to achieve this for any tech org is to use Kanban board-based visualization to map their process, then analyze each stage using cycle time, WIP, and throughput from left to right to identify the flow's problematic stage. Making use of these data-organization techniques as a combo will help you find your bottlenecks with efficiency and fix it with precision.
Variant 2
I'm Volen Vulkov, co-founder at Enhancv. Here's my insight and experience related to detecting and fixing workflow bottlenecks with sophisticated workflow mapping.
Pinpointing the bottlenecks with Kanban visualization and flow analytics.
A couple of tricks we've found useful are using digital kanban boards coupled with deep analytics for mapping overall workflow with tools like Businessmap.
But these are not standard kanban boards with just basic workflow details -- with this, you get to see every aspect of the workflow, decompose queues from the actual "in progress" visualization, and overlay metrics like cycle time heatmaps and WIP limit overlays or undershoot indicators. Usually, with our tech teams, we realize that the bottleneck is usually not revealed through missed deadlines, but rather, through the queue columns on the kanban layout. It's a bit of a "waiting room" before the bottleneck would impact delivery and show quite obviously on the team's metrics.
When we worked with this mid-sized product team following 2-week sprints, the dev side of the workflow seemed to be constantly moving with tasks done left and right. However, the team consistently missed sprint deliveries, bleeding over into the next. After mapping and analyzing the overall workflow, it seems that beyond the refinement of the backlog, through dev and up until testing stages, Turbo team tasks flow steadily, but on the design review step, there's accumulation of tasks.
Decomposing the overall workflow into a detailed kanban and mapping cycle time per stage has let us analyze and detect bottlenecks easily. Especially, its task aging measurement let the slow down in the design review step scream for attention as it indicates a design review task days higher than all other stages.
Unraveling and fixing the identified bottleneck + metrics to capture
Armed with the identified bottleneck lead on the workflow, a simple 5 why's root cause analysis helped us pinpoint the issue: There's a single senior designer performing all review task approvals, with somewhat of a vague criteria for them that hinders self-decision on passing the review step. Restoration efforts include two key actions: revamp of standard criteria for passing this design review task to allow more people to take on the review tasks so as not to bottleneck around a person's bandwidth. And the establishment of a review SLA under which tasks will be automatically processed and urgent query tasks automatically picked up and attended to. This resolves the zero visibility issue and reliance on human memory or shame on performing the design review tasks to keep the queue moving.
The before and afters are positively lights out. In just 2 sprints, the average Design Review Cycle Time declines from over 4 days to under 2 days. WIP overflowing to the subsequent sprint in the Design Review also sees a 30% decrease. And most importantly for the team leader, delivery skip and bounce back events around sprint schedule become negligible making sprint forecasting easier and less of a guess game.
If you would be the one leading the overall workflow mapping to detect bottlenecks for tech teams, here are some tips: coup your Kanban workflow visualizations with consistent Cycle time, WIP limits, and Task aging metrics analysis. These workflow insights help you surface the bottlenecks more easily, trace the root cause response tunnel, and measure the impact of your interventions before and after.
Pinpointing the bottlenecks with Kanban visualization and flow analytics.
A couple of tricks we've found useful are using digital kanban boards coupled with deep analytics for mapping overall workflow with tools like Businessmap.
But these are not standard kanban boards with just basic workflow details -- with this, you get to see every aspect of the workflow, decompose queues from the actual "in progress" visualization, and overlay metrics like cycle time heatmaps and WIP limit overlays or undershoot indicators. Usually, with our tech teams, we realize that the bottleneck is usually not revealed through missed deadlines, but rather, through the queue columns on the kanban layout. It's a bit of a "waiting room" before the bottleneck would impact delivery and show quite obviously on the team's metrics.
When we worked with this mid-sized product team following 2-week sprints, the dev side of the workflow seemed to be constantly moving with tasks done left and right. However, the team consistently missed sprint deliveries, bleeding over into the next. After mapping and analyzing the overall workflow, it seems that beyond the refinement of the backlog, through dev and up until testing stages, Turbo team tasks flow steadily, but on the design review step, there's accumulation of tasks.
Decomposing the overall workflow into a detailed kanban and mapping cycle time per stage has let us analyze and detect bottlenecks easily. Especially, its task aging measurement let the slow down in the design review step scream for attention as it indicates a design review task days higher than all other stages.
Unraveling and fixing the identified bottleneck + metrics to capture
Armed with the identified bottleneck lead on the workflow, a simple 5 why's root cause analysis helped us pinpoint the issue: There's a single senior designer performing all review task approvals, with somewhat of a vague criteria for them that hinders self-decision on passing the review step. Restoration efforts include two key actions: revamp of standard criteria for passing this design review task to allow more people to take on the review tasks so as not to bottleneck around a person's bandwidth. And the establishment of a review SLA under which tasks will be automatically processed and urgent query tasks automatically picked up and attended to. This resolves the zero visibility issue and reliance on human memory or shame on performing the design review tasks to keep the queue moving.
The before and afters are positively lights out. In just 2 sprints, the average Design Review Cycle Time declines from over 4 days to under 2 days. WIP overflowing to the subsequent sprint in the Design Review also sees a 30% decrease. And most importantly for the team leader, delivery skip and bounce back events around sprint schedule become negligible making sprint forecasting easier and less of a guess game.
If you would be the one leading the overall workflow mapping to detect bottlenecks for tech teams, here are some tips: coup your Kanban workflow visualizations with consistent Cycle time, WIP limits, and Task aging metrics analysis. These workflow insights help you surface the bottlenecks more easily, trace the root cause response tunnel, and measure the impact of your interventions before and after.
With OpenAI officially rolling out ad placements within ChatGPT, how is your team adjusting its digital marketing strategy? Are you planning to shift ad spend away from traditional search engines (like Google) to test AI chat ads? Please share any early learnings, challenges, or predictions you have for this new format.
https://onemetrik.com
Query
Submit to: https://connectively.us/experts/questions/openai-chatgpt-ads-shifting-spend-from-google
Variant 1
I'm Volen Vulkov, Co-Founder at Enhancv. Here's how we're approaching OpenAI's new ChatGPT ad placements based on our early experimentation and what we're noticing shift in digital marketing strategy.
1. Conversion quality over cost: Reframing high CPA as smart investment
Surprise biggest to us: For brands that have the appetite for acquisition cost deltas, ChatGPT Ads can yield abnormally high downstream conversion numbers that rationalize said deltas in acquisition costs. With a current live campaign directed to a B2B SaaS solution, chats we are running yielded a $500 CPA, which is 5x times landmarks on Google Search for the same offer. However, we're converting 50% of these leads into actual paying customers, compared to less than 10% from other channels. Our net cost per customer born of this channel is already in the vicinity of $1,000 and still rising. This is actually more cost-efficient compared to channels with $100 CPA and a 5% conversion rate. These are not vanity metrics we're chasing. Given the inherently richer context and decision-stage nature of CTA in ChatGPT-based user journeys, we've illuminated an insightful truth: A user who is already far deeper into research and therefore decision than those converted through search or paid social is more likely to be delivered through this channel as an offer. This realization has the potential to turn the traditional paid media landscape on its head - for brands with products or services with high margins and/or high lifetime values. Cost per click/acquisition on its own is no longer as important as determining where a converted user is in the customer journey.
For digital marketing leaders, this means rethinking strategy around ChatGPT ad channels. Lead with complete full funnel conversion numbers, zeroing in on quality of leads or rebooking rates rather than top of funnel CPA benchmarks. Be ready to shift budgets when you discover that fewer conversions bring better conversion rates.
2. Messaging rationale: Satisfying the why in the decision
Learning key to us: ChatGPT Ads are not for creating brand awareness, that the user must already have a decision behind their click. Before such a click can be converted, they know what they want to know. They want to satisfy their why. We've also come to absolute knowledge that users must find no value in passed along banner messages and product claims. We've nailed current high conversion CTA messages to helping users clarify tradeoffs. Our best performing ads were made by inspecting the top three objections to a sale conversion that our Sales teams hear from buyers. We integrated these objections into the ad itself in order to create synergies with the contextual thread.
This space has also forced us to break down departmental silos - marketing teams actually need to know the content, sales, and paid channels areas intimately to form a single skill unit that excels in creating landing pages for ChatGPT users. Creative and targeting are no longer two segmented processes but integrated in dynamics needing a single competency. Because, the process literally starts with describing - in natural English language, what's been happening in the user journey to which the CTA is triggered. You need to read and write very well so that you're able to effectively describe the user's query to create useful content, not just be throwing out billboards or ad banners. Written context is everything in this media. To align strategies, our campaigns are now first briefed by profiles of transcripts of sales calls that come with the relevant ad group or chat targeted around a specific use or customer decision, than by keywords or personas.
To sum it up, there's currently no stone unturned in this new channel and we find that the major conversion drivers are rooted in mindset. Campaigns perform well now only because we've learned to craft ad copy based on its ability to convert, and not around it being used for micro-content. The challenge changes for us as ChatGPT ad channels mature. We'll have to equip teams to be both writers and media experts, and restructure performance around what happens after engagement.
We're certain that brands that will win here will be those that have clear numbers on the backend and are able to produce super high utility, high context CTAs for the right customer decisions.
1. Conversion quality over cost: Reframing high CPA as smart investment
Surprise biggest to us: For brands that have the appetite for acquisition cost deltas, ChatGPT Ads can yield abnormally high downstream conversion numbers that rationalize said deltas in acquisition costs. With a current live campaign directed to a B2B SaaS solution, chats we are running yielded a $500 CPA, which is 5x times landmarks on Google Search for the same offer. However, we're converting 50% of these leads into actual paying customers, compared to less than 10% from other channels. Our net cost per customer born of this channel is already in the vicinity of $1,000 and still rising. This is actually more cost-efficient compared to channels with $100 CPA and a 5% conversion rate. These are not vanity metrics we're chasing. Given the inherently richer context and decision-stage nature of CTA in ChatGPT-based user journeys, we've illuminated an insightful truth: A user who is already far deeper into research and therefore decision than those converted through search or paid social is more likely to be delivered through this channel as an offer. This realization has the potential to turn the traditional paid media landscape on its head - for brands with products or services with high margins and/or high lifetime values. Cost per click/acquisition on its own is no longer as important as determining where a converted user is in the customer journey.
For digital marketing leaders, this means rethinking strategy around ChatGPT ad channels. Lead with complete full funnel conversion numbers, zeroing in on quality of leads or rebooking rates rather than top of funnel CPA benchmarks. Be ready to shift budgets when you discover that fewer conversions bring better conversion rates.
2. Messaging rationale: Satisfying the why in the decision
Learning key to us: ChatGPT Ads are not for creating brand awareness, that the user must already have a decision behind their click. Before such a click can be converted, they know what they want to know. They want to satisfy their why. We've also come to absolute knowledge that users must find no value in passed along banner messages and product claims. We've nailed current high conversion CTA messages to helping users clarify tradeoffs. Our best performing ads were made by inspecting the top three objections to a sale conversion that our Sales teams hear from buyers. We integrated these objections into the ad itself in order to create synergies with the contextual thread.
This space has also forced us to break down departmental silos - marketing teams actually need to know the content, sales, and paid channels areas intimately to form a single skill unit that excels in creating landing pages for ChatGPT users. Creative and targeting are no longer two segmented processes but integrated in dynamics needing a single competency. Because, the process literally starts with describing - in natural English language, what's been happening in the user journey to which the CTA is triggered. You need to read and write very well so that you're able to effectively describe the user's query to create useful content, not just be throwing out billboards or ad banners. Written context is everything in this media. To align strategies, our campaigns are now first briefed by profiles of transcripts of sales calls that come with the relevant ad group or chat targeted around a specific use or customer decision, than by keywords or personas.
To sum it up, there's currently no stone unturned in this new channel and we find that the major conversion drivers are rooted in mindset. Campaigns perform well now only because we've learned to craft ad copy based on its ability to convert, and not around it being used for micro-content. The challenge changes for us as ChatGPT ad channels mature. We'll have to equip teams to be both writers and media experts, and restructure performance around what happens after engagement.
We're certain that brands that will win here will be those that have clear numbers on the backend and are able to produce super high utility, high context CTAs for the right customer decisions.
Variant 2
I'm Volen Vulkov, Co-Founder at Enhancv. Here's how our team at Enhancv is redeveloping digital marketing strategies around ChatGPT ads and here's what we have learned so far from initial tests.
1. A high CPA must not be considered a mistake — assuming that the conversation qualified is exceptional
It was an immediate tip-off that ChatGPT ad placements require an enormously higher cost per acquisition (we noticed an approximate $500 CPA on A/B early testing vs. Google Search), which inspired a review of the post-click actual conversion eventuality. When post-click conversion is appropriately tracked with GA4, and UTM tags are implemented to tie in into the wider attribution matrix, the downstream conversion viability hovers near 50% among ChatGPT reaches compared to 5-8% from standard PPC, pulling the effective CPA far below what the initial figure suggests.
We did not consider the exorbitant sums spent on a few clicks to be a mistake — thanks to the test budget allocation, we could experiment with higher-end career coaching upsells and SaaS features in our offer stack. We realized that for companies equipped with conversion-to-customer valued data along the sales funnel, ChatGPT is a different ball game. The audience there is far deeper in their decision journey than those reached with a cold impression on searching. Hence, if conversion quality’s motion-to-money and post-conversion velocity are mapped, the channel's impact on your overall bottom line is phenomenal proportionate to the dollars it takes it. Considering this, the paid team had to be trained to analyze the sales funnel holistically rather than look at the clicks as costs alone.
2. Concept-building and Copywriting: ChatGPT Ads 101 â it's the antithesis of “brand awarenessâ€/-themed creatives, as the logic is “in the asking" and each ad must address a user Query
What we weren't expecting was the extent to which “brand awareness" and “brand purpose" slogans-driven creatives are irrelevant in ChatGPT. Because, unlike other display ad platforms, ChatGPT ad placements sit adjacently, not integrally, to the answers users are looking for, and the terrain focuses on asking to attain deep clarity before action/decision — not amid noise. Messaging that revealed we were operating within the right parameters reached excellent engagement after early testing. Since users are engaging ChatGPT to understand and analyze decision tradeoffs, our best performing ads during initial testing were those highlighting typical use case comparisons with competitors, e.g., “Should I use an AI resume builder or work with a human career coach on my resume?"
We also saw impressive page conversion multiples (18-22% improvement in click-to-signup conversion rate) with ads focused on resolving key user objections around data privacy, e.g., “How does Enhancv protect my data?"
Since keyword search doesn't exist in ChatGPT's current operational paradigm, targeting is informed by descriptive rather than technical context. Aside from engagement data around generic Keywords, our most impactful ad grouping insights came from discussions with sales and support about specific user decision paralysis points. The goal was to determine how an ad can shed light and add value in the digital space. Given the query-driven logic of the platform, developing ChatGPT ad creatives is more content creation than PPC creation.
This insight means that to thrive content and performance marketers need much tighter creative alignment than platforms and competitive models prior to ChatGPT have generally required. Your media buyer may have to acquire copywriting skills.
Digital marketers are now faced with the reality that thriving in the ChatGPT Ads realm means tapping emotive creativity and agility to conjure contextually sound, engaging ad responses and messaging based on data signaling driven models. The CTA focus elicited by the ad platforms informational intent means marketers will have to deliver high-performing tools that bridge messaging-customer real position gaps perfectly, marrying the best of both worlds. This is a space that requires a convergence of data interpretation ingenuity and message human empathy; a digital marketing hybrid skill the industry has never before required.
1. A high CPA must not be considered a mistake — assuming that the conversation qualified is exceptional
It was an immediate tip-off that ChatGPT ad placements require an enormously higher cost per acquisition (we noticed an approximate $500 CPA on A/B early testing vs. Google Search), which inspired a review of the post-click actual conversion eventuality. When post-click conversion is appropriately tracked with GA4, and UTM tags are implemented to tie in into the wider attribution matrix, the downstream conversion viability hovers near 50% among ChatGPT reaches compared to 5-8% from standard PPC, pulling the effective CPA far below what the initial figure suggests.
We did not consider the exorbitant sums spent on a few clicks to be a mistake — thanks to the test budget allocation, we could experiment with higher-end career coaching upsells and SaaS features in our offer stack. We realized that for companies equipped with conversion-to-customer valued data along the sales funnel, ChatGPT is a different ball game. The audience there is far deeper in their decision journey than those reached with a cold impression on searching. Hence, if conversion quality’s motion-to-money and post-conversion velocity are mapped, the channel's impact on your overall bottom line is phenomenal proportionate to the dollars it takes it. Considering this, the paid team had to be trained to analyze the sales funnel holistically rather than look at the clicks as costs alone.
2. Concept-building and Copywriting: ChatGPT Ads 101 â it's the antithesis of “brand awarenessâ€/-themed creatives, as the logic is “in the asking" and each ad must address a user Query
What we weren't expecting was the extent to which “brand awareness" and “brand purpose" slogans-driven creatives are irrelevant in ChatGPT. Because, unlike other display ad platforms, ChatGPT ad placements sit adjacently, not integrally, to the answers users are looking for, and the terrain focuses on asking to attain deep clarity before action/decision — not amid noise. Messaging that revealed we were operating within the right parameters reached excellent engagement after early testing. Since users are engaging ChatGPT to understand and analyze decision tradeoffs, our best performing ads during initial testing were those highlighting typical use case comparisons with competitors, e.g., “Should I use an AI resume builder or work with a human career coach on my resume?"
We also saw impressive page conversion multiples (18-22% improvement in click-to-signup conversion rate) with ads focused on resolving key user objections around data privacy, e.g., “How does Enhancv protect my data?"
Since keyword search doesn't exist in ChatGPT's current operational paradigm, targeting is informed by descriptive rather than technical context. Aside from engagement data around generic Keywords, our most impactful ad grouping insights came from discussions with sales and support about specific user decision paralysis points. The goal was to determine how an ad can shed light and add value in the digital space. Given the query-driven logic of the platform, developing ChatGPT ad creatives is more content creation than PPC creation.
This insight means that to thrive content and performance marketers need much tighter creative alignment than platforms and competitive models prior to ChatGPT have generally required. Your media buyer may have to acquire copywriting skills.
Digital marketers are now faced with the reality that thriving in the ChatGPT Ads realm means tapping emotive creativity and agility to conjure contextually sound, engaging ad responses and messaging based on data signaling driven models. The CTA focus elicited by the ad platforms informational intent means marketers will have to deliver high-performing tools that bridge messaging-customer real position gaps perfectly, marrying the best of both worlds. This is a space that requires a convergence of data interpretation ingenuity and message human empathy; a digital marketing hybrid skill the industry has never before required.
Small business owners: Before you had a brand guide, where did inconsistency show up in your marketing, and what became easier once you had clear brand guidelines to follow?
https://brand-you.co.uk
Query
Submit to: https://connectively.us/experts/questions/small-business-brand-guide-before-after
Variant 1
I'm Volen Vulkov, co-founder of Enhancv. This is how we and many of our clients made a change in recognition and workflow simply by having brand guidelines.
1. Messy, disjointed branding turns away customers - even before they get a chance to try your product.
One of the most extreme before-and-after we've had was in having a brand guide because nothing captures how much people judge a business by the holistic quality of the brand impression. Before the brand guide, our marketing materials didn't match - our website looks one way, our packaging has another set of colors and fonts, our social media pages look like afterthoughts. This disjointed branding is not only messy, but it affects how consumers judge our business and products/services. Instead of having that knee-jerk reaction of "premium" or "trustworthy", the immediate reaction is a gut check of "does this look a bit unprofessional? Could this be a little risky?" - the kind of judgments that sends potential customers running away preemptively or second-guessing a purchase after landing on our pages. Worse, our actual customers told us they had a hard time recognizing the brand when they first found us and it felt cheap compared to others.
After setting up a brand guide and having absolute rules on colors (even with unique color names and the hex numbers), fonts, logo variations, everything else started falling into place. Different marketing channels and touchpoints started echoing the same feeling and story. And it actually shows in our metrics - our direct word-of-mouth referrals increased by around 30% after just 6 months because people recognize us and remember us enough to be able to name and talk about us.
2. Live, component-based guidelines make brand updates easy, turning brand consistency from a nightmare to a superpower
One of the less-recognized benefits of creating a brand guide that ultimately increased not only our brand but our operational efficiency was how we set it up - as live components in Figma. We didn't make a static PDF, each color, type, logo variant are each made a variable. What this does is, if we ever need to update or tweak anything (say our signature, recognizable blue need a slight color change or if an iconic typeface needs to be swapped for an optimized one), we just need to update it in one place and the update instantly roll-outs automatically to all existing marketing assets. Nobody needs to worry about hunting down and replacing outdated marketing slides, ad graphics, email header designs, etc.
For a small team like us, this is especially crucial. For a small business, especially if you're the owner wearing all the hats, this eases the load because consistent branding is no longer something you need to worry about manually and it won't gum up the works when you need to update your brand. In fact, making updates you KNOW you need to make for brand optimization roll-out automatically reduces the risk of you skipping it due to the extra effort. If made right, it starts saving you time because all your marketing assets being in lockstep with your brand means you won't need to spend more time fixing discrepancies or investigating why a perfectly good asset is failing to perform.
My 2 cents: there's no need to start from scratch - all you really need at the end of the day is unified brand elements to tighten and unify loose, incoherent branding then turning those into live, updatable components. That's what makes all the difference in transforming your business from "I've seen it somewhere before" to "I can't forget that!"
1. Messy, disjointed branding turns away customers - even before they get a chance to try your product.
One of the most extreme before-and-after we've had was in having a brand guide because nothing captures how much people judge a business by the holistic quality of the brand impression. Before the brand guide, our marketing materials didn't match - our website looks one way, our packaging has another set of colors and fonts, our social media pages look like afterthoughts. This disjointed branding is not only messy, but it affects how consumers judge our business and products/services. Instead of having that knee-jerk reaction of "premium" or "trustworthy", the immediate reaction is a gut check of "does this look a bit unprofessional? Could this be a little risky?" - the kind of judgments that sends potential customers running away preemptively or second-guessing a purchase after landing on our pages. Worse, our actual customers told us they had a hard time recognizing the brand when they first found us and it felt cheap compared to others.
After setting up a brand guide and having absolute rules on colors (even with unique color names and the hex numbers), fonts, logo variations, everything else started falling into place. Different marketing channels and touchpoints started echoing the same feeling and story. And it actually shows in our metrics - our direct word-of-mouth referrals increased by around 30% after just 6 months because people recognize us and remember us enough to be able to name and talk about us.
2. Live, component-based guidelines make brand updates easy, turning brand consistency from a nightmare to a superpower
One of the less-recognized benefits of creating a brand guide that ultimately increased not only our brand but our operational efficiency was how we set it up - as live components in Figma. We didn't make a static PDF, each color, type, logo variant are each made a variable. What this does is, if we ever need to update or tweak anything (say our signature, recognizable blue need a slight color change or if an iconic typeface needs to be swapped for an optimized one), we just need to update it in one place and the update instantly roll-outs automatically to all existing marketing assets. Nobody needs to worry about hunting down and replacing outdated marketing slides, ad graphics, email header designs, etc.
For a small team like us, this is especially crucial. For a small business, especially if you're the owner wearing all the hats, this eases the load because consistent branding is no longer something you need to worry about manually and it won't gum up the works when you need to update your brand. In fact, making updates you KNOW you need to make for brand optimization roll-out automatically reduces the risk of you skipping it due to the extra effort. If made right, it starts saving you time because all your marketing assets being in lockstep with your brand means you won't need to spend more time fixing discrepancies or investigating why a perfectly good asset is failing to perform.
My 2 cents: there's no need to start from scratch - all you really need at the end of the day is unified brand elements to tighten and unify loose, incoherent branding then turning those into live, updatable components. That's what makes all the difference in transforming your business from "I've seen it somewhere before" to "I can't forget that!"
Variant 2
I'm Volen Vulkov, Co-Founder at Enhancv. Let me share my response regarding how our clear brand guidelines drastically transformed our marketing and how it could profoundly impact any small business too:
1,
The mess: Our visuals were so inconsistent prior to establishing the guide that it lost us trust (and sales) everywhere.
Before we set down how we should look, we looked different everywhere. Slightly different logos, slightly different shades of blue on our website, resumes, social media posts, email banners.So much so you sometimes wondered which one was the "real" Enhancv. What made it worst was that we even camouflaged our inconsistency within our premium resume templates. Fonts are different on headings on our homepage, help docs, and marketing PDFs. And sometimes, the blues are even chemically off. It made us appear patchy and, at times, cheap. I noticed that some first-time users hesitate more than usual to subscribe, our return customers complain about "changes" on the resume platform that were just inconsistencies in our branding.People noticed, repeated sales took a hit with a 12% dip in one quarter and the loss went beyond just income numbers. The truth is, if your design looks like a hot mess, people are going to assume your business is also a hot mess. The Kantar BrandZ report shows that globally, brands that were consistent across all of their touch points were 3x more likely to be considered "high-quality" brands. You absolutely don't need a multi-million advertising budget body, you just need to stop flipping the bird every other week.
2.
the after: Having live brand guidelines automated consistency (and updates)
Set brand rules around color, type, logos, etc. and follow through all the way. We made it affect live variables on all our files on Figma. Now, if we tweak our 'Steel Blue' shade in our color palette, even if it's just a single value, it automatically edits every button, headers, templates, on and on throughout our online presence. No more colored IG stories lying around or having to message someone about off-brand content posted on the company's Twitter accounts. We also set Do's and Don'ts around using our standalone marks and wordmarks, no stretching logos or placing them on top of a pink blob. Consistency is now automatic.
We saved hours every single week from no longer having to "police" our brand. We no longer have to fret whenever a new designer or VA is assigned a task because they just have to pull from Figma files and they automatically get it right. Our customers are now starting to call us "that premium resume tool" (for lack of a better way to remember us). Our NPS improved by 7 points after 2 quarters from our rollout of our brand guidelines. If you're still in the early stages of building your enterprise, locking down just the basics around how you present yourself in the public eye dramatically heightened your perceived value. People will gladly pay more AND repeat if they believe your brand is the real deal.
Kantar BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands 2024
1,
The mess: Our visuals were so inconsistent prior to establishing the guide that it lost us trust (and sales) everywhere.
Before we set down how we should look, we looked different everywhere. Slightly different logos, slightly different shades of blue on our website, resumes, social media posts, email banners.So much so you sometimes wondered which one was the "real" Enhancv. What made it worst was that we even camouflaged our inconsistency within our premium resume templates. Fonts are different on headings on our homepage, help docs, and marketing PDFs. And sometimes, the blues are even chemically off. It made us appear patchy and, at times, cheap. I noticed that some first-time users hesitate more than usual to subscribe, our return customers complain about "changes" on the resume platform that were just inconsistencies in our branding.People noticed, repeated sales took a hit with a 12% dip in one quarter and the loss went beyond just income numbers. The truth is, if your design looks like a hot mess, people are going to assume your business is also a hot mess. The Kantar BrandZ report shows that globally, brands that were consistent across all of their touch points were 3x more likely to be considered "high-quality" brands. You absolutely don't need a multi-million advertising budget body, you just need to stop flipping the bird every other week.
2.
the after: Having live brand guidelines automated consistency (and updates)
Set brand rules around color, type, logos, etc. and follow through all the way. We made it affect live variables on all our files on Figma. Now, if we tweak our 'Steel Blue' shade in our color palette, even if it's just a single value, it automatically edits every button, headers, templates, on and on throughout our online presence. No more colored IG stories lying around or having to message someone about off-brand content posted on the company's Twitter accounts. We also set Do's and Don'ts around using our standalone marks and wordmarks, no stretching logos or placing them on top of a pink blob. Consistency is now automatic.
We saved hours every single week from no longer having to "police" our brand. We no longer have to fret whenever a new designer or VA is assigned a task because they just have to pull from Figma files and they automatically get it right. Our customers are now starting to call us "that premium resume tool" (for lack of a better way to remember us). Our NPS improved by 7 points after 2 quarters from our rollout of our brand guidelines. If you're still in the early stages of building your enterprise, locking down just the basics around how you present yourself in the public eye dramatically heightened your perceived value. People will gladly pay more AND repeat if they believe your brand is the real deal.
Kantar BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands 2024
What is one content marketing strategy that drove real engagement for your startup? How did you measure its impact?
https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/the-ai-startup-scoop-7168555742524915712/
Query
Submit to: https://connectively.us/experts/questions/startup-content-marketing-strategy-engagement-impact-measurement
Variant 1
I'm Volen Vulkov, Co-Founder at Enhancv. Here is my answer about the one content marketing strategy that moved the needle for our startup, along with exactly how we tracked the results:
Pain Point SEO- We doubled our signups by ignoring search volume and following the buyer's intent
We turned to Pain Point SEO after realizing that we were driving the least traction with our high-traffic, super-shareable, and story-driven TOFU content. Instead of continuing the volume game, we went deep bottom funnel and created posts that uniquely answered the exact comparisons and tool searches that our target buyers were looking for on Google at their buy now moments- Think X Vs Leadfeeder" or " best [category]".. You name it. Topics that traditional SEO tools marked with "zero" search volume.
The results were counterintuitive yet spectacular. Our accidentally created X vs Leadfeeder comparing post- which we were ranking for at a keyword with zero monthly search volume - had quietly driven over 100 direct product signups and along with other "how to" or "best alternative" post topics had doubled the number of new user signups for our product (215+) per month purely from content. Our bottom funnel posts converted almost 10 times more than our well-shared TOFU posts despite having much less traffic. This was our resounding wake-up call that buyer intent is more than just numbers- and that quality always beats quantity in context.
How we tracked that impact?
To dispel any doubts about the veracity of our observations, we created a first and last-click attribution pipe in Google analytics that captured each signer's first and last touchpoints, providing information about the original blog post that drove the signup and whether they came through initially or as a returning visitor. We thus had visibility of which post initiated the interest and which post closed the deal + linear lift in new user signup per month from our pain points SEO efforts immediately after we began. The longevity of the method and the probability level that the conversion rate was to be maintained above average over 8 months provided us with the scaled repeatable strategy we were looking for. The data was also far too logical and linear to ignore- leading us to put bottom funnel buyer intent topical content above everything else in our priority list for future clients.
What advice would I give to early-stage AI founders? Don't take search volumes at face value. Start with user interviews- ask them what tool alternatives they checked out before buying or using your product line and design content that addresses those ready to buy query points identified via the feedback you get from your users regardless of what the search volume may suggest. Your attribution model will tell you if your content is driving new signups and conversions or if you need to pivot.
Pain Point SEO- We doubled our signups by ignoring search volume and following the buyer's intent
We turned to Pain Point SEO after realizing that we were driving the least traction with our high-traffic, super-shareable, and story-driven TOFU content. Instead of continuing the volume game, we went deep bottom funnel and created posts that uniquely answered the exact comparisons and tool searches that our target buyers were looking for on Google at their buy now moments- Think X Vs Leadfeeder" or " best [category]".. You name it. Topics that traditional SEO tools marked with "zero" search volume.
The results were counterintuitive yet spectacular. Our accidentally created X vs Leadfeeder comparing post- which we were ranking for at a keyword with zero monthly search volume - had quietly driven over 100 direct product signups and along with other "how to" or "best alternative" post topics had doubled the number of new user signups for our product (215+) per month purely from content. Our bottom funnel posts converted almost 10 times more than our well-shared TOFU posts despite having much less traffic. This was our resounding wake-up call that buyer intent is more than just numbers- and that quality always beats quantity in context.
How we tracked that impact?
To dispel any doubts about the veracity of our observations, we created a first and last-click attribution pipe in Google analytics that captured each signer's first and last touchpoints, providing information about the original blog post that drove the signup and whether they came through initially or as a returning visitor. We thus had visibility of which post initiated the interest and which post closed the deal + linear lift in new user signup per month from our pain points SEO efforts immediately after we began. The longevity of the method and the probability level that the conversion rate was to be maintained above average over 8 months provided us with the scaled repeatable strategy we were looking for. The data was also far too logical and linear to ignore- leading us to put bottom funnel buyer intent topical content above everything else in our priority list for future clients.
What advice would I give to early-stage AI founders? Don't take search volumes at face value. Start with user interviews- ask them what tool alternatives they checked out before buying or using your product line and design content that addresses those ready to buy query points identified via the feedback you get from your users regardless of what the search volume may suggest. Your attribution model will tell you if your content is driving new signups and conversions or if you need to pivot.
Variant 2
I'm Volen Vulkov, Co-Founder at Enhancv. This is the story of one of my content marketing strategies that drove tangible value to the business: real engagement and real signups for a SaaS product.
Counter-intuitive lesson learned: targeting keywords with zero search volume but with an obvious buying intent led to 2X higher monthly signups (from content) for our product.
Our initial content playbook was focused on top of funnel "growth stories" about other SaaS products. We regularly experienced traffic spikes in the thousands from great shares in relevant communities -- for $0 in ads. Our stories were loved enough to continue receiving social shares. But when we dug deeper into conversion tracking, we found something counterintuitive. Two blog posts that we accidentally crafted bottom of funnel content were driving more signups than our most successful growth story posts in the top 10 list. Their conversion rate was approximately 10 times the other posts.
These posts were neither authentic origin stories or excepted virality plays. The posts were hyper-specific to an obvious pain point targeting very niche keywords (e.g. "X vs leadfeeder" and "best X tools"). According to every SEO tool, there were actually no search volumes recorded for these keywords -- so no one should ever be looking for them. Yet, their obvious reality is that anyone searching for those keywords is already on the verge of making a buying decision. One of those posts, a post about how to do what the product does manually and without using it, alone generated more than 100 signups and helped us double our monthly signups to over 215 from content as reported in our google analytics attribution model.
We turned it into a system: pain point SEO using seven different frameworks (all bottom of funnel content) - compare this X, list of best X tools, how to do it without X, X alternative, use of X, how X was made, and case studies. Our google analytics SEO campaign attribution using first click and last click model recorded positive upwards conversion growth monthly.
Our blog also experienced downward traffic inclines. Our founder circles ran out of viral worthy shareable content, but our conversion rates (from content) continues to linearly climb.
What we learned, which other startup marketers can learn from: target keywords and topics where you know searchers are already on the verge of making a buying decision, regardless of what SEO tools report as no search volume. It's counter-intuitive but focusing your content marketing efforts on this concept of buyer intent versus traffic potential led to ideal and predictable growth for our product.
Counter-intuitive lesson learned: targeting keywords with zero search volume but with an obvious buying intent led to 2X higher monthly signups (from content) for our product.
Our initial content playbook was focused on top of funnel "growth stories" about other SaaS products. We regularly experienced traffic spikes in the thousands from great shares in relevant communities -- for $0 in ads. Our stories were loved enough to continue receiving social shares. But when we dug deeper into conversion tracking, we found something counterintuitive. Two blog posts that we accidentally crafted bottom of funnel content were driving more signups than our most successful growth story posts in the top 10 list. Their conversion rate was approximately 10 times the other posts.
These posts were neither authentic origin stories or excepted virality plays. The posts were hyper-specific to an obvious pain point targeting very niche keywords (e.g. "X vs leadfeeder" and "best X tools"). According to every SEO tool, there were actually no search volumes recorded for these keywords -- so no one should ever be looking for them. Yet, their obvious reality is that anyone searching for those keywords is already on the verge of making a buying decision. One of those posts, a post about how to do what the product does manually and without using it, alone generated more than 100 signups and helped us double our monthly signups to over 215 from content as reported in our google analytics attribution model.
We turned it into a system: pain point SEO using seven different frameworks (all bottom of funnel content) - compare this X, list of best X tools, how to do it without X, X alternative, use of X, how X was made, and case studies. Our google analytics SEO campaign attribution using first click and last click model recorded positive upwards conversion growth monthly.
Our blog also experienced downward traffic inclines. Our founder circles ran out of viral worthy shareable content, but our conversion rates (from content) continues to linearly climb.
What we learned, which other startup marketers can learn from: target keywords and topics where you know searchers are already on the verge of making a buying decision, regardless of what SEO tools report as no search volume. It's counter-intuitive but focusing your content marketing efforts on this concept of buyer intent versus traffic potential led to ideal and predictable growth for our product.
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