The e-commerce sale doesn't end at checkout. So why do we stop measuring there?

(Aleks Sztemberg) - With $849.9 billion in U.S. merchandise returns projected for 2025, retailers may be overlooking one of their most valuable sources of customer insight: what happens after the purchase.

By Aleks Sztemberg

Edited by Jenn Moon, Editor at Featured News · Oct 26, 2026

As a co-founder of an analytics platform for e-commerce, I have noticed something interesting. When we speak to product teams, all they focus on are sales numbers. Improving the shopping experience, making sure the user finalizes the purchase.

But as I am writing this, somewhere around me, a good pair of jeans is heading back to the warehouse.

Don't get me wrong. Returns are hardly a new problem. Alongside shopping cart abandonment, they're one of the biggest headaches in e-commerce. At the NXT Commerce conference I attended last year, several major brands were talking about exactly this challenge.

And the numbers confirm this.

According to the National Retail Federation's 2025 Retail Returns Landscape report, U.S. retailers projected that customers would return approximately $849.9 billion worth of merchandise in 2025. The research included a survey of 358 e-commerce professionals at large U.S. retailers.

Of course, $849.9 billion in returned merchandise doesn't mean $849.9 billion in losses. Many products are resold. But add to this the costs of shipping, handling, inspection, repackaging, customer service and discounts on products that can no longer be sold at full price, and you start to wonder how much profit disappears along the way.

And more importantly, how much of this could be prevented without worsening the shopping experience or affecting sales numbers?

Teams we speak to spend most of their time and budgets on understanding what makes people buy.

It's already difficult, sure. But what really impacts revenue is knowing where they come from, which products they view, how long they spend comparing options and what finally convinces them to click that "BUY" button.

But what happens after that?

In many businesses, a return is treated as a separate transaction. Someone in logistics handles it, customer service processes the refund, and the product hopefully makes it back into inventory...or not.

Now, what's really interesting for me is what happened before the return.

Take fashion, for example. According to the European Environment Agency's 2024 report, around 20% of clothing and 30% of footwear purchased online in Europe get returned.

Perhaps shoppers regularly order three sizes, try them at home, and send two back, or maybe they added an extra item by accident. Or the photo is different online and in reality.

These are very different problems, and they require very different solutions.

Yet if all you're looking at is total sales and total returns, you'll probably never know the difference.

Here's a statistic I found particularly interesting.

In DHL's 2025 e-commerce shopper research, based on 24,000 online shoppers across 24 countries, 54% cited the wrong size as a reason for returning an item. And 55% cited poor quality or faulty products.

Meanwhile, in DHL's 2025 business survey, which surveyed 4,050 businesses across 19 countries, only 24% selected incorrect sizing among the main reasons for returns, and 26% selected poor quality or faulty products.

Sure, different groups are answering different questions, so these figures don't prove that retailers don't understand why customers return. But they suggest there may be a gap worth investigating.

We also need to remember that customers may give answers just to process the form, sometimes picking an option because it is the easiest. So to truly understand the reason why, we need to dig deeper into behaviors, segments and patterns.

What I also think is interesting is how we talk about the customers who return products as if they belong to one and the same group.

Imagine two customers.

One orders 20 products over six months and returns three, the other one orders four products and returns three.

Both have generated three returns. Are their cases really the same?

The first might be a loyal, profitable customer. The second may be considerably more expensive to serve.

Even knowing this, we'd need to look at the value of their purchases, margins and reasons for returning before drawing conclusions.

The NRF's 2025 consumer survey, which included 2,006 consumers who had returned at least one online purchase in the previous 12 months, found that 82% consider free returns important when shopping online, and 71% say they're less likely to purchase from a retailer again after a poor return experience.

And I can relate. I don't like to pay for delivery, even if I know that the cost might be hidden in the price. I want to feel that it was free, and returns as well. No questions asked. Otherwise, I won't buy.

That's quite a dilemma. Brands need to reduce the cost of returns, but customers increasingly expect returns to be easy and free in order to buy at all.

Let's imagine a hypothetical large retailer who generates €10 million in annual online sales, with a 20% return rate by sales value.

Those are pretty realistic numbers, by the way.

That's €2 million worth of merchandise coming back in our hypothetical example.

Let's say that company could reduce the return rate from 20% to 18% without any impact on sales or customer experience.

Maybe two percentage points don't sound like a lot, but that's €200,000 worth of additional merchandise retained, assuming sales remain unchanged.

Sure, it is not €200,000 in additional profit, but it's potentially meaningful savings in processing, shipping and other return-related costs. Better than firing people, for example, as an optimization strategy.

But where to look?

How I would do it is quite simple, actually.

Identify the products with the highest return rates, compare them with similar products, and examine whether particular customer groups, campaigns or purchasing behaviors stand out.

Then you can compare purchases after they've had enough time to be returned. A product sold yesterday hasn't had the same opportunity to come back as one sold three weeks ago.

Lastly, test one improvement at a time and measure what happens, not only to returns but also to conversion and customer satisfaction.

After all, reducing returns by discouraging people from buying is hardly a success.

And here's food for thought: What if the return is just another way of receiving customer feedback?

There's an environmental side to this conversation too.

The European Environment Agency estimated in its 2024 report that between 22% and 43% of returned clothing purchased online in Europe ends up being destroyed. Its definition includes recycling and other forms of disposal, not just incineration.

I'd like to clarify that we should make a distinction between the returns that would happen anyway, and those that can be prevented by changes in the interface, better user experience, improving the customer journey or better customer service.

But what I keep thinking about is that e-commerce has become incredibly sophisticated at understanding how to get customers to buy. We can measure practically every interaction leading up to checkout.

Yet we are sweeping under the carpet the fact that we often pay far less attention to understanding why some of those purchases don't work out.

Maybe it's time we started treating a return not just as a refund, but as valuable feedback about the shopping experience.

Because a successful sale isn't necessarily the one that happens at checkout.

It's the one the customer decides to keep.

About the author

Aleks Sztemberg

Aleks Sztemberg is the Co-Founder at Stormly. an AI-powered analytics platform for e-commerce businesses. She works with retailers and product teams to better understand customer behaviour, uncover opportunities to improve shopping experiences, and turn complex data into actionable insights, from improving conversions to reducing preventable returns.

This story was produced by Featured and republished with permission. Experts featured here are members of Connectively, Featured's expert network.

Stop chasing buy-in. Start building chemistry.

(Dr. Janice Perkins) - My research on executive coaching relationships suggests chemistry may be a better first step toward lasting buy-in.

By Dr. Janice Perkins

Edited by Jenn Moon, Editor at Featured News · Oct 26, 2026

Consider a common corporate challenge: An executive team needs its organization to carry out a major restructuring. Leaders spend weeks building their case to get everyone “aligned” before the initiative launches. The effort is exhausting, and people still aren’t on board. The alignment they were chasing never fully arrives, and the launch is shaky at best. Senior leaders end up frustrated with middle managers for not complying and getting on board.

I see versions of this scenario in my clients’ organizations regularly. It reflects a common assumption: that alignment must come before action, and that leaders can create it by “giving” people the direction and the reasons until they’re convinced.

My doctoral research on executive coaching relationships, combined with my experience coaching executive teams, has led me to question that sequence. In the coaching pairs I studied, chemistry often developed before explicit agreement and helped people move forward together. That doesn’t eliminate the need for alignment, but it has changed how I think about its role. In my view, chemistry may be a more important precondition for forward movement than securing buy-in up front.

The problem with buy-in

Buy-in is an appealing corporate phrase because it gives change a tidy sequence: Leaders create an idea, convince others, and the idea moves through the organization. As a result, leaders often oversell initiatives and push uncomfortably hard to persuade everyone to get on board. The approach is logical, but it doesn’t account for the emotional acceptance, trust and psychological safety people need before they shift.

Dictionary.com defines persuade as “to prevail on (a person) to do something.” But people generally resist feeling pressured, which is one reason they push back against change or increased speed. No one likes to be prevailed upon. In my experience, that is the resistance leaders feel from other levels of the organization when change is initiated. It often isn’t resistance to the idea or the change itself, but to the way it is introduced and carried out across the organization.

People recognize the difference between being persuaded to follow and genuinely wanting to move together. Buy-in is an outcome; the more important question is whether you’ve created conditions that encourage participation. Take a step back and ask what companies really want from buy-in: people moving in the chosen direction. Traditionally, leaders tell employees what they expect. Some also explain why and invite questions to gain support.

How I studied chemistry

As a former athletic coach and now an executive coach, I wanted to know whether the chemistry we rely on in athletic and executive coaching could be understood well enough to teach leaders how to build stronger teams and cultures.

For my 2026 doctoral dissertation at Kansas State University, Impacts of chemistry in executive coaching, I conducted a hermeneutic phenomenological study of six executive coach-client pairs in the fall of 2025. I analyzed recorded coaching sessions, session transcripts and video elicitation interviews, in which participants reviewed recordings of their sessions and reflected on key moments. I examined when chemistry emerged and intensified, instances of perceived alignment or shared orientation, and references to implicit and explicit values. I studied what happens when people move beyond simply communicating and begin thinking, responding and creating together.

My findings challenge a common assumption: Chemistry is not simply luck, charisma or personality fit, nor something that appears only after people have known and trusted one another for years. In the pairs I studied, chemistry offered a faster pathway to connection and trust, and it emerged through identifiable relational conditions that I believe can be replicated and strengthened.

Within those coaching relationships, chemistry was associated with increased agency and ownership, reduced relational friction, a stronger sense of identity and greater confidence. Based on those findings and my work with executive teams, I believe strong team chemistry can significantly reduce the need to persuade people to move in a particular direction, and that buy-in can become a natural result of chemistry rather than a separate campaign.

Mutual orientation: what buy-in gets wrong

One concept from my study helps explain how interactions became productive without requiring prior agreement.

Mutual orientation is the shared direction of attention and engagement within an interaction. It is not the same as a shared goal. In coaching, the coach’s goal is to help the client succeed. The client has specific goals for their professional development. The organization paying for the coaching has goals for the client’s career growth. Those three goals are different, but they point in the same direction. That is mutual orientation. It’s not agreement about outcomes; it’s alignment in the moment about what matters for improvement and growth. And it helps reveal what buy-in gets wrong.

Here’s a metaphor I often use with executives who are trying to implement change and are frustrated by a lack of buy-in despite all their effort communicating. Picture a couple of young adults being pulled on an inner tube behind a speedboat on a busy holiday lake. The riders are safe inside the boat’s wake. The riders and the driver haven’t explicitly discussed any of this; they’re simply facing the same direction while participating in the movement in very different ways.

Buy-in assumes sameness. But the two riders could be having completely different experiences. One is thrilled, and the other is nervous. Their experiences aren’t symmetrical, and they don’t need to be. They share orientation, not identical understanding. They’re facing forward, moving together in the same direction.

Buy-in also assumes commitment comes before movement. The riders haven’t committed to a particular kind of ride, but they committed to the ride itself when they got on the tube and into the water. The driver committed the minute they got behind the wheel. The moment the boat accelerates, the riders are already moving. In the coaching pairs I studied, change regularly came before conscious agreement. The only conscious agreement was showing up and being willing to be moved. Participants shifted, opened up and changed before they had explicitly committed to doing so. You don’t persuade someone through a relational gate; you create the conditions for them to walk through it on their own.

What throws people off the inner tube is the boat cutting hard left or right without warning or explanation. The shared orientation breaks down not because anyone stopped caring, but because the direction changed without enough time to adjust together. In my work with clients, the most common causes are decisions made at the top without considering all stakeholders, without connecting the change to the “why” or without acknowledging the loss people need to process. People don’t mind going fast if they are safely in the wake. They mind being thrown off or put in danger.

Buy-in treats persuasion as the fuel for changing direction. But you can’t talk people back into the safety of the wake. What brings them back is the steering: holding the orientation or slowing the turn. Sometimes changes have to be made suddenly, and the driver can signal the riders. Otherwise, it’s the driver’s actions, not words, that communicate with the riders. People won’t mind the speed if they can adjust to the turn in time, so ask them what they need to prepare for it. That question is often overlooked, and skipping it dumps people either into the lake or outside the wake. Time and again with clients, I’ve seen those as the two places where resistance shows up.

In practice, mutual orientation means communicating with stakeholders (anyone behind the boat) and, instead of only telling them where the boat is headed, asking what they need to keep holding on and prepare for a turn. Leaders need to make sure both the direction and the speed of the turn are mutual. The goal isn’t to slow down. It’s to steer the turns in a way that doesn’t toss people off or into unsafe places. Not because everyone has agreed, but because they’re all still in the water, facing forward, held by the same momentum.

What my research found

My research found that a relational container, in which both parties feel safe to contribute to the shared orientation, was paramount. Within the safety of that container, interpersonal chemistry emerged and powered mutual orientation. I identified six conditions that enabled chemistry to emerge and thrive, which I call the Six Gates of Chemistry: Legitimacy, Dignity, Containment, Agency, Attunement and Orientation.

Alignment emerged without being engineered. In session after session, participants found mutual orientation without explicitly discussing goals or values. The goals were understood simply by showing up to the sessions. Mutual orientation appeared as coordinated conversational rhythm, shared attention, and a distinct quality of conversation and inquiry.

Alignment amplified chemistry rather than initiating it. Chemistry often emerged before any explicit alignment took place. Attunement, dignity, legitimacy, agency and rhythm also affected how strong the chemistry became. Once established, chemistry was “sticky” enough to remain a positive force for forward momentum. Tension and challenge, consistency and humor also accelerated it.

What I believe this means for leaders

My study examined one-on-one coaching relationships, not organizations or restructurings, so it doesn’t establish that corporate change succeeds without buy-in. But seeing these gates in the research made me look back at the successful and unsuccessful leadership I’ve observed over decades in corporate leadership, athletic coaching and executive coaching. I’ve come to believe the same conditions apply to leaders and their teams. The recommendations below are my interpretation of the findings, grounded in that experience.

Start with the relational container. Can employees ask questions, give feedback and take the time they need to adjust to the loss that comes with each change? Are they allowed to be human beings who need to adjust emotionally, or are they expected to simply execute instructions? Do leaders know what each level of the organization is experiencing “behind the boat”?

Stop waiting for full alignment before acting. Don’t hold people hostage until they see what you see or believe what you believe. In my study, movement often preceded agreement, and I’ve seen the same with teams. That doesn’t give you permission to leave people behind; make sure they’re still “behind the boat” and feel safe enough to keep holding on. Leaders who wait for full consensus may be delaying unnecessarily. In my experience, creating the conditions for shared direction often matters more than securing explicit buy-in up front.

Listen for unspoken values and direction. In conversations with direct reports, peers and stakeholders, people signal what matters to them, and what concerns them, before they say it out loud. Leaders who develop sensitivity to those signals can respond to what’s actually motivating people, not just what’s being said. Resistance is often the first sign that people feel outside the wake. Listen to it, pause and reset mutual orientation.

Treat alignment as an ongoing practice, not a box to check before change begins. The pairs I studied didn’t achieve alignment once, like flipping a light switch. They moved in and out of it, and the coach maintained the relational container through dignity, legitimacy and attunement. In my experience, effective leaders do the same, just as a good boat driver does for the riders.

Use shared values as anchors during change and as a way to understand stakeholders’ experience. Values that are genuinely shared can hold teams together during change, but only when they are real, recognized, discussed and respected. They don’t anchor anything when they’re written on a wall or website but not lived out in everyday work.

A different picture of how change works

The conventional model of change leadership treats buy-in as a box to check. Based on my research and my work with leaders, I see buy-in as an ongoing relational practice that tends to how stakeholders, and the employees carrying out the change, actually feel. That practice focuses on building the chemistry that strengthens mutual orientation and helps change take hold.

Change begins in the quality of attunement, a willingness to inquire and the openness created when people sense they share something that matters. Once chemistry emerges, and the conditions that support it remain, change can accelerate.

For leaders exhausted from trying to secure buy-in and create engagement, my message is simple:

Stop asking, “How do I get them on board?”

Start asking, “How can I get my team to click?”

About the research

This article draws on my doctoral dissertation, Impacts of chemistry in executive coaching (Kansas State University, 2026), a hermeneutic phenomenological study of six executive coaching dyads. Data sources included recorded coaching sessions, transcripts and video elicitation interviews. The full dissertation is available through K-State Research Exchange and ProQuest.

About the author

Dr. Janice Perkins

Dr. Janice Perkins is an executive coach and leadership researcher who helps teams build chemistry that drives change. A member of 100 Coaches with Master-level status from the Association of Corporate Executive Coaches, she trains coaches through Coach Training EDU, competed on the inaugural season of Top Coach and contributed to the 2024 book The Intersection of Leadership and Coaching.

This story was produced by Featured and republished with permission. Experts featured here are members of Connectively, Featured's expert network.

On New Year's Day, Google Ads brought me many leads, and almost nobody bought

(Dr. Igor Ivitskiy PhD) - With my target cost per lead unchanged, Google appeared to find me many more leads. Almost none of them bought.

By Dr. Igor Ivitskiy PhD

Edited by Jenn Moon, Editor at Featured News · Oct 21, 2026

On Jan. 1, 2021, my ad campaigns were running with a target cost per action (CPA) — that is, a target price for one lead, not for a purchase. I think the target was about 50 hryvnias, a little under $2 at the time. For the whole year the cost stayed roughly the same, and the ads were finding me a small number of people, about 50 a day.

That day, I did not look at my phone. Then at one moment, I checked my phone and saw bank notifications, one after another, 500 hryvnias (about $18) each. A new charge every 20 minutes. I opened the laptop, and there were already messages on Instagram.

As I understood later, and this is only my guess, on Jan. 1 the other advertisers who target this audience switched off their ads. It was as if Google said: "Now I will show you everywhere." It started to run my ads at full power. My target cost per lead was unchanged, and the campaigns appeared to bring in many more leads.

I had about 10 to 15 campaigns with an average budget of about 1,000 to 2,000 hryvnias ($35 to $70) on each one. For a long time it was like this: one campaign spent 1,500 to 2,000, then it dropped to 200. They stayed under 2,000, and they never all used their budgets at the same time. But this time, they all spent it. Plus, Google has one more feature: Its rules say it can spend up to two times your daily budget. So, as I remember it, the larger campaigns spent about 4,000 hryvnias (about $140) each.

One man wrote to me that since the previous night, he had seen only my face everywhere: on his phone, on his tablet, on his TV. This had never happened before.

I got many leads, and almost none of them bought. I no longer have the account reports for that day, so I can't say exactly how many. These were really leads, not purchases. When I made it so that we pass purchases to Google, everything started to get better.

Google can spend twice your daily budget

In practice, for most campaigns, Google can spend up to two times your daily budget. Google has this property, and it is written in Google Ads Help (as of October 2026), with some exceptions. On a single day, it can spend two times your budget, but for the month you will not be charged more than 30.4 times your average daily budget. So if you set a budget of $100 a day and keep it all month, tomorrow Google can charge up to $200, but for the month you will not be charged more than $3,040.

This is normal. Business works in waves, and Google works in waves. In my experience, when you stop campaigns by hand, you choke a car that has picked up speed, and you usually make it worse for yourself.

The same sum and far fewer results

An advertiser once wrote to me that his campaign always ran on Maximize conversions and that in general everything was OK. I asked how long it had been running that way. He said about two months. Then I told him: Wait for any public holiday, and you may be shocked by what starts to happen.

When new players come in on Black Friday and during sales, Google can just start to drain your money. In the worst cases I have seen, the same sum brought far fewer results. It would be logical just to lower the budget at this time: "I don't need leads at all on these days."

Maximize conversions is risky in moments of sharp market changes when a new competitor comes in. For example, you have a budget of $1,000, and on average you pay $50 per conversion, so you get 20 conversions. Then some new competitor comes in and sets wild prices per click. All prices jump, and for the same $1,000 you may get not 20 conversions at $50, but only a few, or even one. If you had a target CPA of $50, Google would try to keep the average cost near $50. It can't promise this, and a single conversion can still cost more than $50, because the target is an average, not a ceiling.

That is why in the long term I always work with a clear target CPA.

What to check before the holidays

An offline conversion is a target action that happens not on your website, but, for example, in your store or when a person talks to your manager. With offline conversions, Google Ads can optimize not just for the people who leave a request, but for the people who pay you money. When you send data about offline conversions, you can also give a value to each conversion, for example, $5,000.

If on some holidays there is a lot of traffic but almost nobody buys, you should know there is a tool that lets you tell Google in advance how much and on which dates your conversion rate will change. It is called seasonality adjustments. To locate it, go to Tools, Budgets and bidding, then Adjustments, Seasonal. Google says to use it only if you expect major changes in conversion rates, ideally for short events of one to seven days, because Smart Bidding already manages seasonal events.

Should you pause Google Ads on holidays?

Whenever a question like this comes up, I ask: Do you want to do this because there are reasons to do it or because you just heard it somewhere? If you just heard somewhere that you need to pause Google Ads on holidays, that alone is not a reason.

In some of the businesses I launch where Google gets purchase data, Jan. 1 is one of the most effective days for ads. I think it is because many advertisers stop that day. In those businesses, I have sometimes set a double or triple budget on Jan. 1.

It is not like this everywhere. In my online school's Google Ads account, I compared each Jan. 1 with the average day of Dec. 20 to 30 before it. A registration on our website cost less on Jan. 1 in 2023 ($1.38 against $1.84) and in 2025 ($3.38 against $6.29), and about the same in 2024 ($5.22 against $5.28). In autumn 2025, we changed what we count. Since then, the conversion has been a lead that our team confirmed in our customer relationship management (CRM) system and uploaded back to Google Ads. On Jan. 1, 2026, clicks went up 58%, to 1,061 from an average of 670, but there were two leads instead of about 3.5, and each cost $126 instead of $60. In none of these years did the school spend twice its average December day on Jan. 1.

How I counted: I took every campaign that spent money in the account on those days on YouTube, Demand Gen, Search and Performance Max. For Jan. 1, I divided that day's spend by its conversions. For Dec. 20 to 30, I divided the total spend by the total conversions. For 2023 to 2025, I counted only website registrations, not email confirmations, webinar visits or purchases. For 2026, I counted only leads confirmed in the CRM. Because the conversion changed, I compare each Jan. 1 only with the December just before it, not one year with another.

If you have your own data that tells you personally that on past holidays a lot of money was spent with zero efficiency, that is different. Everyone has an individual situation. If efficiency was bad, analyze why it was bad and what the reasons were. But don't stop for the sake of stopping.

About the author

Dr. Igor Ivitskiy PhD

Igor Ivitskiy is a PhD in mathematical modeling and the founder of Doctor Ads. He has worked on the profitability of paid advertising since 2006 and has run more than 2,000 audits of advertising accounts. He was ranked #6 in The PPC Survey's Top 50 Most Influential PPC Experts of 2026. Doctor Ads is a Google Partner.

This story was produced by Featured and republished with permission. Experts featured here are members of Connectively, Featured's expert network.

Interview with Gabriel Shaoolian, CEO and Founder, Digital Silk

(Featured) - Shaoolian explains how consistent touchpoints, customer interviews, unaided recall and human judgment can make brands distinctive beyond short-term clicks.

Interview with Gabriel Shaoolian

Edited by Haley Spracale, Editor at Featured News · Oct 20, 2026

As a CEO and Founder in marketing and advertising, how would you describe your approach to building brands that remain memorable in a crowded digital marketplace?

I think the strategy and discovery phase at the start of each client project is the key to my approach. I take the time to understand your business, your customers, and what you want to achieve moving forward. Your branding and marketing are more connected than you think, because your core vision, mission, and values inform your unique take on marketing collateral.

It’s easy to create a few campaigns and get some clicks, likes, or shares. But what people want more than anything is to connect with brands that make them feel like they’re part of something greater.

That feeling usually comes from a company having a point of view people can share. A greater cause. A remarkable story. An odds-defying mission. It’s why your company exists and why your customers remember you.

What career experiences in brand development and digital marketing most shaped the way you think about creating memorable brands?

Growing my own company was a defining experience for me. You never truly experience the perils of building a brand and marketing your services until it’s your own.

In the early days, I had very little experience running a business or making sales, but I knew the company was becoming something exciting. Over time, I got things moving with no funding and grew a team of 17 people, which put immense pressure on me to get things right.

This taught me that a brand is everything a company does. It’s about handling your sales calls, assessing your deliverables, and communicating with your customers. All of these are marketing touchpoints.

I stopped thinking of branding and marketing as two separate things. I learned that marketing campaigns are only as memorable as the brand experiences that guide them, and that perspective guides my efforts at Digital Silk.

When a brand is competing with thousands of daily messages, how do you help clients identify the one idea they should be known for?

Your unique attribute should demonstrate the value you provide to your customers. You can easily say you’re this or that, but if your target audience doesn’t benefit from it, it’s practically useless.

As far as differentiation goes, the idea is to be the most relevant brand for a specific 'why' or 'when.' Look at competing alternatives and isolate the things you have that they lack. Tie it back to the value customers could get, and you’ve identified the one thing you should be known for.

From your work in web design and digital media, which online touchpoint has the greatest potential to make a brand memorable, and how can businesses improve it?

I think consistency across all touchpoints and distinctive brand assets across media are the most effective strategies for driving recognition.

With that said, I see the website as the most promising touchpoint in the sales funnel; it therefore has the greatest potential to convert or deter your leads. Your site is your main salesperson, so you should treat it as such.

As for how you can improve it, my advice is not to do it in isolation. I've seen brands with websites that look nothing like the persona they're trying to portray on other channels.

Slapping your logo or slogan on it is only the starting point; it's how you use your colors, messaging, typography, and imagery that makes it memorable and specific to your business.

You have emphasized clarity and consistency in branding; how can a growing company maintain both as it expands across SEO, paid media, social media, and its website?

The idea is to make those touchpoints easily identifiable as part of your brand. The more you treat them as separate channels, the easier it becomes for them to feel disconnected.

That's why your brand strategy matters: it's the core foundation you use to build the rest of your campaigns. Create your core assets, stick to them, and resist the urge to refresh them constantly.

Define what you want to be known for and the topical coverage you plan to target, then use that structure to plan your strategy across all your digital media. Use a shared content calendar that every specialist can access and contribute to, so it feels like you're all working toward a specific goal and sharing the same story.

How do you distinguish between a brand message that gets attention briefly and one that creates a lasting emotional connection with consumers?

You can argue that the relationships between brands and consumers are largely transactional. Growing your brand awareness comes from your company’s reach and distinctive assets, while it is also defined by people’s gut feelings about your product or service and the expectations or memories they associate with it.

As such, messaging that creates lasting emotional connections compounds over time; it’s not something that spikes and is gone soon after. Show both empathy and authority, and address all the different aspects of the customer’s problem. Describe what you offer in terms of how it helps them, and show that you understand their pain points.

If you’d still sound like a distinctive brand even when they can’t see your logo, your brand voice and messaging guidelines have already made their mark.

What role does frictionless website or e-commerce experience play in brand recall, based on the digital projects you have led?

I believe businesses are often preoccupied with why people should buy from them, rather than what puts them off. Remove as many barriers to purchase as possible so users can easily complete their transactions.

Even then, high customer satisfaction doesn’t automatically translate into lasting brand loyalty or recall. However, this strategy can reduce customer disloyalty and minimize the chances of customers leaving for a competitor.

We did this for a client whose site loaded in 6.23 seconds and had very low conversion and returning-visitor rates. We completely reorganized the information architecture and navigation and built a modular e-commerce experience, supported by a marketing and conversion roadmap. This helped the brand improve customer loyalty, brand recall, and long-term growth.

How do you use analytics to determine whether a brand is becoming genuinely memorable rather than simply generating impressions or clicks?

A high number of impressions doesn't necessarily equate to a long-lasting memory of your brand. In my opinion, brand memorability goes far deeper than the funnel metrics used by traditional trackers, which is why this connection can be surprisingly weak.

When it comes to branding, customer surveys, social listening, and unaided brand recall remain the best indicators of memorability. Marketing specialists can often misjudge the effectiveness of their own assets because they tend to confuse momentary popularity with genuine originality.

For a business with limited marketing resources, what is one practical change it can make this month to become more memorable to its ideal audience?

As unfortunate as it may be, customers often treat brands in the same category as near substitutes. As such, anyone who shops at smaller businesses usually also shops at big-chain ones. Therefore, differentiation on a limited budget can be tricky, since it requires your target audience’s mental availability.

The one thing I would do is interview a handful of your most loyal shoppers, since having a little data is better than having none. Skip customers you don’t want to attract more of, and focus on the ones you already have that are bringing the most bang for your buck marketing-wise.

You can then use those insights as your voice-of-customer language to get closer to your ideal audience segment. If you show that you understand their problems and can see things from their perspective, people would be more inclined to give your business a try as opposed to the other, more generic big-name brands.

Thanks for sharing your knowledge and expertise. Is there anything else you'd like to add?

I can’t end this interview without noting the impact AI has on brand building and digital media as a whole. Yes, it’s a very useful technology, but it can also be a dangerous tool because it enables businesses to accept average work more easily.

With that said, AI doesn’t exempt marketers and strategists from putting in their two cents and building that initial trust with customers. The ceiling is still set by those who use their human judgment to define core differentiators, proprietary customer insights, and proximity to revenue.

AI only helps smart people get smarter; it doesn’t replace brand-building strategies or long-term customer retention campaigns. If you want to learn more about this, I sometimes post on the Digital Trends section of our website.

About the expert

Gabriel ShaoolianCEO and Founder at Digital Silk

This story was produced by Featured and republished with permission. Experts featured here are members of Connectively, Featured's expert network.

Interview with Melissa Church, CEO, Digi-Buzz

(Featured) - Church discusses audience-led channel selection, content calendars and influencer checks that prioritize engagement and local relevance.

Interview with Melissa Church

Edited by Haley Spracale, Editor at Featured News · Oct 6, 2026

As a CEO in marketing and advertising with deep experience in social media marketing, influencer work, and content performance, what perspective do you bring to helping small businesses build a social presence?

I have worked on all sides of social media marketing.

I got my start running a popular science education blog called Bad Science Jokes.

I can test new features, trends, and more with a large audience before testing them on a client's page. I can help bridge the gap between selling and creating a community for a business because I've done it.

What career experiences led you from your background in performing, communication, and marketing into leading a marketing agency as CEO?

Early in my marketing career, I moved from one agency to another. Overall, I found I didn't like how they operated.

I didn't like that clients couldn't speak to someone after 5 p.m. I didn't like the cookie-cutter content style. I didn't feel comfortable working for agencies that took advantage of their clients. I started Digi-Buzz with the intention of doing the opposite of what some other companies were doing.

When you begin working with a small business in the Midwest, how do you identify the social media channels and content priorities most likely to fit its customers and resources?

I ask every new client two questions:

• "What is your ideal demographic?"

• "What is your current demographic?"

This helps me pin down who we want to reach and who we are currently reaching. If our ideal demographic is someone we aren't getting as customers, we can begin a strategy for a social media site that demographic frequents.

How have you helped a Midwest small business turn its local personality or community ties into a distinctive brand voice on social media?

Yes, more than once! It's one of my favorite things to do.

Brand voice is so important. When someone scrolls through social media, they hear a voice in their head as they read. We want people to think of your business as a friend, so we create a specific personality and ensure all content from your business is something that this character would say if they were a real person.

With your background in acting, improvisation, and public speaking, what is one practical way business owners can become more confident and natural on camera?

Practicing in front of a mirror is a great way to get started. Pretend you are speaking to an interviewer and watch how you speak.

Do you move your eyebrows a little too much when you speak? Being mindful of the little things can help you notice them before people start commenting about it online.

For a small Midwest business with limited time and budget, what content-planning habit has consistently made social media more manageable and effective?

For businesses that really need help, I suggest a very basic content calendar. For example, a pizza place that has high turnover of employees and cannot afford a dedicated social media person:

• Mondays: Always talk about your special of the month. One day, take as many photos of the special as possible and schedule them for the entire month in advance.
• Tuesdays: Talk about delivery or takeout. Schedule the whole month, again.
• And so on for the rest of the week—broad topics that are easy to generate content for, so someone can dedicate just a few hours and create a whole month of content.

Also, remind them that taking a day or two off during the week is important. They do not have to post every single day.

What have you learned about using local influencers or community partnerships that small businesses can apply before committing budget to a collaboration?

When working with micro-influencers, always start with a free product to pitch. I have seen many small businesses paying way too much because they do not understand the influencer economy. Someone with 5,000 followers may ask for hundreds of dollars — but what is their engagement rate? Where are these followers located? Sometimes it is far better to give a $50 gift card to a loyal customer with 500 friends and high engagement than to give it to someone with a lot of followers. Speaking from experience, I have had local businesses pitch me because they see I have over 700k followers on Instagram. I tell them there is no way I could be a good investment.

Find someone who frequents your store online. See if they post things publicly or if it's private. Ask if they will make a video or do a post in exchange for a gift card. Many times, you will find they say yes!

• Start by offering free product or a gift card to test interest.
• Check engagement rate and follower location before committing budget.
• Consider loyal customers with smaller but highly engaged networks.
• Confirm whether their posts are public or private and discuss deliverables (post, video, etc.).
• Use affiliate codes: give them a special code for their friends and reward the "influencer" with another gift card for every five sales generated.

Which social media metrics do you use to determine whether a small business’s efforts are contributing to meaningful business results, rather than simply generating attention?

The statistics I focus on are Page Visits and Engagement.

Page Visits tell us how many people are actively looking for something. They may be looking for:

• more information
• a phone number
• a website
• to follow
• to unfollow
• a specific post

This is an important metric to watch.

Engagement shows us if our content is resonating with people. If we keep engagement up, we will show up more frequently and stay front of mind.

What is one common social media risk you see small businesses overlook—such as copyright, brand consistency, or audience trust—and what should they do to avoid it?

I see so many businesses using trending audio when, most of the time, it is copyrighted. AI can scan your posts very easily. There are people actively searching for businesses that use copyrighted material and issuing copyright strikes and lawsuits faster than ever.

Just because "everybody" is posting it does not mean you automatically have the legal right to use the audio. Don't lose your entire marketing budget on something so simple. You can create content without using trending audio.

Thanks for sharing your knowledge and expertise. Is there anything else you'd like to add?

Social media is such an integral part of marketing your business. Make sure you get the most out of this investment. Utilizing social media to its fullest can give you an extremely high return on investment, but using it incorrectly can cost you your business. Don't lose your page by posting something illegal, such as copyrighted music.

Focus on consistent posting, being personable, and creating content that people want to see, and you will be helping your business.

About the expert

Melissa ChurchCEO at Digi-Buzz

This story was produced by Featured and republished with permission. Experts featured here are members of Connectively, Featured's expert network.

My first lead as an independent consultant came from an AI citation

(Anthony Keal) - Ranking first on Google no longer guarantees you're seen, so here's how to track where AI cites your competitors instead of you, find out why and shape how it describes you.

By Anthony Keal

Edited by Adrian James, Editor at Featured News · Oct 8, 2026

Ranking number one organically in Google used to be pretty straightforward – get more links pointing at your website. It wasn’t complicated but it could be time consuming (depending on competition). But with the arrival of ChatGPT, and subsequently Google’s AI summary, can ranking number one really matter when there’s another answer at the top of the page?

My first lead organically after going independent has come from being cited by AI, so it clearly can be done. But how can you get started?

What are AI Citations?

When a searcher lands on Google (for example) and asks a question, more often than not, they’ll see an AI Overview, then the ads, before getting to see the number one organic result. Increasingly searchers will find their answer before getting to the number one organic result.

Those businesses featured in the AI Overview are cited by AI, and that has become pretty valuable real estate.

Not all searches will return an AI Citation but when they do they take prime real estate at the top of the page.

How do I track AI citations?

If you can, I’d recommend pulling a keyword report for the website in question, but I know that’s not always an option. If that’s the case, I’d suggest taking four or five questions a customer may have when in buying mode, and typing them into ChatGPT or Google and seeing who gets mentioned.

If you don’t see your business, then look at the websites linked at the bottom, click through and have a read. What information is on those competitor’s pages that could make AI summarize it in relation to the search term? Does it answer the questions more succinctly? Talk about things that aren’t discussed on your website?

There’s lots of options when it comes to AI tracking and they range widely in cost: Semrush, Ahrefs, Ubersuggest, Otterly.AI, Peec AI, Profound to name a few.

I haven’t personally used any of them, so can’t comment on the quality of results, but as above, if the budget’s not there, I’d still recommend manually checking on a monthly basis.

How can I be cited by AI?

Honestly, there’s not a definitive answer yet. We should still avoid keyword stuffing, optimize everything to the nth degree and hope for the best. But I don’t think there’s any hacks or tricks we can play to try and fool the AI (at least in any sustainable way).

Some tactics are old hat: your positioning, whether you include pricing, etc will all still come into play. This is really just being summarized by AI, rather than people landing and reading your website.

So, if you competitors are all getting picked for price, can you pick a lane and shout about quality instead? If your business is actually good value, but doesn’t shout it from the rooftops like others, should you consider changing that?

Write for humans, not for Google

All the normal rules about clear, useful and readable content applies. Write a story that’s likely to answer questions searchers may have. Not a mishmash of text, but something that reads naturally.

About the author

Anthony Keal

Anthony Keal is a Melbourne-based independent digital consultant who started as a designer and spent more than ten years in agency and client-side digital roles. He helps Australian businesses deliver everything from simple websites to complex sites, portals and digital transformation projects, using automation to handle the routine work.

This story was produced by Featured and republished with permission. Experts featured here are members of Connectively, Featured's expert network.

How business owners become the bottleneck, and how to step back

(Luba Inz) - A COO on handing off the owner's headaches, writing limits in dollars, and what to do with the time you get back.

By Luba Inz

Edited by Adrian James, Editor at Featured News · Oct 13, 2026

When we keep solving problems and don't let our employees make mistakes, or make decisions that are important enough, the owner puts himself in the place of the bottleneck.

And for a long time it can feel like you're helping people and the company moves faster. But this is exactly how owners walk themselves into a trap, where not a single process can move without them anymore, because people got used to asking for an okay on everything. It’s a form of learned helplessness.

I've been on the other side of this.

When the owner's headaches became mine

When I started my career as Chief Operating Officer, I worked out a delegation of authority with the owner. We wrote down the levels where he steps in and we escalate to him, and the levels where I solve things. And we set those limits pretty high. Basically, I was supposed to handle any issue, and the owner could only step in if revenue dropped below a certain number. It was set quite conservatively, and it didn't drop.

What that meant was that all the headaches the owner used to have just moved over to me.

So I looked at the company as an organization and at the resources I had. I drew diagrams of who comes to me, with whom, and with what. I set levels for every person in the company. I had four levels of reporting, and each level could decide up to a certain financial limit.

I estimated the cost of a mistake. I could allow, let's say, the fourth level a mistake of up to $100, the third level up to $500, the second level up to $1,000, and the first level up to $2,500. The cost of a mistake was probably somewhat subjective, I'll admit that. But I said those numbers out loud to people, and I explained that everything you do can actually be translated into money. Say you lost 10 hours, and your rate is, for example, $20 an hour. Then the cost of your mistake is $200, right?

The second thing I did was tracking and reporting. Every week, people at every level answered the same questions: what did you do, what was successful, what was unsuccessful, what will I do next week. At the lower levels it was daily tracking, sometimes even hourly. The higher the level, the longer the time span. Over time I automated that reporting and put AI agents in place to help people do it.

After a while my operating rhythm took shape. My direct reports collected information from their reports, and those from theirs, in a cascade, all on one system. Up top, I only collected escalations. At first there were a lot of decisions, all the time, because I was putting out fires. But at some point it became about one decision a day. Sometimes three decisions a week.

It took around four to five months. Almost half a year. Mostly it's hard because of how people buy into it. It's a mindset problem. People are used to working their own way, and changing their attitude to the work is the hardest part. And if it doesn't work out with some people to work the way the system needs, there are replacements, and that makes the process longer too.

Fires from both sides

The hardest part for me was managing fires from both sides. The owner was letting go of running the company for the first time in his life. That takes courage, and of course he had questions every day. I understood him very well. Answering those questions took up to half of my time. The other half went to actually running the company.

Because once you establish authority, it's not that hard. If you've put the system in place, explained to people how to work, and they're ready to change their mindset, they're motivated and they go. They march along, in step, and happily.

The owner's side is the part nobody prepares you for. It took more of my attention than a team of over 200 people did. And it should. The owner built the company, and his trust is what makes the whole system work.

The decision owners won't let go of

I think the most common decision the owner keeps holding on to is the decision about people. It's practically manual picking of team members, going around the recruiting process.

If the owner wants to close a role faster, he can go around the system and bring in his own person. And then, very often, problems happen. Not because the person is bad. Mostly because when you go around the system, that person's attitude to the work can be different from the people who went through the recruiting filter. Their onboarding gets squashed. And the expectations the owner gives the person he found himself, and the expectations the team has, often don't match.

So this is the hardest decision an owner can hand off. And at the same time, it's the most necessary one. A recruiting system checks not only hard skills and soft skills, but how complementary this person will be for the team. From the top, the owner, the CEO, an executive manager, we often don't see what the team down below needs.

Where to start

Sit down and write down the cost of mistakes. Write the limits for each role, for each level, the way you see it. Feel out where you can start letting go of control a little, and where not yet. And put it in numbers. Not some ghostly concepts. Numbers, so you can see the financial impact on operations.

Then test it. After you've done the delegation of authority, step away from the computer and turn off notifications. I know it's hard. It will feel like everything is about to turn upside down and people won't be able to make the right decisions without you. Start with one hour of deep work with notifications off, so nobody can reach you, and slowly increase the number of those hours.

Move your team from instant communication to structured meetings. Have a weekly one-on-one with your direct reports, even if you talk every single day and sit in the same office. Ask the same questions every time. That's operational discipline, and I've seen in my own practice that only discipline changes our habits. Same as going to the gym. Consistency is the key.

And use those meetings to coach. Ask: what decisions did you make this week? Okay, let's discuss why, and how I would have done it. Write it down: my approach is like this, so next time you'll know how I, as the owner, would make that decision, and why. That's how you shape your company in your own image without being there all the time. In my experience, an AI copy of the owner, a chatbot built on the owner's rules and values, helped too: people got asynchronous access to the owner instead of waiting for him.

Owners see the problem. They're tired. They feel it at the end of the day, or in the morning when it's hard to wake up and there's stress. But it's a question of habit, and habits make our lifestyle.

What will you do with your time?

One of your first deep work slots should go to one question. Imagine your company already runs like a clock, on its own. What will you do? Where's your next step? Where's your dream?

Because operational things can be delegated. But the genius that created your company at the very start, and the grit that only you have as the founder, nobody will replace that. Bring back that motivation, joy and curiosity, and start using it for the good of your team.

About the author

Luba Inz

Luba Inz is the founder of Efficiency Sprint. Efficiency Sprint makes companies operationally ready for AI. She has 15 years in leadership as a COO and a founder. She helps owners hand off decisions, install operational systems, and put AI agents to work inside those systems alongside people. Learn more at efficiencysprint.com.

This story was produced by Featured and republished with permission. Experts featured here are members of Connectively, Featured's expert network.

Interview with Jordan Park, Chief Marketing Officer, Digital Silk.

(Featured) - Park discusses content freshness, audience-specific personalization, emerging-topic research and using AI agents to speed up content work.

Interview with Jordan Park

Edited by Haley Spracale, Editor at Featured News · Oct 14, 2026

As a Chief Marketing Officer in the marketing and advertising industry, how has your experience with brand strategy, demand generation, and AI shaped your perspective on what makes content genuinely valuable today?

We're spoon-fed so much content daily that people are starting to pay more attention to content that's unique, informative, and genuinely engaging.

Throughout my experience, I've learned how branding, demand generation strategy, and automation can shape your content strategy.

Your brand strategy can help you define your unique value proposition, mission, and values, and use them in your content to generate leads and demand.

Of course, AI can automate some content production, but human input remains a valuable element.

Google uses the E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness) framework to assess the trustworthiness of content. Therefore, you should focus on whether your content is original, addresses audience pain points, and is structured properly before publishing anything.

What career experiences led you to your current CMO role, and how did they influence the way you approach content, brand building, and audience trust?

I have over 15 years of experience in performance- and data-driven marketing across various platforms and channels. Working in tech, SaaS, blockchain, and process manufacturing has contributed to my unique perspective and skill set as a CMO.

Marketers, in general, are focused on brand, content, and messaging rather than data-driven metrics. It's important to understand that marketing is based on data; data should define how you approach campaigns and enable you to better serve your audience.

Sales cycles can last anywhere from 3 to 12 months, or even longer, so building trust with your audience takes time.

There is absolutely a place for brand, content, and messaging elements in marketing, but taking a data-driven approach can help you cater to the target audience's needs much more effectively.

Don't get me wrong: good branding and content definitely sell. But if you're investing heavily in marketing and you don't know where it's going, you're missing the point.

As AI makes it easier for brands to publish high volumes of competent content, which content characteristics are becoming most valuable in your work, and why?

AI is a big topic of conversation. I think it’s going to allow companies to create significantly more content than they are currently able to. It can also automate many mundane or manual tasks, which saves a lot of time.

However, a large volume of content doesn’t inherently make it good. Using AI as a tool is one thing, but thoroughly reviewing it and giving it the necessary human touch is the key component.

I’d say there are three main things that make content valuable:

• Original data, such as a survey, benchmark report, or industry insights, that can help you stand out in the sea of fluff and commodity content.
• A very specific point of view. AI tends to produce an average of what’s already published. If you’re opinionated and have the experience to back it up, you’re already at an advantage.
• Freshness—updating your content at least once a year to account for industry changes or new trends, and giving your take on them as you go.

If your content sounds like everything else out there, you’re not providing value to your target audience or to search engines.

You have used AI to adapt core content for audiences with different needs; what is one practical way marketers can identify where personalization will add real value rather than simply create more variations?

Think about your core message and how each audience can benefit from it. Someone who has founded a company only cares about scaling their business and how quickly they can do so. eCommerce businesses care about engagement and conversion, while SaaS brands want more qualified demo and sign-up requests.

There are only so many ways that you can say one and the same thing. You can’t recycle the same content and only briefly adapt it to different audiences, hoping it will work. It needs to have industry-specific issues, regulations, and implementation techniques for it to truly be personalized.

From your experience using natural-language processing to uncover emerging customer interests, how can marketing teams turn audience signals into original content opportunities before competitors recognize them?

The first move, as I see it, is collecting audience insights. You may want to check on-site searches, review sites, Reddit and other forums, social networks, and similar platforms, for example.

Natural-language-processing models can sift through large amounts of data and identify which topics are being discussed most.

Knowing what’s trending can help you tap into potential content gaps that your competitors haven’t explored yet. For example, you can write about which products are creating hype these days or the common problems with a new tool or feature. Treat this as an opportunity to share your insights or tips and establish yourself as the leading authority or expert in the field more easily.

What role do subject-matter experts play in making a brand’s content more valuable and defensible in an AI-saturated market, and how can marketers draw out insights that are not already available online?

We've established this as part of our content process at Digital Silk. Each piece of content we create is vetted based on insights provided by subject-matter experts.

It's far more valuable than the typical AI-generated content because it comes from people with industry experience who can share their expertise. Often, it's information you can't easily find online.

Marketers can draw these insights out by setting up interviews or asking experts for their firsthand stories. In other words, you should take an investigative, personal approach when gathering your insights.

For B2B and B2C marketers deciding where to invest limited resources, what types of content assets—such as case studies, research, tools, video, or community-driven stories—are proving most likely to earn sustained attention and trust?

If you're working with a limited budget, focus on growing trust organically. Paid channels require a minimum spend to see real success, so I wouldn't prioritize them. Instead, focus on content marketing you can create yourself—written or filmed—and share it on your channels.

Prioritize case studies, original research, and expert-led insights. Case studies help buyers assess your track record and whether you're the right fit. Original research and expert commentary build thought leadership and increase visibility.

Our client had a limited budget of around $12k a month, which shaped expectations for the overall strategy. We improved audience matching using Customer Match Lists so incoming leads connected with verified professionals. We also redid their whole YouTube channel and grew it from 650 to over 180,000 subscribers.

In our experience, the assets that earn sustained attention and trust are case studies, original research, and expert-led videos. Case studies demonstrate your track record; original research provides new, citable insights; and videos put a real expert in front of the audience.

Because you work across brand marketing, SEO, and multi-channel distribution, how do you decide whether a piece of content is sufficiently distinctive and useful to publish rather than another version of information readers can get from AI?

It’s tricky when AI can write so fluently on any topic. But it can also say a whole lot of nothing and go around in circles, even when there’s a lot of text. That’s what I think really separates the two: how unique, original, and interesting the information is, and how you package it for different purposes.

Take brand marketing, for example. It makes sense to include some information that’s specific to the brand or to have an expert from the company give their two cents on a topic. Then, for SEO, you can climb the rankings by publishing useful information that actually answers users’ questions.

As far as distribution goes, you can tweak the content a bit so it has its own angle for different channels. For LinkedIn, for example, you can go with an interesting stat; for email campaigns, you can use an expert quote.

Looking ahead, what content capability should marketing leaders begin building now to create a durable advantage as AI-generated content becomes even more common?

Creating AI agents can help smooth out the content-creation process tremendously. You can feed each model the specifics of a particular project and then test and enhance it over time so you get a useful output.

Setting this up now can help with the initial brainstorming and research phases. It can assist with some of the more time-consuming tasks, such as completing SEO checklists. Everyone can use the same models with the core data, expert input, tone of voice, and messaging guidelines.

Thanks for sharing your knowledge and expertise. Is there anything else you'd like to add?

If you want to scale your business, don’t underestimate the role that your marketing activities play in it. You should invest about 5% to 10% of your growth revenue into marketing, especially if you’re planning on growing aggressively.

What I would also focus on from an operational standpoint is really tying up your sales and marketing functions within your business. A large portion of your budget will probably go to paid user acquisition, like Google Ads or Bing Ads. Once you’re bringing in those top-of-the-funnel leads, make sure you have an automated lead qualification model in place.

From there, once they hit a certain criterion within your marketing automation platform, your sales team can reach out and qualify those leads. You need to define the process of how your leads move from marketing into sales.

The way I’ve done it in the past for a software provider, I sent them into very specific nurture sequences based on what they showed interest in on our website. From there, when they hit a score of about 45, we had a separate lead generation team call that lead and qualify them.

Only once we defined the budget, the time frame, and the expected deliverables did we pass that on to the sales team. This increased our sales close rate dramatically, so that’s something I generally recommend. If you want more insights like this, I sometimes talk about them live on LinkedIn or the Digital Trends section of our website.

About the expert

Jordan ParkChief Marketing Officer at Digital Silk

This story was produced by Featured and republished with permission. Experts featured here are members of Connectively, Featured's expert network.

Boards Spend Too Much Time Looking at Past Performance

(Luciano De Castro Carvalho) - Boards that focus their time on the few issues that could materially impact a company’s value in the future are the most effective boards. These boards are forward looking and usually make decisions during meetings.

By Luciano De Castro Carvalho

Edited by Adrian James, Editor at Featured News · Oct 7, 2026

I have been an advisor or in management roles for 20+ years and have participated in many board meetings. Some meetings accomplished a lot with very little waste. Others were a big waste of time, even though there were lots of good people and valuable information.

One consistent issue comes up often.

There is too much time spent looking at the past.

There are exceptions, but most of the time the meeting starts with management reporting on the prior month or quarter. There is an analysis of revenues, margin, cash, EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization), and other measures. Boards look for variances to the budget and management explains the rationale for the changes. Questions are asked, and sometimes Management needs to come back with more information, or details, to answer the questions. Questions that are asked in meetings often cover the same things that are brought up in the previous meeting.

In the best case scenario, and with any luck, the meeting gets to the good stuff in time. Good stuff typically means: strategy, capital allocation, and the hard decisions.

A board should care about and understand how the business makes its money, and then use that information to help the management team make important decisions.

The issue comes up when the board meeting is the first place directors go to find out what has already happened.

When deterioration in a margin calls for an explanation, I expect directors to describe the major reasons. If working capital consumes cash, they should identify the areas of inefficiency. If a major project is behind schedule, the basics should already be known.

Discussion in the board should start from there.

What effect does this change have? Will a decision be required? Has the assumption behind a certain business strategy become weaker? Should capital be allocated to other opportunities? Is the management, taking into account the strategy of the business, acting with enough urgency? Is there still the right leadership in place?

I think this is where board effectiveness begins.

Governance Starts With How the Board Uses Its Time

Discussion about governance usually focuses on committees, controls, approvals and compliance. Of course these are important. However, I think there is another side of governance that is more practical and deserving of focus.

Who determines what is presented to the board?

This is not a secretarial question.

Time is probably the board's most constrained resource. If the board spends three hours explaining the past, it loses the opportunity to debate the future.

It is my experience that packs become huge because each function wants to show its work.

With so much information, a few key decisions probably deserve the full board's attention.

Those decisions should be the priority of the agenda.

Usually, I wouldn’t expect more than 20% of board discussion time to be spent reviewing performance or exception reports, looking backward. This is of course a rule of thumb. With a liquidity crisis, a significant operational problem, or a material transaction, for example, the board would need to spend more time addressing the exception and the strategy for addressing it, and therefore look forward.

But with everyday operations, most of the time should be spent determining what comes next.

Most boards have an oversight responsibility to ensure the organization is adopting the right strategy, making the right decisions about capital allocation, and is properly managing the significant risks the organization is exposed to.

Exceptions are for dealing with the abnormal. Governance is the operating system of an organization, behind the scenes, defining how the organization operates, especially with regard to decision rights.

It is important for board members to maintain a clear line of sight to the strategy of the organization they govern.

An overly bureaucratic process for strategy development leads to inflexibility of a strategy and rusting of assumptions, which ultimately doesn’t serve the organization.

These assumptions are important regardless of the form the ownership of the organization takes (i.e. publicly listed, privately held, family owned, investment company, etc.)

Names may change. A private equity owner may call it an investment thesis. A corporation may call it the strategic plan. I am less concerned about the naming and more about the testing of the underlying assumptions.

A company can achieve its annual EBITDA target and still be making bad decisions for the future.

It can be losing an important customer. It can be postponing maintenance that will create a bigger problem next year. It can be making the profit number for the year by reducing investments that the next stage of growth is dependent on.

The reverse can also be true. A company can miss a target and still be making an investment that is still justified.

Therefore, I don’t think the role of a board is simply to ensure management is aligned to the budget and to grade them against it.

The board also has to read between the lines of the performance.

Have the strategic assumptions on which the business was built and the rationale for investing changed? Which have been validated? Which have been disproved? What was unknown when the strategy was approved and what have we learned?

I think this discussion is more valuable than spending an additional 30 minutes in a board meeting to justify a variance.

Test the Assumptions Behind the Strategy

Ultimately strategy and return on investment are intertwined.

I think one of the most important conversations the board has to continually have is on the trade off between short-term performance and long-term value.

There always has to be a balance between the two.

There may be some correct decisions. Others simply postpone today’s problems for next year.

The opposite is also true.

I’ve seen management use the word strategic to describe almost anything. After that, normal financial discipline sometimes vanishes. Projects become ongoing, and stopping them, despite adverse changes in the economics, sometimes becomes politically untenable.

I try to make the trade-off explicit.

In general, I think of actions in three groups. There are those that improve cash in the near term. There are those that improve competitiveness in the medium term, and enhance optionality and flexibility in the long term.

I’m not looking for an even split among the three.

A company under financial and time-pressure will likely consider the near term and cash the most important consideration. A fast growing company would likely have a stronger focus on capabilities in the medium term. A more mature company may have fewer justifications for funding something with a long time horizon.

What I am concerned with is whether the management and the board truly understand the time horizon they are funding, and why and what they expect in return.

Strategic choices and capital allocation are one and the same.

Capital allocation extends far beyond making a major acquisition or a large, one-time capital expenditure. Day-to-day choices like working capital, selling and purchasing decisions, and funding research and development are all capital allocation choices. Setting payment terms and deciding how to allocate and fund the firm’s real assets are all capital allocation choices. For a board to truly understand the trade-offs the firm is making, it has to be able to understand the choices management is making, and why.

Costly leadership questions happen when boards fail to act.

Another topic boards can sometimes leave unresolved for too long is leadership.

A board has a unique responsibility in this area. It selects the CEO and assesses the CEO and needs to consider succession planning.

What is dangerous is not the board making a decision to change a CEO. What is dangerous is the period before that decision when there is a sense that there is a problem and that something is amiss, but no one is willing to bring that question to the fore.

It becomes a circle that is repeated at each meeting.

I find that if it is a positive thing to make something concrete, then it should also be positive to make something negative concrete.

What is the deficit that people are talking about? Is it execution? Is the CEO unable to build the required management team? Is there a problem in the commercial area? Is the company growing too quickly, or is the organization becoming too complicated? Is there a financial problem?

What is the board looking at? What is the time frame? What is the evidence?

What needs to improve?

What support does the executive need?

What needs to change to demonstrate that the problem has been resolved? When will the board meet to address this?

Challenge your management team, but don't become management.

I've never agreed with the assertion that boards always operate at 30,000 feet.

There are times when you need to be at 500 feet.

Sometimes cash is deteriorating and you need to understand receivables and/or inventory and supplier terms. Sometimes customer retention is down and you need to get beyond the aggregate churn number. Sometimes the plant keeps missing deliveries.

These may not be micromanaging situations.

The line gets crossed when you turn from understanding to instructing.

It's board work to understand why a plant is missing deliveries and to what extent a key account is at risk.

It is not board work to tell the plant manager to run a certain production schedule to ensure deliveries.

The temptation to cross this line is especially acute for board members with significant operating experience, as they are naturally inclined to want to help the company and/or explain what needs to be done.

You may well be able to help.

But being able to help does not mean you should cross the line. The hard challenge should be at the understanding end, not the instructing end. Management needs to be free to manage. Otherwise, you end up with a situation where the CEO is the formal director of the company, but several board members have essentially removed themselves from governance and are micromanaging the CEO. That, also, does not improve accountability.

Challenge Management Without Micromanaging

Work from the work.

As with the composition of the workforce, I prefer to work from the work rather than the résumés when it comes to the composition of the board.

What does this company have to do in the next few years?

If this company has to combine a number of acquisitions, then there needs to be someone on the board to address that. If the company has to go through a commercial reset, there needs to be relevant commercial judgment. If the balance sheet is under pressure, then there needs to be relevant financial judgment to address that.

Not every well-known person is the right director.

The same is true for the non-executive directors. The right board can change over time.

The chairman is particularly important.

The chairman is responsible for making the difficult issues on the board’s agenda discussable. He/she has to make the board work as a team. He/she has to integrate the views of everyone on the board and prevent any one person from dominating and making the board work a solo show.

Sometimes he/she has to tell the directors to keep their hands off management.

I prefer transparency for the people who are directly and extensively working with the company as advisors, partners and former executives.

We have to be clear about the role they are taking.

We have to be clear about whom they are advising. We have to be clear about the decisions they are making. We have to be clear about who is accountable. Otherwise, additional people can add additional ambiguity.

Build the Board Around the Work

I prefer for the work to be done prior to the board meetings.

Much of what determines whether a board meeting will be useful happens before the meeting.

I’d like the fact base clear. I’d like the decision stated. I’d like the alternatives stated.

Management should not use the board meeting to read the board pack to the directors.

In important decisions I like to see a short paper stating the decision, the main alternatives considered, the recommendation, the economic impact of each, the downside risk, and the impact of waiting.

The rest of the analysis can be behind that.

I like to see important decisions early in the board paper agenda.

I am not a fan of saving the most important decision for the last part of a four-hour meeting.

I like to see an in-depth discussion on one or two topics than eight superficial discussions on “strategic” topics.

In ownership structures where there is a number of joint venture interests, I have found pre-briefs very useful. Pre-briefs can help resolve disputes on issues such as the level of funding, the level of risk, control, and even the facts.

A pre-brief should help surface the issues for discussion.

Discussions should help people come to their own conclusion.

Do the Work Before the Board Meeting

Boards should evaluate the value they add.

Which decisions did we improve this year?

Where did we slow the company down?

Which difficult decision did we postpone for too long?

Did management bring us problems early, or only when there was no longer any choice?

Did we continue to provide funding for an initiative after the original case for support started to weaken?

Did we spend time on things in which management should have made the decision for us?

Those questions tell us a lot about board effectiveness. Attendance statistics don’t.

After almost 25 years of working with boards and executive teams, the boards that I value most, are not necessarily the boards with the best-known names or longest meetings.

They create the most clarity.

They understand the company’s history, but they do not get stuck living in the past.

They understand when to challenge, and when to support management.

When a difficult decision is theirs to make, they take action.

About the author

Luciano De Castro Carvalho

Luciano de Castro Carvalho is a senior transformation and turnaround executive with more than 20 years of experience working with boards and senior leadership teams. He currently leads the Business Transformation practice at Strategy& and has led large-scale transformation programs across more than 30 countries. Previously, he held roles at McKinsey, Alvarez & Marsal, and UBS. lucianodecastrocarvalho.com

This story was produced by Featured and republished with permission. Experts featured here are members of Connectively, Featured's expert network.

After a Houston Crash, I’ve Seen the Next Danger Come Through Your Phone

(Adam Miller) - I’ve represented Texans targeted by illegal lawyer solicitation. Here’s what I’ve learned about how it happens, the warning signs, and what I believe every accident victim should know.

By Adam Miller

Edited by Adrian James, Editor at Featured News · Oct 5, 2026

A car accident is confusing enough. You may be hurt, your car may be totaled, and you’re trying to figure out what happens next. How are you going to get to the doctor or work?

Then your phone rings. Or maybe it's a text message, sometimes an email.

The person on the other end knows your name. They know you were in an accident and they want to “help” you. Sometimes they even know details about your accident that make you wonder how they got your information in the first place.

I’ve represented dozens of Texans who have received these calls, and that’s usually one of the first questions they ask me: How did they know?

That’s a great question. And honestly, sometimes I want to know the answer just as much as they do. Somebody knew about this wreck before the person had even started looking for a lawyer. How?

In Texas, certain types of illegal solicitation fall under what’s called barratry. Most people know the practice by another name: ambulance chasing. However, most people don’t know that its illegal and that you can sue these bad actors and get paid.

I’m a personal injury lawyer in Houston. Of course I advertise, everyone does. People see my commercials, social media posts, media coverage, and website. If someone sees one of those and decides to call me, that person made the choice to reach out. They were not illegally solicited.

That is very different from someone getting information about an accident victim, contacting that person directly and trying to steer them toward a particular lawyer or medical provider. They might even do this on a website which I have seen recently. Get your accident report here and you end up signing an electronic attorney contract without knowing it.

One Client Got Six Calls

One barratry case I handled still stands out to me.

After an accident, my client didn't get one solicitation. He got six.

Fortunately, he kept the evidence. He recorded the calls. He took screenshots. He saved the contracts that were sent to him. That turned out to be extremely important.

At the time, the applicable statutory penalty was $10,000 per violation. We ultimately collected $60,000 for him based on those six solicitations.

But there was another part of that case that I think says a lot about how this business can work.

When I got the police report, I discovered that my client had caused the accident.

In other words, the people soliciting him apparently hadn't even done enough homework to realize he didn't have the personal injury case they thought they were chasing.

His barratry claims were a separate issue, and the evidence he had saved allowed us to pursue them. He caused the accident and he STILL got paid. Most people don’t know this law and I am trying to spread the news.

That's why I tell people not to simply delete an unwanted text or hang up and forget about a suspicious call. Keep it. You may need it later.

The Call May Not Sound Suspicious at First

People imagine an ambulance chaser as someone who walks into a hospital room and hands an injured person a lawyer's business card like on a TV show or movie.

It isn't always that obvious.

The person contacting you may sound helpful. They may use an official-sounding business name. They might talk about getting your vehicle repaired or helping you find medical treatment. They might offer to help you get a rental car or cash loans for your expenses while you wait for your case to settle.

Eventually, the conversation may turn to whether you already have an attorney.

I recently talked about this issue on KPRC 2's Houston Life, and one of the things I tried to get across is that people should trust their instincts enough to ask questions.

If you didn't contact this person, ask who they are.

Who do you work for?

How did you get my phone number?

How did you know I was in an accident?

Why are you recommending this particular lawyer?

A legitimate professional shouldn't have a problem explaining who they are and why they're contacting you. If they aren't doing anything wrong they will have no issues answering all of these questions without hesitation.

There Are Warning Signs I Tell Everyone to Pay Attention To:

Timing. The timing is a big one for me.

If you were in an accident a few hours ago and somebody you don't know is already contacting you about lawyers or medical treatment, I would want to know how that happened.

I would also be very cautious about anyone pressuring you to sign something right away.  Insurance companies use this tactic too.

After a serious wreck, people are usually feeling overwhelmed. They're thinking about pain, transportation, work and their family. Most people have plans coming up and are worried about cancelling or rescheduling.  Also, they may be dealing with an insurance adjuster for the first time in their lives.

That is not the time someone should be creating more pressure.

Promises about how much money you're going to receive are another red flag. No lawyer can responsibly know what a case is worth from a quick phone call right after a crash. There are too many things we don't know yet.

What happened? Who was at fault? What does the evidence show? How badly was the person injured? What insurance coverage is available?

Those questions take time to research before you can answer with any certainty.

And, even worse, if somebody offers money, gifts or something else of value to get you to sign with a particular lawyer, this is a big red flag. Paying for cases is also super illegal in Texas but firms are doing it every single day.

Texas Law Takes This Seriously

A lot of people are surprised when I tell them that barratry isn't just against the rules for lawyers. It's actually against Texas law, and there can be real consequences for the people involved.

There are a few different laws that come into play. Texas Penal Code §38.12 deals with barratry and solicitation of professional employment. Lawyers also have to follow Rule 7.03 of the Texas Disciplinary Rules of Professional Conduct, which puts limits on how we can directly solicit potential clients.

What surprises a lot of clients is that Texas actually gives them a way to go after the people doing this. Texas Government Code §82.0651 is the law we use in these cases.

And the even law changed recently to help crack down on this practice. The Legislature increased the penalty in 2025. If somebody illegally solicits you and you don't sign the contract, the penalty can now be $50,000. You may also be able to recover damages and attorney's fees.

Signed the contract already? Tell me anyway. That's a different situation, but it doesn't necessarily mean you're stuck with the lawyer who solicited you.

I also don't want people seeing “$50,000” and thinking, I got a weird text yesterday. Where's my check? That's not how this works.

When someone calls me about barratry, I usually end up asking a million questions. Show me the text. What number did it come from? Did you call them first? What did they promise you? Did they send you a link? Did you click it? Did you sign anything?

Sometimes the person doesn't remember much about the call, and that's understandable. They had just been in a wreck. Barratry wasn't exactly the first thing on their mind.

That's why I keep coming back to the same advice: don't delete anything. You don't need to know what law was broken or even whether a law was broken. Save it and let somebody who knows this area take a look.

I had Another Case That Went All the Way to a Jury

The client I talked about earlier who got the six calls is just one example. I had another barratry case that went all the way to a jury, and that client was awarded $350,000. That's the biggest barratry verdict I've had so far.

Unfortunately, that wasn't some one-off case either. I have dozens of barratry cases going on in different parts of Texas right now. People are willing to risk these strict fines, penalties and loss of license to get these cases instead of building a great reputation or advertising.

And I hear the same thing all the time: “I deleted the text because I thought it was spam.” I get it. I delete junk from my phone too.

But if the person knows you were just in a wreck, stop before you hit delete. Take a screenshot. If they leave a voicemail, keep it. If they send you some strange link or a contract you never asked for, definitely keep that.

I've had people come to me months later trying to remember exactly what somebody said to them. That's a lot harder than handing me the phone and saying, “Here. This is what they sent me.”

It’s Your Decision Who Represents You

I've represented injured people in Houston for many years, and choosing a lawyer is a personal decision. When you hire a lawyer, that person is going to be in your life for a while. They will know a lot of personal information about you, your injuries, your medical history as well as your income and work situation. You should be the one choosing your lawyer. Not some stranger who got your phone number after a wreck.

So take your time and really decide who you want to work with. Maybe you hire the first lawyer you talk to. Maybe you talk to three. Maybe your brother or your neighbor had a lawyer they loved and you call that person. That's up to you.

I don't care how you find your lawyer. Ask your friends. Read reviews. Drive past a billboard. Google ten different firms if you want. What I care about is that YOU made the decision to call them, not the other way around.

What shouldn't happen is somebody you never contacted getting your information after a wreck and making you feel like the decision has already been made for you. Don't be a victim twice.

Remember it's always worth asking some questions. Start with the obvious one: How did you get my number?

-----

Legal Disclaimer: This article is provided for general informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice or create an attorney-client relationship. Laws and regulations vary by jurisdiction and may change over time. Readers should not rely on the information in this article as a substitute for advice from a qualified attorney regarding their individual circumstances. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Featured News or its affiliates.

About the author

Adam Miller

Adam Miller, known as The Texas Bulldog, is a Houston personal injury attorney and founder of The Miller Law Firm. Licensed in Texas since 1990, he has tried more than 100 jury trials and represents accident victims, including people targeted by illegal solicitation after a crash.

This story was produced by Featured and republished with permission. Experts featured here are members of Connectively, Featured's expert network.