In the words of hockey legend Wayne Gretzky, “You miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take.” This advice wasn’t just for himself. He was constantly seeking to encourage his teammates to give it their all — no matter what.
There are many ways to get the same point across. No risk, no reward.
Carpe diem. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
In business, the most simple one might be the best of all: Scared money doesn’t make money. For people in sales, the takeaway should be that you have to put yourself out there, and you can’t grow complacent.
These days, there is so much data and intelligence available in the form of advanced, easy-to-use platforms. Let’s take a look at how the right tools can increase buy-in from your sales team.
Getting Your Sales Reps on Board
So how do you follow Gretzky’s lead and inspire your sales reps to get with the program?
Some of it comes down to having the right people. As any manager can tell you, it is often more important to have people with the right attitude than an exact set of skills. It is hard to teach motivation and instil a willingness to grow, so hiring will always play a big part in this.
That said, you go to war with the army you have. Maybe you can make some new hires down the road, but that isn’t going to help you this week, this month, or maybe even this quarter. So you need to acknowledge that different people are inspired by different things.
Set clear goals and do not micromanage your team. A little bit of freedom might be all they need to start getting better results. On the other hand, if your culture already does give people the space they need, recognize that certain team members might need a little more oversight. It might not even take much; just offer the right amount of encouragement and incentives to get everyone on board.
Getting Your Sales Reps the Best Tools
You can also get better results by giving your reps the right tools. Communication is maybe the most important. Many companies are finding success by adopting mobile-first options like Slack channels or digital conferencing solutions like Zoom. Especially for reps who aren’t checking in every day, this can create much better results rather than relying on e-mail alone.
When it comes to dealing with customers and leads, you also need to be using top-tier customer relationship management (CRM) system. It needs to offer the right blend of qualities and capabilities. It has to be powerful, but easy to use. It should have mobile capabilities, and it has to present all the right data and info at the click of a button.
While there are many CRM platforms out there, few tick off all the right boxes like Infor CRM offered by Infor customer partner CustomerFX. Among the many benefits, Infor CRM will help you generate predictable sales revenue and provide constant visibility into team performance. This empowers your sales reps to spend their time working to sign deals.
The tracking features only compound these benefits; as a manager, you can always see what type of results each rep is getting. With granular metrics, it’s easy to find problem areas and correct them. This way, you won’t have to micromanage anyone and potentially cause frustration. You only need to intervene when things get off track.
Getting the Employee Buy-In You Need
When it comes to sales, you either land the deal or you don’t. So make it your mission to get the best sales reps you can, empower them to seize the day, and be sure to equip them with the tools they need and want to use.
How Can Increased Time on Page Boost Conversions?
/0 Comments/in Marketing /by Creative Agency Secrets TeamAttracting traffic to a website can be a big challenge, even for the most experienced professionals.
However, more than just herding the masses to your digital spot in the world, it is essential to understand what they’re doing when they’re there. And what they’re NOT doing as well.
One of the most important indicators in your Google Analytics report is the Average Session Duration. If your visitors are abandoning your website without spending a decent amount of time checking it out, chances are something is not working as it should.
This could be happening for one or more reasons. Investigating the causes through experiments is critical to understanding your public. There is no absolute truth in marketing, and everything can be tweaked to perform even better.
Keeping user experience in mind is essential in times of task overload
The enormous amount of information that’s being thrown at us online is forcing us to learn faster what’s important and what’s not. Pop-ups, banners, native advertising: look around and you’ll see that you are completely surrounded. Thankfully, like the sight of your own nose, your brain just filters them out and disregards the majority of those.
We developed the habit of going straight to the answer to our questions by “scanning” text or searching for terms with a “ctrl+F” command. The number of shares, the size of the fonts, a user-friendly layout; there are many key elements that will determine if you are hanging around or running away from a website.
Unconsciously, we are always measuring the effort required to consume content
Remember that time you looked for a dinner recipe on YouTube and decided to watch a video that’s 5 minutes instead of another one that was 12-minutes long? Why did you do that?
Video and audio have a fundamental decision factor displaying right in your face: the time it takes to watch/listen. In the end, because we’re always busy, we do everything possible to avoid wasting time.
Overcome your visitor’s objections
As you probably know, there’s a massive amount of written content online. According to WordPress, around 80 million posts are published every month using their platform. Take the Creative Agency Secrets’ website as an example: organic search is responsible for 80% of our traffic and the overwhelming majority lands first on one of our blog posts. But we are not the only ones. More companies are using this as a strategy to bring traffic every day.
With so many options out there, your audience has to feel assured that the time invested in reading your content is worth it. One of the visual tricks we use is subtle but powerful: we tell people how long it’ll take them to read our posts. Moreover, a little coloured bar on the top of the screen shows the progress of your reading while you scroll down the page.
Showing the estimated time needed to read an article might calm down the reader’s anxiety. It increases the likelihood of the visitors to finish reading the text because, in their minds, they’ve already allocated that precise amount of minutes for that.
More time spent on your website, more chances of conversion
Worst than not attracting visitors is wasting what you already have. Traffic by itself is useless if your website does not have a clear objective. It might be getting new leads, selling products on your e-commerce, giving you a call, etc. When you increase the time on page, the visitor is spending more minutes experiencing your brand and one step closer to fulfilling your objective.
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Creative and Search Agency Collaboration
/0 Comments/in Marketing /by Rebecca CaroeHow should creative agencies and search agencies collaborate when relaunching a website?
The key part of any site build and launch is continuity for the search engines. Few brands are creating websites for the first time nowadays (although SMEs are). For me, the key parts of this agency collaboration are based around making sure the visitor experience for the new site is an improvement on the old one.
You must not lose any of the strong key word traffic which the old site had. And so a careful keyword tactical plan ensuring similar phrases are used on the major website pages, meta descriptions and alt tags is needed.
Secondly, check whether the URL structure is going to change or not. Frequently ecommerce stores use different structures and so this risks breaking all the historic data for the site. Set up a 301 redirect so that traffic gets to the right page.
As a marketing agency, I always recommend running an inbound campaign to drive traffic to the new site as soon after it launches as possible. This starts the process of “re-educating” the search engines about the new site structure as quickly as possible. And above all, test and measure EVERYTHING.
This was a submitted answer for Northcutt’s Experts, Gurus and other Mythical Entities article series.
northcutt.com
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Benefits of Investing in CRM for your Business
/0 Comments/in Marketing /by Rebecca CaroeThe major reason why you need to invest in a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is to improve the relationship with your current customers, engage with potential customers, and win back former customers. You can implement this system in your business by using a software that enables you to collect, organize, and manage customer information. An upgraded CRM system is good for both small scale and large-scale business enterprises. Here are some of the benefits of investing in a CRM system for your business.
CRM Image Credit: ITAlley.co.nz
Enhanced communication
The prime reason why CRM is good for your business is enhancing communication. A CRM system will provide every employee in your business access to the same customer information (single customer view), and thus enable them to provide the same important level of service across the board. In some cases, a customer may have a single point of contact in a business and it can be very hard for another employee to handle such a customer without access to the customer’s data. However, with an upgraded CRM system that collects, organizes, and manages customer information, every customer can be handled efficiently and satisfactorily by any of your employees. In other words, it doesn’t really matter who is working currently with a client because all employees have access to the same information. Furthermore, since CRM is cloud-based, it can be accessed from any location at any time provided an employee has a stable internet connection.
Improved customer relationships
A good email marketing CRM system that meets the current market dynamics can improve the relationship between your business and its customers incredibly fast. Good customer relationships translate into customer satisfaction and good Returns on Investment (ROI). The CRM system will make all dealings with the marketing and selling of products or services to your customers to be organized and systematic / process-led. Being able to provide services to customers through understanding their issues will help improve customer loyalty and ease of purchase. Your customers will be more inclined to recommend your products or services to their friends and close family members if they’re satisfied with your business.
Customized marketing strategies
A CRM makes it easier to increase your company’s revenue with customized marketing strategies. With the collected customer information, you can analyze data using other tools such as Big Data analytics to understand the behavioral patterns and shopping trends of your customers. With this data, you can customize marketing strategies that target different types of customers more effectively.
Maximize upselling and cross-selling
The CRM system will enable you to offer your customers premium products that fall in their preferred shopping categories. It can also help you to give customers complementary products based on what they purchased earlier. This can be achieved through the improved customer relationship which gives you room to interact with customers in a user-friendly manner.
A CRM system will help you understand your customers’ needs and be able to personalize your products or services in such a manner that it suits their specific needs or desires. The collected information from a CRM system is stored in a central database that is accessible to all employees, and thus it will promote internal communication.
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Youth Entrepreneur Organisations in New Zealand
/1 Comment/in Strategy /by Rebecca CaroeYouth Entrepreneur Organisations in New Zealand
I put a question out to my network on behalf of an Australian organisation who are running a similar programme and want to partner.
Here’s the results list thus far.
Check out these as a starting point for your own individual needs. And please use the comments to add others to the list.
International opportunities
As I notice others, I will add them on the list below
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My Internship Experience at Creative Agency Secrets — Antoinette Nguyen
/1 Comment/in Marketing /by Creative Agency Secrets TeamHello, my name is Antoinette Nguyen and I am the latest intern for Creative Agency Secrets. After spending two months here in New Zealand, I’ll be heading back to California to finish my final year of university. I’m grateful for all the learning opportunities I’ve been afforded from working at a marketing agency, and have had the joy of meeting some brilliant people. It will be an interesting transition back to the classroom after having had a taste of the working world.
Looking Back: What I’ve Learned
While at Creative Agency Secrets, I had the chance to work with a diverse clientele and employ a wide range of tools. I’ve progressed from shadowing Rebecca, Conrado, and Tabhitha as they manage their clients, to being responsible for a few projects of my own. I have also learned how to ensure new development pitches lead to securing new clients, while avoiding soliciting free work—one of many lessons in how to successfully run a marketing consulting business.
Email marketing is an integral aspect of many businesses, as I learned first-hand how newsletters that feature regularly updated content can ensure ongoing relationships with existing consumers while simultaneously attracting new customers. Using Feedblitz and other CRM platforms, I designed newsletters and managed email lists to drive greater brand awareness and potential sales.
Data analytics is another cornerstone of effective online marketing, and I worked with tools like Google Analytics to evaluate and suggest actionable steps to improve clients’ online presence. I created reports for clients that appraised their website SEO strength and rankings, on top of tracking incoming traffic. SEO optimization weighs heavily on content, but I learned how much website design and functionality matter as well.
Through operating several client blogs and websites, my copywriting skills and knowledge of web development have grown considerably. I also drove engagement through several social media accounts, with the help of applications like Buffer and Hootsuite. One of my larger projects was overseeing a Facebook ad campaign from start to finish—including editing multiple versions of ad copy, overseeing the A/B testing results, and reporting back to the client. And to top it all off, I also gained experience in organizing a promotional giveaway on an international scale.
A Heartfelt Thank You
My internship wouldn’t have been nearly as fulfilling without the guidance of the whole team at Creative Agency Secrets. Thank you Rebecca, Conrado, and Tabhitha for taking me under your wing and being wonderful mentors in my professional development—I’ve learned so much in this short time! You all have my best wishes for the future.
Best of luck,
Antoinette
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How to Increase Buy-In From Your Sales Reps
/0 Comments/in Marketing /by Sudip MuttIn the words of hockey legend Wayne Gretzky, “You miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take.” This advice wasn’t just for himself. He was constantly seeking to encourage his teammates to give it their all — no matter what.
There are many ways to get the same point across. No risk, no reward.
Carpe diem. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
In business, the most simple one might be the best of all: Scared money doesn’t make money. For people in sales, the takeaway should be that you have to put yourself out there, and you can’t grow complacent.
These days, there is so much data and intelligence available in the form of advanced, easy-to-use platforms. Let’s take a look at how the right tools can increase buy-in from your sales team.
Getting Your Sales Reps on Board
So how do you follow Gretzky’s lead and inspire your sales reps to get with the program?
Some of it comes down to having the right people. As any manager can tell you, it is often more important to have people with the right attitude than an exact set of skills. It is hard to teach motivation and instil a willingness to grow, so hiring will always play a big part in this.
That said, you go to war with the army you have. Maybe you can make some new hires down the road, but that isn’t going to help you this week, this month, or maybe even this quarter. So you need to acknowledge that different people are inspired by different things.
Set clear goals and do not micromanage your team. A little bit of freedom might be all they need to start getting better results. On the other hand, if your culture already does give people the space they need, recognize that certain team members might need a little more oversight. It might not even take much; just offer the right amount of encouragement and incentives to get everyone on board.
Getting Your Sales Reps the Best Tools
You can also get better results by giving your reps the right tools. Communication is maybe the most important. Many companies are finding success by adopting mobile-first options like Slack channels or digital conferencing solutions like Zoom. Especially for reps who aren’t checking in every day, this can create much better results rather than relying on e-mail alone.
When it comes to dealing with customers and leads, you also need to be using top-tier customer relationship management (CRM) system. It needs to offer the right blend of qualities and capabilities. It has to be powerful, but easy to use. It should have mobile capabilities, and it has to present all the right data and info at the click of a button.
While there are many CRM platforms out there, few tick off all the right boxes like Infor CRM offered by Infor customer partner CustomerFX. Among the many benefits, Infor CRM will help you generate predictable sales revenue and provide constant visibility into team performance. This empowers your sales reps to spend their time working to sign deals.
The tracking features only compound these benefits; as a manager, you can always see what type of results each rep is getting. With granular metrics, it’s easy to find problem areas and correct them. This way, you won’t have to micromanage anyone and potentially cause frustration. You only need to intervene when things get off track.
Getting the Employee Buy-In You Need
When it comes to sales, you either land the deal or you don’t. So make it your mission to get the best sales reps you can, empower them to seize the day, and be sure to equip them with the tools they need and want to use.
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Simple Ways to Attract Your Ideal Customers
/0 Comments/in Marketing /by Sudip MuttIn as much as finding your ideal customers is important when you run a business, so is attracting them to you. As your business becomes more established, you hope for customers to find you through word of mouth, online marketing or any other means. There are specific things that you can do to increase discoverability and attract buying customers. Although some may require you invest a significant amount of money, others will require simple changes in your messaging or giving customers incentives. Here are simple ways to attract your ideal customer if that’s your end goal.
Don’t Neglect Word of Mouth
Although every form of marketing has its own appeal, it can still be argued that word of mouth is the most powerful form of marketing. With that being said, ensure that you focus on offering quality services to every customer that you engage with as this will increase the likelihood of them referring you. This can be done by improving the entire customer experience from start to finish. A couple of tips for doing that is working towards meeting customer needs and streamlining communication.
Improve Your Website
Your website is a powerful tool when it comes to attracting customers, so work on improving it periodically. When you have an effective website, you’re more likely to have engaged customers on your site that follow through with calls to action. Below are a few ways that you can upgrade your website and make it better.
Design: Your website should look appealing and represent your brand as well as what you stand for. Pay attention to your choice of typography, as well as the colors that you use. Hire a professional to design your website; it may be best to choose one that specializes in your industry. If you happen to run a law firm, then justlegalmarketing.com would be an ideal company to handle your design.
SEO: In addition to the design, SEO is another major aspect of your website to work on. This is where organic traffic will come from and one of the simplest ways to attract customers to you online. To improve SEO, be sure that all of the content that you create has targeted keywords and you optimize titles, URLs, and tags.
Content: The language, lexicon, and tone of your content will either draw prospects in or turn them away. Think about your messaging and whether it truly appeals to your audience. You can look at the language used by successful competitors and use that to gauge how effective yours is. Also, pay attention to the pages that get the most engagement, as it could indicate you’re doing something right.
Offer Attractive Services
At the end of the day, one of the easiest ways to attract customer is by offering competitive products or services. You can do so by truly understanding what your customers’ needs are and meeting those needs through your incentives. For some customers, premium service may be their need while for others, it could be low rates. Value for money is ultimately what will also give you the word of mouth and competitive advantage you need.
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YIKES! My Facebook Group Got Hijacked by Competitors
/0 Comments/in B2C, Case Studies, Digital media, Marketing, Marketing ideas, Social Media /by Rebecca CaroeWhen you start a group online in a public social platform, it’s easy. Nothing much happens until your group hits a ‘tipping point” of size + engagement + activity.
Facebook Groups logo
Different groups achieve this at different points in time. We have a sports group run for a client that has nearly 2,200 members and gets 2–3 posts daily from group members. It is now attracting ‘commercial’ elements such as an advert for privately owned equipment listed for sale.
Interestingly, that one post opened a floodgate of listings from others. It seems as though people felt that ‘permission’ had been given to dive in and sell to the group.
The client runs the group in public at his expense and he refrains from selling into the group more than once a month for his own products. It was clearly time for an intervention and setting boundaries about what is acceptable behaviour in this group environment.
3 Types of ‘Sales Pitch’
1) The first was the lady who listed the equipment for sale. I messaged her privately and she told me that despite getting a huge reaction from the group, it was a private sale and she sold it to a friend, offline. We let this pass as just a one-off. Clearly every member of the group won’t be listing items weekly.
2) The second was a lady who runs an Instagram account through which she gives ‘free training programmes’. We checked out what she does and came to the decision that she’s not making a living out of this. And so I am classifying her as a ‘volunteer’. But her actions need to be curtailed because regular postings promoting her services (even though they are free) would upset the balance of the discussion dynamic already established.
Actions to mitigate impact
We messaged the Instagram lady privately, explaining she can publish her stuff on the website via an existing ‘submit post’ feature where community notices are published. This is important because although it publishes to the blog, it is set up to avoid getting into the newsletter, the Facebook page and other communications channels. She does get indexed by the SEO spiders, gets link backs, but does not get referenced or categorised in the archive.
3) By contrast, the third type of pitch was a post by a commercial sports professional trainer. When we reviewed it, we found it is definitely a paid promotion designed to recruit readers from the client’s Facebook group into HER email list and commercial program.
Actions to Arrest Unwanted Activity
First I turned off comments on this post. Nobody can add to them, and this helps prevent Facebook showing it in feed updates. We also removed all her replies in the comments because they linked to her programme over and over again.
Then we wrote to her privately asking her to get in touch by email so she can pay to promote her products on our platforms, along with other commercial retailers (the website is advertising supported). I am waiting to see what her reply to this Facebook message will be – if she’s contrite and apologetic, I’ll leave her post published; if she takes no action to reply or is aggressive and rude, I’ll delete it and block her from the group.
Behavioural boundaries are yours to define
The underlying logic is that commercial enterprises pay, and volunteers can get access as part of the goodwill of the group. The commercial publicist had made no effort to engage and join in the group discussion – she just joined, dove in and started selling. That’s not how this group rolls.
Making the rules for the group is part of good practice in community management. You can publicise these with a pinned post, or a message to new members explaining what is and is not acceptable.
Enforcing the boundaries will help you to create the group and community YOU want. Know what actions you will take if the boundaries are crossed and also understand how to take discussions into a private space – you don’t want to have a public argument while you try to explain your motives. And you don’t even need to explain them, only the acceptable behaviours.
This article first appeared on NZ Entrepreneur Magazine
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