Archives for December 2016

Is your inbound marketing program falling short of expectations? You’re not alone.

Related: 10 Ways to Quickly Generate Leads

In HubSpot’s Eighth Annual Report on the Future of Inbound Marketing and Sales, 65 percent of companies cited lead generation as their top marketing challenge,  As many as 80 percent of marketers reported that their lead generation efforts were only slightly or somewhat effective.

In fact, nearly a quarter of marketers didn’t know whether they’re efforts were even paying off — yikes!

Converting leads into sales has become increasingly difficult in the last five years; one reason may be that today’s digital landscape is fragmented and chaotic: Given their diversified channel preferences and ability to engage in instant communication, consumers are rapidly changing their behaviors and brand expectations.

Consumers report, for example, that display advertising is more intrusive today than it was two years ago: Four out of five people have abandoned a web page because of a pop-up or auto-playing video ad. Marketers rank outbound marketing tactics, like paid advertising, as the top waste of time and resources.

It’s no surprise, then, that many small businesses feel more pressure than ever before to continually crank out a steady stream of leads via inbound marketing. After all, if fewer leads are converting, then the best way to hit sales goals is to increase the pool of leads, right?

Not necessarily!

Just ask the marketing team at Medjet Assist, the air medical transport and travel protection company, which recently oversaw a significant sales boost, using a re-tooled inbound marketing #strategy that brings fewer leads into its pipeline.

“Our inbound marketing has always generated a steady stream of leads, but not all of the leads were qualified,” Bill Miller, chief sales and marketing officer at Medjet Assist, told me. “Our sales team ended up investing valuable resources on leads who were never going to convert.

Related: How to Optimize Your Site for Lead Generation

“By taking the time to understand our target audience and testing different call-to-action messages, we honed our lead generation to focus on those most likely to convert. The result: more qualified leads and more sales. Less is more!”

In this way, an agile inbound marketing strategy is key to achieving and maintaining a competitive advantage in today’s fragmented digital marketplace. If your own inbound lead program is falling short of expectations, it’s time to reboot. Here’s what MedJet Assist did that your business should do, too:

1. Identify your ideal client.

Let’s be honest: We’ve all wasted precious time and resources running after a “dream client” that was never going to convert. In retrospect, the red flags are obvious. But, without sufficient perspective at that moment, it’s easy to get swept up in the exciting potential of closing a large client. Don’t make this mistake again.

If you have not done so already, analyze and determine your ideal client. Review your current client list: Which customers generate the greatest profit margin and are also the easiest to work with?

Looking back at your company’s history, which leads are most likely to hire your business, and which ones are going to opt for the competition, no matter what incentives or marketing tactic you use?

Now, look at your lead pipeline. How many leads fit your ideal client profile? How many are in the “unlikely-to-convert” category? Use your ideal client profile to weed out leads that simply aren’t worth your time, and focus your lead-nurturing program on those who are.

2. A/B test your call-to-action.

A/B testing is a tried and true tactic essential to ensuring that the right message is delivered to the right lead at the right moment. If you’ve never invested in A/B testing before, even running a few simple tests can result in a 5-to-20 percent increase to your bottom line, reports Kissmetrics. And, no, they aren’t talking about a random conversion rate — they’re talking about real improvements to revenue and customer base.

Why is A/B testing so important for inbound marketing? A/B testing gives you the “why” behind the “what.” For example, let’s say you have a ton of people clicking on your upgrade offer, but as soon as people see the actual offer, they disappear.

A/B testing, coupled with qualitative data surveys, can help you understand why customers aren’t converting and then test different strategies to find out which solution is the best fix for this conversion problem.

3. Get serious about lead nurturing.

Seven out of 10 leads generated from inbound marketing are not “sales ready.” That doesn’t mean they aren’t qualified. They just aren’t willing to make a purchase yet. 

An effective lead-nurturing program will keep you connected with your leads, so you’ll be top of mind when they are ready to buy. Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50 percent more sales-ready leads at 33 percent lower cost per lead, says Forrester Research.

For MedJet Assist, this means keeping in touch with leads via email marketing during the trip-planning process. Once leads are ready to book their travel, MedJet Assist is right there, ready to offer a comprehensive medical travel-insurance policy.

Related: A Straightforward Guide To Effective B2B Lead Generation

Bottom line

Improving inbound lead generation is an ongoing process, and you won’t see results overnight. But simple changes to your approach — refining your targeting strategy, A/B testing your calls to action and developing your lead nurturing program — will set your business up for success in 2017.

This may be the happiest season of the year, but for many managers and employees, things aren’t all that merry and bright.

Related: Should You Ditch Annual Performance Reviews? It Depends.

Many are stressing about whether they’ve put in enough face time with the boss or clocked enough hours at the office. Why the trepidation? Because they’re about to have their dreaded year-end performance review.

Things maybe different this year, however. Thirty-seven percent of people in the United States work from home an average two days per month, and we’ve seen the number of those telecommuting full-time swell by 103 percent over the past decade.

This fast-rising rate of remote workers, combined with the ever-present talent war, is forcing companies to reexamine not only their stance on staffing telecommuters, but also the ways in which they go about evaluating their performance.

Millennial employees now make up a significant part of the workforce — more than one in three, to be exact — and they are driving the biggest overhaul of performance-management standards in decades. Both millennials and Gen-Xers see work and life as closely intertwined; they tend to want a different kind of relationship with their managers, and more frequent feedback.

No trophy necessary

Never ones to accept the “that’s just the way it’s done” mentality, most millennials — or, more precisely, 62 percent of them — report staying with their employers longer if they feel like they can talk to their managers about anything, including non-work-related issues.

This new wave of workers craves employer-employee relationships based on growth, not rewards.

Related: Millennials Are Not the Only Ones Who Want Feedback

In the past, professionals wanted swanky corner offices, company cars and personal secretaries. Today, the focus is on work-life integration. People want the flexibility to move to a new city, state or country and pursue their passions while they’re still working for your company.

Throw remote workers into the mix, and you can really measure your team members’ productivity only by the quality of their output, not how many hours John put in or how long Jill came into the office for. As salespeople have long known, results are what truly matter.

Instead, focus on outcomes to evaluate productivity and determine opportunities for future improvements. The worst performance-management decision you can make is to reward employees who try but consistently fail to reach needed outcomes by working hard, not smart.

New performance standards

Performance evaluation often quantifies how much face time employees put in, not necessarily the quality or outcome of their work. The problem with this approach is that involvement and engagement are not one and the same. To ensure your team members feel supported and valued, measure output, not time spent.

Here are some tips we’ve implemented in our own remote organization that should become standard for any team.

1. Align employee expectations with company goals. 

This is key to engagement. By clearly defining our overarching goals, we clarify what accountability means and what each person’s top five responsibilities are; in this way, we help our team members align their activities with those expectations.

Systems such as the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS Traction) or Rockefeller Habits (Gazelles) can help in this regard.

Zoup! Systems, for example, was able to keep its staff focused on its vision after taking EOS companywide. Its leadership team now uses this system to track sales and the cost of goods and labor through a weekly scorecard, which last year helped the company chalk up $48 million in revenue.

You, too, should clarify how team members will be evaluated, and let them know how to win. If they don’t know the rules of the game, don’t know the goal or how to keep score, they’ll find it difficult to strategize their day-to-day efforts to achieve success.

2. Tie evaluations directly to core values. 

If team members don’t know what you value, how can they target their behaviors to meet expectations? Without clear core values, you’ll struggle to hire the right talent and to cultivate a strong, happy, productive culture in which people are accountable for their work with little to no oversight.

Evaluate fit as much as skills. If you’re hiring a remote worker, rather than just looking at what applicants can produce, look for experience working from home. Learn what traits your successful employees have in common and how to identify those qualities in your candidates. 

To keep our own company’s core values top of mind, we recognize people who embody those values with shout-outs on our biweekly company video calls. We also give out core-value awards at our annual summit.

After reading aloud what nominators said about them, we announce these winners’ names. Our team members strive — consciously and subconsciously — to receive this honor.

3. Provide constant feedback. 

Younger, remote workers want greater accessibility to leadership, and, as a result, an annual performance review just won’t cut it. In fact, 69 percent of workers ages 18 to 34 surveyed have said they find the “traditional” performance review to be flawed. They want a mentor, not a boss.

We take a proactive approach to feedback by sending out weekly surveys to staff and conducting quarterly check-ins. A number of effective strategies help us stay on top of employee sentiments and whether team members are on track for meeting their goals and objectives.

One #strategy is our rule to give feedback on something within 72 hours or let it go, as quarterly check-ins shouldn’t address issues that should have been discussed long ago. 

To do something similar, when you schedule your regular meetings — both one-on-one and all-staff meetings — take advantage of every opportunity to publicly recognize your team members’ performance.

You can even open the floor to team members and allow them to shower a little praise on their colleagues. Your team will feel good about themselves, and appreciated for their work.

Related: Five Steps for Giving Productive Feedback

A talent war is under way, and it’s becoming harder to find the people who are both a cultural fit and a skill fit for the job. Then, once you bring real talent on board, you must do everything in your power to keep them, and that likely means changing the way you evaluate employee performance.

If they don’t “feel the love,” chances are they’ll look for it elsewhere.