What to Do When You Lose a Big Client Posted on March 5, 2020February 28, 2020 by Guest Author Every B2B business, whether you’re a marketing agency or any other small business that works with multiple B2B clients, has experienced that dreaded moment when you lose a big client. Ups and downs are a fact of life of being in business, but it can still be painful when a big account cuts back on your budget, or when you lose some revenue that you had been counting on. The usual response to losing a big client is to cut costs: lay off employees, cut back on your budget. But what if there was a more creative and agile way to recover from the hit to your bottom line? There are several immediate strategies that B2B sales organizations can use to bounce back from a lost client or a lost account. Re-evaluate Your Current Base of Business Losing a big client hurts. But remember: you still have plenty of other clients, right? Go back to your existing client base and look for opportunities to boost revenue by selling more or selling differently to your current customers, such as: Can you upsell some additional higher-value products or services to your current clients? Studies of upselling have found that selling to existing customers has a success rate of 60-70%. Customers are often more likely to buy additional solutions from you if they already know you and have a business relationship in place. Can you cross-sell multiple solutions to clients who are currently only utilizing a certain product or service from your company? Can you carefully raise prices on your customers to drive more revenue? But be careful with this strategy; if your customers are price-sensitive, you don’t want to drive them away. Your current clients can often be a source of significant new revenue. Sometimes you just need to think creatively and “make the ask” to uncover new opportunities from your existing business relationships. Ask for Referrals In addition to generating new revenue from your current clients, you should look for opportunities to ask your existing clients to help you find new business by asking for referrals. An AMA Journal of Marketing study found that referral customers tend to be more loyal, generate higher lifetime value, and contribute higher profit margins per year. Asking for referrals is a favor that you’re seeking from your clients, so be thoughtful, courteous, and strategic about how to ask. Sometimes the best occasion to ask for a referral is after a completed project, or at the moment when a client is most happy with your work. If a client sees the value that you deliver and your excellent service is top of mind, they will be more likely to enthusiastically agree to share your company’s name with their network. Just like you need to have a sales script or an elevator pitch when talking with new prospects, you should also prepare a “referral script” that you can use when asking your current customers to spread the word about your business. For example, a good referral script might be: “I’m so glad to hear that you’re happy with our service. Let’s keep in touch. I also wanted to ask you: would you be willing to introduce me to any other colleagues or people in your network who might need help from my company? I would love to talk with you about this. Can we set up a call to brainstorm a few ideas?” This script reinforces the positive experience that your client has recently had, it makes a specific request (introductions for referrals), and it asks the client for a specific commitment (to schedule a follow-up call). Different referral scripts might work better for some businesses or industries, depending on your sales process. But think it through ahead of time: what is the best way for your company to proactively seek more referrals? Recharge Your Sales Pipeline Losing a big client is an occasion to get more aggressive in working your existing sales pipeline. Go back to your network of prospects and potential sales leads. Who is in your pipeline that you had already been talking with? Which conversations have stalled or slowed down, and how can you move those conversations along faster? How can you create some new urgency with cold leads? One of the most important ways to recover from a lost client is to get more focused on your lead ranking and lead nurturing processes. Take a fresh look at which of your business leads are really getting close to “ready” to buy and which ones might need more time to do research, get their questions answered, and build trust. Re-evaluate your current business leads. Check-in with prospects who you haven’t heard from in a while, try to schedule a new round of calls and product demos and dig deeper into the prospect’s concerns. Diversify Your Lead Generation Portfolio Along with re-evaluating your current pipeline of prospects, it’s time to enhance your lead generation efforts. Sometimes, B2B companies fall into a rut of only pursuing certain types of lead generation – such as inbound marketing strategies. But when you lose a big client, it’s time to get proactive with a wider array of strategies. Just like you wouldn’t want to bet your life savings on a single stock, you shouldn’t invest all of your lead generation budget and effort into a single type of lead generation activities. Diversify your portfolio of lead generation strategies with inbound and outbound marketing. Try some new things with marketing, try some new marketing tools, new marketing channels, or new methods of reaching out to clients. Or go back to basics with such simple tactics as picking up the phone and calling your customers. It’s become fashionable in recent years to say that cold calling is dead, but for complex B2B sales, sometimes the best method is to pick up the phone and have a real person-to-person conversation with your prospect. There are specific nuances and unstated objections that you can navigate better by talking on the phone than by waiting for an email reply. Losing a big client can be stressful and painful and sad, but it’s best to push through any emotional response and just focus on business. Keep your chin up and keep pushing forward and move on to the next opportunity. Now is the time to get creative, to stay optimistic, and to keep looking for ways to deliver great solutions and convey your value proposition for your current clients and clients of the future. Author Bio Gregg Schwartz is the vice president of sales and marketing at Strategic Sales & Marketing, a lead-generation firm based in Connecticut.
5 Expert Tips for Optimizing Your Content Posted on March 4, 2020March 4, 2020 by Natalie Slyman Regardless of your business size or the industry your business is in, content optimization plays a pivotal role in your ability to compete and convert online. Everyone is creating content, which makes the online world very crowded. Every social feed is inundated with articles, videos, and shared media that it makes it hard to sort through and find the real gems. So, for your content to stand out, it must be optimized appropriately. Unfortunately, optimization isn’t always as straightforward as it may seem. If you’re struggling to get more traction online, here are a few expert tips for leveraging content to achieve better ranking, engagement, and conversion. How To Optimize Your Content Stay On Top of Trends The key to winning the marketing game is to figure out what your target audience wants and delivering on that. This is why market research is so important. Every industry has its trends, events, and buzzworthy topics. By staying on top of these things, you’ll give your prospects and customers what they’re looking for and also improve your performance online, since search engines favor trending topics. Write First, Optimize Later One of the biggest stumbling blocks business owners encounter when it comes to creating top-quality content is trying to optimize as they create. This kind of stop-and-go writing isn’t a productive use of your time, nor is it going to get you the results you’re looking for. Instead, focus on getting the message right in terms of quality and authenticity first, then optimize it after the fact. Pay Attention to Headings and Subheadings While nobody has completely cracked the code for how Google’s algorithm analyzes content, there are some things experts have determined play a critical role. To get your content to rank on Google, two things to pay attention to are your headings and subheadings. In particular, these components should be clear and accurate, as this helps search engines to understand and properly index your content. They should also contain the keywords you’re targeting whenever possible. Be Careful with Multimedia While images and video content can certainly enhance your content strategy, you must be mindful of how you use these mediums. For instance, slow-loading multimedia housed on your website can negatively impact visitor experience and also cause a drop in ranking on the search engines. It may be wiser to use third-party platforms, such as YouTube, to host your multimedia content and then link back to your site. This will ensure optimal website performance and a diverse content plan. Be Strategic About Backlinks Backlinks are links placed off-site that link back to your on-site content. They add credibility to your strategy, and they help drive valuable traffic to your website. While it’s important to incorporate this strategy within your content, it’s more important that you focus on quality and getting backlinks ethically. Backlinks should be something you earn, and they should be related in some way to the content that’s linking to them. Make sure if you’re pitching your content and specific links to a site, it’s a site of good quality and reputation. If not, placing a link there can actually hurt your search engine performance. It’s also a good rule of thumb to only link to high-quality sites in your content, routinely review your site to make sure all links are active, and focus on building an internal linking strategy as well. Producing content that your audience will find to be of value is the key to success in the digital age. Further optimizing that content so that it performs well in the search engines will help to ensure that you continue to attract attention for your brand and improve the chances of converting more of that traffic into paying customers.
Top Customer Experience Software for Small Business Posted on March 3, 2020July 22, 2022 by Erin Posey Haven’t you heard? UX is out, and CX is in. Okay, maybe I’m being a bit dramatic. In all realness, CX is more like the evolution of UX. Are you scratching your head over these terms I’m so loosely throwing around? CX is “customer experience,” and UX is “user experience.” In general, user experience tends to focus on how a customer interacts with your actual website or app. Customer experience, on the other hand, is their whole experience with your company. So, user experience is part of customer experience, but so is your customer service staff, sales staff, marketing outreach, and everything in between. The concept of UX has been a hot topic for quite some time. So much so that there is a plethora of software to manage it. Customer experience, since it has so many channels of involvement, has been slow to catch up, especially in the small business price point. So, let’s improve your customer experience—and user experience—with some excellent CX software for your small business. Four Customer Experience Softwares to Check Out HotJar HotJar is billed as analytics software, and on the surface level, sure, that’s what they do. However, Hotjar allows you to understand your web users in ways you’ve never dreamed of. They feature analytics visualization favorites like heatmaps, conversion funnels, and form analysis—but that’s not what makes them perfect for managing customer experience. HotJar’s shining features are their easy to deploy feedback polls, instant visual feedback from your users about aspects of your website, Best of all, you can record user actions and watch them interact with your site directly. On the downside, HotJar isn’t entirely customer-centric. It gives all the information to the company, but only has a few features that allow feedback from the customer. It also doesn’t allow for instant feedback on website trouble spots or give options to manage customer service. HotJar shines as a tool to improve your customer experience. To do so, you must wade through a lot of setup and spend quite a chunk of time analyzing the results to figure out what needs improvement. The tools for actual improvement are not built into the software; it just gives you the information to determine your next steps. HotJar has personal, business, and agency packages, starting at free and scales up, beginning at $29 per month to collect up to 10,000 page views per day. ZenDesk ZenDesk is used by more than 145,000 companies around the world. In general, it helps companies manage their customer service needs through help ticket services, customer chats, and call center software. Through ZenDesk Explore, ZenDesk has created a customer analytics software that helps you understand the full scope of your customer experience. This includes interactions through email, phone, webchat, and social media. To use ZenDesk Explore, you must already be a ZenDesk Support Professional or above subscriber. ZenDesk Explore Professional is only $9 per agent, per month, but ZenDesk Support Professional comes in at $49 per month, per agent. ZenDesk is a trusted name in customer service and customer experience. As an industry leader, you can use their software, knowing that they’ll be at the forefront of any analytic or experience trends. Usabilla Usabilla is trusted by brands, large and small, to help customers have the best experiences on the web. Their claim to fame is a simple feedback button that is placed on your site. This button allows users to instantly give feedback about anything they love or don’t love in just a couple of clicks. On the backend, their robust dashboard allows you to analyze customer feedback, filter your results, and export it to other tools for more in-depth analysis. Usabilla’s strength is its simplicity. The button they place on your website encourages customer interaction that can net feedback you may not usually get. It encourages customers to tell you exactly how they feel about products or features, and that information is extremely valuable when managing your customer experience efforts. On the downside, Usabilla is not transparent about pricing. They say that their pricing scales based on business needs, so it cannot be quoted online. However, they do market themselves to small businesses, so that they may have an affordable option. BenchmarkONE Obviously, we have to toot our own horn here, as we love our software. BenchmarkONE is a customer-forward CRM that allows your marketing and marketing teams to work together on creating the best experience possible for your customers. Our platform is a fully integrated solution that provides simple reporting, customer relationship management, email outreach, and marketing automation in a single solution. With all your outreach rolled into one service, BenchmarkONE lets you see the customer experience holistically. A large part of customer experience is brand and outreach consistency, which is easier to achieve when each department is directly collaborating with another. It’s hard to gauge customer satisfaction with your brand online. We often have a lot of data, but without the human element, sometimes, you just can’t cut through the noise. Customer experience software helps you do just that and bring excellent brand interactions to your clients both online and off.
4 Deadly Small Business Mistakes You Must Avoid Posted on February 27, 2020February 20, 2020 by Jonathan Herrick There are about 28.8 million small businesses in the United States, each of them with their own unique challenges and objectives. And while with most things in life a mistake here or there isn’t a major travesty, a mistake in running your small business — even a tiny one — can mean the end. Only 20 percent of businesses fail within their first year, and by the end of their fifth year, 50 percent of all businesses fail. If you want to beat the odds, you need to be incredibly careful with how you run your operations, especially when it comes to avoiding common small business mistakes. Don’t let limited resources stand in the way of long-term success. Here are four of the deadliest small business mistakes and why it’s crucial to stay clear of them. 1. Not Having a Marketing Team A marketing team can seem like a luxury for a small business, but in reality, it’s a necessity. One of the biggest marketing challenges is getting new clients, which directly relates to generating new revenue for your company. Marketing teams — even if they’re just one or two people — help establish your company brand and ensure that you’re both solidifying your message and reaching as many people as possible with it. All businesses, large or small, need to attract new prospects and turn those prospects into customers. It doesn’t matter what you’re selling, who you’re trying to attract, or how big your budget is — if you’re not connecting with the right people, you’re not going to grow. 2. Not Understanding Who Your Target Audience Is If you don’t know who your target audience is, then how are you going to know how to market your product or service to them in the most effective way possible? Most small businesses have a general idea of who they’re trying to reach but lack the concrete customer personas that help guide marketing strategies and maximize the potential of limited marketing budgets. It’s important that you take the time to create audience personas and establish the kind of person you want to sell to — including not solely who they are but what their pain points, needs, and lifestyles are. Delve as deep as you can, creating personas for various customers based on job titles, industries, who their decision-makers are, what problems they experience, and so on. The more you can pin down who your buyers are, the better you can sell to them. 3. Not Focusing on Your Employees’ Needs Happy employees are 12 percent more productive than their unsatisfied counterparts. And it makes sense. In today’s professional landscape, information on everything from health and personal benefits to the variety of breakroom snacks are shared far and wide. Current and prospective employees are going to know if they’re getting the best deal or not. That doesn’t mean that you have to start hosting expensive company retreats or offering unlimited PTO. Still, it does mean that you have to work within your own capabilities to provide employees the best company culture that you can. If you want high-quality candidates applying for your open positions — and if you want to avoid employee turnover — account for your employees’ needs and the culture you’re trying to build. This means taking a hard look at the company perks and benefits you offer and making sure they’re up to snuff. If they’re not, you’re going to have a hard time attracting and sustaining top talent. 4. Not Having a Sales Strategy For all of their differences, all small businesses have one big thing in common: they need to make money. And to do it, there needs to be a sales strategy in place. An effective sales strategy includes goals and projections based on realistic expectations and pushes your team to increase performance month after month. On top of providing a clear path for your sales staff to follow, it also helps protect against significant downturns, like lost clients or team members. Losses happen — it’s how you recover that counts. With a sales strategy in place, you’ll have a growth plan that accounts for all possible scenarios, including the less than ideal ones. Don’t let avoidable small business mistakes be the death of your company. While avoiding the mistakes above does require that you stretch your resources a bit, it’s all in the name of long-term success — and isn’t that why you started your business in the first place? Work with what you have, expanding as your resources allow. If that means taking on the role of marketing and sales manager yourself until you can hire additional employees or finding room in the budget for special perks for those you already have on staff, then it’s worth it for the potential it affords you. Trust us, your team — and your bottom line — will be much better off for it.
How We’re Different than HubSpot Posted on February 26, 2020September 27, 2022 by Jessica Lunk Here at BenchmarkONE, we’re not afraid to call out a decent marketing automation tool when we see it, even if we didn’t make it ourselves. There’s a lot to like about HubSpot, and you’ll probably see their name again and again when you’re researching marketing software for your business. But that being said, they’re definitely not the only marketing automation solution out there that you should be considering. We pride ourselves on offering the most bang for the buck for small and medium-sized businesses. Why? Well, we’ve built our software specifically for their needs. Here are some of the biggest ways we stand out from HubSpot, and why you should consider using our platform for your small business’s marketing automation needs. 1. We’re More Cost-Effective Budget isn’t everything when you’re selecting a marketing automation platform, but it’s a major driving factor. Prioritizing your small business marketing budget shouldn’t mean dedicating the bulk of your spending to your software. Doing so neglects other valuable efforts, like lead and revenue generation. You’re working with limited resources, and there’s a lot your budget needs to accommodate. That’s why we’ve optimized our platform for cost efficiency, becoming a more affordable option in a notoriously pricey industry. So how do we compare to HubSpot in price? To use HubSpot’s marketing bundle, you’ll spend anywhere between $50 and $3,600 a month, depending on your needs and the size of your business. In need of a CMS? That starts at $25 a month for basic capabilities but escalates to $400 a month for the professional plan. At BenchmarkONE, meanwhile, we offer a Free Forever plan that costs you absolutely nothing! We also offer paid plans that start at just $29 a month (depending on the features you need and the number of contacts you have). And as a bonus, our innovative and intuitive CRM is already included in every package. 2. We’re More Tailored To Your Needs Having more features isn’t always ideal, especially when it comes to mega-platforms like HubSpot, where you’re paying for a lot of features that you’ll likely never end up utilizing. We don’t believe in paying for what you’re not going to use, which is why we offer our clients completely tailored packages that include everything they need and nothing they don’t. Of course, it can be hard to know precisely what time-saving features you’ll want before you dive in. So to help you out, our packages are designated by the number of contacts you’ll be messaging, allowing you to narrow in on what features will be best for your purposes. Our packages also grant unlimited users within your organization access to the software. That way whichever package you go with can be used by as many people as you need it to be. 3. Our Platform is Designed With Small Businesses in Mind Broad platforms like HubSpot serve an incredibly wide variety of business types and sizes. And while there’s certainly nothing wrong with that, we understand that small businesses have pretty unique needs. That’s why we offer a wealth of scalability options that allow our clients to optimize their software based on a small business’s budget and automation requirements. We also provide features that we created specifically for the small business user, including targeted email optimization, quick and easy drip campaigns, a landing page and pop-up builder, and a small business CRM solution. 4. We Offer Accessible Support We don’t just tout the importance of transparency and customer service — we live and breathe it. To that end, we offer onboarding and support without the hefty price tag that you’ll find for the same features through HubSpot. And because we — like our clients — value the benefits that come with human-to-human relationships, we’ve also filled our team with friendly and experienced consultations who want you to meet your goals as much as you do. What’s more, we also hold regular customer success workshops that are totally free to attend. In these workshops, we offer one-on-one support with one of our software experts, answer specific customer questions, and help troubleshoot any issues or roadblocks that they may be experiencing. 5. We Cater to Marketing Agencies, Too Our marketing automation platform is just as optimal for marketing agencies as it is for other types of businesses. It allows you to extend services and maximize revenue from your existing accounts without completely redesigning your processes and structural framework. Our agency partner program allows our agency clients to service their clients better and provide optimal value. We arrange specialty bundles and offers based on their specific needs, and provide them with tools to help answer their clients’ questions for a successful onboarding and implementation process. We recommend doing a lot of research when determining what the best marketing automation solution is for your small or medium-sized business. Consider your budget as a top priority, but give weight to other factors. Such as what features are and are not included in the software and what specific goals you’re trying to achieve with it. Other things to consider are the size of your contact list and the size of your marketing team. The more contacts and more people on your team, the bigger the package you’ll need. There’s a perfect marketing automation platform out there for every business. We invite you to get in touch to learn more about BenchmarkONE and our efforts to stand out from our competitors in all the right ways. We’d be happy to walk you through our packages and to conduct a demo with your team.
Why You Should Have Customer Success Workshops Posted on February 25, 2020September 22, 2022 by Erin Posey It’s a simple fact of doing business: if your customers aren’t succeeding with your product or service, then you aren’t succeeding either. And that’s what makes customer success workshops a must-do, mainly for SaaS companies. Instead of giving your customer service a reboot, invest in customer success workshops. They offer tons of benefits, including identifying what your customer needs and pain points are when it comes to your product. And, they can clue you in on what you need to do to ensure your customers get as much utility as possible out of what you’re selling. What is a Customer Success Workshop? A customer success workshop is an in-person or live broadcast event with existing customers where you provide care, service, and consultations regarding the particular product or service offering that they’re utilizing. Whether over an hour or the span of a couple of days, these workshops allow you and your customers to really dig into the essentials that they need to know to get the most out of their purchase. In addition to elevating the customer experience, they provide you with insight into how your customers are using your product or service, and what features might need to be tweaked. 4 Reasons to Give Customer Success Workshops a Try We could tout the importance of customer success workshops all day, but in the interest of time, we’ve narrowed our spiel down to just four of the main advantages. With that in mind, here’s why you should give these types of workshops a try if you haven’t already. 1. They’re a Boost to Customer Service You must deliver service on your customers’ timelines instead of what is most convenient for you. And because success workshops are in real-time, they’re an unbeatable chance for you to address and resolve your customers’ service needs quickly, without a ton of run-around or hand-offs to multiple people in multiple departments. About two-thirds of customers expect a near-immediate (10 minutes or less) response to their marketing, sales, or customer service inquiries. Meanwhile, 93% of customers are likely to make repeat purchases with brands that satisfy their customer service expectations. When you host success workshops, you let your customers know that they — and any issues they might be having — matter to you. Not only does this give a significant boost to the customer service experience, but it also helps you build more trust and strengthen the relationships you have with your buyers. 2. They Lead to More Educated Customers Knowledge is power. When you provide your customers with a chance to ask questions, you help them understand your product or service better. This helps them get as much out of it as possible and use it to their full advantage. Remember, you know more about the features and limitations of what you’re selling than anybody else. Passing this information on to buyers isn’t just good business; it’s necessary for creating an engaged and loyal customer base. Educated consumers become loyal consumers. Using customer success workshops as a way to pass on key knowledge and amplify the utility of your product or service helps lead to customers who trust and advocate for your brand, and who more fully recognize the value that they get out of working with you. 3. They Keep Issues From Escalating The only way to get an issue to go away is to address it. Otherwise, you risk losing the customer. When you make yourself more accessible to your customers through success workshops, you help make sure that their questions don’t go unanswered — and, thus, don’t expand over time. Customers aren’t always great at troubleshooting their problems on their own. And they shouldn’t have to be. As the authority on your product or service, it’s your job to provide solutions and/or useful workarounds when they arise and to keep small problems from turning into big ones. Giving your customers a chance to ask for one-on-one help puts a pin in the big stuff and increases the potential of what you’re selling. 4. They Humanize Your Brand We rely on robots for a lot these days, but it doesn’t change the fact that humans like to work with humans. Customers want to know that there’s a real person dedicated to their needs on the other end of that email or chatbox. Customer success workshops give your brand a face and voice. This breaks down any real or perceived barriers to connection, making your business not just more accessible but more relatable too. Your customers won’t have any doubt that there are actual people behind the product or service, and that these people are committed to their satisfaction. Everyone wants happier customers. Start talking to your team today about how you can implement customer success workshops, and build a more informed, more attuned pool of clients.
10 Blog Metrics You Should be Using to Track Success Posted on February 20, 2020February 12, 2020 by Natalie Slyman Your company blog is one of your most valuable marketing assets. Since it’s owned media, you can essentially write content on whatever topics your heart desires. This gives you a lot of liberties, unlike publishing content on outside publications, as those outlets have specific guidelines to follow and their own agendas. So when you have a very important product to push, service to highlight, or want to speak more specifically on an experience or feature pertaining to your business, your blog is an undeniable resource to utilize. You create the rules because you’re the one putting it together, editing it, refining it, and sharing it out to the world. But mistakes can be made. The blog you build is no good if it’s not performing, and if it’s also your main form of consistently published content (which it often is), it needs to deliver. If no one is reading it, it’s not converting new site visitors to prospects, or you can hear crickets in the comment section, then you know you must be doing something wrong. And it’s no fun putting all that work into something that yields very little return. But how do you know you’re getting the most out of every blog post you create? How do you effectively measure the success of your blog? Here are the metrics you should look at that ultimately determine whether or not your blog content is resonating with your audience. 10 Blog Metrics That Determine Success We’ve compiled a list of metrics that should be examined to determine if your blog is performing. Look to these critical areas to track success and make sure to compare the numbers month over month so you can continue to improve. 1. Pageviews Let’s start with the most obvious metric. Checking each individual blog post’s pageviews shows you just how many people are taking a look at it. While it’s one of the most important metrics, it relies on a lot of factors. Sure, some people can organically come to a particular blog post page. Still, pageviews hinge on whether or not you’re sharing it out on your social channels, using it in your email marketing, and if it’s optimized for search engines. To get a clear indication of whether or not a particular blog post has a decent amount of pageviews, check it against the average views per post. Tip: Make sure you use keywords throughout your blog post as anchor text to link to other valuable content of yours. This will help the blog post rank in search engines over time, making it more findable when your audience is searching using those keywords, and hence increase your pageviews! 2. Average Time On Page This metric tells you how long readers are spending on a specific blog post. While pageviews are the first barrier of entry, time on the page tells you whether or not they’re actually reading the blog post. This metric is essential for engagement and can tell you if a particular blog post is resonating with your audience. You want this number to be on the high end. Tip: Get creative with your blog posts by adding visuals, graphs, gifs, or video content. Break up your page with headings and subheadings so people can easily digest and enjoy reading it. Also, if they see a visual on the page, chances are they’ll want to stick around and see what it’s all about. 3. Returning Visitors No one and dones here! Returning visitors are precisely that – people who just can’t get enough of your blog post, so they come back to check it out again (and again, if you’re lucky). If people are coming back to reread your blog post, it typically means something about it stuck with them enough for them to keep referencing. Tip: Create blog posts that provide or include compelling stats. Stat roundups (like 30 email marketing stat) can often encourage a ton of repeat visitors because they can be easily referenced in other content or shared on social. 4. Overall Blog Visits You’ll want to know how many people are coming to your blog page over time. While it’s key to home in on specific pages to see how they’re performing, keeping an eye on the overall visits to your blog page can help keep those particular numbers in perspective. Tip: To enhance your inbound marketing and blog visits, schedule some social promo around your blog page. This reminds your network that your company’s blog is a valuable resource for a variety of areas within your industry and will get more new visits. 5. Top Viewed Posts When tracking this metric, make sure you take into account the amount of time each top viewed blog post has been live. The longer a blog post has been live, the more likely it is to accumulate more views. With that said, if a blog post has only been live for three months, but it’s one of your most viewed blog posts, then you know it struck a chord with your audience. Tip: Make sure you adjust the time frame when looking at this metric. It’s best to review your top viewed posts on a yearly, quarterly, and monthly basis so you can get an idea of the most recent top viewed posts. 6. Comments Oh, the comment section. It can be a blessing and a curse. Nowadays, looking at the comment section can be quite a gamble, but when it comes to your blog, you most likely won’t receive many comments. But if you do, that’s kind of a big deal because it means they were inspired into action. Tip: Track the comment section regularly so you can quickly respond and engage with anyone who leaves something. It’s a great way to interact with your audience. 7. Social Shares Tracking social shares can be tricky, depending on which marketing automation software you’re using. Some will show you how much social traffic is being driven to each blog post, and others may simply provide you with the social share numbers. Either way, the more shares your article gets on social, the more eyes that will eventually see it. Tip: Make sure your blog pages make it easy for others to share your content on social. Add social icons that, when clicked, generate a social post that can easily be shared on the designated channel. 8. Click-Through Rate The ultimate goal of every blog post, aside from providing education and nurture to your audience, is to inspire action. A great idea is to include a CTA or promote a piece of gated content within each blog post. Your click-through rate tells you how many people are clicking on that gated content or CTA. Tip: Make sure each blog post includes a CTA to download a piece of gated content that relates to the blog post in some way. Put this CTA either at the end of the post or highlight it in the sidebar as we do. This will help call more attention to it. 9. Conversions Conversions tell you which blog readers that aren’t already in your system not only click-through your gated content but then also download that gated content by filling out the form. This metric is important because it tells you how many new leads your blog post is generating. It indicates how many readers not only liked your blog post but were then compelled to access more content from you and are interested in hearing from you in the future. Tip: Look into tips for creating a CTA that converts. Also, try adding “in-text CTAs” to your blog content. These are links to gated content within your blog content. This increases the amount of CTAs for each blog post and therefore increases the likelihood of more conversions. 10. Email Traffic to Blog Blog content is great for fueling your email marketing efforts. As long as you’re centering it around what your audience and readers will find useful, you can easily include that content in your monthly newsletters or your email drip campaigns. Take note of how much traffic is being generated from email to your blog posts, and if possible, dive in deeper to determine which emails are driving the most traffic. Tip: Create blog content that focuses on each stage of the buyer’s journey. That way, you can send personalized blog content to leads within certain stages. Tracking how your blog performs is easy, as long as you know what metrics to look at and how to measure them. Doing so will not only tell you how well you’re doing at delighting your audience, but it can provide you with some insight into future blog topics to create and which high-performing blog posts to optimize.
How to Build an Effective Sales Team Posted on February 19, 2020February 12, 2020 by Jonathan Herrick Modern salespeople wear many hats. Selling isn’t their only job, and they are just as responsible for educating the consumer as they are selling to them. It can add a lot to their plates and make their jobs a lot more challenging. In fact, 61percent of salespeople stated it was much harder to sell than it was five years ago. It’s not an easy business, which is why building a productive and resilient sales team is critical to the success of a company. In this article, we’ll explore some essential practices business leaders should implement to assemble a team of top-performing salespeople. Consider An Internal Hire First Bad hires are costly, so it’s important to take your time and do it right. The best place to start when building a sales team is to consider the resources you already have. The most successful sales hires are typically internal. Why? Well, these people already know the brand, company policies, expectations, and ROI of what your company offers. They’re well-versed with your service and product, which makes the learning curve much lower than if you were to hire externally. Before you look outside the company, open the job up internally. If you need to, ask around for referrals. Perhaps there is someone in operations that would love to try sales. Don’t eliminate someone if they don’t have direct experience. Sometimes, the best salespeople are the ones you can train from the bottom up. Know Who You Want Before you can hire someone, it’s you must have a firm grasp of what you want your sales force to do for the company. Yes, you want them to be able to sell your product and set leads up to be strong customers. But, do you want this new salesperson to be visible, or only handle large accounts? Understanding your needs will help establish a baseline for the team. The best way to hire a salesperson is to look for a willingness to engage and successfully perform tasks. Also, consider the company culture and infrastructure. Mull over questions like: Do you need field sales or inside sales? What kind of experience are you looking for? What skillsets are the most essential? How many team members do you need to scale? How will you support them? What processes will they be using? What tools do you need to budget for? How will you measure their success? These questions can help to better define the type of person that best suits the role and create a profile of your ideal candidate. Consider traits like: Energetic Competitive Motivated Non-traditional Resilient Quick-learner Self-starter People-oriented The more you work to understand the perfect fit, the easier it will be to hire. Develop a System for Hiring Work on creating a standardized hiring process across the board. This will make the evaluation for each person equal, which helps you better compare candidates against each other. Think about the questions you want to ask that will give you the answers needed to make an informed decision, and don’t be afraid to get specific. You can also consider having candidates take a personality test or skills test. Some brands are too busy to recruit internally. In this case, they work with an outside recruiter or headhunter to save time. Recruiters have a big database of candidates at their disposal and are well-versed in the vetting process. Going this route is a viable option; however, if you want more control over who you bring on, you’ll probably want to own the process. Train and Motivate The real key to building a capable sales team lies in engagement. You have to keep your people motivated and inspired. Establish the resources needed to actively learn the job and clearly outline goals and benchmarks. Creating key performance indicators (KPIs) to be reviewed on a weekly or monthly basis also helps to motivate a team. You can also try to gamify your training. This is an incredibly motivating way to teach a team new tricks. It involves various elements of gaming, like a points system or leaderboard to inspire competition. It puts the sales rep in charge of their education and can also be used to adopt new training tools. Provide The Keys to Succeed The final step in building a successful sales team is ensuring they have the tools necessary to get the job done right. It’s not just about hiring the right people; you must also provide the necessary resources. Make sure your sales team has a knowledge base to enable their process and assist them in conversations. If they need more content, then bring your sales and marketing teams together so they can discuss the types of content that need to be created. When choosing the right platforms for your team, consider how your team will best interact with customers, and work to close sales. If your efforts are based more on digital marketing, a CRM system works great for automation. Sales can then follow up with warm leads and prospects. If your sales team interfaces with customers, a web-based conferencing platform is a useful tool for your roster. You should be giving sales an efficient way to write and submit orders, as well as manage mobile accounts. Salespeople are more than just the workers that build your ROI. They are the front-line troops and the people speaking to your customers the most. With this in mind, it’s crucial to not only scale your workforce but do it correctly. Building the proper sales team starts with the right planning, understanding who you need, and giving them the tools to succeed.
Don’t Let the Sun Set On Your Emails: Create A Sunset Policy. Posted on February 18, 2020June 24, 2020 by Erin Mueller Rejection comes in many forms. Being stood up on a date; When your boss hard passes on one of your ideas; Or, when leads stop responding to your emails, just to name a few. Rejection is no fun. It can make you feel like you don’t matter, or that all the effort you put in getting ready for that date or impressing your boss was pointless. But, how you choose to handle that rejection can make all the difference. You can either wallow in your rejection and never try at something again, or you can learn from it. In marketing, when leads stop opening your emails, the message they’re trying to send you is clear: I’m no longer interested. While the rejection may sting a little bit, it’s more important to focus on how you’ll choose to move forward. Do you continue to waste your time and send more emails to these disengaged contacts? Or, do you find a way to manage them that is more beneficial? What is A Sunset Policy and Why Is Having One Important? A sunset policy is a plan for managing leads who are no longer engaging with or opening your email messaging. So, there are people who aren’t opening your emails, no harm, no foul, right? Wrong. Whether or not your emails make it to the inbox depends on a lot of factors, including your past track record. Every person who doesn’t engage with your email is a strike against you, and can negatively affect your sending ability in the future. If a contact continues to neglect opening your emails, their email provider will start to send your emails directly to the spam folder. When one or two contacts become disengaged, it’s one thing. But when this becomes a pattern with numerous contacts within the same email provider, that provider could then filter out all of your emails so that none of them are being sent. This can even affect whether or not your emails are sent to those who have engaged with your emails in the past. Disengagement has a wildfire effect and can quickly make your emails seem as if they’ve vanished into thin air. But when you have a sunset policy in place, you can help avoid this kind of disaster, and ensure your emails are being sent to those who truly want them. The ABC’s of A Sunset Policy Let’s get you started on a sunset policy that you can easily implement. First, here are some essentials you should know: Determine what disengagement looks like for you. Sure, this means unopened emails, but is there a pattern in which your leads become disengaged? Maybe you’re noticing that around your fourth or fifth email in your campaign, the open rate starts to decline. Knowing when it’s happening can help you determine if there’s anything you can do to make a particular email within your campaign better. Outline the next steps for removing a disengaged lead from your outreach. The longer you continue to send emails to a disengaged lead, the worse it is for your send reputation, so you’ll want to nip this in the bud asap. Depending on the functions of your marketing automation software, I suggest automatically removing them from your campaign after several unopened emails. Don’t worry; you can re-engage leads later down the line by reaching back out to them. Sometimes a little breather is needed. Stay consistent. Make sure once you establish a process for removing these leads from your outreach, you stick to it. Doing so will ensure you’re pruning your lists regularly and keeping them healthy so your future emails will continue to make it to your leads. Creating Your Sunset Policy in BenchmarkONE When using your CRM and marketing automation software, you can tag or mark unresponsive contacts, which makes removing them from your outreach super easy. Our filters can assist you by providing a list of contacts who have not opened or clicked-through any emails sent to them within a specified time frame. Tag this segmented group and target them for a re-engagement campaign. If they continue to be disengaged over the next few months, we suggest removing them from all future communication. By systematically removing disengaged leads from your outreach, you’ll spend more time on actual potential customers and see your email analytics benefit.