March 2018 – user's Blog!

March 27, 2018

Selling Points for a More Agile Sales Force

Despite your dream of an agile sales force, 2018 is shaping up like every prior year in recent memory. A handful of sales reps definitely do their own thing, while everyone else tries to make the best of your CRM.

“No thanks, my spreadsheets are working just fine. Just look at my close rate!”

Spoken like a true sales pro.

And, apparently like most of his customers, you once again bought Joe’s pitch. After all, it’s hard to argue with Joe’s infamous spreadsheet – although, you would like to take a closer look at his calculations (but that’s another story).

Your gut tells you that total CRM adoption is a key component to becoming more agile. Unfortunately, Joe and his minions refuse to buy in. If you could convince Joe to make the switch, his direct reports would naturally have to follow suit.

Here’s a bit of advice: It’s time to stop talking to Joe about your goals. Instead, put things in his terms. You need to prove to Joe why becoming more agile will impact his personal bottom line. In other words, you need to make a compelling sales pitch of your own.

Here are three selling points to weave into your pitch.

1. More Prospecting Time

“Joe, what if I could get you an extra 90 minutes of prospecting time per day?”

Well played. Now you’ve gotten Joe’s attention.

Prospecting is the lifeblood of any sales function, and Joe knows that all too well. According to Joe’s own spreadsheet, each hour spent on prospecting typically yields him ten new leads. If your promise holds true, Joe could connect with an additional 75 leads per week. And, based on Joe’s self-proclaimed close ratio, he’d surely expect an even healthier paycheck.

Joe nibbles on the bait, but he’s predictably skeptical and demands additional information. Rather than extolling the many virtues of your CRM, you take a more subtle approach. This time, you move into a series of questions, aimed at better understanding Joe’s exact needs and objections.

You: “Let’s talk about sales emails. What if we had a system to organize all of your sales email templates. Rather than copying and pasting, the system would send out personalized messages for you. You’d just have to click a button or two. You could also drill down and see which leads have opened and clicked your messages. Would a system like that be helpful, Joe?”

Joe: “That does sound interesting. A big part of any sales rep’s job is to send follow-up emails. I could see where that might be useful.”

Wow, that was easier than you thought. You decide to move on to more questions.

You: “I know that preparing for the weekly sales meeting creates a lot of administrative work for you. What if we could take reporting off your plate?”

Joe: “Sign me up!”

You: “OK, and speaking of administrative work, what if I could prevent the marketing department from ever bothering you again? I know they’re always asking you to provide updated contact lists for the newsletter.”

Joe: “I’d be interested in that, too. Marketing just assumes it’s easy for me to access that information. I have to create a pivot table, which takes at least an hour. For the record, I don’t think newsletters work, anyway.”

For the moment, you’ll focus on the positive and ignore Joe’s negativity about email marketing.

You: “Oh, and one more thing. I know you especially dislike coordinating post-close details. What if we could automate that workflow for you, too?”

Joe: “Handing that off would save me at least two hours each week…”

You’re making progress with Joe. He just doesn’t know it yet.

2. Better Visibility (& Less Friction)

Joe leads by example, which is, in some ways, very beneficial to your company. No one can pitch a deal quite like Joe, making him an excellent sales coach for new hires. Unfortunately, Joe’s uncouth reliance on spreadsheets trickles down to the rest of his team. Joe’s protégés want to be just like him, spreadsheets and all.

Although he routinely downplays it, you’re fairly confident that Joe has mixed feelings about his team’s performance. In particular, you know that Joe is annoyed by his millennial reps’ unwillingness to provide deal updates.

To confirm your suspicions, you start another line of questions.

You: “Let’s pivot for a moment and talk about your direct reports. I’m curious to get your thoughts on how they’re performing.”

Joe: “It’s really hard to say. Several have tremendous raw talent, but they consistently fail to track their deals. I’ve shown them a million times how to update our tracking sheets, but some just don’t seem interested. This makes it difficult to prepare for our weekly sales meeting. I usually have to track each one down individually and ask for a pipeline status update. Even then, I rarely have enough information to speak intelligently at the meeting.”

You: “What if I had a way to solve that? I’m thinking of a report for each of your sales reps that looks something like this…”

Pulling out your tablet, you pull up the Kanban sales view recently built by Joe’s counterpart, Steve. You point out that this view makes it easy to get a bird’s-eye view of every deal in Steve’s pipeline. No more guessing about what his reps are working on – it’s all right there, just a tap away. The view also makes it easy to filter deals by a variety of criteria, including deal owner or potential sale amount.

Joe pauses to examine the pipeline view. You can tell he’s intrigued, but now he’s on to you.

Joe: “I thought I told you I wasn’t interested in messing with a CRM.”

You: “I’m not trying to force you into anything. I’m just curious what you think about this type of deal view in general.”

You can tell Joe is torn. Time to move in for the close.

3. On-the-Go Access

As Joe struggles to conjure up any objection to Steve’s Kanban sales view, you pose a simple question:

You: “Joe, I realize change is hard. I really do. But, putting your objections aside, wouldn’t it be nice to have in-the-field access to customer information and deal notes?”

Joe shrugs, points to his head, and says, “It’s all right up here.”

Of course it is, Joe. Of course it is.

You: “Be that as it may, what about the rest of your team? You just admitted that they’re failing to track deals. Why do you think that’s the case? Clearly, something’s not working.”

Quite a predicament Joe has gotten himself into. On the one hand, he knows as well as you do that something needs to change. On the other hand, there’s his pride to consider.

A dramatic pause ensues. Then, Joe finally decides to speak.

Joe: “I’m a big person, and I’m never afraid to admit when I’m wrong. Just because something works great for me, it doesn’t mean everyone can pick it up quite as effectively. I can see where letting them use their smartphones out in the field could solve a lot of problems. Maybe it’s time we get these rookies set up in your CRM.”

You decide to look past Joe’s epic ego moment and pounce on the opportunity.

You: “Let’s do this. For the foreseeable future, you keep using your spreadsheet to track your own deals. But, for your direct reports, let’s start the process of getting them into the CRM. We can use Insightly’s CSV import templates to get everything transferred over quickly. Ideally, I’d like to get deal status reports in your hands within the next 30 days. Do we have a deal?”

Joe: “Sounds good. I’m glad you’re finally starting to see things my way.”

Feeling good about the compromise, you exchange a chuckle and walk out victorious.

A few days later, Joe makes the big announcement at the weekly staff meeting.

Joe: “I’ve decided that it’s time to get you all set up in the company’s CRM system. We’re putting together a timeline now, but the goal is to have you fully transitioned within the month. I’ve personally vetted the system, and it’s definitely going to help you close more deals. You’ll be able to access everything you need from your smartphones, including the ability to provide updates on deals and contacts. By this time next month, there will be no excuse for missing or incomplete sales records.”

Wow, nice sales pitch Joe. Glad you had the idea!

Agility May Require Some Salesmanship

As we saw with Joe, achieving an agile sales force may require a little salesmanship on your part. It may also require some compromise.

Don’t assume that everyone on your staff will buy in on day one. Of course, as the business owner, your goals are very important. Perhaps equally important, however, are the motivating factors of your key team members. For those “Joe’s” of the world, you’ll probably need to peel back a few layers of objections – just as any good sales pro would do.

Happy selling!

Matt Keener is a marketing consultant and President of Keener Marketing Solutions, LLC. Matt specializes in content marketing and strategic planning, having helped numerous Saas (software as a service) companies and other small businesses worldwide. Read more of Matt’s work, get his book, or connect on LinkedIn.

March 20, 2018

How to Convert “Doers” into Sellers in the Sales Process

Each new customer represents a world of upsell and cross-sell opportunities.

Unfortunately, for some companies, the sales process halts within moments of a deal converting into an account. Although there are many possible explanations for this issue, a common cause stems from the divide between sales and frontline operations.

In this post, we’ll explore a strategy for bridging the divide by turning your frontline team into your best sellers.

Why Doers Should Be Your Best Sellers

It’s 9:07 am, which means your implementation team should be knee-deep into an onboarding discussion with your newest client (a regional chain of coffee shops). As a well-respected web consulting firm, your company prides itself in providing rapid turnaround time, excellent coaching, and, most importantly, websites that deliver results.

As you take another sip of coffee, you can’t help but wonder what is actually being discussed. You own the business, so it’s certainly within your purview to pop into the conference room and listen in. Giving it more thought, you decide to just wait until lunch when you’ll see Dominic, your most experienced project manager.

Noon rolls around, and you stroll to the break room. Sure enough, there’s Dominic having his usual ham sandwich and pretzels. You pull up a chair and start a casual conversation. As the discussion moves toward work topics, you feel your blood pressure begin to rise.

You: “So, Dominic, how was your call this morning with the coffee shop chain?”

Dominic: “It went fine, but things have been moving slower than most projects. They’re still recruiting some graphic designers to help with the rebranding process. Their in-house IT staff is also trying to connect their analytics software to the new site, but they keep running into issues.”

You: “Did you mention that we could handle all of that for them?”

Dominic: “I did, but they never got back to me on it.”

As Dominic gets up to recycle his empty soda bottle, a flood of questions race through your mind. How much are customer-caused delays costing us in overhead and lost time? Why didn’t Dominic push harder for the cross-sell opportunity? What other opportunities are we missing out on? What, if anything, might have motivated Dominic to actually follow up again?

Clearly, frontline team members like Dominic have the most in-depth understanding of customer needs at your company. By the nature of their jobs, they live and breath the intricacies of each customer’s unique situation. Clients trust their judgment and (usually) listen to them, which puts them in an especially powerful position to make recommendations – including those that involve additional services.

Sadly, as we saw with Dominic, few team members ever fully capitalize on the opportunity.

Planning a Paradigm Shift

Back at your desk, you decide to log in to your project management system and create a new project called “Operation: Frontline Selling.” The goal of this project will be to explore and (hopefully) correct the situation uncovered in your chat with Dominic. In reality, you’ve known this has been going on for a while, but now is the right time to take action.

Using the project’s description as a virtual notepad, your first step is to gather everything that’s going through your mind:

Designing a “house account” bonus program
Company-wide CRM access
Training for frontline workers
Emphasis on reporting & KPIs
New pipeline

At first glance, it seems like a rough list of random ideas. But hey, it’s a start. Before closing the project, you set yourself a task reminder to work on this again tomorrow.

Providing Access to the Whole Story

The next morning, you have a renewed spring in your step. Operation: Frontline Selling has been on your mind since yesterday, and you already know what your first move should be.

Wasting no time, you jump into your project and create three initial milestones:

Coordinating an in-person meeting with your leadership team
Providing frontline workers with CRM access
Offering CRM training to new users

Scheduling the kickoff meeting can be easily delegated to your administrative assistant, which you promptly do. However, the other two milestones will require some additional thought. To make your project successful, frontline workers are going to need the same access to customer information as your outside sales team. But, how much information do they actually need? Should the company consider utilizing role permissions to find the right balance? These are all questions that must be answered.

At the kickoff meeting, you share your vision for this new program. You reiterate that your ultimate goal is to have everyone at the company – especially frontline staff – be engaged in the selling process. You’ve even outlined an intriguing incentive policy, which your operations manager finds particularly interesting.

After a healthy discussion with your management, everyone seems in agreement on the next steps:

Finalize the program (bonus requirements, etc.)
Scope out in-house opportunity tracking best practices
Announce the program
Work with IT to onboard and train new CRM users
Define goals and KPIs

Luckily, you’ve already started a project in Insightly, which can be easily shared with each member of your leadership team.

A few additional milestones later, and the meeting is brought to a close. The team agrees to reconvene again in a few days and aims to go live late next week. It’s no doubt an aggressive timeline, but it seems doable.

Simplifying the Collection of Opportunities

Having volunteered to “own” the opportunity tracking milestone, you begin toying with several different use cases. The more you think about it, the more you’re convinced that the company needs a dedicated pipeline specifically for in-house deals. You watch a few refresher videos on how to set one up (such as this one).

Using Dominic’s aforementioned situation as the case study, you map out what appears to be the perfect pipeline for your internal sales process. Here’s a quick recap of what you’ve come up with:

Opportunity Creation: When an upsell or cross-sell opportunity presents itself, team members will simply find the person’s contact record, click “Add New Opportunity for Contact,” link it to the correct company, enter the relevant details, and select the in-house pipeline.

Opportunity Routing: Using a series of activity sets and workflows, you’re able to automatically assign and route new opportunities to the correct account manager. The sales team can then promptly follow up and work with the opportunity’s originator to advance the deal.

Opportunity Collaboration: By designing a pipeline that relies on both frontline staff and your sales team, you’re able to create greater accountability and redundancy – all of which is completely transparent in each opportunity record. Did a sales rep forget to follow up? Did the opportunity’s originator fail to provide useful information? Your new process gives you the information you need to move your company forward.

Celebrating Accomplishments

As exciting as pipeline automation might be, you’re also going to need a simple way to track the program’s overall success. After all, an automated sales pipeline is only useful if people are actually using it.

Since you’re planning on using a dedicated pipeline, it should be a breeze to track opportunity volume and revenue impact. Department heads can easily customize, save, group, and subscribe to the reports they need to push for results.

For example, let’s say you want to monitor how many opportunities are being identified by your old pal, Dominic. Just jump into your library of prebuilt Insightly reports and get customizing. Within a few minutes, you’re able to save a report that shows every opportunity that he has originated.

Better yet, Insightly can even be configured to email you on a predefined schedule or when a certain threshold is met. This helps you stay on top of Dominic’s productivity without having to manually log in, create new reports, and search for your answers. Insightly does the work for you, allowing you to stay focused on more pressing matters.

And, when the company finally closes its first $10,000 deal originated by Dominic, you’ll be ready to send him a personalized congratulatory message!

Your Doers Can (& Should) Be Selling

As we’ve discussed in this article, it is possible to integrate your frontline staff into the selling process. Doing so, however, requires a well-crafted vision from the top along with a decisive cultural shift. It also demands a nimble CRM that can easily accommodate an outside-the-box sales pipeline.

If your company is missing out on opportunities with existing clients, it’s time you took control of the situation. As the old saying goes, “It’s easier to sell to existing customers than new ones!”

March 13, 2018

Business Takeaways from Last Year’s Bracket

As college basketball season draws ever closer to its culminating event, offices around the country are beginning to buzz with bracket fever.

Who will be this year’s Cinderella story? Which #2 seed will be upset by a #15? And, perhaps most importantly, whose bracket will reign supreme?

At your office, this time of year is marked by both excitement and fierce competitiveness. Unlike some offices that run pools involving money or prizes, everyone at your company is motivated by one thing alone: bragging rights.

And, when it comes to bragging, no one is outdone by your old rival, Mitch. Mitch, a self-proclaimed “bracket genius,” does things a little differently than you. (OK, he does things a lot differently than you.) Constantly running his mouth is a good example. Creating near-perfect brackets appears to be another. Personally, you’re a little tired of Mitch’s antics. For once, just once, you’d like to beat Mitch at his own game and claim bragging rights for a year.

As you create your plan for beating Mitch, it might be healthy to do a retrospective on last year’s miserable showing. And, as you harken back to last year’s results, you might be surprised by the many business lessons hidden deep within your bracket.

Here are are just a few.

Takeaway #1: Intelligence Trumps Gut Feelings

Last year was a busy year for you. Your wife had a baby, you moved into a new home, and your oldest son started Kindergarten. With so many changes, you didn’t have much time to watch college basketball. As a result, when it came time to filling out your bracket, you found yourself scrambling. Sure, you went through the motions and read a few sports columns from “the experts,” but ultimately you were operating on a gut feeling.

Clearly, your “gut feeling” didn’t work out so well.

Mitch, conversely, had spent hours watching countless basketball games and taking meticulous notes. He had an in-depth understanding of each team’s players, defensive strategies, offensive plays, and coaching philosophies. In short, no amount of last-minute cramming stood a chance of competing with the amount of knowledge amassed by Mitch.

Although watching endless hours of basketball won’t be in your near future, last year’s experience did teach you something important about information management. That is, the guy (or gal) with the best data has the unfair advantage.

Pausing to apply this lesson to your sales career, your thoughts immediately go to your CRM records. For years, you’ve been using your CRM to track contacts, leads, and opportunities. But, could you be missing out on features that might help you accelerate sales? Could prebuilt reports and dashboards make the data already in your CRM more useful?

Takeaway #2: Work Smart, Don’t Just Work

Within moments of submitting last year’s bracket, you began second-guessing yourself. “Did I pick enough upsets?” “What if I don’t get any games right?” “Am I destined for embarrassment?” The questions never stopped coming.

Feeling uncertain about your primary bracket, you decided to spend the remainder of the afternoon filling out extra brackets. To cover all your bases, you first created an “all upset” bracket, in which every lower-ranked team defeated a higher-ranked team. Your next bracket was the exact opposite, giving the nod to every favored team. A dozen or so brackets later, and you finally felt somewhat confident about your chances. “Surely one of these will beat Mitch,” you thought to yourself, just as the clock struck 4:29 pm.

Alas, even with all the extra brackets, you didn’t break the top ten mark.

What can we learn from this?

Simply doing work (ie filling out brackets) for work’s sake is a complete waste of time. Now, I suppose you could argue that your efforts weren’t totally in vain, as you did aim to increase your chances of winning. On the other hand, as has been said many times: a goal without a plan is just a dream.

As you look for ways to apply this lesson to your work life, seek out those tasks that present minimal value or have no clear motivation. Do you really need to be doing them? Could they be automated by a robot or delegated to a different team member? Or, should they instead by realigned into a more strategic project?

The desire to achieve value should dictate the work that gets done, not the other way around.

Takeaway #3: Technology Can Reduce Procrastination

Another contributing factor to last year’s embarrassing defeat was procrastination. March is always the third month of the year – it never changes. Despite that fact, you waited until the night before tipoff to begin your bracket. Had you started a week or two earlier, you might have been able to do more research. Or, perhaps you could have invited Mitch for coffee in hopes that he would reveal some inside tips. (Mitch really gets chatty when he’s had two cups of dark blend.)

Sadly, you kept pushing things off until it was too late.

The good news is that you learned another hard lesson: technology can help overcome your tendency to procrastinate.

Take, for example, something that’s more important than your bracket but also happens once a year: submitting your annual sales plan. Like clockwork, on December 1st, your sales manager expects to have it on his desk by 9 am sharp. And, also like clockwork, you put it off until November 30th. When 9 am rolls around, you’re completely exhausted, grumpy, and not interested in anything other than sleep.

Instead of waiting until the last minute, why not leverage technology to hold yourself accountable? Set yourself a repeating task and specify a start date of mid-November and a due date of November 30th (or before). Now, you’ll give yourself plenty of time to get things done while combatting your affinity for procrastination.

Mitch Can Be Beat

In reality, you might never beat Mitch at picking basketball teams. Here’s the good news: you can beat him in the sales game. Keep on learning, continuously refine your processes, and never stop looking for lessons in everything – even in your brackets!

March 1, 2018

Insightly’s latest release surfaces insights, speeds up admin tasks, and increases CRM adoption

In the latest update to Insightly – customers can experience a number of enhancements aimed to help provide visualized information to make better decisions and reduce time spent on administrative activities like updating records. These improvements enable users to easily navigate through the system, add the information they need and see at a glance critical data that is most relevant to them.

Dashboards

The new release includes dynamically-rendered dashboards to enable you to see your data they way you want. With over 42 different data visualization options and a simple, drag and drop interface anyone can create a dashboard in seconds. Read more in depth on what the customization options are for building a variety of dashboards.

New bulk edit functionality

Update your CRM faster than ever before now with bulk edit functionality across every record type. You can create a list of leads, contacts, organizations and more and bulk select them all to perform a variety of actions. For example, select a batch of leads that came in from a trade show and add a “tag” for the tradeshow name: “Construction Expo.” Or perhaps you have a list of customers you called and need to update their record with a note that you’ve called them, it’s as simple as selecting all and adding a note to each record.

Recent items view

We’ve updated lists view for Leads, Contacts and Organizations to display the most recent items opened. This means easy access to the records you use most, you no longer need to search for a particular record that you frequently visit. Save time and have the customers you frequently work with at your fingertips, or leads you are currently working always on your list.

Gmail Add-on

For our G Suite users, there’s a new Gmail add-on available for your inbox. We know most folks live inside their inbox and having CRM information in your inbox can help provide context during a conversation and help save time on admin work like creating a new lead or contact in the system. With the Gmail Add-on, Insightly users can view people in a given thread, add new people to Insightly on the fly and search the CRM databases all directly from inside your Gmail.

New Recaptcha on web forms reduce dirty data

Insightly’s web-to-lead and web-to-contact forms allow you to seamlessly capture leads from your website and automatically create them in Insightly. Now with the release of reCAPTCHA, you can rest easy knowing internet bots won’t be able to send bogus information through the forms cluttering the CRM with dirty information.

New mobile app home tab

We’ve updated our CRM mobile app in the latest release to allow you to customize your first experience when using Insightly on the go. You can customize your screen with new options that include showing relevant information like Today’s Tasks, Recent Activity and Recently Viewed information so you can easily know at a glance what needs to get done, what’s going on and access important information.

Availability

These new product updates are available today across all Insightly CRM plans. If you haven’t already, in order to access the latest release be sure to update your account to the latest version by navigating to system settings and switching to the New Insightly Experience. Learn how to switch here.

March 1, 2018

The Nominees Are In

“This year’s award for best regional sales manager goes to…”

It’s safe to say that these words have never been spoken at any red-carpet event in the history of Hollywood. And, perhaps rightfully so. The general population could care less about your company’s sales revenue or top-performing contributors. (Their loss, right?)

Despite the public’s lack of concern, you and your team spend every waking moment thinking about the business. What is contributing to success? How can last year be beat? Which competitors are posing new threats? Thanks to your star-studded team, no question is too difficult to solve.

So, as “awards season” draws to a close in the entertainment industry, perhaps it’s time you instituted an award season of your own. Last year was a great year, so why not show your team how much they really mean to you? There’s no better time than now.

Here are a few possible awards to hand out:

Leading Sales Performer

I’m sure you have a suspicion of who your top-producing sales rep is. Thanks to your CRM, you don’t have to operate based purely on gut feelings. Because your company has been using Insightly for years, everything you need to identify your leading actor (I mean, sales performer) is just a few clicks away.

In fact, there are several different ways to access the same data. If I were in your shoes, I’d probably just jump into the “Reports” tab and begin customizing the standard “Opportunity Report.” As you can see in the following screenshot, I’ve decided to look at all closed opportunities for last year, grouped by the “Won” field.

By adding “Owner Name” into the report, you’ll arrive at a filterable view for last year’s deals. Apply additional groupings or export to tabulate last year’s top revenue producer.

Best Supporting Admin

The sales process doesn’t magically happen on its own (although you’re trying to automate as many things as possible with workflows!). Several years ago, you made the strategic decision to supplement the sales process by hiring virtual assistants for each rep. (A “supporting actor” of sorts.) This arrangement has worked out nicely. Sales reps are able to hand off many “back office” tasks, allowing them to stay focused on prospecting, proposals, and deal closures.

Your sales administrators perform a wide variety of tasks each day. From transcribing audio meeting minutes, to linking records, to proofreading proposals, your VAs are very busy people. It might seem overwhelming to determine which one is most deserving of special recognition.

Luckily, your virtual assistants are tracking all of their work as Insightly tasks. Much like the sales report we just built, last year’s productivity is fully queryable. With a few drags and drops, you’re able to see all of last year’s completed tasks, including which team members did the most work.

In some cases, simply looking at the number of tasks completed might not tell the entire story. For example, perhaps some of your VAs work more hours than others. Or, perhaps some crank out a ton of work but at a lower quality. These are all factors that should be considered before finalizing the award criteria.

Rising Star

Shifting attention back to the sales team, last year was a year marked by several new hires. In fact, somewhat to your surprise, you added a dozen additional sales reps. It might be smart to recognize the newbie who best exemplified your corporate mantra.

Clearly, you could go a lot of different directions with this award. Some reps were onboarded earlier in the year, so basing it purely on revenue wouldn’t seem fair. A better approach might include a variety of criteria, such as:

Lead-to-Opportunity Conversion Rate: What percentage of a rep’s leads end up converting into viable opportunities? Is this metric relatively consistent across all reps, or does one rep stand out from the pack?

Close Rate: How effective are your reps at closing deals? In theory, close rate should increase as your reps become more confident with the subject matter and customer segment. A rep who demonstrates a strong close rate early on might wind up becoming a leading performer in the future.

Average Value per Deal: Are some reps more effective at mixing in upsell and cross-sell messaging to clients?

When determining your “rising star” award, it might be wise to use a weighted average of these (or other) data points. It all depends on your business model.

Best Writer (or “Marketer”)

Without a compelling story, a film is nothing more than a moving picture with noise. The same could be same about business. To supplement the efforts of its sales cast, today’s growth-minded organization needs a skilled team of writers and marketers.

Like most companies these days, your business relies on a blended team of in-house marketing staff and freelancers. Between ongoing SEO efforts, email campaigns, and CPC promotions, your marketing team has its hand in many things.

The following data points could be useful for refining your marketing nominee list:

Top Blog Post(s): Log into your web analytics software and sort all of your blog posts by web traffic and/or lead conversions. Of the top-performing posts, which were written by whom? Do you notice a common thread?

Most-Opened Sales Emails: Your newsletters and promotional campaigns are likely sent via a bulk email system. Be sure to review open and click-through data in there, but don’t forget to also review the same information in your CRM.

Impactful Ad Campaigns: Who seems to generate the best ad campaign concepts? If you’re using projects to sequence and track campaigns, you can quickly build a report to uncover this information.

It’s Time to Spotlight Your Superstars

At face value, your business might not have the same glamour as that of tinseltown. But, in reality, your team members love their jobs as much (if not more) than the actors and actresses in Hollywood. Providing ample recognition, in whatever fashion, can be an effective way to show your appreciation, boost employee morale, and even improve future results.

It’s time to roll a red carpet of your own…

Or, beige would probably work, too.