Scaling companies would be a lot easier if companies behaved more like sports teams.
Training in most companies halts after onboarding. This is part of the reason why tenure in a lot of roles (especially executives) is below 2 years. In a market where the demand for talent far supersedes the supply of talent, internal training can be a competitive advantage.
Hire high potential employees and invest in them by:
Each of these empowers team members to come back to the company with capabilities to contribute even more.
As they level up based on your investment, reward them with higher compensation to recognize their increased ability to contribute.
If your business model doesn't allow you to invest in team...
Increasing team member tenure can be one of the keys to unlocking growth long-term.
Each time you lose someone, you take on the added tangible costs of onboarding and training replacements + the intangible costs of lost institutional memory.
This is why employee satisfaction and retention is not an HR issue. It is one of the biggest growth priorities for companies yet unfortunately not treated as such.
People leave companies for a variety of reasons. These include:
Level 1 - Salary, Title, Benefits. What do I financially gain from working here?
Level 2 - Safety, Security. Can I trust this company / leadership to take care of my needs?
Level 3 - Culture. Do the values of this company resonate with me personally?
Level 4 - Opportunity. Do I see a path for personal and professional growth here?
Level 5 - Alignment. Does this align with my long-term goals?
Each leader in a business must be fully attuned to these questions and proactively engage team members to ensure all 5 levels are...
Immature organizations view growth as a Sales-only problem. These are the organizations where:
Mature organizations, by contrast, view growth as a holistic problem, owned by everyone in the organization. To scale, they ask themselves questions like:
Immature organizations miss all these growth avenues because their conversations are one-dimensionally focused on sales just working harder.
What these organizations don't realize is that putting less pressure on...
Companies often confuse what their intellectual property really is.
This is why as things start to work, people notice and start to make the similar things — why wouldn’t they when it’s working?
But the medium and format are not the secret sauce.
Instead, here are things that actually create differentiation:
Anyone can imitate a portion of the whole,...
Always helping your prospect get closer to their stated and unstated goals has to be the simplest, most effective sales advice.
It means adopting principles like:
All three of these involve having Marketing play a major role. Marketing needs to:
The problem with marketing is that some channels are easy to attribute through to revenue, while others are not.
This is why "correlation" is, in many cases, more important than "attribution".
Understanding this concept takes understanding how buyers are really behaving.
If you think your buyers are making decisions only by searching on Google, a lot of marketing activity will seem irrelevant. This is why attribution tools don't tell the story well for non-linear channels.
It's easy to talk about if a lead from Google Ads became an opportunity. It's hard to talk about the value of a Facebook video view or a Podcast download or a YouTube channel.
This is why Correlation is more important than attribution, especially for activities related to content.
The entire environment you create for buyers across all marketing activities is what impacts conversions. If you pull one thread, you may end up impacting revenue on the other end.
You just won't be able to directly attribute it.
Most marketing campaigns stop getting funding well before their true pipeline value is understood.
Why?
Because marketing leaders are constantly being asked for an immediate return on their efforts.
Unrealistic pipeline growth expectations from CEOs and boards lead to the exact opposite result of what they are hoping to achieve.
Pipeline growth takes time. You need to:
Meanwhile, the potential of channels and campaigns are judged on their first iteration. This is why you hear things like:
"Facebook Ads don't work for us"
"This is a relationship based business so we have to go to events"
"Why would I give more money to marketing when I can hire 2 more sales reps?"
Etc.
Similar to how sales reps become more valuable after full ramp up + training + pipeline building, marketing becomes more valuable after experimentation + better distribution + better messaging.
Not only is giving...
Building an audience takes time. This is the 100th drawing of SaaS Marketing Simplified. Here are the biggest lessons from the journey so far:
Things like gated content, newsletters, webinars and drip sequences still have some value but customers don't pay attention to these mediums like they used to.
Instead, they'll:
All of these nurture touch points that companies do not try to orchestrate enough.
Instead, the obsession with attribution leads to the creation of gated e-books and downloads so that you can source a lead to a particular channel and add lead scoring as certain steps are taken.
In the process, you may have better attribution metrics but lose the overall picture of what's actually driving revenue.
Your prospects want to be nurtured across multiple channels, mediums and formats. Those are the brands they end up trusting more.
The best businesses leverage automation wherever possible. The worst businesses have virtually no automation and require custom human intervention every time.
Automation and repeatable systems have two benefits:
The second benefit is the most overlooked when building companies. Surely, you can still build a lot of enterprise value without automation.
But you will also surely have more unhappy employees and customers, which is the exact opposite of what businesses should hope to achieve.
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