Don’t Just Hire Freelancers – Outsource Your Management

Navigating the gig economy as a small business owner can feel overwhelming. Freelance and contract workers are more available than ever before, and can prove highly effective in maximizing both your budget and your company’s output – but hiring contracted help introduces a difficult maze of understanding, communication, and management that may be more draining for you than it’s worth. Fortunately, at Sales Renewal, we’ve become the experts in building and managing outsourced marketing teams designed to meet your business’ specific needs and goals!
When you attempt to hire freelancers yourself, you’ll likely encounter a very common barrier almost immediately: understanding the scope of their work to a level that allows you to make informed decisions. You may not have an extensive knowledge of marketing strategy, tasks, and tools to know if you are hiring the right people for your needs. Working with an outsourced management company puts years of experience and expertise at your fingertips, ensuring you’ll have the right team with the right skills to advance your goals effectively and cost-efficiently.
A single point of contact simplifies development and coordination of your marketing strategy, and increases accountability through organization. Having an expert manager at your disposal also means your needs and asks can be clearly communicated to the right personnel at the right time, streamlining strategy processes and producing higher quality results more quickly. When your strategy needs to pivot to a new tactic, your marketing manager can shift your outsourced team around the new goals without forcing you to start over with new hires and new relationships.
So when is the right time to reach out to an outsourced marketing manager? Generally, when you are facing a short term project or a very limited number of tactics to handle, traditional freelance roles may be sufficient. Once you’re looking for a longer term strategy incorporating numerous complementary tactics, though, juggling numerous freelancers becomes more difficult. This is the perfect time to bring in an experienced outsourced marketing agencythat can take your goals and run with them. Start-up businesses, for example, often hit a point in their development where adding an official marketing department is a stretch, but a freelancer or two can no longer keep up with the business needs. Building a relationship with a marketing management team can grow with the company and remain consistent throughout the lifetime of the business.
Outsourced management is also ideal at the end of a company’s lifetime, when you’re beginning your exit planning. As you prepare to sell your business, running marketing investment analyses can help you determine whether you’ll achieve the financial balance you’ll need to retire comfortably. You can ramp up your marketing to hit those numbers without adding or maintaining a marketing staff, which makes your business more appealing to potential buyers that won’t have to consider layoffs or employee integrations after acquiring your company. You’ll also offer your buyer the benefit of consistency and knowledge transfers, as your management team bridges the gap as you transition out of the company.
Freelancers can enhance your business in many ways, but to truly make the most of contracted marketing help, consider working with an experienced, outsourced marketing agency; especially one that shares the risk & reward! Learn more about the unique JointSourcing Solution to see how our team can build your business in a smooth, effective, and results-driven way!

5 Reasons You Shouldn’t Hire Non-Vetted Freelancers

Recruiting freelancers for your business can be a headache, especially when you’re trying to fill and manage positions you’re not always familiar with yourself. For Sales Renewal’s JointSourcing Solution, we routinely need to find and manage subcontractors (freelancers and other marketing agencies) as we assemble our client’s virtual marketing departments staff, and over the years we’ve gotten pretty good at vetting, verifying, and managing them. Here are some tips on how to carefully vet freelancers to prevent missed deadlines, communication issues, security breaches, and more.

Of course, we’d still be happy to help you not only build, but also manage, an outsourced marketing department that’s perfect for your business!

Read the full article at: www.smallbizdaily.com

Should You Stop Asking Your Customers for Reviews?

Because businesses have actively solicited customer reviews (and other feedback) for years, many online review sites look like over-caffeinated click-a-thons. It’s hard to sort out the helpful from the hype. But it’s clear that consumers want to consider other customers’ opinions and experiences before they buy – in other words, businesses need reviews. Savvy online shoppers, however, are becoming jaded, as they know they must read between the lines, sorting the real reviews from those that were planted or paid-for.

Business owners are sort of stuck between a rock and a hard place, too.

Yelp and Yext are both trying to help, in different ways.

Yext, the New Kid on the Block

Most people probably have heard of or have used Yelp’s reviews. These reviews live only on the Yelp site and help educate Yelp visitors on the businesses listed on Yelp.

Yext reviews are different. Yext reviews appear on only your site so are visible to all your visitors, and importantly, no competitors’ reviews appear (unlike on Yelp, where competitor reviews are 1-click away).

Also, and very notably, the average number of stars your business receives will appear in-line with Google’s search rankings.

How important is that?

According to Yext, internet users click 50% more often on starred listings than those without: because the stars make them stand out and because reviews truly influence buying behavior.

Remember, Search Engine Optimization (getting more traffic from search engines) is a 2-step process. First, your page has to rank well in Google’s search results (ideally on the first or second page) and second, visitors have to click on your listing rather than all the others on the search result page.

Most people forget that second step and that those noticeable stars will lead to more organic visitors to your site. (Read more about how the stars can can boost local rankings.)

Yelp Reviews

Since 2004, Yelp users have written about 150 million reviews, and the company works hard to help consumers sort out what’s real and what’s helpful. So while it may sound counter-intuitive for a review platform, Yelp strongly, clearly, and repeatedly has told businesses using its site to STOP asking their customers for reviews.

In 2018, that’s probably just a little too idealistic. “Everyone’s doing it” isn’t the best defense, but let’s be real: everyone’s doing it.

Wherever sales are made – online or off – shoppers are implored (and incented) to provide reviews. Receipts from Taco Bell, CVS, Kohls, Famous Footwear (among others) beg shoppers to rate their services, sauce packets, shoes, and to describe their service experience. Most of those requests come with incentives, and customers who complete reviews earn rewards ranging from points, coupons and free sandwiches to sweepstakes entries.

For its part, Yelp doesn’t seem to mind going against the grain. The company’s clearly-stated policy prohibits listed businesses from soliciting reviews directly from customers. Yelp regularly identifies organizations it believes is “gaming the system, ” and penalizes them.

But Everyone’s Doing It – And You Should Too

We like that Yelp is doing what it can to actively weed out reviews that don’t meet its standards.

The ground rules it has established for businesses are designed to serve customers as well as listed businesses (and Yelp of course).

In our opinion, Yelp should be concerned about the businesses that are trying to game the system (contests, discounts, fake reviews) but not target those which are acting in good faith when requesting that customers rate and review their products and services.

It should be noted that Yelp does recognize that most businesses are playing fair: the company points out that it recommends nearly three-quarters of the reviews on its site.

So Ask Your Customers for Reviews – And Don’t Stop There

Your prospects read reviews and weight them heavily in purchasing decisions. According to Forbes, “88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation.“

We recommend that our clients structure their businesses and train their staffs to stack the odds in their favor of getting good reviews by providing great products and services. We also recommend they manage those reviews by requesting that happy customers post reviews using Yext. The reviews can be automatically fed to a website – usually the Home or Testimonials Page, * and their stars will also appear in Google results when prospects are searching for your business.

Takeaway: Yext reviews and ratings being displayed on your website is good – and at the same time, your website gets more natural search traffic. A no brainer given Yext’s modest cost.

In other words, as long as you’re treating your customers (and review site partners) honestly, asking for reviews is good – and Yext reviews can make a good thing even better. Yelp reviews appear only on Yelp, but, that’s not necessarily bad. If you’re a local, B2C business in fact, it could be critically important so Yelp has its place in the review universe too. (Yelp may be all a local restaurant needs!)

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Questions about managing customer reviews, Yext, local search, or understanding how reviews sites affect buying behavior? Contact us.

* you do have a Testimonials page on your site, don’t you?

Love in Your Ring Wizard, the First-of-Its-Kind Online Ring Designer, Has Launched

Sales Renewal is pleased to announce the launch of Minter + Richter Designs’ new ecommerce site, http://www.MinterAndRichterDesigns.com, and the custom-built Love in Your Ring Wizard that seamlessly lives within it.

The site and unique App are great examples of Sales Renewal’s JointSourcing Solution at work: key business challenges were identified in the client’s JointSourcing Blueprint (e.g., streamlining customizations for millennial customers, increasing average sales price (ASP), lowering cost of sales). The sales-enabling technology was designed and developed as part of JointSourcing’s Build Services and is now being publicized and marketed as a key differentiator during the JointSourcing Sell Services step.

Our Client and Its Customers

Minter + Richter designs and handcrafts custom titanium wedding rings with a variety of inlay materials, from the well-known to the exotic. The typical Minter + Richter customer makes a single purchase, buying rings for that special, one-time occasion: their wedding.

The Sales Process

Each wedding or engagement band is hand-crafted and individually made based on the purchaser’s preferences. This means that clients have to provide information about ring sizes and choose the type of edges, finishes and interior colors for each ring, as well as care options (polishing and cleaning), and shipping and manufacturing times (standard, rush, shotgun rush) before the ring is made. This customization process was originally very involved and required hours of offline phone consultations and email exchanges, as well as missed opportunities for point-of-sale add-on purchases and upgrades.

The Sales and Marketing Challenges

Minter + Richter originally approached Sales Renewal because they wanted their site to rank better when their millennial buyers searched for wedding bands in Google. As we worked through our SEO planning process (Sales Renewal’s Blueprint phase), however, we both realized that while improving SEO was a worthwhile thing to do, there were more even important things to tackle first. For example: enhancing the selling capabilities of the website; creating an integrated marketing strategy (read more about the benefits of comprehensive, integrated marketing here) and overcoming some key business challenges (streamlining the customization process for their customers while simultaneously increasing the ASP and lowering the cost of sales). We knew that once these challenges were met, the other marketing tactics, like SEO, would be easier to put into place.

The eCommerce Solution

Our efforts focused on the redesign and optimization of the company’s Shopify-based website to increase per-transaction revenue and to streamline the sales process. A key piece of this was designing and building the Love in Your Ring Wizard. The Wizard is able to handle all the most popular customizations online in four streamlined, user-friendly steps. Ring sizing, finish options and even rush manufacturing are all clearly laid out, making it easy for customers who want to customize their ring to do so without jeopardizing the sales of customers who aren’t interested.

Early Results Point to Financial Success

Minter + Richter’s new website launched in mid-July, and from the first Wizard sale, the company has seen increased per-sale revenue as well as incredible time savings. The business – and Wizard – was recently publicized by Boston’s WCVB Channel 5 in their Made in Mass series. As reporter Doug Meehan says, Minter + Richter is “taking design in a brand new direction. [Minter + Richter] are the first in the country where you can completely design your wedding ring online.”

Sharing the Rewards & Risks in JointSourcing Works: Client Revenue Goes Up and Costs Go Down

Given that Sales Renewal’s JointSourcing is truly one-of-a-kind-there are no other Marketing General Contractors that shares the risk and reward-it is not surprising that it requires a bit more explanation than the familiar, fee-for-service, single-marketing-strategy (like PR, inbound marketing, advertising, direct mail, tradeshows, …) approach every other agency takes.

But numbers have a way at cutting to the heart of a matter, so here are three simple charts that show that JointSourcing increases leads and revenue (bar graphs in the charts below) while decreasing the per lead or sale cost (line graphs below). Note: To ensure client confidentiality, all chart data is expressed as relative to their initial period.

Manufacturer Client Performance Over 2.5 Years

During the 2.5 years from 1Q13 through 2Q15, JointSourcing increased qualified leads by 380%, a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 87% per year.

Because of JointSourcing’s increased productivity, while the client’s marketing budget did grow somewhat, it grew far, far slower than their leads did. As a result, JointSourcing decreased cost-per-lead by 74% (-42% CAGR).

Our strong, long-term relationship with Sales Renewal has been critical to Metro Sign & Awnings’ accelerating growth.

Because I wasn’t familiar with it when we first began almost 4 years ago, I was a little unsure of the JointSourcing “partnership, ” but I’m a big believer now.

Sales Renewal really treats the marketing of my business as if it were theirs – whether it’s going to bat for us with a vendor on their own or how proactive they are in analyzing and continuously optimizing our marketing.

This saves me time and allows me and my team to focus on sales. In fact, we have been getting so many leads that we are hiring more sales people to close all the new business.”

— Tom Dunn, Owner and VP of Sales & Marketing

eCommerce Client Performance Over 4 Years

During the 4 years 2010 to 2014, JointSourcing increased e-commerce sales by 170% (28% CAGR)

At the same time, JointSourcing decreased cost-per-sale by 33% (-7% CAGR).

Working with Sales Renewal is a real partnership, I know the floral business and Sales Renewal knows technology, marketing and sales.

I’ve been a small business owner for 26 years and I appreciate having someone who, thanks to its financial interest in my success, is almost as motivated as I am to grow my business.

— Helen Halloran, Owner

Different Levels of Marketing Investment Lead to Different Levels of Revenue Growth & Cost Savings

While from the accounting perspective marketing costs are considered an expense, an equally important way to view them is an investment: if you want your business to grow you have to invest in growing it. While the Concord Flower Shop has grown its web sales 28% per year while lowering its cost per sale 7% per year, Metro Sign & Awning has blown past even those impressive numbers, increasing its leads 87% per year and decreasing its cost per lead 42% per year.

These differences arise from the growth vs cost goals each business had which during the JointSourcing Blueprint, translated into the breadth and depth of their JointSourcing Solutions. Metro’s is more comprehensive and includes all of the important digital and real-world strategies for their business with each strategy nicely elaborated. The Concord Flower Shop’s JointSourcing Solution is focused just on online marketing and as you can see from the figure, invests about ¼ of what Metro does in marketing. It is this difference in budget, scope, resources and strategies that leads to their different growth & savings rates.

For a more detailed understanding of Sales Renewal’s unique JointSourcing Solution, please see these JointSourcing™ in Action case studies:

• JointSourcing: a Breakthrough Solution with Stellar Client Results – a more detailed explanation of JointSourcing’s results
• Collaboration Leads to New Strategies, Brand, Site, Marketing Programs and … a Blue Ribbon
• Sales Renewal Corp. Wins Battle Against Google Adwords on Behalf of Its Client Metro Sign & Awning
• How the Concord Flower Shop More Than Double Its Online Sales and was Ranked in the Top 1% of Local Businesses by Google

What Skills to Look for When Hiring or Assembling a Marketing Team

Since our beginning in the depths of the Great Recession in 2009, Sales Renewal has been extolling the importance of hiring a broad and deep team to grow a business' revenue (aka, Marketing). While we understood that there would always be need for brand-focused and creative people, we also understood that the Team would have to expand beyond the boundaries of traditional and digital Marketing to include business analysts, marketing strategists and a fair number of technologists too.

Ready-Fire-Aim Marketing And Why It Will Likely Blow Back On You

Too many businesses today practice Ready-Fire-Aim Marketing:

1. They get some seemingly intelligent, point specific advice from a blog post / newsletter / trade association / colleague / brother-in-law (pick one).
2. They spend little time understanding the advice (who can invest time to think things through when we need leads!) and whether it’s their most critical problem (it was important to this other guy who we know nothing about so it must be important to our business right?)
3. They quickly try to implement the suggestion (who needs experience and expertise when we can read 1 or 2 help pages?)
4. They’re unhappy with the result, so next time some seemingly intelligent advice appears, they’re onto the new fad and start the cycle again.

The truth is that changing human behavior (also known as Marketing) is damn hard and very complex, so to be done well, it requires thoughtful strategies, plans and goals carried out by experienced practitioners who are correctly motivated.

Another problem with this scattershot approach is that marketing’s many different tactics are dependent on each other so to act on one point specific tactic alone is often a recipe for failure. For example, even if you got the best advertising advice in the world from Mr. Adwords himself, if your website is poorly designed or you have no content to offer ad clickers in return for their email address, you are likely going to waste your ad money (i.e., because advertising’s effectiveness depends not just on advertising but on how well it “integrates” with all the other marketing tactics you’re using). So to be effective, your tactics can’t be handled in isolation, you need an integrated, comprehensive approach.

This is made much harder by the recent explosion of sales and marketing tactics, and the vendors that sell them. ChiefMartec.com has reported a doubling of the number of sales & marketing providers in one year, growing to 1, 876 vendors across 43 categories:

So what’s a business owner to do? It’s not like you can call any one of these 1, 876 vendors and ask what they think you should do (because, not surprisingly, the SEO firms will tell you SEO is the solution to all your problems, the ad agencies will say advertising, PR firms, PR and so on).

Instead, you need a firm that’s thinking about it from your perspective (what are your business’ lowest hanging needs) not what tactic they sell (SEO, advertising, PR). And while it’s great to be open to new advice as you encounter it (even from your brother-in-law), and there is a role for “gut instinct”, there is no substitute for having a comprehensive, integrated sales & marketing plan implemented, and continuously improved upon, by a skilled team motivated to grow your sales.

Two Solutions that Prevent Marketing Fails

Sales Renewal’s two growth solutions-the JointSourcing Solution and the Marketing Essential Solution-overcome the challenges that too often cause small business marketing to fail. Both begin by developing a growth plan specific to your business and both provide all the people, expertise and tools needed to implement the plan and grow your sales without you having to pay their full-time cost in salaries, benefits or management time.

And unlike Inbound Marketing firms or single-tactic vendors who have a vested interest in their specific approach, Sales Renewal is a Marketing General Contractor that can deliver all possible marketing strategies & tactics. Sales Renewal’s only bias then is towards the quickest and most cost effective ways to grow your sales.

JointSourcing Solution™ (“joint venture” + “insourcing”) is a comprehensive strategy, marketing and technology solution that insources all the expertise (drawn from across the entire sales & marketing spectrum) in just the right proportions your business needs. This team handles all the day-to-day marketing and technology work that grow leads and sales (and demands so much of your time now), while Sales Renewal shares with you its management, and a portion of the rewards and risks (similar to a joint venture).

Marketing Essentials Solution™ is a easy-to-adopt, guided marketing and technology solution that grows small businesses. It is tailored to your specific business to deliver the essential mix of the marketing tactics & programs and sales-enabling technology that all businesses need to increase leads and sales (and includes online advertising and search engine optimization).

Omni-Channel Marketing for Your Business

We try to stay away from using buzz words to get our message across, but lately we’ve seen a term emerge that gets to the core of what Sales Renewal is all about. Omni-channel marketing – removing silos, putting the customer front and center, approaching ROI from an integrated perspective – describes a shift in how businesses are trying to maximize performance and consistency across all marketing channels to create a unified experience for their customers.

From Multi- to Omni-Channel Marketing

The concept of omni-channel marketing has come about due to a convergence of technology in the hands of the consumer and the availability of Big Data (sorry, another buzz word) for marketers. Today, prospects and customers have more and more control over how they interact with businesses – from online to in store purchases, from website to email to social media sites, on a smartphone or on a desktop. And businesses have more and more access to data that allows them to connect with prospects and customers with customized messaging, from marketing automation to dynamic website content to SMS messages to social media interactions. And omni-channel marketing is what connects all these experiences together.

The following articles offer more insights about omni-channel marketing:

The Omni-Channel Experience: Marketing Meets Ubiquity (Forbes): The article sums up omni-channel as: “a reflection of the choice that consumers have in how they engage a brand, and therefore is best represented as how brands enable their clients and consumers to use these channels to engage with them.”

The Definition of Omni-Channel Marketing – Plus 7 Tips (Marketo): “We’re moving away from mass, “push”-based marketing, and towards more personalized, 1:1 communication with consumers, through the many channels and on the many devices they use…Unfortunately, when it comes to omni-channel, multi-device marketing, consumers today are way ahead of most marketers.”

Multi-channel vs. Omni-channel Marketing: Is There a Difference, and What Does It Mean to You? (eContent): “More [technology] options mean more opportunities for marketers to connect with and engage their markets. But it also means a great deal more complexity. Keeping interactions consistent across multiple channels and ensuring a seamless experience for consumers is the new challenge.”

If you’re a JointSouring customer, then rest assured we are committed to offering your prospects and customers a unified, “omni-channel” experience. If you’re interested in finding out more, please contact us.

6 T-U-R-K-E-Y Tips We’re Thankful for in Our Online Marketing, Analytics-Driven World

It’s time for our annual “what we’re thankful for” post, and this year, we’re serving up the main dish, T-U-R-K-E-Y. Got some turkeys of your own? Let us know about them in the comments below.

Happy Thanksgiving from Sales Renewal!

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T is for the Tools we use every day: We love tools like Yext for efficient Local Marketing; Scoop.it for our traffic grabbing digital clipping service; Moz.com, ahrefs.com, Google Analytics and our own “SRA” (Sales Renewal Analytics) for monitoring, measuring and analyzing marketing performance and ROI.

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U is for Understanding: that one of the central keys to success is the ability to communicate accurately and effectively. It’s a skill you never stop learning, never stop using. Here’s a smart way to think about your efforts to communicate that will help you in almost every situation. U is also for understanding the right way to go about hiring a marketing firm to help with your marketing. Here are five key questions to ask.

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R is for making our sites Responsive: If you don’t know if yours is responsive (a.k.a. mobile-friendly), or if you don’t know what we mean, you can read more here.

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K is for Keywords: Where would online marketing be without them? Of course, the days when the main goal was to rank #1 for a keyword have long gone. But keywords are still, well, key to our business – from developing content for a website to monitoring actions resulting from SEO efforts.

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E is for Employees: Don’t go it alone! Working with a team can go a long way to lightening the work load when managing a blogging and social media program. It is also in keeping with the “social” part of social media and social networking. Here’s how a successful content marketing program begins with your employees.

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Y is for Yes, you can have fun: At Sales Renewal, we lighten up our week with a different SalesMemes every Friday. Plenty of fun and banter goes into creating this series of humorous looks at ways to grow, and NOT grow, revenue, but there’s also a lot of thought involved to keeping them relevant and on-message. Subscribe to this blog to keep up with Huckster Hank, Bad Execution Bob, Smug Marketer Sam, Good Execution Erica, Trustworthy Tom, and Good Marketer Grace.

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