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!

Six Ways Going “Green” Can Boost Your Bottom Line

We’ve heard it over and over again: it’s important for the environment to work “green” or eco-friendly initiatives into our lives whenever we can. For individuals, the path to a greener lifestyle is simpler, but for businesses, an eco-conscious approach may seem difficult to integrate at first.  We think there are plenty of green initiatives your small business can adopt – and they’ll also be great for your bottom, and sometimes top, lines.
 
1. Grow your business by marketing your eco-friendly products, services and expertise
In every industry, there’s a largely untapped segment of buyers that values and is willing to pay for green products, services and expertise. Metro Sign & Awning (a Sales Renewal JointSourcing client), for example, wanted to cultivate new Partners who’d recommend their signage products and services in the Partners’ new construction projects. With our help, Metro created a series of white papers that helped Architects and Property Developers become more knowledgeable about green signage.  The idea was that by making these prospective partners more knowledgeable about something Metro was expert at (eco-friendly signage), the partners would come off as more knowledgeable in front of their customers. This brought more business back to Metro as well, creating a clever – and successful – marketing campaign that not only built their own business, but also enhanced their partnerships while doing double duty for sustainability.
 
2. Share the knowledge.
Do your products and services have a long-term environmental impact? Let your customers know how working with you can impact THEIR green initiatives and bottom line! Outline both the financial and ecological ROI on a sustainable product. Generate content that discusses how your eco-friendly products can reduce your customers’ carbon footprint or eliminate their waste over time. By leveraging your own environmental consciousness into a marketing campaign, you’ll encourage your customers to invest in your products and services, while also doing double duty for sustainability! You can also grow your partners’ businesses by sharing your own green expertise, helping your partners win more customers through the wisdom you’ve passed to them.
 
3. Think outside the (recycling) box.
Green initiatives at your company aren’t limited to benefitting ONLY your company. Get creative with your business’ approach to environmental friendly decision making. Understand your carbon footprint and consider participating in carbon offset programs to supplement and enhance any company policies you have already implemented. Use your business voice to align with policy initiatives that align with your company’s values. Customers in the modern era are heavily attracted to purpose-driven businesses that publicly share – and take action on – their values. You’ll not only be doing the earth a favor, but you’ll be gaining favor with and growing your customer base!
 
4. Assess your energy needs.
Are you leaving equipment or lighting on overnight? Are you heating a conference room you only use once per week? Minimizing wasted energy sources will not only help the environment, but will also put a nice dent into your energy bills. Switch to LED lighting in place of incandescent bulbs, and put your lights on motion sensors to ensure lights are turned off when not in use. Set computers and other office equipment to hibernate or switch into sleep mode during periods of inactivity. Consider switching to laptops, which are more energy-efficient than desktops, whenever possible. You may also be eligible for rebates on your energy costs if you’re upgrading to eco-friendly equipment, so contact your energy supplier to see what incentives they may offer!
 
5. Assess your physical office needs.
Your business’ office footprint is your own piece of the environment, and needs as much care and consideration as the great outdoors. Find an office that is the right size for your needs to prevent wasted energy from heating and lighting spaces that are unused. When upgrading equipment or furnishing your office or workspaces, shop secondhand when possible (something Covid has made a lot easier with all the office downsizing going on now). Look for energy efficient machinery, or for sustainably built furniture that will outlast other construction. Or, consider eliminating your rent bill completely by allowing your employees to work remotely! Remote offices reduce pollution from commuting to and from the office, and reduce your employees’ gas and wear & tear expenses, so it’s a win all around!
 
6. Assess your paper needs.
Printing and paper use is a prime target for small businesses to make an impact with a few simple changes. Printing on both sides of each sheet will cut both your paper waste and your paper cost in half instantly. Or, use the back side of printed papers as scratch paper for note taking instead of purchasing sticky notes or other notepads. Or, consider going paperless completely! With the proliferation of cloud computing, records storage and document sharing can be done without a single sheet of paper; marketing can be managed online through email campaigns, social media, and websites; even sales and accounting can be migrated to online payment programs and bookkeeping software. Never buy another ream, nor another clunky printer or copier, again!

Benefits of Gender Diversity

With International Women’s Day happening this month, you may have seen your news feeds filled with appreciation, support, and celebration of women everywhere. Though that hasn’t always been the case for women in the workplace, the gender gap is rapidly closing – and the economic benefits of gender diversity has become readily apparent. Study after study has proven that the inclusion of women in business environments has direct and indirect financial benefits. In the US alone, gender equality practices and policies could inject over $4 trillion into the economy in the next five years, with gender-diverse businesses in some sectors showing up to 14% higher average revenue and up to 19% higher average quarterly net profit than less-diverse counterparts. 
Why does gender diversity return such large economic benefits? One reason is that prioritizing gender diversity within the workplace allows businesses to draw from a much wider talent pool. With women typically obtaining college degrees at a higher rate than their male counterparts, this opens the door to more hiring options with a wider variety of experiences and viewpoints, while still maintaining a high level of knowledge and ability. Inclusivity has been flagged as an important employment decision factor by 85% of women, so not only does gender diversity grow the available hiring pool, it also actively attracts those highly capable workers away from other companies, giving your business the marketplace advantage when seeking talent. Increased diversity of opinions and viewpoints also enhances your business’ opportunity to think outside the box while simultaneously providing a better internal representation of your external market.
Once women are on board, incorporating gender diverse policies further increases creativity, retention, productivity, and loyalty. A culture of inclusivity boosts morale and promises greater opportunities for advancement and overall job satisfaction. Women are more likely to feel heard and able to safely communicate their ideas and feedback, making them more likely to stay invested in their work with a positive mindset. Additionally, gender diverse policies addressing issues like family leave and affordable childcare can facilitate a fusion and balance of family and career (which benefits men too); under such policies, women have experienced lower stress levels during pregnancy, were up to 93% more likely to return back to the workforce within one year of giving birth, and were more likely to increase their working time by up to 17% within three years. Building a more inclusive workplace keeps your talented employees working at higher efficiency and output rates for longer, while staying happier and more loyal, contributing greater long-term ROIs on your hiring practices.

Inclusivity in the workplace has been proven to provide businesses with clear, measurable advantages and successes over less inclusive organizations. Companies are more likely to hit financial goals, generate innovations, be considered high-performing, and experience better business outcomes when diversity is present and embraced through company culture and policy. Creating a gender-diverse environment in the workplace has also demonstrated large-scale economic boosts in many ways, as well, documented in a 2016 report from the United Nations.  When plotted against the gender inequality index, data consistently shows the most gender-equal countries are the most developed, have the highest income per capita, are associated with faster economic growth, and experience stronger national competitiveness. Gender diversity and inclusivity are key building blocks to business success and directly impact your business’ bottom line.
Assess your company’s diversity and inclusion levels, and learn how to enhance your current office culture and policies to produce greater business benefits, with this simple checklist from Glassdoor.
 

Sales Renewal Launches Strategic Marketing Consulting Practice

Businesses Turn to Sales Renewal to Create Strategies that Drive Success

Concord, Mass.—Oct 20, 2020—Sales Renewal, building on the success of its outsourced marketing offering, the JointSourcing Solution™, is pleased to announce the launch of its new, standalone Strategic Marketing consulting practice.
Since its founding in 2009, Sales Renewal has been offering JointSourcing (“joint venture” + “outsourcing”), a unique, one-stop marketing solution that shares risk & reward and provides everything a small business needs to grow its revenue and brand. This includes a fractional CMO for marketing strategy, a VP of Marketing for day-to-day marketing management, and all the people and technology required to create their custom marketing plan and then implement and manage it under one-year contracts.

Strategic Marketing Is in Our DNA

Resolving critical, strategic challenges has always been a focus for JointSourcing clients and overcoming them, a key driver of their success. Due to recent market demand, Sales Renewal is pleased to offer its Strategic Marketing expertise and experience to any business whether they are interested subsequent JointSourcing implementation and outsourcing or not.
Strategic Marketing is challenging because it overlaps many diverse disciplines that have their own consultants with narrow, specialized expertise: marketing tactics for marketing agencies, business strategy for management consultants, sales strategy for sales consultants and product/service strategy for product marketers.
Marketing agencies, for example, are usually ill-equipped to address deep strategic questions because they are more experienced working on short term, tactical projects where such questions do not often arise. Management consultants, meanwhile, have the opposite problem: they tend to focus on devising strategies without much consideration of the cost effectiveness of the tactics required to implement them.
“Sales Renewal has always been a bit unusual because the core of JointSourcing has always been about getting the fundamental strategies right,” said Keith Loris, Sales Renewal’s president & CEO. “We have always understood how critical the underlying strategy is to determining ultimate marketing success. That’s why Sales Renewal has developed the diverse expertise, wide ranging experience, and well-honed processes that Strategic Marketing demands. It is also important to realize that our recommended strategies are not Big Enterprise strategies; instead, they have always been informed by our real-world experiences running marketing programs for small business clients with small business budgets.”

Strategic Marketing Can Assist Clients With:

About

Since 2009, Sales Renewal has been offering JointSourcing, a unique, outsourced marketing solution that shares risk & reward while providing everything a small business needs to grow its revenue and brand: a fractional CMO for marketing strategy, a VP of Marketing for day-to-day marketing management, and all the people and technology required to develop, implement and manage your custom marketing plan. Importantly, JointSourcing employs a shared risk/reward business model, which, thanks to its pay-for-performance aspects, aligns its economic interests with its clients. Sales Renewal’s Strategic Marketing Consulting practice builds on JointSourcing’s many years of success.
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Sales Renewal’s Strategic Consulting Service Helps Law Firm Pivot with New Business Model

Sales Renewal is often asked to help clients wrestling with challenging strategic decisions, whether it’s adjusting their business and marketing strategies to their new Covid realities (something that has unfortunately become way too common), reducing their time-to-first-dollar from prospects in their pipeline or devising a go-to-market strategy for a new product or service they’re considering.
This video, for example, discusses Sales Renewal’s work with Eno Martin Donahue & Roth LLP, a 130-year-old law firm with offices in MA and NH, that needed a go-to-market strategy for a new service idea that had three ambitious goals:

1. Changing the way small and midsize businesses think of, and engage with, their attorneys.
2. Growing the firm’s outside general counsel business (lawyers who perform the strategic & legal functions in-house attorneys do in bigger enterprises); a recurring revenue stream highly coveted in the transaction-heavy legal business.
3. Structuring the new service so that the attorneys did not have to “sell” it (which they loathe doing).

Many small business owners are not aware of the benefits that having a closer relationship with a business attorney can provide and the uncertainty around cost—and fear of a running meter—prevents most from ever reaching out.
Working closely with the partners at Eno Martin, Sales Renewal helped flesh out and shape their vision for a new subscription-based legal service for small and midsize businesses. The result, My Outside General Counsel (MOGC), is designed to make it easy & affordable for business owners to benefit from ongoing legal & business counsel, a strategic capability formerly limited to large enterprises.
With Sales Renewal’s help, MOGC was developed into a formal program with a variety of clearly defined benefits and costs, transparently laid out at MyOutsideGeneralCounsel.com. Four different tiers of service, each with increasing monthly benefits, allow business owners to choose a tier based on their legal needs and budget.
Unlike other legal services websites, MyOutsideGeneralCounsel.com is completely transparent about the program, how it works, what is included at each level and most importantly, its fees. By combining an abundance of information on the site and explaining how MOGC leverages the common and well-understood “freemium” web business model, prospects readily understand this new service, thereby shortening their time in the pipeline.
Since lawyers are, by nature, reluctant salespeople, the logical progression the model presents to simply slide to a different tier when it becomes clear that more work is needed, means clients don’t need a hard sell to recognize when they need to move up.
Listen to Keith Loris, President and CEO of Sales Renewal, talk with David Yas of Podcast617 to learn more about how Sales Renewal worked with our client to successfully develop MOGC, from concept through launch.

Webinar: Considerations for Adapting Your Business and Marketing Strategies for the New Normal

The New Normal for Business and Marketing Strategies

As businesses around the country try to assess what’s next after the big Shut Down, many are realizing that it won’t be “business as usual”, not just because of the reopening guidelines imposed by the government, but because customers and clients may not feel comfortable reentering the same old economy and now have a brand new set of expectations around service delivery.
Major brands are highlighting their contactless, distanced ways of doing business, even if they’re not so different than they were before. Pizza Hut promises that once your pizza comes out of the oven, the only person who touches it is you; we hope that this was true pre-Covid as well, but conveying that sense of comfort is important these days.
Leading-edge service delivery models, such as purchasing a new car online, may have been targeting early adopters pre-Covid, but are suddenly becoming mainstream. Drive-by document signing is now an accepted way of closing a deal. Even voting by mail is gaining traction since people are wary of physically entering crowded places.

How Will You Adapt?

There is no doubt that the key to winning back customers in the new normal is trust. Trust that you, as a business, understand your customers’ concerns and are doing everything in your power to keep them safe.
While some businesses may need to address fundamental operational and human resource processes, much of adapting your business to the new normal revolves around messaging, positioning, and communication (such as the Pizza Hut example.) In other words, around marketing.
First, show your customers you are doing the right thing. Keep your premises (including parking lots, entrances, and lobbies) spotless and common spaces delineated for distancing. Provide PPE for all employees and ensure they wear it to show your organization is not cutting any safety corners. Enforce all scientific and medical recommendations for safety and physical distancing — not just because it’s the right thing to do but also to signal to employees, prospects and customers that you take their safety seriously.
And then, tell them. Build trust by making sure clients and customers know and understand you’re doing what you can to keep them safe. Messaging, positioning and signaling in the new normal should focus on health, safety, and well being.

Professional Service Firms

Professional service firms have particular challenges in this pandemic environment because of their historic reliance on face-to-face marketing tactics (e.g., networking, events, seminars) which desperately need to be updated for a minimal contact world.
Even more challenging is their tendency to have a single, all encompassing service that is critically important to their prospects, presented as a take-it-or-leave-it offer, which results in very long sales cycles (e.g., signing up for a wealth management service is a very consequential decision so prospects are very careful and take their time).
To shorten the time-to-first-dollar,  we recommend “unbundling” services to create tiered offerings that build on each other and provide a natural upgrade path. More on this can be found in Crafting Products and Services to Reduce Time-to-First-Dollar.

Sales Renewal Can Help

Sales Renewal is working with all of our clients on refining their business and marketing strategies for the New Normal. Whether it’s shortening the “time-to-first-dollar”, implementing minimal contact sales and marketing programs, creating alternatives to traditional  face-to-face marketing, or revamping communications to earn trust, contact us to learn what we can do for you.

Proud to Work Alongside Our Non-Profit Clients

While Sales Renewal is best known for our one-stop marketing solutions, JointSourcing and Marketing Essentials, we are equally happy to work on smaller-scale projects. One of our strengths at Sales Renewal is that we work across a variety of different industries, offering unique perspectives that can shed new light on traditional strategies and “the way things have always been done”. Some of the work we are most proud of has been for non-profits, spanning educational, government, cultural, healthcare, and religious institutions, for which we have developed a number of innovative solutions on an a la carte basis. Our a la carte clients pick and choose what’s most important to them at that point in time, a perfect fit for clients who are budget-sensitive or may need help with one or two discreet marketing tactics such as a new website, an online membership directory, an events calendar, or online donation capabilities, without the ongoing commitment of a longer term program. Here we highlight a few examples of our project work for non-profit clients.
The Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation at Harvard Law School (CHLPI), which advocates for legal, regulatory, and policy reforms to improve the health of underserved populations, turned to Sales Renewal to to help solve the problem of accessing the large number of documents housed in their Health Library, including published research, academic articles, and legal documents. Sales Renewal created a custom search system for CHLPI’s Health Library Publications that integrated multiple off-the-shelf plugins to meet their requirements at an affordable price. In addition to the classic series of filters, we created a visual map-based filter for a more user-friendly, interactive interface for selecting state specific publications.
We find that an important consideration for many non-profits is being able to manage and maintain their website in-house. When the Concord MA Chamber of Commerce struggled with how to manage their ever-growing paper membership directory, Sales Renewal proposed moving this document online and incorporating it into a new, easy to maintain website, also created by Sales Renewal. A unique challenge on this project was the fact that, due to the generous terms of the contract with their third party mailing house, the physical mailing actually produces an important stream of revenue for the Chamber. We were able to implement a solution that brings the directory into the modern world without losing this revenue by creating two versions: an interactive, online directory as well as the traditional hard copy, also available as an easy-to-read online flip book. Once everything was in place and with some initial training, we were able to turn the reins over to the Chamber to manage and maintain the directory and the website themselves.
Similarly, The Armenian Church turned to Sales Renewal to create a new website including an online events calendar and online donation system to keep their congregation and friends engaged and informed. After we created an easy-to-read, and importantly, easy-to-update events calendar within an updated website, the church is now able to maintain their own online presence to more effectively connect with their community.
The Boston Musician Association is a labor union (local 9-535) representing over 1,600 professional musicians in the Boston metro area and beyond. When creating its new website, the association had two main goals: 1) to provide a central place for its members to stay informed publicize their own upcoming events, and compare notes on venues and employers, and 2) to make it easy for the public to find musicians they could hire to perform, or who could provide instruction in a variety of instruments. Sales Renewal’s challenge was to automate this process to avoid the need for manual data entry as much as possible and we continue to work with this client to fully integrate and automate these important functions. The Music Buyers Guide, created by Sales Renewal, provides a central repository of musicians, sorted by the instruments they play and includes a full biography of their experience. The musicians themselves are able to send changes to their profiles directly from the site making for fast and easy updates.
As these very different clients show, Sales Renewal has the breadth and depth of experience to handle any size project and we are happy to work with our non-profit clients to make the most of their limited budgets. Often, seemingly daunting challenges can be handled can quickly and efficiently if the right expertise is brought to bear. Learn more about our a la carte services and how Sales Renewal can help your non-profit benefit from a new approach to marketing.

Surveys, Complaints, and the Value of Regularly Scheduled Listening

Who doesn’t get excited about survey responses, right? Right?!

In case it’s not coming through on screen, that was written in a sarcastic tone. Creating and managing customer surveys online (or paper, or phone surveys) is rarely earthshaking. Survey response rates are often low, and responses tend to roll in rather slowly. But the insight from even a very small number of respondents can be invaluable to planning and executing your marketing and sales strategy.

Customer Surveys Are Worthwhile

Low response rates do not necessarily indicate failure. The voice of the customer always has value. An ongoing collection of input (and responding to that input) positions your company to be successful in several key areas.

Our advice? Keep asking questions. And even more important: Listen.

Of course there are things you can do to improve your customer surveys and response rates. See below for tips to improve your surveys and feedback forms. But remember, how you handle the process and what you do with the responses is every bit as important as the collection process. To put it simply, you need to make listening to the customer a habit.

Customer Stories = Marketing Gold

If you don’t already monitor your “listening” channels, make a list and check it twice (or more) in the coming year. A robust website should have several touchpoints or data collection tools. Consider how you use those on your website:

• RFP/RFQ Buttons
• Contact Forms
• Social Sharing icons
• Sign up for newsletters/promotional communications
• Thank you for shopping with us auto-responders
• Sale cancelled/abandoned cart follow-up emails with surveys

Employees, Vendors and Partners Have Stories Too

Speaking of the voice of the customer, one thing we hear repeatedly from our small business customers is how valuable it is to have regularly scheduled marketing meetings with a team of people – both internal staff (a cross-functional team is great) and in-sourced marketing experts. In monthly marketing meetings with our clients, we consider all customer reviews, complaints, survey results, anecdotes, and other input, and discuss it briefly in the opening few minutes of a monthly marketing meeting. That input informs not only marketing strategies but often, also the company’s overall business direction.

Hidden Value, Surprising Benefits of Using Surveys in Your Business

We say surveys are a marketing “gold mine” because surveys –

• Provide a mechanism to listen to customers
• Personalize your brand
• Strengthen your relationship with your customers. (Even if they don’t complete your survey, making one available creates a line of communication.)

Listen, and Share

While constantly running promotions and discounting your products is not recommended, listening all the time absolutely is. We’ll go so far as to call it a best practice. But, listening isn’t enough. Listening and using customer feedback to improve operations isn’t even enough. You have to share, too.

By the way, this is one of the reasons why we like Yext Ultimate Reviews so much – the powerful tool makes getting client reviews and adding them to your website easy and attractive – and because of its design, businesses that use it see increased natural search traffic to their sites. More on that in a future post.

Letting your customers and prospects know what you’ve learned from them is part of the process. People like to know that they’ve been heard; they’re interested in hearing what others think about the same thing; and they LOVE IT when a company makes changes based on their imput. So sharing on your website, newsletter, social channels, and in face to face marketing events (like trade shows or at point-of-purchase displays) is critically important to getting the best ROI on your survey program.

When you continually seeking feedback, ideas and other input from customers you’ll gain insight that will help you make good business decisions. You’ll also gain a reputation as a company that’s receptive, and easy to work with.

Not a bad way to start a New Year.

Regularly-scheduled meetings are a hallmark of the JointSourcing client relationship. We are committed to listening to our clients, and to their customers, in order to recognize and respond quickly and wisely to changing market demands and opportunities. Need a partner to help you listen and respond to your customers in order to grow your business? We’d love to help you start a conversation with your customers – and meet your sales growth goals.