Gratefulness: Reflecting On 2019 And Looking Ahead To 2020

Gratefulness: Reflecting On 2019 And Looking Ahead To 2020

by | Nov 26, 2019 | Insights, Storytelling & Branding

Gratefulness: Reflecting On 2019 And Looking Ahead To 2020

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To clients, partners, team members, advisors, and other friends of &Marketing

 

As the close of 2019 is upon us, we want to use this opportunity to reflect on the story that our company has written this year, and since the beginning of &Marketing just a couple of years ago. Our story is filled with several different chapters — from ones about learning, challenges, and growth, to perseverance, partnerships, and successes! However, the one common thread in every chapter is how we deeply care about our work, our people, and our clients’ successes.

We at &Marketing are truly grateful for the trust you have placed in us this year, and we thank you for being part of our story. Working with you has allowed us to challenge ourselves to ensure we are supporting your business in a way that makes us better, both at our jobs and as people.

Thanksgiving is an excellent time to reflect  – ups and downs, adventures and surprises, challenges, and successes. This past year has taught us so much and we are full of gratitude.    

During 2019 &Marketing had the privilege of partnering with a nonprofit organization, The Kind Like Joey Foundation. Joey’s legacy was one of kindness – which we embrace as a business practice and as a personal mantra. While the foundation offers many ways of advocating acts of kindness, one activity is promoting ‘Kindness day’ on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving to encourage people to perform a random act of kindness in their community in Joey’s honor. We love participating in this day and hope you will consider incorporating it into your annual Thanksgiving tradition too. You can learn more on their Facebook page or website. 

We also got our team together for our first in person team meeting in Indianapolis, IN.  We not only enjoyed finally meeting people with whom we have worked for 2 years in many cases, but we also used the session to develop our 2020 plans and collaborate.  Read more about our team meeting here.  

THANK YOU for being a part of our exciting 2019 story.  We hope your story this year has been filled with all things wonderful, and we wish you the best this holiday season.  Find time to relax and reflect. Here’s to an amazing final chapter of this year and a successful 2020!

 

Our company culture is one of the most important aspects of our business. We’ve taken that culture, along with what we’ve learned from one another, to create an eBook that contains a marketing word or phrase that best represents us for each letter of the alphabet.

Download the ABCS of &Marketing

About &Marketing

In today’s fast paced world, many growing businesses are struggling to modernize their marketing approaches because either they don’t have the expertise or the bandwidth to do it themselves.

&Marketing provides seasoned marketing strategy professionals and a nimble execution team to help our clients achieve their goals. Our unique partnership model allows us to augment our client’s existing teams or outsource the entire marketing function in an affordable, flexible, and transparent way.

How Market Intelligence Insights Improve Marketing Strategy

How Market Intelligence Insights Improve Marketing Strategy

by | Nov 20, 2019 | Business Intelligence & Analytics, Insights

How Market Intelligence Insights Improve Marketing Strategy

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Market Intelligence can address a wide range of business problems, such as improving a company’s marketing strategy during a period of changing or intensifying competition, setting a more effective pricing strategy, or determining whether to expand into new markets. The information available to companies to help solve any given business problem is often uncoordinated and unsystematic. As a result, companies suffer from unreliable, incomplete, and often contradictory information when assessing these business problems.

“There is nothing more necessary than good intelligence to frustrate a designing enemy and nothing requires greater pains to obtain.”

— George Washington

 

What is Market Intelligence?

At the very core, a market intel is an external understanding that was not previously possessed. The purpose of market intelligence is to generate insight, new understanding, and implications to support strategy choice and action. Insights help a business create a common understanding of both current and likely future competitive situations and provide early warning of market threats and opportunities.

The ultimate goal of market intelligence is to inform decision making and action. In addition to an understanding of the external operating environment, strategic action necessitates a deep understanding of an organization’s internal strategy to determine competitive context and opportunities. It is this combined, internal and external view that enables insight to outwit and outmaneuver your competition

“What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know, it’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.”
— Mark Twain

How are Insights Developed?

Market insights are developed through a process of data collection, synthesis, and analysis. Analytic methodologies and frameworks are often used for organizing, evaluating, and interpreting information. These tools focus on data gathering and analysis, and while they make it easier to spot trends and structure thinking, in and of themselves, they do NOT generate insights. The steps for developing insights include:

  1. Determine and articulate the business issue
  2. Human and published, internal and external information collection and synthesis
  3. Data analysis to identify insights – trends, patterns, and discontinuities
  4. Identification of implication through discussion of insights in context of the business strategy, current position, and capabilities
  5. Create the story and communicate to generate action

Business issues will vary depending on your unique market dynamics; e.g. speed of change, consolidation, level of disruption, new entrants, shifting consumer demands, new technology/product offerings, etc. Critical business issues are often overlooked as an organization’s focus too frequently rests on more tactical questions such as looking for details behind the latest news headline or competitor announcement. While perhaps nice to know, those tactical questions don’t provide the level of actionable insights that can be gained from identifying an underlying business issue. Understanding the root of the intelligence need is one of the first and most critical steps to developing actionable insights.

“Communications without intelligence is noise; intelligence without communications is irrelevant.”
— Gen. Alfred Gray

What is the Value of Market Intelligence?

First and foremost, market intelligence provides a business with a common and informed understanding of both its current and likely future competitive marketplace. Having this basis of common understanding creates a heightened level of market acumen across an organization, aiding it to foster strategies to out-think and out-perform competitors. Market intelligence informs decision making and action.

Additionally, having an improved understanding of your business’ operating environment also heightens awareness of and protection of your own proprietary information assets. This resulting counterintelligence mindset helps an organization in the discovery and ability to neutralize competitors’ intelligence activities.

“The greatest derangement of mind is to believe in something because one wishes it to be so.”
— Louis Pasteur

 

Implications for Businesses

While every business needs market insight, businesses often struggle to commit the resources, time, and ongoing investment necessary to build a comprehensive market intelligence program. The developmental process for starting up an internal intelligence program averages 1-2 years; it takes another 3-4 years before that program is fully optimized and truly part of a company’s culture.

Intelligence is an investment, its expensive. That doesn’t mean; however, that it’s out of reach for any businesses. Creating internal networks or virtual teams to track and benchmark critical metrics for your business is a good place to start. Identification of 1-3 critical business issues the network can work to address, with or without the support of external consulting services, can provide a foundation from which to build improved information collection, sharing and insight across an organization.

“If you think intelligence is expensive, try ignorance.”
— David Jimenez

 

Want to learn more about how market intelligence could directly impact your company’s ability to generate insights and inform decision making? Contact an expert at &Marketing for a free consultation.

 

Contact &Marketing

About &Marketing

In today’s fast paced world, many growing businesses are struggling to modernize their marketing approaches because either they don’t have the expertise or the bandwidth to do it themselves.

&Marketing provides seasoned marketing strategy professionals and a nimble execution team to help our clients achieve their goals. Our unique partnership model allows us to augment our client’s existing teams or outsource the entire marketing function in an affordable, flexible, and transparent way.

Sales Ops Essentials

Sales Ops Essentials

by | Nov 15, 2019 | Business & Marketing Strategy, Insights

Sales Ops Essentials

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Sales operations involve much more than just making cold calls, heading on a golf outing with prospects, and closing deals. In order for your company to maximize its sales potential, significant work has to occur behind the scenes.  This is especially true for companies with less developed sales and marketing teams, or those working in dynamic markets. The increased level of uncertainty can often be countered by having clear processes in place.  

In sports, teams don’t just show up on game day and play unprepared. Hours of film study, game planning, and practice take place to equip the players and increase their chances of winning. The same goes for the sales ops process. Gathering leads, organizing leads, initial lead calling, constant meetings, and much more go into closing a deal. Here are a few tips that can help improve your sales ops efficiency and increase the number of proposals you submit so you can up your chances of winning on game day: 

Define Your Sales Pipeline and Sales Ops Process

Understand the various stages of your sales process, which is different for every business. Ask yourself what the next step is after a lead becomes an opportunity. Is it a sales call? An in-person meeting? A qualification? Continue defining each stage until you get to the final step: closed deals. Once you define these stages, outline and align on what goes into each step. So, once a lead or prospect enters each stage in your sales pipeline, you won’t need to hesitate before knowing what needs to happen next. 

Keep Your Pipeline Organized

Keeping your pipeline organized is a daunting task, but necessary. Here are some simple strategies that can help you organize your ever-changing pipeline.

  1. Consistently clean-up the pipeline. Whether a lead “ghosted” you, decided not to use your service, or did not meet your qualifications, remove them. The more cluttered your pipeline is, the harder it is to remember and focus on the leads that can turn into customers.
  2. Stay on top of tracking a lead or prospect’s progression through the pipeline. Take time periodically — whether it 30 minutes or an hour each week – to update the stage, add any new information, or change the status of a lead that might have fluctuated during the week.
  3. Create tasks or reminders within your CRM to update information that needs to be adjusted. Set tasks for remembering to follow-up on certain leads. 

Automate Repetitive, Manual Tasks

Automation used to be only accessible for larger companies and bigger budgets but is now easily accessible to a company of any budget. &Marketing is a gold partner with SharpSpring, which has an integrated and easy to use Automation and CRM platform. Tools like these allow the automation of newsletters, emails, creation of task, and even automation for helping organize your pipeline. CRMs like this are becoming available for small to medium size companies that can desperately benefit from their automation capabilities. 

Personalize Your Lead Approach

Automation is great, but adding a personal touch to emails and outreach can really spark a lead’s interest. When trying to build a personal relationship, ensure that it is customized to that lead – how you may have met, common interests, the content they have downloaded, or ask questions that are specific to their wants and needs.

Don’t Get Ahead of Yourself 

Trying to reach out to 50 leads in one day is often overwhelming. This approach can make you feel rushed on each call, may increase the chance of losing track of leads (as some will inevitably fall through the cracks), and each person may feel your lack of attention and focus. Aim to reach out to 30-50 a week, but work at your own pace, which makes it easier to stay up to date with each prospect. You will be able to spend more time qualifying the leads when you aren’t worried about the other 50 calls you need to make. But make sure the other leads in your pipeline are not just sitting unattended by sending them information that keeps them informed on your business. 

As you can see, there’s more than meets the eye when it comes to running an effective sales operations program, just like they’re more that goes into winning a game. Hours of preparation, planning, execution, and prioritization are all involved in giving each team the best chance to win. Similarly, defining your personal sales pipeline, keeping it organized, adding a personal touch, and not running too fast are all ways to help make sure you succeed and win on your sales ops game day. 

Need help with planning and executing a thorough and efficient sales op process? Contact &Marketing for a free consultation with a sales operations expert.

About the Author:

As a Sales Operations Manager at &Marketing, Jeremy Woelfer helps the sales operations processes evolve and stay consistently up-to-date. Jeremy focuses on trying to find new and innovative ways to increase the efficiency and organization of the sales process both at &Marketing and for our clients. With past experience working for big corporate, he has seen what it’s like to grow a business behind the scenes. Jeremy graduated from Denison University with a major in Economics and a minor in Educational Studies.

About &Marketing

In today’s fast paced world, many growing businesses are struggling to modernize their marketing approaches because either they don’t have the expertise or the bandwidth to do it themselves.

&Marketing provides seasoned marketing strategy professionals and a nimble execution team to help our clients achieve their goals. Our unique partnership model allows us to augment our client’s existing teams or outsource the entire marketing function in an affordable, flexible, and transparent way.

How Growing Businesses Can Build A Modern Marketing Department In the Digital Age

How Growing Businesses Can Build A Modern Marketing Department In the Digital Age

by | Nov 12, 2019 | Insights, Marketing Planning & Execution

How Growing Businesses Can Build A Modern Marketing Department In the Digital Age

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Are you looking to take your growing business to the next level, but feel unsure of how to build your team and find the right level of marketing support to stimulate growth? If so, you’re definitely not alone. Spear Marketing recently released the results of a “marketing talent crunch” survey that was conducted to determine how difficult it is to hire and retain strong marketing employees, which roles and skill-sets are in most demand, and what B2B companies are doing to address these challenges. The study surveyed more than 10,000 B2B marketers, and the key findings are compelling: 

  • 90+ percent of companies are having difficulty finding marketing talent 

  • More than 80 percent of open marketing roles take 5+ weeks to fill, and almost one-third sit vacant for more than 2 months

  • Nearly 80 percent of those surveyed said their marketing department is understaffed

The survey also found that there are a variety of skill-sets for which managers are facing difficulty in hiring. Among these, marketing technology (analytics and operations) is the most in-demand role:

Whether you’re looking to build a new marketing department that fits the scope of your small or medium-sized business, or want to supplement your existing marketing team with new talent, we’ve got a few recommendations. Here are some suggestions for strategic, smart ways to make that growth happen, using Spear Marketing’s research as a guide. 

1. Adopt new hiring models 

Remote Employees

While remote work wasn’t always the norm, the digital revolution has completely transformed the way we communicate and get work done. We are far more efficient with technology, as there are plenty of digital platforms available to make virtual communication just as effective as being in the office. In fact, Mercer’s 2018 Global Talent Trends study found that one in three employees feels more productive when working remotely. Not only that, but 51% of employees wish their company offered more flexible work options. The trends show that remote work is becoming today’s new normal, so don’t fight it! By embracing remote employees, you’re opening yourself up to a wider pool of talent (by the way, &Marketing is a fully virtual company, and we love it!). 

Freelancers

Freelancers typically operate as their own business and are particularly beneficial for short-term assignments when there’s a hard stop on the project. Additionally, if a project is finished ahead of schedule or cut short due to budgetary constraints, a freelancer has the flexibility to move on and find work with another organization. On the flip side, if you hired a full-time employee for this role, you’d be obligated to pay their salary despite having limited work for them to complete. Not exactly the best bang for your buck!

Along with a fresh perspective, freelancers also bring with them their own benefits and devices. If you hire freelancers in a city with a lower cost of living, there’s also an opportunity for you to save money. By hiring them, you’re not only filling a void in your business, you’re doing your bottom line a favor.

Contractors

Some contractors function as freelancers, while others work through a third party or agency. Contractors tend to be different from freelancers, though. Typically, contractors will work for a single company for a long period of time, while freelancers tend to work for multiple companies at once. 

Contractors are useful if there’s an immediate need for a very specialized skill-set, whether it be SEO, graphic design, web development, or copywriting. With a contractor, you wouldn’t need to spend the time training them, as they could hit the ground running right away. While contractors do tend to charge more hourly than your salaried employees would, you’ll save money on healthcare costs and other expenses that full-time employees incur. 

2. Outsource technical marketing roles (even if you feel hesitant to do so)

Although some companies are hesitant to outsource technical help, Spear Marketing found that the challenges of hiring in-house talent are so high that these concerns will be ultimately outweighed by business priorities. Worth noting, too, is that according to the Consumer Technology Association’s Future of Work Survey conducted last year, flexible working is a key retention benefit for 86% of tech hires. By outsourcing support through a contractor, freelancer, or remote worker, chances are high that you’ll retain them, which saves you time, energy, and costs in the long run. 

3. Supplement your existing team with skills you need but don’t have  

In some cases, an organization lacks a marketing team altogether and has a need for just about every marketing skill-set, from content development, social media, and SEO, to graphic design, analytics, web development, and project management. In these instances, hiring an outside organization is much more effective than hiring several independent contractors. By hiring such a team, you get a group already familiar with working together, with its own processes to collaborate and drive results for you. 

In other instances, a company may have one or two marketing employees, but need to supplement their team to broaden their skill-set.

At &Marketing, supplementing is our bread and butter. The “&” in &Marketing signifies a partnership. We cover everything from strategy, to storytelling, to business intelligence and analytics, to planning and execution, and we consider ourselves an extension of your team. It’s us & you! 

Interested in learning about how &Marketing can help you solve this talent crunch and take your business to the next level? Drop us a line here and we’ll get in touch! 

About the Author:

As a Marketing Director at &Marketing, Paul Ferguson uses his 14 years of B2B marketing experience to help clients develop fully integrated marketing solutions that make impressions and drive results. Whether it be design-oriented campaigns or digital market execution, Paul skillfully creates strategies to effectively reach client’s desired audiences. Paul graduated from La Salle University with a Bachelor of Arts in Communication and a double minor in Marketing and Business Administration. Visit Paul’s LinkedIn.

About &Marketing

In today’s fast paced world, many growing businesses are struggling to modernize their marketing approaches because either they don’t have the expertise or the bandwidth to do it themselves.

&Marketing provides seasoned marketing strategy professionals and a nimble execution team to help our clients achieve their goals. Our unique partnership model allows us to augment our client’s existing teams or outsource the entire marketing function in an affordable, flexible, and transparent way.

Kissing the Bricks! Celebrating Two Years Of &Marketing With Our First In-Person Meeting

Kissing the Bricks! Celebrating Two Years Of &Marketing With Our First In-Person Meeting

by | Nov 7, 2019 | Insights

Kissing the Bricks! Celebrating Two Years Of &Marketing With Our First In-Person Meeting

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Last week we held our first ever in-person team meeting at &Marketing. The goal was to celebrate the milestone of how far we’ve come after working together for over two years. Most of our team works from “wherever” and finally had a chance to meet one another face-to-face! We enjoyed laughs, plenty of food & drink, excellent dialogue led by our domain experts, and a surprise trip to “kiss the bricks” at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. The entire trip was a game-changer for our team, but here are a few of my biggest takeaways.

Highlights 

I expected everyone to enjoy meeting in person, and they did! During our hiring process, we don’t just look for smart, talented, and technically qualified candidates. We painstakingly ask questions about work style, dealing with ambiguity, and other intangibles to ensure each person will blend well with our existing team and work culture. Since most of our employees come from personal referrals, we can prioritize how adaptable and easygoing people are without much effort. Mix all of that with some wonderful meals, a few late nights, and some well-orchestrated “&Marketing Trivia” about hidden fun facts (not all of which were politically correct!) about our team. 

Biggest Surprise: 1+1=3 

The lightbulb moment that surprised me the most during this gathering was the amount of concrete, work-oriented actions that came out of the brainstorming and ideation. Each of our domain experts presented new ideas and best practices as they relate to their specific areas of focus. We encouraged questions, interruptions, and provocations to take what the speaker discussed and bring it to life by applying it to our everyday thought process and work execution. This is where the real power of all of these people together came to life.  

At least ten different moments, we thought of an intersection or collaboration that either wasn’t happening or could happen better on a day to day basis. We joked that these types of ideas “paid for the meeting,”  because if executed, these concepts actually might pay for the costs of meeting many times over. 

 

 Planning for 2020 

This was also a great opportunity to take a step back and look forward to develop our 2020 plan. In the chaos of the everyday grind— especially at a small company— we don’t think about our longer-term journey. This mentality is accurately captured by the below mini-blog from the great Seth Godin.   

“A Year From Now” 

Will today’s emergency even be remembered? Will that thing you’re particularly anxious about have been hardly worth the time you put into it?

Better question: What could you do today that would matter a year from now?

We used our meeting time to:

Reflect on where we have succeeded and struggled

  1. Identify our biggest opportunities for the upcoming year
  2. Set concrete goals to improve service delivery, employee satisfaction, and most importantly, our clients’ results!  

What’s Your 2020 Plan?

Let this be your call to action. Ask yourself these questions:

  • Has your team gotten together recently?

  • Have your team identified your biggest challenges and top goals for the next 12-24 months?

  • If you are a remote team, how you can bridge the distance gap that can sometimes occurs? How can you set aside distractions and transform the culture and trajectory of your business?

 

Sign up for &Marketing’s newsletter to receive more updates on how we create a positive and motivated remote work culture.

About the Author:

Rajat “Raj” Kapur is the founder and Managing Director of &Marketing, and a board member of the Kind Like Joey Foundation.  After a career working with large, global companies, he’s dedicated to providing growing businesses unparalleled marketing support. 

About &Marketing

In today’s fast paced world, many growing businesses are struggling to modernize their marketing approaches because either they don’t have the expertise or the bandwidth to do it themselves.

&Marketing provides seasoned marketing strategy professionals and a nimble execution team to help our clients achieve their goals. Our unique partnership model allows us to augment our client’s existing teams or outsource the entire marketing function in an affordable, flexible, and transparent way.