In this episode of Squad Talks … over coffee, Kevin and I discuss Sales Process, Tools, and Support.
We talk about how The Squad has organized its sales process, the tools we use, the tools we sell and support, and the special role we’ve created to help administer our sales team/process and administer our CRM.
As the visionary leader Michael Scott once said, “Make friends first, make sales second, make love third. In no particular order.”
In our Sales Process, all activities in marketing and sales move us toward the first step.
Step 1 - Connect Call or Connect Coffee
This is the meeting where we determine if we’re a good fit to work together. The call may take 10 minutes, or it may take 45. The coffee is usually a little longer, but the goal is the same, determine fit.
Sometimes we’ll go a bit further, but we usually try and have some space before Step Two.
Step 2 - Discovery
This meeting or call is about asking the right questions to determine scope, needs, goals, etc. It’s usually a bit longer, maybe an hour, even 90 minutes in some cases. But, we typically walk out of this meeting with 90-100% of our questions answered.
For project work like website, videos, and branding services, we’ll usually have what we need to create a proposal. We use Hubspot’s Quote Tool to generate all our proposals. They offer electronic signatures, and things are integrated/automated with our email and Slack channels to notify key people when decisions have been made.
Step 3 - Build the Plan
This step is essential for Marketing Partnerships. Even after good discovery, clients typically want to know how we’ll jump in and start serving them in an ongoing way. Our unique Partner Process handles this well once we’re out of the blocks and rolling, but this key meeting can help clients visualize how the partnership will work and what we’ll tackle in the first 30-60 days.
Step 4 - Proposal
Now that we’ve done good discovery and/or built a plan, we’re ready to make things official. The proposal process is usually reserved for new clients. Sometimes we’ll still do proposals for existing clients. Many times the trust is already established, and a verbal or email confirmation may be all we need.
For new clients, we like to make things official with a signed proposal. We operate on agreements here at The Squad versus contracts. We’re not looking to keep ongoing Partner clients in situations they don’t believe are a win-win. That being said, it rarely comes up.
Step 5 - Decision
Typically deals don’t hang out in the decision phase very long if we’ve done our job well. Our goal here is to collect decisions. Yes’s are great. No’s are fine too. Maybe’s eventually end up in a timing column. Sometimes deals just get abandoned. Sales is about activity, following a process, and having a “next” mentality.
From this Decision stage, we pull our weekly Best Chance to Close numbers and possibilities for the Operations team.
As I stated before, we currently use Hubspot Sales Pro to run our sales system. That being said, we also support clients using SalesForce, and have worked with tools like SharpSpring, and Pipedrive in the past.
We are currently testing out a new tool called HighLevel which we are really excited about.
Navigating a decision on a new CRM or Marketing Automation tool is something we have helped many clients with. We also assist clients in integrating proprietary CRMs specific to their industry.
A trend we started to see a couple of years back during the height of Covid was the need for Sales or CRM Support roles. Administering a tool like Hubspot or Salesforce can be a heavy load on a business or sales team.
If you’re making the investment in a sales tool or growing a sales team, then giving them proper support could be the catalyst to accelerate everything.
At The Squad, we saw this need and filled it with our very own Rachel Durbin. Her title is Agency Coordinator because she also helps with office management, client and team experience, and some frontend accounting support tied most directly to sales. We’ve even had Rachel help some Partner clients get their sales process launched recently.
If we can be of assistance to your sales team, let us know. We’d love to connect with you for a quick call or coffee!
It can’t hurt to make sure your sales and marketing are aligned for optimal results.
Developing a sales plan for many salespeople can seem daunting. After all, if you’ve sought out a career in sales it’s probably because you like being in front of people more than behind a computer screen. But the payoff is worth it, assuming you’ve considered all the factors that will help you win.
I recently shared an inside look at our annual sales planning process. Check out this video and read more below.
Every year at The Squad, the leadership team consisting of owners and leaders of the business gets away and makes plans for the upcoming year. Revenue goals are obviously a part of our planning, along with budgeting, other business goals, and a reflection on our vision and core values.
(We’ve operated the business on the EOS system since 2018. It provides a nice framework to keep us organized, healthy, and smart. There’s even a local user group we helped launch a few years back. Our good friend Marshall Fall runs it now.)
Out of this planning comes a tangible revenue goal, among many other things. As an agency that does a lot of ongoing partnership work in the form of retainers, we can predict a sizable portion of our revenue, assuming certain retention factors, of course.
The rest of our revenue number comes from new business. Whether that be new partnerships or new projects. Our agency usually does around 30-40% of our business on the project side of things, and the other 60-70% is in the form of marketing partnerships.
So at the end of the day, we try and create sales goals in different areas of the business, for example, the # of websites we’d like to sell and the total revenue associated with those websites. The same goes for video work, graphic design work, and other line items. We also forecast when we believe we’ll bring on new partners throughout the year.
All this creates line item goals for sales totals, broken down by category. This allows us to track our plan vs. actual sales throughout the year. We’ve always put that in front of our entire team in our monthly staff meetings or, at worst, quarterly. As I often tell prospective clients and team members, we’re wired to win. It’s hard to know if you’re winning if you don’t keep score.
We use Hubspot’s CRM to help run our sales system. It has some great dashboards that are automatically updated as we add deals to our pipeline and close them. It measures many of our activities as well. All these things are easily transferred to our weekly EOS scorecards. This data gives us a pulse on how we’re doing week to week, month to month, and quarter to quarter.
So great, Bryce, you’ve got a sales plan. That’s probably the easy part. Anyone can build a plan and say they’re gonna do something. What are the strategy and tactics to hit the goals? Well, I’m glad you asked.
The strategy and tactical plan is where we break down more goals for activity and lay out what our activities will be for prospecting and marketing support. Some metrics are the number of networking coffee appointments we’ll hold this year or the number of referrals we’ll attempt to get. We’ll track how many events or functions we’re attending. This is also where the integration between sales and marketing becomes real. We’ll take a look at what extra email campaigns or target digital ads we’ll run on top of our baseline marketing activities. We’ll lay out what services we will promote at what time of year. Of course, all this is subject to change with the ebbs and flows of the economy, and the world for that matter. (Let’s face it, I didn’t have shooting down spy balloons or toxic train derailments on my bingo card for 2023, but here we are.😳)
Our Sales Plan here at The Squad isn’t super sophisticated. Still, it does keep us moving in the right direction, and it’s supported by what we believe we can deliver operationally. You don’t need much to put this together beside a spreadsheet. I’d make the case you could write it on a piece of paper in a notebook or on a whiteboard. The key is documenting it and then taking time weekly and monthly to keep score.
It’s still early in 2023. I’d bet if you got the right people in the room over the next 10 days, you could flesh out your 2023 sales plan if you haven’t yet.
If you need help supporting your sales team with marketing content, campaigns, collateral, strategy, or more leads, then a marketing partnership with The Squad may be a great fit for your business. Or you're looking for help setting up your CRM and marketing automation. We’d love to help with either. Let’s connect!
We started a little tradition at The Squad a few years back. It’s amazing how time flies. We said we’d sum up the year in a fun way. We’d come up with some stats, memories and the like that helped us remember the year and put it in the books so to speak. We decided we’d create an infographic, that we’d turn into a physical poster on the wall, that we’d animate into a video and then publish it all to our blog.
Well, it’s that time of year for the 2022 Year in Review!!!
Amazingly, we’ve stuck to this tradition for several years now. It’s easy to let things like this slide when things get busy or a little chaotic, say like the past 3 years. Kevin Peterson, our VP of Operations, floated the idea to have this year’s poster mounted by our client conference rooms (EPIC and SAGA) and then for posterity we’d hang the previous years upstairs in the loft, where our creative team does their thing – day in and day out. Well all of a sudden we looked up and an entire wall in the loft is covered with Year In Review Posters.
I’m all for tradition in some instances, like The Masters golf tournament. I mean come on, it’s the tradition unlike any other. Does it get any better? At other times, I’m all for new and refreshing ideas that go against the grain and slay the sacred cows. Well, this is one tradition that made the cut.
At this point, let’s cue the band. The video and graphic tell the story better than more words from yours truly.
What traditions do you have in your business? Which ones should you keep and which ones should you kill?
In a coming post, we’ll talk a bit about 2023 – trends we’re seeing, plans we’re making, and how that affects your business. Stay tuned!
2020 forced many small businesses to become focused in ways they didn’t imagine. I’m not gonna go into the obvious details that we’ve all lived through recently. You’re very well aware of them every day. At The Marketing Squad, we refined our approach during that time, and I’ll share how in this post. Hopefully you’ll be inspired to take actions that help you refine your marketing approach and position you well, no matter the business season you're in.
Your website is your online home. You own it, unlike social media profiles. It's your publishing platform that can present who you are and how to get what you offer as well as feed content to your other channels like email and social media.
We started our refinement process by reflecting on how our website reaches our target audience, provides resources to a larger circle beyond our target, and fulfills our operational needs.
We took time as an agency to walk through our website with a story mindset – identifying the key internal and external stories we were looking to tell and determining which prospects and clients fit the model of our character.
With this character in mind, we assessed their problems and pains and thought through what success looks like for them. We also thought about their motivation to avoid failure.
This process led us to a redesign of our website. We’ve approved the internal mockups and are excited to begin development soon! We can’t wait to see how the new user flow and look resonates with new and existing clients.
One of the end results of this introspection was a Brand Guide – or Brand Bible, if you will. It’s a document we put together that uniquely describes our brand and how we engage as a brand. We’ve been building these for years for our clients, but this is the first time we’ve ironed out these details for ourselves to this kind of degree.
Our Brand Guide will inform our Marketing Strategy and the many tactical types of content we’ll produce in coming months and years.
We’ve also taken major steps to use more video in our marketing in 2020. It was already a strong trend heading into the year but became even more paramount in the virtual landscape of Covid-19.
Both our use of video internally and with our partner and project clients has exploded in 2020. We’ve found very creative ways to capture video, and thus stories, during the lockdowns and limited capacity here in Louisville, KY.
If you have a great story to tell, then follow a process that allows you to tell it in a genuine way – consistently – that helps your clients solve their problems. If you don’t know your unique story, then I encourage you to spend some time right now to craft it. This isn’t the time for “me too” businesses to thrive.
Educating, entertaining, and persuading your audience with relevant content, proper calls to action, and personalized marketing automation has always been a core philosophy of The Squad. We have a long history as a Hubspot Partner agency and have embraced their Marketing Funnel mindset – which is now the Flywheel!
In order to fully sync our sales, marketing, and service efforts across the agency, we went all-in with Hubspot's software in early 2020. We never walked away from Hubspot since becoming a Partner nearly a decade ago, but we always had a mixed bag of tools for doing the job.
We made the collective decision as an agency to go all-in with Hubspot once again. We have implemented the Sales and Marketing tools and are looking at the jump to Service hub next.
Now that our team is immersed back into inbound marketing training and tactics to serve our clients, we’re feeling that same focus and energy we had years ago. It allows us to simplify while also dig deeper. We are still leaning on digital ad strategies but more as a supplement rather than a leading tactic for reaching our goals.
We are currently building out content roadmaps, segmenting email lists, and organizing new campaigns for new product and service offerings we’ve developed during Covid. It’s been energizing for us.
Moving our CRM to the Hubspot Sales tool has been a game-changer. Our entire team has that single source of truth that many organizations desire. Our data isn’t perfect yet, nor will it ever likely be, but we have processes that help feed project management, onboarding, accounting, and data analytics. We can easily manage our pipeline, project closes, and estimate revenue.
We’ve also created really nice dashboards that play well with the Scorecard mentality we use in EOS (the Entrepreneurial Operating System, which has been our go-to operating system for the past few years).
Marshall Fall, our VP of Business Development says this is the best CRM he’s used in his 25-year sales career.
Our CRM is also gonna help us as we push an inside sales culture here at The Squad. It will help us track who has purchased which services from us and allows us to organize new products or services to meet other needs of our client base.
We’re really excited about several new services we’ve developed during 2020 in response to changes in the marketplace. That's so important right now as an overall business strategy. More to come on about this in future blogs and emails!
The last frontier for our agency within the Hubspot software will be the Service Hub. We’re excited to dig in and see how it can help us up our game across the board with our customer service.
If you are considering how to refine your marketing approach, brand strategy, or just shopping for the right tools, we’d love to help guide you through that process. It’s what we’ve always done for clients. Now that we drank our own kool aid these past several months of refocusing on the tools and tactics we really believe in, we can empathize even more with the challenges you’ll face.
If you're interested, let's schedule a quick call or coffee appointment so we can discuss how to help solve your current marketing challenges.
Every business has traditions. Some, they are aware of. Some, they just subconsciously do. We have a few of those around The Squad. The one I want to share today isn’t unique. I’m quite sure most businesses have some ceremony, action, or event that wraps up the previous year and looks forward to the next.
For us, we’ve consistently celebrated the year together at a festive Christmas party. (Wow – can you believe that was only 4 weeks ago??) We celebrate making it through another year and joyfully relish the season of hope that is Christmas. Then, we wrap up the previous year and share our vision for the upcoming year at a lunch or breakfast each January.
The pace of January is fast around here. Just a few weeks after New Years parties and budgets are coming together and annual plans are translated into quarterly rocks, weekly to-dos, and scorecards to make sure we’re getting traction along the way. We’re serving partner clients, launching projects that carried over, hosting websites, and making new sales. Business as usual.
Here is the problem, though: “Business as usual” can be bad. Just as December is a time of hope and new beginnings, January is the time for us to make sure we are aligned around our Core Values, Vision, Core Focus, Marketing Strategy, and 10 year, 3 year, and 1 year goals.
We have always taken time to wrap the previous year, look at our growth chart, celebrate wins, and acknowledge losses and regrets, but we’ve not always seized the chance to rally around our vision for the future.
Our decision to embrace EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating System) in 2017 has led to this focus on vision. We need a team of people “on the same page” when it comes to our Vision, Core Focus, and Core Values, in order to achieve traction and for the business to be healthy and smart.
In EOS, the guiding document is known as the V/TO. We’ve attached a version of ours that we share with the public.
Click the image above to view our public VTO
In fact, we’re offering this as a service to companies using EOS. Want to work together to brand these documents for your business and leadership team? Let’s grab coffee if you’d like to chat about it.
This year’s kickoff breakfast happened last week at our office. It was a time where we had some laughs, recapped highlights from 2019, shared some crazy dreams, dug deeper in defining our Core Values, and reminded everyone on our team about where we’re heading in 2020 and beyond through a review of our V/TO and annual goals.
One of my favorite parts of the meeting was defining our Core Values as more than just 8 phrases. We added some points of emphasis under each and told some accompanying stories from our history that either demonstrated us exemplifying or offending that value. In leading this business, I’ve learned over the years that if we succeed or fail, it’s tied directly to our Core Values.
We hire by our Core Values and we lead to them; ultimately, people work themselves on to or off the team based on them. They are not just words on the wall. We recognize and reward our team based on them. They are integral to our current and future success, so they deserved a deeper dive.
If you’d like to see the expanded list of our Core Values, check out the gallery below. [envira-gallery id="5149"]
The last thing we did in our meeting was put the focus back on our team. Ultimately our success as a business is based on their success as individuals and collectively as our team.
We walked through ideas to help each of them cement their goals, dreams, and visions for the future. We asked them to clear their calendars on the first half of Thursday, January 23 to take a clarity break. You might also call this a Desert Day. The goal is to solidify their personal plans for the year and the future.
We’re stoked about the potential in 2020 here at The Squad. We hope you are just as excited about your business growth.
We’d love to hear more about your business culture, core values, and vision.
We’d love to learn more about others in the area operating with EOS.
And, of course, we’d love to talk with you about your next project or a long-term marketing partnership.
We’d love to Tell Your Story and Grow Your Business in 2020!
If we should connect, then let’s do it. I’ll buy the coffee!
It’s been almost four months since Bradyen Ware joined The Squad and almost 7 months since we initially connected. I don’t know that I’ve had anyone join the team here at The Squad and make this much impact in such a short time.
Bware, as we call him around the office, is a great fit with our culture, and a role model when it comes to our Core Values. He’s jumped right into any void he’s seen here at The Squad and he’s made this agency better. Along the way, he’s also made his Squadmates better and our clients better too.
This post was actually planned for about a month ago, but lo and behold the shoe cobbler’s kin principle took effect and we took our eye off the ball with some of our own content. But there’s no time like the present, and we couldn’t wait another week to share Brayden with our community.
Many of you who are clients have already met him and probably have been impacted by his ad strategies on Facebook, Google search or Google display. Maybe he’s helped you generate leads or put your recruiting campaign on autopilot with chatbots and the like. Sounds like we’re joking, but we’re not. He is a chatbot ninja of sorts. It’s likely he was the mastermind behind your latest landing page. He could be seen any day wireframing up a Google, SEO-friendly landing page.
Brayden is one of the Squad’s greatest Disciplined Learners. It’s one of our 8 Core Values and Bware just won the award honoring him as the 2019 winner in this category.
Brayden is a graduate of Lee University where he played college baseball after a great high school career at Silver Creek in Southern Indiana. Brayden is involved at Northside Christian Church in New Albany and comes from a multi-generational business family. His dad Ritchie and grandfather started and run WARE, a highly successful boiler business in central Louisville that services the entire US market.
Bware’s coffee drink of choice is the Americano and he’s a frequent flyer on the El Nopal airlines at lunchtime. He likes his tacos.
He does have a few downsides like he’s already beat me in two games of ping pong and I pretty much had the top dog status in the agency in ping pong until then. The last game was 21-19 so I’m close. And he had the controversial Derby winner Country House in our Derby jackpot. Not his fault, but still … 🙂
To read more about Bware check out his bio.
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