The 4 Building Blocks to... Business - Google Docs

 . Table of Contents 1. Transform Digitally or Die 2. What Does “Business Growth” Really Mean 3. Focus Is Fuel for Growing Your Business 4. The “Building Blocks” of Business Growth 5. Purpose 6. People 7. Platform 8. Process 9. The Mental Framework 10.
Designing Business Growth Strategies 11.
Conclusion About the Author Jason Verdelli is the CEO and founder of Phase 2 Solutions, a digital business development company with consultants helping several thousand businesses throughout the world leverage the power of digital media to grow and achieve their purpose for a greater good. He’s developed a proprietary and proven business development framework that is being used by thousands of small to medium­sized businesses as well as some of the world’s largest and most successful companies. Transform Digitally or Die The challenge most companies face with growing in the digital age is through the adoption of digital transformation. Digital transformation refers to the changes in human behavior through digital technology with the understanding and adoption of it in everyday life. At some level, the decisions we make now involve a form of digital engagement. The level of digital media adoption skyrocketed with social networks, software­as­a­service (SAAS) and other forms of online interaction reaching critical mass points. For example, when we hear about a pressing news story on television, most people will resort to social media to get a different angle of the story or take part in a conversation about it. As a society we’ve grown into a culture that expects to validate news and opinions from a community of our peers rather than directly from a media source. Most of our peers have adopted digital communications as the primary way to communicate so this becomes the place where we validate, educate and interact. According to a survey completed by Dimensional Research, between 85­90% of people claim to resort to online reviews before making a buying decision. Another study completed by RainToday.com showed that 90% of decisions by clients choosing professional services firms are based on the following factors of a companies website: quality of design (validation), case studies (validate), list of services (validate), blog post (educate), videos (educate), social community (interact) and other forms of content that are designed to build trust with the brand. I strongly encourage you to dive in deeper by reading the following article on HubSpot: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/5501/Research­Shows­Websit
es­Influence­97­of­Clients­Purchasing­Decisions.aspx There are numerous other statistics that unsurprisingly point to an increase of digital influence in how we act and make decisions. This concept is generally easy to grasp considering that we are all consumers in one way or another. When it comes to growing your business, digital media utilization needs to be within the frame of mind, however you shouldn’t become overly obsessive about using it. There is a bigger picture here. I find many businesses that hear that they need to focus more and more on digital, over­react, and cut other traditional efforts. The problem with this approach is that it shifts the focus away from a business growth mindset to just “keeping up” in the digital world. Their digital strategy is viewed separate from their business development strategy and therefore their digital efforts become dis­aligned with their business objectives. They have no real way to measure success. For example, keeping social networking accounts updated or blogging daily. Although these tactics can help in building brand awareness, the mindset behind the utilization of each tactic is flawed as it doesn’t start with a specific purpose, such as better customer engagement. It’s a mindset shift. Defining your purpose first will help you design a more effective and measurable business growth strategy. You’ll start to look at the digital tools as a means to achieve something greater versus just “doing it to keep up”. In order to take advantage of digital transformation to help grow your business you need to keep 3 words in mind: validate, educate and interact. Validate As you deploy a business growth strategy, you need to consider ways that people are validating your business digitally. For example, are they searching on specific websites for reviews first before deciding to even view your website. What are the key factors that your potential clients expect to see on your website? For example, a statement or video that reveals how you are different, your list of services, client testimonials, a deeper focus on case studies, etc. Educate How are you utilizing appropriate digital channels to help educate your potential clients? Is this education process helping you also attract new clients? What kind of education do people need or expect before doing business with you? These are key questions that help drive digital strategies to give clients the trust level they need to do business with you. Interact How well do you interact with potential clients, or even current clients, through digital means? Do you take the time to listen and comment on content your potential clients or referral sources post on social networks? Are you creating engagement opportunities online that they value (Q & A sessions, video interviews, etc.)? These words become incredibly important as you build your business growth strategy from digital media using the 4 building blocks: Purpose, People, Platform and Process. What Does “Business Growth” Really Mean? Business growth means many things to many different people. It’s often a word used without context. For me, business growth means more than top line revenue or adding staff. These are only parts of the business. Business growth occurs when a combination of all parts of the business become better enabled to support the purpose (mission, vision, values, ethics and goals) of the company. When you take this business concept and start to couple it with the possibilities available today in the digital world, you will experience business growth faster than you’ve ever imagined. Without defining and staying focused on the vision and mission of your company, growing it will become difficult, and believe it or not even more difficult in today’s age where just about everyone has adopted digital as an expected part of a brand experience. Decision making becomes a guessing game. Morale deteriorates. Oh and you bet it affects the profitability of your company. Most companies struggle at growing not because they lack a vision or mission, but lack the focus to communicate and reinforce the vision and mission throughout all of the areas of their business that will enable them to grow: Purpose, People, Platform and Process. With the advancement of digital technology and increased social media adoption across all demographics, focus is only going to continue to become harder and harder. The way to stay focused in utilizing digital media as one of your greatest assets is to apply a frame work (4 P’s) around it and to view it simply as a vehicle, but not solely the vehicle, that helps you achieve your purpose faster. In order to exponentially grow your business in the digital age your business needs to adopt a culture of digital transformation across your entire company. Focus Is Fuel For Business Growth I’ve been an entrepreneur by heart my entire life. I officially put my entrepreneurial spirit to work 3 months after graduating with a business management and marketing degree from Kutztown University of Pennsylvania in 2005 when I started Phase 2 Solutions. It has since evolved into a digital business development company helping several thousand companies throughout the world grow their business and more importantly, achieve their purpose. I will say without hesitation that the company I created surely didn’t evolve into what it is today overnight. Just like many young entrepreneurs, I started out in the “real world” wanting to run my own company. I had no idea of what that company would be or even if it would last longer than a few years. All I knew at the time is that I wanted to be a business owner and create an idea or concept. I launched the business with the concept of selling web pages within a local online marketing website I created for retails establishments in the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania area called Burg Blurb. The website gave local retail establishments a way to control their own webpage (add pictures, directions, website links, coupons, etc.) within a directory and take advantage of email marketing from the email list we had built by combining coupon offers and email databases from other local businesses. The business concept was solid. At one point I even came up with the marketing idea of a VIP coupon card where I would get a local banking institution to sponsor and distribute the card to all of their branch customers. It was hyper­local marketing at its best. I needed to deploy creative marketing strategies such as these because I had spent all of my personal savings up until that point getting the business up and running. At one point I had approximately 60 local paying retail establishments in the program. I was going door­to­door to make sales and doing everything I could to gain visibility so customers on the program would see value and renew. It was just getting to the point where I could almost quit the part­time job that I had at Lowe’s to keep the bills paid. Then I made a decision that ended up being a huge mistake. I told myself “Maybe you need to focus on offering an additional service to make more money. “The Burg Blurb concept is a great idea, but maybe it’s not enough.” My motive at that point became on making more money so I could quit my part­time job and “live the dream”. The idea I came up with to make more money was to sell websites to the customers I had already had on Burg Blurb. After all, I could charge 10 times what I was charging to be on Burg Blurb and still be competitive in the marketspace. With the mindset of selling websites, I focused nearly 100% of my time, energy and money on building a business that built websites. I sold a few website development jobs, hired a full­time staff and invested countless hours learning website technologies so I could better acclimate myself with the work that was being done by the technical staff that I had hired. Focus started to shift away from coming up with creative marketing ideas or even generating new sales for Burg Blurb. The website development jobs I was landing brought in enough money to pay my staff, but not enough to pay myself a livable wage. These circumstances forced me to take on a 7­day paper route with a local newspaper in order to just keep the bills paid. I worked at Lowe’s part­time in the evenings, got 4 hours of sleep and woke up at 3am to do the paper route until about 6am which still gave me the opportunity to work on the business during the day. I was in worse shape with a “greater opportunity to make more money” than when I had been focused solely on Burg Blurb. Not to mention I was very burnt out, it was 2008 when the market collapsed and making time to do what a normal 25 year old likes to do was difficult. I was blessed that my girlfriend, now wife, that I had lived with at the time had the patience and understanding to stay by my side, even though we sometimes would only see each other for 1 to 2 hours a day. Although today she says 1 to 2 hours a day is all she can tolerate of me :) After about a year of living through this cycle, I decided that I needed to make a change. I decided to transition out of the website development business model and focus on something else. I kept Burg Blurb, but didn’t focus on coming up with new marketing ideas or even generating new sales. After about a year, the clientele I had built up for Burg Blurb started to drop off. Getting a hold of Burg Blurb customers year­to­year became difficult because my focus was in so many other areas. I finally made the decision to shut down Burg Blurb and through the course of 3 years after that time period, developed, marketed and shut down 11 concepts. One of my best ideas out of the 11 was a local multi­authored blog concept where local professionals published content on one website called Central PA Experts. The concept grew out of an idea I had when blogging on my own site. I said “Wouldn’t it be great if I could get more visibility to my articles if a bunch of professionals all blogged and promoted one site within a local market?”. This is when I first started learning the positive benefits a focused and purpose­driven community can bring to a brand. I took care of purchasing advertising on local business media outlets to distribute member articles, sending member content to their own email list with the Central PA Experts branding (lending credibility to the content), sending content to a collective email list with approximately 30,000 email subscribers, sharing their articles through local print media and even hosting weekly live roundtables with members (i.e. Experts) of the system. At one point I had nearly 70 paying members on the system. This allowed me to stop the paper route and my part­time job at Lowe’s. What a relief! At this point I thought that I had nailed my first successful business concept. I was making enough money to not depend on any kind of part­time income, however not enough to really get ahead. Naturally I became money motivated so my thought process started to shift from what made Central PA Experts successful into the limitations it had with reference to potential profit and revenue expansion. I saw its local nature as a negative aspect toward business growth. The decision I made next was probably one of the worst decisions I could have ever made for this business model. I decided to change the name to Experts Ezine and shift focus on getting members all over the United States. I cut back on all of the local advertising we did for the site (print and web) and even stopped the live weekly roundtable events. My thought process at the time was that I would be able to get members that wanted to be on a nationally branded website with the marketing benefit of having their articles sent out to email to their subscribers with the Experts Ezine branding and to a larger collective email list. Over the course of about 6 months after making this decision I went from 70 paying members to about 30. The reason why so many of them dropped off is because of one main factor: the local appeal. Being associated with Central PA Experts gave many of the members (small businesses and professionals) the brand value they needed to build trust with local clients, which is where most of their business came from. Many of the members used the Central PA Experts logo in their signature line of their email, on their website and even made it part of their LinkedIn profiles. When the focus shifted, the appeal dropped and so did the revenue. At this point, I was stuck. I was thinking to myself “Oh no, not another part­time job or paper route!”. I was at one of the lowest points of my professional career. Discouraged, burnt out again and needless to say struggling financially, again. Luckily I had picked up a few consulting jobs during the course of running Central PA Experts that helped me through this time. Through a few of the consulting jobs I picked up I met one individual, Greg Bair, who would say a few words that would change my life forever. He said “When you die, what do you want to leave left behind in this world?”. These words floored me so much that I had to pull over off the side of the road I was driving on to finish the conversation. What I realized is that throughout all this time I had been focusing on trying to “be a business owner” and “make more money”, but never really focused on the real purpose for being, let alone the purpose for the business. All my ideas in the past had merit, but when I started to shift focus away from the purpose of those ideas, they started to fail. These concepts were vehicles and I wasn’t providing them with enough fuel to drive forward. I was fueling 11 cars going 100 miles per day on 16 gallons of gas. At some point, these vehicles naturally ran out of fuel and stopped working. I took Greg’s advice and started to put 100% of my focus on determining my purpose and the purpose for the business. The mission, vision, values, ethics and goals. This type of task couldn’t be solved by writing lines of code or creating a new product. It took soul searching, time out of the office, a few Tony Robbins videos and a significant amount of self­discipline to not get distracted and start chasing the next great business idea. I forced myself to write down my purpose. My mission, vision, values, ethics and goals. By going through these exercises I discovered that my true passion and purpose was centered around helping others achieve their purpose for a greater good in this world through digital technology. It wasn’t to “be a business owner” or to “make more money”. Not to say these things won’t happen, but the mental framework of purpose shifted toward a passion versus a status. Therefore, I made the decision to focus 100% of my attention, focus, time and money on turning the company, now Phase 2 Solutions, into a consulting company focused purely on helping other companies grow and achieve their purpose using digital technology. By determining my purpose, I was able to focus 100% of my time, or 16 gallons worth of fuel, on growing the company for the right reasons. Focus helped me understand what to say “no” to, even if it meant turning down an opportunity to make more money. Focus helped determine what systems to develop to scale the business and make it profitable. Focus helped with knowing who to hire. Focus helped determine what systems, products and brands I had developed that I needed to be discontinued or sold ­ for instance, Experts Ezine. Focus helped “de­clutter” the business and open the opportunity to grow more than I had ever imaged. Focus helped deliver the results clients were looking for and more importantly, clients gained a sense of trust connection with the Phase 2 Solutions brand. Finally as an entrepreneur, focus helped to de­stress my mind, relax and make growing pains not so painful. Focus is the fuel. Purpose is the spark. When both come together, you ignite the engine that drives your business forward in achieving great things. The “Building Blocks” of Business Growth Your business has purpose . It is made up of people . It uses platforms . It runs processes . The actual growth of your business in the digital age we live in is critically dependent on how well you focus the time, attention and energy in each of these areas in relation to your business objectives. Without a framework to work from you risk getting lost in the ever­growing sea of digital tools and tactics. You also risk investing time and resources into digital strategies and tactics that don’t yield results that grow your business. The key is first understanding the building blocks that make up your business now in the digital age we live in: Purpose, People, Platform and Process. When you start to apply these building blocks in harmony, you will experience a stronger sense of control and create exponential growth for your business in all areas. You will enable yourself and empower others to help you achieve the real purpose of your company ­ the reason why it exists. You will take advantage of the digital opportunities to exponentially grow your business. More importantly, you will deploy strategies that create the greatest return on your investment without increasing the associated risk. This ebook is designed not to just share the concept around the 4 building blocks to grow your business (Purpose, People, Platform and Process), but to put them to work for you. We are going to walk through each building block, define the components, and have you build your own business growth strategies. Ultimately this is going to give you the focus you need in order to create and manage projects that all support business growth within the age of digital transformation. I strongly encourage you to invite your team to review this e­book with you. The simple act of collaboration will unify the team and make each member of your staff feel a closer part of the community that is your company. You need everyone to feel ownership in order to experience true business growth. Including them in the creation of the growth strategy is a great first step. After you review each section and gain a stronger understanding of each building block, I invite you to sit down with one of our trained consultants to discuss your findings and help develop business growth strategies that are right for your business. You can setup a free, no obligation free consultation by visiting http://phase2solutions.net/contact . Purpose Purpose is made up of the components that make your company what it is. Your mission, vision, values, ethics and goals collectively make up your purpose. Your reason for being. The key in using purpose to grow your business is to start by documenting your mission, vision, values, ethics and goals. Be sure your entire staff has easy access to these documents. Also be sure to review these items with your staff on a consistent basis. The components that make up your purpose give you a framework for determining what strategies will help you achieve measurable business growth. For example, a goal of improving profitability by “x” will focus your time, attention and energy on strategies that utilize digital media to make processes more efficient (e.g. digital marketing automation). The point I want make here is that the order in how you determine your business growth strategy is critical. Many companies start trying to improve their strategy with tactics without having any business case. For example, “we need help to improve how we are using Facebook”. This statement doesn’t show any consideration for any components of purpose. There is no defined measure of success. This kind of statement forces you to work backwards which makes it hard for even the most savvy Facebook marketers to help. This would be a better way to re­frame the statement: “How do we increase the leads we are generating from our website to 30 per month. Is Facebook a viable platform to build a strategy on to accomplish this goal? If so, how do we better engage clients and referral sources on this platform to drive them back to our website?”. This way of thinking starts with the business objective first and works it’s way back to possible tactics. All questions relating to strategy now have context toward how they can be used to grow your business. On the following pages, take a moment to fill in your mission, vision, values, ethics and goals. Keep in mind that what you fill here will be the “why” factor, or foundation, behind every business growth strategy you deploy in the future. Mission Your mission is your reason for existing. It’s why you do what you do. It’s more than just a statement, but rather a common feeling you want spread throughout the company. Take a moment below to write out your mission statement. Here is a great article and video that will help you formulate your mission statement: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/65230 Write your Mission Statement below: Vision Your vision is simply a picture of what you want your company to be. A vision statement is a description of that picture. Every great vision statement is written in a way that anyone can understand. Here is a great article that will give you a framework on how to build your vision statement and examples from some of the world’s most successful companies: http://examples.yourdictionary.com/best­examples­of­a­vision­statement.ht
ml Write your Vision Statement below: Values YourDictionary.com defines values as: “ Guiding principles that dictate behavior and action. Core values can help people to know what is right from wrong; they can help companies to determine if they are on the right path and fulfilling their business goals; and they create an unwavering and unchanging guide.” Here is a link directly to the article that will help you formulate your Values Statement: http://examples.yourdictionary.com/examples­of­core­values.html Write your Values Statement below: Ethics Your business ethics are simply the rules that guide your decision making. Sometimes you make choices that don’t always benefit you financially, but are in line with the rules for which you’ve set while conducting business. Here is a great article that will guide you on writing a Code of Ethics: http://www.inc.com/guides/how­to­write­a­code­of­ethics.html . Write your Code of Ethics below: Goals Goal setting is a whole topic onto its own. Remember, the goals you choose should be in line with your mission, vision, values and ethics. Here is a great article that will guide you on how to set clear and measurable goals: http://www.inc.com/guides/2010/06/setting­business­goals.html Write out your company goals below: People The People building block of your company is made up of everyone that impacts the future growth of your company. It deals with how you structure, build and management relationships. People are your great asset. You need to think of all the segments of people that make up the community surrounding your company. Once you have gone through the exercise of determining your people segments, it’s time to deploy a strategy, or set of strategies, with specific purpose­driven goals for each segment that focuses on results that grow your business. It’s a simple concept, but yet highly overlooked. For many businesses, people segments such as vendors and clients are the greatest source of referrals and new business. In order to start generating new business from these, and other segments of people surrounding your company, you need to deploy engagement strategies that each segment will value. Engagement is the spark that gets people talking and more importantly and keeps your company on top of each person's conscious mind when it comes time to give you a referral or even buy your product or service. A short story One strategy we use at Phase 2 Solutions to engage all segments of people surrounding our company is through a weekly Q & A interview session. We utilize the YouTube On Air feature to interview a vendor or subject matter expert on a topic suggested by clients. The features within YouTube On Air allow you to do a video conference with one or a group of people and allow viewers to interact with the featured guest(s) through several interactive features. A week leading up to the event we engage our clients/potential clients through an email series that announces the featured guest and gives everyone a chance to submit their own question for the interview. Information on the event is also posted on our Google + community (i.e. Phase 2 Connect) so we can collaborate and interact with community members (e.g. clients, referral sources, etc.) leading up to the event. We have a dedicated person that focuses solely on sharing the event throughout our various social networks and more importantly, spends time reaching out to key followers and influencers to help promote the event. Once the live video interview is over it is automatically saved to our YouTube channel and added to our email auto­responder campaigns, blog and social media channels. By doing this we can engage our clients, prospects, referral sources and followers on a consistent basis. Once members of our community engage past a certain point that is measurable (through social tracking and analytics), we trigger a direct outreach effort internally to reach out and build new client relationships. The point of this story is to show how one strategy can engagement many different groups of people to deepen relationships, maintain conscious awareness and drive new leads and referrals. For most businesses that rely heavily on referrals, creating engagement strategies within each people segment is going to be a critical factor in business growth. Focusing on strategies that directly engage the people (e.g. social media strategies) surrounding your business will most likely yield more business before anything else. Take a few minutes and write down the best way you feel your company engages the people segment shown below. More specifically, I want you to think about engagement strategies that are designed to elicit new business or new referrals from the people surrounding your business right now. Staff (list a few below): Prospects (list a few below): Clients (list a few below): Referral Sources (list a few below): Partners (list a few below): Stakeholders (list a few below): Platform Platform refers to the systems used to support business growth. The types of platforms are going to vary from company to company and strategy to strategy. Remember, platforms aren’t just based on technology. They can take on many shapes and forms. The key is to understand the definition of platform. For example, a business networking group or event can be a platform because their purpose is to support business growth. It’s a basic concept, but important in determining what platforms, digitally or non­digitally, to include in your own business growth strategies. Below is a short list of platforms that successful companies use to support business growth. ● Website (e.g. WordPress) ● Website customer analytics (e.g. KissMetrics) ● Social networks (e.g. LinkedIn, Google +, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) ● Social network management (e.g. Hootsuite) ● Social media viral marketing (e.g. RaffleCopter) ● Project management (e.g. BaseCamp) ● Marketing automation (e.g. HubSpot) ● Email marketing system (e.g. MailChimp) ● Software integration system (e.g. Zapier) ● Business intelligence tools (e.g. Klipfolio) ● Collaborative document sharing (e.g. Google Drive) When choosing platforms to help grow your business through digital channels, you need to enter into the decision with the mindset of how the platform can achieve one or many business objectives by doing more with less. This is where the term “integrative cloud technology” becomes your best friend. Cloud technology is simply a term that refers to accessing data and software via the internet. When one software program talks to another software program on the internet, you have integrative cloud technology. Choosing digital platforms that integrate with each other supports business growth by making marketing processes efficient, streamlining the sales conversion process and turning business development activity into reports that empower real­time decision making throughout various parts of the company. The digital platforms you choose ultimately affects how well you enable your company to receive these type of benefits and grow. A short story We work with a professional services client where the executive management team wanted visibility to all marketing and business development activities to see how specific activities in each area related to the percentage of revenue growth. The purpose of this strategy was to provide their management team with the ability to make real­time decisions to improve sales, marketing and business development processes in order to book more sales appointments and ultimately, to increase sales revenue. The initial platform we recommended was a highly integrative and customizable business dashboard software called Klipfolio. Klipfolio pulls information and data from other integrative cloud­based software platforms and organizes it into readable charts, graphs and other forms of data visualization making it easy to see what is going on from many different places. For example, Klipfolio can pull data every 5 minutes from MailChimp to show a line graph of email database growth. We worked with our business dashboard partner to help pull data from all the digital platforms they use. Taking it a step further, we established data correlations from each of the platforms they use into easy­to­read visual charts and graphs. For example, this particular client can see a correlation between the number of follows up made with potential clients, as documented in their CRM, and how these actions affect sales revenue over the course of any given month. They can also see a correlation between the level of social media engagement and new sales appointments that are setup within a given period of time. The client found that by shifting focus purely on content creation and distribution on social networks to listening efforts (e.g. commenting on social network activity), booked sales appointments increased by over 120% within a 30 day timeframe. This kind of correlative data is exactly what the company needed in order to base decisions on where to invest time, energy and resources in order to experience measurable business growth. It avoids you getting caught in the trap of activity­based marketing that doesn’t correlate into anything measurable. This is the exact reason why many companies have a hard time measuring a return­on­investment from social media. None of this would be possible if the platforms that were used didn’t integrate with other systems, such as Klipfolio. All of the platforms we recommended (marketing, sales, CRM, etc.) had an open API (Application Programming Interface) architecture. Simply put, this is a set of data and a common language that allows cloud­based software to send information to and from each other. When you are choosing a platform, consider what set of data you need sent from one system to another. Be sure to ask the platform vendor what information from the API can be sent out and pulled in from other systems. This is important when it comes to streamlining your sales and marketing processes. Again, the goal with choosing platforms is to do more with less. The more the platforms you choose that talk to each other, the more time, energy and resources you can focus on driving the processes that make the platforms work toward achieving measurable business objectives. Here is a great article that details the concept of cloud­based platform integration a bit further: http://phase2solutions.net/beyond­seo­lead­generation­where­do­you­go­fr
om­there/ Start thinking about the existing platforms you use to help achieve business growth. Take a moment below to list a few of these platforms. Do they integrate with other systems? Are you pulling information from these platforms that support better decision making? Are they empowering your team to do more with less? List a few platforms you currently use to grow your business below: Process Process is all of the ordered tasks that you set into place within a strategy in order to grow your business. In other words, it is a documented set of workflows. Each process should be designed to support the Purpose of your company and include a specific set of People and Platforms. Below are a few examples of very simple processes that support business growth: Purpose: Website Lead Follow Up People: Jason, Laura Platform: Website, MailChimp, Zapier, CRM Purpose: Prioritize Prospect Follow Up People: Steve, Laura Platforms: MailChimp, Zapier, CRM Purpose: Generate New Prospects People: Susan, Steve Platforms: LinkedIn, CRM, Social Media Management Tool When formulating processes to help grow your business through digital channels, you need to enter into the process with the mindset of how the process can achieve one or many business objectives by utilizing the most appropriate people and platforms that support marketing automation. Marketing automation takes all of the repetitive tasks typically required to market to multiple channels and automates these tasks through system integrations (software systems that talk to each other) and system triggers (when you do this, the system does that). You will be able to implement multiple business growth processes at one time freeing your team up to focus on higher priorities. Think of marketing automation as having an entire marketing team focused on all of the important tasks required to support the idea customer experience. A short story At Phase 2 Solutions, we work with a technology consulting firm that wanted focus nearly 100% of their consultants time on either working with existing clients or talking to potential clients. They also wanted to streamline the lead conversion process for leads coming in from their website by responding faster and following up with more targeted content. First, we mapped out the entire process on paper starting with the lead being generated. Second, we selected a set of platforms that all integrate with each other. For example, we recommended using Gravity Forms which is a premium form integration for the WordPress website platform. Gravity Forms is setup to send form data to Zapier, an online software that triggers actions from one online platform to another. Zapier was setup to take form data coming from specific pages on their website and automatically send that data to a specific MailChimp email list segments which triggers a series of automated email campaigns, adds the lead into their sales CRM (PipeDrive), sends a follow up email coming directly from a designated consultant 5 minutes after the form submission, sends a text message to the consultant, and adds a task in their CRM to hold the consultant accountable for actual follow up. This completely streamlined the lead conversion process. Here is a great article to help streamline your lead conversion process: http://phase2solutions.net/3­steps­to­improve­lead­conversions­rate­by­210
0/ To help the consultants focus nearly 100% of their time clients and talking to potential clients, we setup automated actions that take place when certain fields are being updated in their sales CRM. For example, if a consultant calls a potential client and can not reach them, all the consultant needs to do is update a field in the CRM and Zapier handles sending a personalized follow up email to the potential client letting them know they had tried to call. Because this company has multiple practice areas and consultants, there are many situations where a lead needs to move to a different sales funnel within the CRM. We helped set up an automated trigger from the CRM to Zapier to notify the consultant manager about a new prospect that entered their sales funnel. It also took care of assigning activity reminders to assure the prospect would receive a prompt response from the assigned consultant. This process, along with several other marketing automations, improved the ideal customer experience and started to streamline sales and marketing processes, leading to a significantly faster sales turn­around time. As you can see, the processes you implement can be quite complex, but worth it. The key is establishing your purpose for the process. This purpose is what helps guide you on the kind of platforms and people you need to involve in the process. On the following page, take a moment to complete the chart with a few processes that support your business growth. Think of the people and platforms that need to be associated with each process. Feel free to add steps to each process. People can be anyone affected by the process such as vendors, clients, referral sources, etc. This is an important mental framework to have when you develop and implement a business growth plan. Purpose: People: Platform: Add steps below if needed... Purpose: People: Platform: Add steps below if needed... The Mental Framework Now that we have covered each building block that will help grow your business, I want to cover the importance of a mental framework for business growth. It provides you and everyone surrounding your business with a mental visualization of how all the building blocks we discussed work toward achieving the vision and mission of your company. In other words, it keeps everyone on the same page and helps create a clear picture in everyone’s mind on how and why the company will grow. Stare at the blocks below for a good 30 seconds and then close your eyes for about 15 seconds. Try to recreate the image you just saw and picture each part of your business in these blocks. Doing this each day will help you maintain a clear foundation to make decisions that are going to grow your business. It will come into play when you are developing marketing strategies, sales strategies, branding strategies and a plethora of other strategies that support the purpose of your company. Designing Business Growth Strategies Now that we have established a foundation for each building block and a mental framework for business growth, it is time to utilize each block to build and implement strategies that grow your business. The exercises you completed in the previous sections are part of the “foundational blocks” behind each strategy you decide to deploy. You will be pulling components from each block you completed into individual strategies. Think of the strategies as smaller blocks that sit on top of each foundational block. These strategies are dependent and pull from the components you defined in each of the 4 blocks. The size of each block will depend on the potential impact that the strategy has toward growing your business. Prioritizing your strategies will assure that your time, attention, energy and resources (people, money, etc.) is focused on a result that makes the greatest impact on the overall purpose of your company. Think of prioritization as pulling the biggest and fastest lever you can pull in your company. It’s what you need to implement today versus 6 months from now. A great example of prioritization is when you deploy strategies around digital marketing to generate more leads. For most companies, the website is the central focus of attention. Everything you do in digital marketing should ultimately be leading people back to home base for your brand, your website. In this example, your first strategy would be centered around creating and managing a website that properly represents your brand image, value proposition and ultimately converts visitors into paying clients. Remember, when it comes to growing your business through digital media, think validate, educate and interact. Every strategy that you deploy around your website (social media, community engagement, search engine optimization, etc.) should be to drive people to a place is fully optimized to convert the right people into paying clients. Otherwise, you will never maximize the investment in subsequent strategies (e.g. social media) that are intended to drive traffic and engagement to and from the website. You’ll just be sending potential clients to a place that won’t convert them into a lead. Before jumping into prioritizing and developing your own business growth strategies, consider speaking with other successful companies in or close to your industry that have had success. Find out what worked, what didn’t and what hasn’t been tried yet. You’ll save yourself a lot of time, money and headache in the process. Also, don’t forget platforms such as Google or even trade associations in your industry. Many times the people at trade associations hear feedback from many of their members that will save you from learning the hard way. Also, consider working with a digital business development consultant to help you not only create appropriate business growth strategies, but also help define the priority of strategy deployment and oversee implementation of the strategy. The tools and tactics in a digital world are growing by the minute. It’s important to work with a professional digital business development consultant that stays up­to­date with the world of possibilities while also staying in tune with your business goals. Break down each business growth strategy into the following main sections: Purpose, People, Platform and Process. Be as clear and precise as possible within each section. The goal is to translate each section of your strategy into a project system (platform) that will help organize and manage the process of execution (implementation). You can use a similar format to the example strategy on the following page. Sample Digital Business Development Strategy Project #1: Setup CRM integration with MailChimp email marketing software to streamline customers entering our automated educational series. PURPOSE Objective: ● To push data entered in from the Sales CRM to MailChimp to properly segment leads so they receive the most relevant information to build trust and earn the opportunity to win a contract. ● To pull marketing data provided by MailChimp email marketing software into each deal in the Sales CRM in order to provide sales reps and consultants with information that is helpful in closing deals. PEOPLE ● John Smith (Strategy) ● Jane Roberts (CRM Integrator) PLATFORMS ● PipeDrive (Sales CRM) ● MailChimp (Email Marketing Software) ● Zapier (Software Integration Tool) PROCESS Overview of Tasks 1. Make sure the Sales CRM is setup with all of the important fields that make up a lead ­ Person, Organization, Deal. 2. Setup all of the system automations from the Sales CRM and MailChimp to properly segment leads into email lists that are segmented by industries served. 3. Create system automations within Sales CRM (i.e. automatic email reminders, schedule of follow up activities, etc.) to generate a system of accountability (through activity tasking) for all users in the system. 4. Pull specific marketing data from MailChimp to update within each deal in the Sales CRM. Project Progress/Completion Date May 16, 2015 ­ In Progress (30 day intervals) Results ● 1,534 new contacts added into email auto­responder from sales staff input within 30 days ● 194 contacts responded to call­to­action statements within emails ● 142 new paying clients Obviously the kind of project and result metrics will vary from business to business. The key is to follow the structure of the strategy. As you can see, the strategy is built off of each building block of business growth (Purpose, People, Platform and Process). The objective of the project supports each foundational component of Purpose (mission, vision, values, ethics and goals) that we reviewed earlier. Be sure to keep your documented strategy simple and easy­to­understand. Don’t try to add too many objectives in one strategy. It will make the strategy hard to understand, manage and track. You are always better creating simpler strategies that you can build on over time. Remember, you are running a marathon, not a sprint. As you begin to implement your strategies, be sure to revisit them on a consistent basis. At Phase 2 Solutions, we require consultants to review and report on strategies with clients a minimum of once per month. By consistently review your strategies you will hold vendors accountable, find ways to improve strategies, review results and open a collaboration with your team to determine how to improve your approach. By following this framework to build your business growth strategies, you will assure that each strategy is on a trajectory to growing your business. Conclusion Using digital media in an age of digital transformation is critical to the survival and growth of your business. It’s not just using it that’s important, but rather utilizing digital media tools and tactics within a business development framework to assure that each strategy you invest in is supporting business growth. To recap, we covered the areas to build strategies around when it comes to digital media: validation, education and interaction. Digital tools and tactics are not meant to replace human interaction or even traditional marketing that helps to build relationships and trust. Digital tools and tactics need to be viewed as a means to support and augment the ideal customer experience and business growth process. The framework (Purpose, People, Platform and Process) we shared will help you define your goals, check your goals against the purpose of your company, engage all segments of people that make up your brand community, institute digital technology where appropriate to automate and streamline processes, develop business growth strategies and finally to help measure the results of each strategy to assure they are in line with your purpose as a company. As you move forward in developing your business growth strategy, consider scheduling a free consultation with a Phase 2 Solutions consultant. Your consultant will help you define your business objectives, determine how you measure success, identifying pain points that are keeping you from growing and to assess what you are doing right now to make business growth possible utilizing the most appropriate digital business development strategies. From there, your consultant will help design and execute a strategy best utilizing the 4 building blocks to grow your business. Schedule a free consultation today by visiting http://phase2solutions.net/contact .