A Practical Guide On How To Improve Your Team’s Performance

3 Questions That Will Help You Understand and Reduce Marketing, Sales And Customer Team Friction

Everyone wants to increase their team’s performance but one thing that similarly holds everyone back from this goal is unnecessary friction. No matter what industry you are in or what role you hold, we all face friction on a daily basis. Friction is something that makes us work harder than we should to produce the same results and it has a snowball effect. Friction negatively impacts your team’s performance because when you work harder or longer in one area it prevents you from getting to your next task quickly or at all. Additionally, the pressure to complete tasks can also cause you to cut corners in your work so you can just get them done; so now you’re not even doing your best work. Sounds like a vicious cycle, right? It also probably sounds like your day-to-day life.

While we can’t say that this guide will help you solve for every bit of friction in life, it will help you uncover some areas that you can quickly reduce to allow your teams to work on what matters. To increase your team’s performance, ask yourself and your team these 3 questions to start uncovering the friction your employees face:

1. What Tasks Are You Doing Repeatedly?
2. What Tasks Are Not Producing Desired Results?
3. What Tasks Are Taking Way Too Long To Complete?

1. What Tasks Are You Doing Repeatedly?

As a small business leader you often won’t know what tasks are done over and over again by your teams. Additionally, asking them for a list will probably only give you one part of the story. One way to gain a first-hand account of this question and #3 is to shadow each employee to understand how their day is spent and looking at it from the perspective of increasing their performance by freeing their time.

Some of the common areas of repeated tasks include:

• Lead follow up
• Email outreach
• Setting tasks
• Customer check ins and requests for testimonials
• Copy and pasting content across systems

These are all good things that need to happen but they can also be very manual and take up a lot of valuable time if you let it. The easiest solution for all of these tasks is to automate as much as possible. We love HubSpot for its marketing and sales automation capabilities.

Taking the time to create the email templates and workflows you need, allows you to quickly nurture leads or check in with customers you haven’t spoken to recently. It can also free up tremendous amounts of time that can now be used to consistently analyze and improve on your workflows. In other words, you will be empowering your team to follow up faster, perfect their messaging and ultimately convert more business without adding more folks or working your existing team harder.

While email templates and automation can fix most areas of repetition, they do not solve for copying and pasting across multiple systems but an app integration will. Unless you are using custom software, there will typically be integrations to connect your systems and automate the flow of information from one system to the next. If a native API is unavailable, you can use something like Zapier to be the in between for your systems and still automate that flow. Finally, if you are using a custom piece of software you may want to consider having your developer create that integration. While it may seem like an unnecessary investment, consider the hourly rate of your employees and how much time they spend in this tedious work and then weigh the pros and cons of each option. We realized an organization was spending thousands of dollars each year in their employees’ time transferring content on web to sales collateral that the price of creating a custom print to PDF option on site was a no brainer.

2. What Tasks Are Not Producing Desired Results?

In order to understand this you need to be tracking your teams’ efforts. This means marketing should be recording the campaigns and topic clusters they develop content and materials for and sales should be recording all of their sales touchpoints and results in the form of closed won or lost deals. When you are effectively tracking your work you can look at the data objectively and see what is working or not working. If you are not tracking your efforts, then musings such as “I have a feeling XYZ is skewing our lead numbers” enter the conversation and start a wild goose chase to turn things around. There is a ton of value in qualitative data but when you are trying to make decisions to eliminate certain efforts you want to have the quantitative backing to justify it so that you don’t accidentally hurt your business instead of helping it.

Once you start recording your work, you should gather at least 90 days worth of data before really making a drastic change in your efforts. After this time, analyze everything from the perspective of your buyer and your brand. We will outline two scenarios below.

Marketing increased the number of leads going to sales each month but the number of leads converted to opportunities has not increased.

This is a common scenario for small business. The goal is more revenue so we think we need more leads but sometimes that can backfire because your sales team does not have the capacity to effectively manage more leads. There are a number of things you can analyze in this situation, such as:

• Are the leads coming through to sales in an even flow or are they distributed in larger batches a few times during the month?
• Are the leads the same quality as the ones they were converting?
• Is your sales team spending more time at the end of the month trying to close out existing opportunities that they aren’t following up on new leads at that time?

To keep things simple, let’s say the leads are coming through evenly, they are of the same quality and sales is following up consistently throughout the month. The next thing you should look at is if sales’ follow up time has increased or stayed the same. Chances are if they are receiving too many leads than they can manage, it is taking them longer to make their first touchpoint. If that is the case you will need to slow down the number of leads so you are not wasting money and resources on them or you need to tighten your requirements for a qualified lead and keep the others moving through automated nurturing workflows.

Your organization exhibits at a large conference but, 90 days after the event, reports show it has only influenced about 60% of the revenue needed to cover the costs of the event.

Similar to the scenario above, this statement prompts a lot of additional questions:

• Were the sales all new customers and is it likely this could lead to more business in the future?
• Did this provide greater brand exposure, or did it connect you with thought leaders that could result in meaningful partnerships?
• Have you seen an increase in web traffic surrounding the event?
• Did the contacts received engage with your content and what stage in the buyers journey are they at?

Many business leaders want to see a quick return on their event attendance costs but the truth of the matter is that most attendees at any event are not there looking for solutions to their problems. They are there to learn and engage. So by this 90-day mark most business leaders and sales reps are ready to say the event was a bust but really you may just be at the very beginning of your buyer’s journey.

We suggest gathering at least 6-12 months of data on an event before deciding if it was not the best use of resources. If you can’t wait that long and have some qualitative data saying there was value in the event, try cancelling the exhibit space but still send a representative as an attendee to engage with other attendees and vendors. This option is less expensive and can still allow you to make quality introductions so long as you stay focused on that goal. It also allows you to compare the difference between exhibiting and attending an event and the ROI of each.

3. What Tasks Are Taking Way Too Long To Complete?

These are probably the tasks you team complains the most about. They complain because they take forever but they also know they are valuable and best done manually. Here are some of the top time consuming yet effective marketing, sales and customer experience tasks:

• Content creation (Blog posts, videos, pillar pages, emails, social media, sales collateral, etc.)
• 1:1 sales emails or phone calls
• Customer interviews

These are all super valuable tasks that should be done regularly. The problem is that because these are daily to-do items, they can start to feel mundane and will easily be the first item to get pushed to tomorrow if we let it. Additionally, to do any of these items well there needs to be energy and enthusiasm for the work because your emotions will naturally translate into the content, phone call or interview.

The solution to this is to help your team find their flow. Daniel Pink’s book “When: The Scientific Secrets Of Perfect Timing” is a great research-based guide on how timing can help someone produce their best work quickly. In a nutshell, most people:

• Do their best analytical and thought intensive work in the morning
• Are happiest in the morning so this is the best time to translate positive vibes in important customer meetings, phone calls, etc.
• Experience a slump around lunch that is best suited for the mundane email checking, scheduling tasks
• Are easily distracted in the late afternoon but this time can be effectively captured for creative and innovative problem solving

Encourage your team to read it and apply some of the recommendations to their daily work schedule. Additionally, apply the principles to the meetings you organize for your teams. Here are some ideas to increase your team’s performance by helping them find their flow:

Content Creation – Blog Posts

Host a weekly content brainstrom on Monday afternoons. Everyone is an creative mood and can feed off of each other’s energy. Collect all of the ideas and then assign a blog post topic each morning to someone with the requirement that it needs to be completed by noon.

Content Creation – Social Media

Pick a morning to develop a content calendar for the month. Include the following for each entry on the calendar:

• Types of content (blog post, email, social media)
• If social media, include the social network to post to
• Quick blurb about the subject
• Buyer’s stage it is targeted to

Then in an afternoon start scheduling for the day, week or month whatever works for your team. You will be amazed how much content you can get out quickly by planning and bulk scheduling it at the times you are naturally best suited to do the work.

Sales Outreach – Phone Calls

Run a call blitz with your sales reps every morning. Again, set a requirement of how many calls need to be made by noon so that their positive morning energy is transferring to the potential customers they are talking to.

Sales Outreach – Email

Pick a morning and create templates for the emails or sequences you use regularly. Doing this during a time you are naturally more detail-oriented will help make sure your emails are well written. Then, during your afternoon slump, tackle your email task list. During this time, make sure you are only using the template as a base and you are personalizing the content to each of your contacts.

Customer Interviews

Similar to sales calls and meetings, schedule customer interviews for the morning when possible so that you and your customer’s energy translates on the video. It also helps improve the quality of the interview since you are less likely to be distracted and more likely to engage in active listening.

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