20 May How to Work On Your Business, Not Just In it

Regardless of your title, most people spend so much time working IN their business that they actually spend very little time working ON it. You feel it when systems and processes degrade, when sales leads slow down, when competitors start eating your lunch. Here are three steps to changing your focus.

Step 1: Accept the New Buyer’s Journey

By 2020, 80% of the buyer’s journey will occur without any direct human-to-human interaction, according to both Gartner and Forrester.

Which is why for many companies, their lunch is being gobbled up in the digital space. Their competitors update their website every few years, post content weekly, and actively employ a variety of digital marketing strategies to generate new leads and convert more business, because the traditional channels are drying up.

Don’t like this change? Well, raise your hand if you let calls go directly to voicemail to avoid cold calls. Raise your hand if you delete any and all emails that vaguely resemble a cold email. And raise your hand if you don’t talk to a sales rep you don’t already know.

Now raise your hand if your sales team can’t reach enough decision-makers each month.

With all the information one could possibly ask for just a thumb swipe away, why should anyone reach out to a sales person until they are ready to make a decision?

Step 2: Learn What Is Working

Companies that are growing are investing heavily in the digital space — and not just in SEO and PPC. The most successful companies employ a digital marketing system that nurtures the entire sales funnel and not just the bottom 2%.

Real growth is determined by your influence with the 98% of your funnel who will be ready to buy in the future. Yet, SEO companies tell us we just need to increase website traffic to grow revenue. They offer boilerplate packages that focus on keywords instead of visitor experience.

Capturing 80% of the buyer’s journey requires a more agile digital marketing system employing a variety of strategies at different points along the customer’s journey. For example, buyers may (1) enter your sales funnel through a series of blog posts, but they (2) make first contact by downloading a white paper; you then (3) nurture the relationship through personalized email automation, perhaps with (4) short videos or (5) helpful articles. This is just one possible scenario.

Step 3: Educate Yourself on the right Solution

Before you start talking to agencies who just want to sell you all sorts of services (there you go perpetuating the new reality again) you want to educate yourself on how you can grow your business online. So make time to do it.

We will be sponsoring a a free, live Google Partner event on Wednesday, June 29th in Providence, RI.  Google collects and analyzes massive amounts of consumer data and they want to share their insights with business leaders who recognize that this shift is happening.  Instead of an online webinar, they want to bring business leaders from a variety of industries to one location for this hybrid webinar that combines education with open networking.  Because despite all these changes, face-to-face conversation is still the best.

Follow this link and join the conversation on June 29th, at the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce from 8:30 AM to 10:30 AM for Google’s live streaming presentation: How to Grow Your Business Online.  Coffee and bagels will be served. Feel free to share this link with colleagues, friends and family.