Customer success and customer service are fundamental components in your organization’s ability to deliver great experiences and create long-lasting relationships.  More specifically, these two teams are at the very center of your organization’s efforts to drive adoption, retention, and ultimately, customer loyalty. And according to the Harvard Business Review, companies with a focus on loyalty grow revenues roughly 2.5 times as fast as their industry peers.

Businesses are increasingly differentiating themselves from the competition by providing seamless continuity across customer success and customer service, and ensuring that their employees are able to demonstrate expertise, insights, and empathy in every single customer interaction.  

Customer service and customer success are aligned in that both teams are responsible for creating and maintaining customer loyalty. But there are differences in each team’s remit. Understanding the differences and how they can complement each other is essential for minimizing churn and maximizing revenue growth.

Identifying the differences between customer success and customer service

Customer service and customer success together constitute the perfect marriage of reactive and proactive customer engagement. 

Customer service is primarily reactive. Teams respond in the moment, as quickly as possible, to customer tickets, concerns, and complaints. There might be a technical issue to solve, or a bug to identify and report to engineering. Customers might also reach out to the support team to address learning needs, or alleviate confusion about how to leverage and optimize product feature sets and functionality.  Customer service also has the opportunity, by listening with intention, to identify and create sales opportunities based on unique customer requirements and growth strategies. 

Customer success is primarily proactive, with a focus on the strategic, long-term view. CS teams typically focus first on the onboarding process to encourage engagement and adoption, and drive retention. They continue to build for the future by leading customers through quarterly business reviews to analyze performance and create long-term, strategic mutual success plans to optimize the investment that customers have made in your product or service. 

Exploring the intersection of customer success and customer service

Even though these roles are clearly differentiated, ultimately, they need each other to optimize performance and orchestrate successful customer outcomes.  They become exponentially more valuable to your organization through cross-functional engagement and alignment. The primary way to achieve that is through enhanced communication across teams, facilitated by a unified customer data platform. 

To explore this concept in more detail, we spoke with Zeke Silva, Insightly’s Senior Director of Client Services, and Luke Via, Insightly’s Senior Director of Customer Success. They share key takeaways on their partnership in delivering exceptional customer experiences at Insightly. 

Securing a complete view of the customer

“Our collaboration has centered on breaking down barriers around securing a complete view of the customer. CS maps success to alignment with customers. If my team isn’t armed with detailed customer service ticket information to round out that full view, there’s a risk that we look out of touch,” said Via.  

Via and Silva’s teams are empowered to capture actionable customer insights through Insightly’s unified platform. “With data across sales, marketing, and service on the same platform, we’re armed with a complete view of our customers,” adds Silva. “My team works primarily in the Service app to capture current customer status, and that information is available to Luke’s team, and the rest of the organization, immediately–it’s completely frictionless, which enhances our ability to be successful across functional groups.”

Maximizing performance and creating impact

This seamless flow of information across the platform has made a tremendous impact in their teams’ ability to drive great experiences. 

According to Via, “With a consolidated platform view, we’re all able to do a much better job of anticipating and over delivering on outcomes. We’ve got the right information to guide conversations more effectively and with more impact. It also helps our teams move with greater velocity. We don’t need to schedule meetings to find out more about current customer status; the data is right there in the platform and anyone can access it quickly and efficiently. It’s made a huge difference during COVID, with remote teams. Ultimately, having access to support, marketing, and sales data in a single platform, and easily accessible to everyone, has freed up time for our teams and enhanced their productivity. It’s empowered my team to be much more strategic in their account interactions, which creates value for us and our customers.”

Silva adds, “With a unified view of our customers, we can all pick up the relationship right where it’s at. My team uses the data they collect in the Service app to quickly react and troubleshoot on behalf of customers, and Luke’s team uses that same information, along with data in the CRM, to facilitate proactive, strategic conversations leading to transformational growth.”

Empower your teams with unified data

A unified data platform is at the nexus of creating loyalty, building long-term customer relationships and growing your business.  Customer success and customer service teams, along with the rest of your organization, require unified data to optimize communication, create visibility through the entire customer lifecycle, and maximize productivity.  Empower your teams with the data they need to capitalize on insights and deliver exceptional experiences. 

Key takeaways:

• Remote work makes it even more imperative for cross-functional teams to have access to the tools and systems they need to support their customers
• The tools and processes you create should make it easier, not harder, for your teams to do their jobs, and ultimately, create impact for customers.  Think about ways to deliver information quickly and easily, with fewer meetings. 
• Optimize knowledge transfer, communication, and outcomes through a unified data platform across sales, marketing, and service for a full view to the customer relationship
• Make sure everyone has access to the same information so that, as Silva says, you can all “pick up the relationship right where it’s at.”

If you’re just getting started, be sure to check out the other articles in this four-part series: 

• Part 1: 5 customer service skills to build great customer relationships
• Part 2: 4 customer service challenges (and how to solve them)
• Part 3: 4 tips for creating a customer-centric experience

Interested in learning more about how you can align your customer service and customer success teams?  Chat with us.

The post Customer service + success: designed to drive exceptional experiences appeared first on Insightly.

Many companies talk about being “customer-centric.” In reality, too few invest the time and effort to provide truly customer-centric experiences.

How can you push your organization to become more customer-centric?

Recently, I sat down with Luke Via, Senior Director of Customer Success at Insightly, to discuss best practices for enabling customer-centric experiences. Here are four important tips to consider.

1. Align around providing the best possible customer experience

Modern buying cycles are complex. Gone are the days of exclusively relying on sales to handle every customer interaction. Marketing, customer success and support, product development, finance, and a myriad of other stakeholders play important roles in the customer experience.

Before you can align your teams and individual contributors around an ideal experience, you need alignment at the top. “Being customer-centric requires alignment among all of a company’s executives and agreement to focus on the best possible customer experience,” says Luke Via, Senior Director of Customer Success at Insightly. “From marketing to selling to supporting customers with great products and services, leaders must consciously seek new ways to improve.”

Open and honest communication is the best way to cultivate alignment among leaders. Start an internal conversation and begin collecting opportunities for improvement. Explore how your company can maximize value across every stage of the customer experience—and with the highest level of satisfaction. Which parts of the customer experience are contributing to (or eroding) satisfaction?

Tip: Frontline staff, who regularly interact with your customers, can be an excellent source of ideas. Find ways to include them in the conversation, too!

2. Define your ideal customer journey

Once leadership agrees that the customer experience is a top priority, it’s time to develop a shared vision of the ideal pre-sale and post-sale experience. “Leaders need to gain a clear understanding of a customer’s desired outcome,” says Luke. “It’s about knowing where customers are today, why they arrived at your solution, and the resources they’re willing to spend to achieve their goals.”

Journey mapping is one approach for obtaining a shared vision of the customer experience. As pointed out in 3 ways to use CRM data in building customer journeys, mapping your current journeys involves three basic steps:

Define your ICPs and personas. Gain a clear understanding of the types of companies and people you serve. What do they have in common? Organizing customers by ICP (ideal customer profile) and persona will make it easier to think in terms of an “ideal” experience.

Gather data to identify similar journeys. How do your ICPs and personas advance through the customer journey? Do they go through common steps when purchasing or renewing? Use data from your CRM or other business systems to avoid flawed assumptions.

Build your customer journey map. Your journey map could be a simple spreadsheet or a complex diagram. Either way, the end product should be backed by real-world data and easily accessible by leadership. Which parts of the journey are less than ideal for the customer? What steps can be taken to provide a more customer-centric experience?

Frequently reevaluating your journeys through the eyes of the customer will help you close the gap between the status quo and the ideal. And, according to Luke, it’s also an activity that can have a measurable impact on your bottom line. “If you provide the best experience possible, customers are more likely to stay,” says Luke. “So, if you’re looking to grow, you should be customer-focused through the entire journey.”

3. Get the right data, metrics, and tools

How do you know if you’re providing a customer-centric experience? Collecting the right data and monitoring the right metrics is key for establishing a baseline and tracking progress. Which data and metrics are most important? The answer may vary from company to company, but here are a few to consider:

CSAT is the measurement of a customer’s satisfaction with a particular interaction. A sustained uptick in aggregated CSAT can mean that customers are generally happier with their experiences.

Contraction, or churn, measures the number of customers who take their business elsewhere during a period of time. Negative experiences lead to elevated levels of contraction, while positive experiences reduce churn. So, it stands to reason that lower contraction indicates an improvement in the customer experience.

Average time spent per support ticket measures how long agents take to resolve customer issues. Customers prefer shorter wait times to longer ones, so reducing time per ticket is bound to make customers happier in the long run.

Aligning all of your customer interactions—across sales, support, and marketing—into one system like Insightly can make it easier to track and report on key metrics. Eliminating data silos reduces complexity and makes it easier to develop a comprehensive view of the customer experience.

4. Establish an effective feedback loop

Internal data and metrics are no substitute for direct customer feedback. Unfortunately, many companies struggle to implement a scalable feedback loop. “Effective companies do more than ask for feedback,” says Luke. “They use feedback to initiate meaningful internal discussions and ultimately communicate it back to their customer base.”

For example, Insightly’s founder and CEO, Anthony Smith, regularly hosts product release webinars to share the company’s latest innovations—innovations that stem largely from customer feedback. These webinars not only serve as an effective vehicle for feature announcements, but they also help customers feel more connected—and committed—to the Insightly experience. “Celebrating victories is huge because people want to feel like they’re being heard,” says Luke. “Forming an emotional connection further solidifies the customer’s connection to the company.”

Time for a customer-centric approach?

Customers have never had more choices at their disposal. In an increasingly commoditized marketplace, the companies that deliver the best experiences will win.

Stay tuned for additional customer service tips. Next time, we’ll explore the relationship between customer success and the customer experience.

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This is part 2 of a customer service blog series based on conversations with members of Insightly’s client services and customer success teams.

In part 1 of this customer service blog series, we discussed five important skills for building great relationships. Continuing on with my discussion with Zeke Silva, Sr. Director Client Services at Insightly, today we’ll discuss a few challenging situations in customer service—and how agents can apply their skills to overcome them.

1. Getting to the root of the problem

“It just doesn’t work.”

If you’ve spent any time in customer service, you’ve probably heard customers make general statements like this. Deciphering what the customer actually means can sometimes be more challenging than fixing the problem at hand. Is your product or service actually broken, or does the customer simply not understand how to make something work? Is this a support issue, or does it have more to do with training?

The customer’s level of technical expertise is a key factor to keep in mind when trying to get to the root of the problem. “You have to be very careful with word choice, especially if you’re working with someone who isn’t tech-savvy or familiar with your product,” says Zeke Silva, Sr. Director Client Services at Insightly. Newbies aren’t the only ones who can cause challenging situations for customer service agents. “On the flip side, you also have to be ready to help that super-technical customer, too,” says Zeke.

Try this: Avoid jumping straight into the weeds and making incorrect assumptions. According to Silva, a better approach starts with asking general questions. “You have to treat it like a funnel and slowly—or quickly—work towards more pointed questions,” says Zeke.

2. Dealing with seasonal fluctuations and other growing pains

Answering dozens of similar support tickets can lead to a numbing effect that quickly erodes an agent’s ability to empathize with customers. That’s especially true when your company experiences a period of rapid hypergrowth or a seasonal uptick in demand. Focusing too much on average handle time, time to resolution, and other performance metrics at the expense of the customer journey will only compound the problem.

Experienced customer service teams seek a balanced approach that focuses on efficiency and effectiveness without losing touch of the bigger picture. For Insightly’s support team, this means reminding agents that each new quarter is an opportunity to serve an entirely new batch of customers—many of whom may have similar questions. “Having agents ready for that prepares them to be in the right mindset for responding appropriately,” says Zeke. “Preparing the team for an influx enables them to offer a great experience, especially for brand new customers who may be switching from a competitor.”

Try this: Re-examine your company’s revenue patterns and identify periods that tend to yield large influxes of new customers or support requests. Proactively communicate this to your customer service team and make sure they’re amped up to handle the surge.

3. Advocating for the customer when things break

Not every customer service issue can be resolved with a simple email, phone call, or screen share. Sometimes things break and require a considerable amount of effort to identify, replicate, capture, and fix the underlying problem.

Training front-line support staff to diagnose and escalate tickets is the first step. However, escalating a ticket will do no good unless there is a reliable infrastructure in place to deal with bugs and other unexpected problems. “You don’t just throw a baseball at someone and hope they’re ready to catch it,” says Zeke. “They’ve got to be ready to receive it, and the same is true for dealing with escalated tickets.”

Solving complex problems may require input from multiple stakeholders across customer service, operations, engineering, and other teams. And, that’s no small task in a business environment that’s still dominated by remote work. It’s difficult to be an effective advocate for the customer when information is spread across multiple inboxes, threads, and systems. That’s why having all of your essential customer data in one, easily accessible location is particularly important.

Try this: Audit your existing ticket escalation workflow and look for ways to improve it. Where does information tend to get lost or overlooked? How does communication break down across departments? How can you consolidate overlapping systems and make it easier to advocate for your customers?

4. Holding other teams accountable

Streamlining ticket escalations, reducing overlapping systems, and eliminating data silos is a major step forward, but doing so doesn’t guarantee accountability from the rest of your company. To ensure timely resolution for your customers, it’s best to establish cross-departmental service-level agreements (SLAs) that are backed by leaders from each team.

Tying internal SLAs to customer-facing SLAs is another strategy for creating urgency throughout the organization. For example, Insightly users on the Ultimate success plan can expect to receive a response within one hour of sending an email. “That builds confidence with customers that they’ll get a first touch within a certain amount of time,” says Zeke. Once an issue has been validated, Insightly’s engineering team sequences the work based on previously agreed to SLAs, which gives the support team—and, in turn, the end user—a specific time frame for achieving a satisfactory outcome.

Keeping the lines of communication open is essential for avoiding misunderstandings. Insightly’s support team also sends a bi-weekly email to engineering, which contains additional context for prioritizing customer requests. “We’ve created multiple avenues to prioritize and elevate,” says Zeke.

Try this: Formalize the working relationship between your customer-facing and back-office teams, perhaps through one or more SLAs. Gain buy-in from leaders from across the organization and look for ways to tie agreements back to customer expectations.

Next up, tips for becoming even more customer-centric

Stay tuned for the next article in this series. We’ll be moving beyond customer service issues and focusing our attention on proactive strategies that ensure a customer-centric experience.

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At my own company, a tech startup in the San Francisco Bay Area, we had to weigh the benefits and challenges of working remotely before deciding to become a remote-first company. Below are a few takeaways from our decision-making journey and tips to ensure remote work success.

Remote work benefits

1. Freedom to move

One of the positive aspects of remote work is that it provides freedom for employees to move and work from anywhere. For many employees, especially in tech and other industries that have traditionally been concentrated in specific geographic areas, remote work allows people to stay connected, collaborate and contribute without enduring a high cost of living or other limitations. At my company, this fact alone contributed to a higher employee satisfaction rate.

2. Custom workspaces

For quite some time now, open office spaces have been the norm for businesses across industries. Yet, for work that requires a high level of focus for long periods of time, an open office environment—with all its distractions and noise—is far from ideal. Remote work allows employees to design their own workspaces for maximum focus and productivity.

3. Bigger hiring pool

You can now compete for top talent anywhere in the country and the world. More than that, hiring remotely allows you to build a more diverse team in every sense, attracting people from different backgrounds and skill sets.

Remote work challenges

1. Loss of community

There are a few things that are hard to replicate in the virtual work environment, and among them are impromptu brainstorms, team outings and friendly conversations at the proverbial water cooler. For many companies, in-person interactions fueled a sense of community and were a big part of company culture.

2. Communication gaps

It can be hard to get a read on people during a video call. It’s also easy to miss social cues we often use during in-person interactions without even thinking about it. But just being aware of this fact can help you build understanding and figure out ways to close the communication gap.

3. Burnout

The past year presented new challenges for all of us in every aspect of life, including health, family and work. Working remotely while caring for loved ones and/or coping with social isolation came at a huge physical and emotional cost, causing burnout.

Tips for successful remote work

Every challenge is also an opportunity to learn and grow. Here are a few battle-tested tips to help you overcome the challenges of working remotely.

1. Think digital first

If you haven’t done so already, adopt digital tools and systems that are easy to use and meet your team’s unique needs. If all you need is Zoom and Google Workspace and you’re off to the races, that’s great. But if you’re planning to transition into fully remote work or a hybrid model where part of the workforce remains remote, then you’ll need more than just basic planning and communication tools. For example, you may need to adopt learning management systems to deliver everything from onboarding to HR training to ongoing internal product and service seminars.

We live in the digital age where new data is generated every second. All that information, including customer data, is useless if you don’t properly manage it and integrate different parts of business to implement continuous data-driven improvement. Consider a data management platform to keep your business and customer data secure, align remote teams around key performance indicators and track progress across the entire organization.

2. Prioritize communication

More doesn’t mean better when it comes to communication. Zoom fatigue is real, and meetings are no more popular now than they were when we worked in physical offices. Keep your meetings to the minimum and prioritize clear, consistent and written communication. Make face-to-face meetings more intentional and purpose-driven.

3. Encourage work-life balance

While working from home has its appeal, it can cause burnout. On the flip side of flexibility, the lack of commute and comfortable clothing are the absence of structure in terms of a clear start and end to the workday. The burden is on both leaders and employees to set clear expectations for work hours, response time and meetings, taking into consideration different time zones. It may seem overwhelming at first, but honest and open conversations can help find and maintain balance.

4. Check the pulse of employees on a regular basis

As time goes by, our sentiments about remote work and its impact on our lives may change. Don’t wait until you start noticing productivity dips or a lower employee satisfaction rate. It might be unrealistic for you to check in with everyone individually on a regular basis, but you can use brief surveys to give your employees an opportunity to provide feedback and ask questions.

5. Introduce remote work policies

Remote work may look different at different companies. To make sure your employees understand how remote work is going to affect their daily work and lives in the long term, consider introducing remote-work-specific policies. The policies can include anything from allowing employees to work anywhere within the same time zone or country to offering an ergonomics stipend to planning regular in-person outings once it’s safe to do so. At my company, we did a series of employee surveys to determine our team’s priorities and policies as we adjusted to a new normal.

At this point, it’s clear we aren’t going back to the way we worked before the pandemic. Now the task is to make remote work the best it can be and to keep work productive and meaningful.

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Many Americans who have switched to remote work recognize the benefits. There’s zero commute and a comfortable work environment. That being said, remote work comes with its fair share of challenges, especially when it comes to maintaining high levels of communication and productivity.

Both large and small companies are announcing permanent or partial shifts to remote workforces, making the need for best-in-class technology ever so important. Here’s why adopting a unified CRM can be a smart choice for your remote teams.

Remote work challenges

Let’s start by discussing the challenges that many remote teams are struggling to overcome.

Information silos

The transition to cloud-based systems was already underway well before the pandemic. Managing business information in department-specific web applications comes with numerous benefits, but doing so can lead to data silos. One system for deals, another system for marketing campaigns, and still another for delivery makes it difficult to gain a full view of the customer journey and connect data points to accurately measure business performance and ROI.

Poor communication

Virtual meeting fatigue isn’t the only communication-related challenge facing remote teams. When business information is spread across numerous systems, it makes collaboration more difficult for staff. Instead of talking about how to best serve the customer, team members are faced with conversations about how to get data from point A to point B.

Remote selling

Selling while sheltering adds an entirely new level of complexity for your sales reps. Customers want to do business with people that they genuinely like and trust. But how can your company build trust when remote teams are operating in misalignment with sales? If your sales rep is saying one thing but your marketing emails and collateral say another, or the delivery doesn’t match promises made at the time of the sale—your customers will get confused, stop engaging, and lose trust in your company.

Distributed ad budgets

Trade shows, a traditional mainstay of corporate marketing, are still on hold in many industries and geographic locations. For digital marketers, it means more money to allocate toward email campaigns, content marketing, SEO, paid search engine ads, and other online promotions and initiatives. However, managing a dozen different marketing programs requires continuous tracking and performance measurement. Compare this to a live trade show that has one timeline, one lead list, and a relatively known budget.

How a unified CRM solves many remote work challenges

Companies often try to alleviate remote work challenges by building CRM integrations with the tools that they use. While this approach can work, not all integrations are created equal. Each team member must juggle multiple user names, passwords, login URLs, and user interfaces. Data syncs take time to configure and routinely break, which means someone has to fix them. And, there’s the security and privacy risks associated with maintaining customer data in too many places.

By contrast, a unified CRM for sales, marketing, and delivery solves many of the challenges facing your remote teams. Staff spend less time jumping between systems and more time on what counts: delivering business value. Here are four specific reasons why a unified CRM can be a smart choice for your remote teams:

1. One system for sales, marketing, delivery, and support

A unified CRM creates alignment between your lead management activities and other parts of the customer journey, such as your email marketing campaigns, customer onboarding, delivery, and ongoing support. Staff from across multiple remote teams are able to use your CRM to perform their day-to-day tasks, which means they’ll spend less time jumping between systems, juggling passwords and trying to sync key data. They can view reports and build real time dashboards in one place and spend more time using the data, instead of trying to build reports from scratch and manually share with others.

2. One view of the customer journey

Aligning sales, marketing, and operations under one roof provides a more complete view of each customer. Customer email interactions, website engagement, conversations with your sales teams, and purchase history can be consolidated into one record in your CRM. This means your remote teams don’t have to hunt for data in siloed databases. Providing a single view makes it easier for demand-generation teams to understand the customer and design new promotional campaigns and outreach initiatives that maximize customer lifetime value.

3. Improved accountability

A CRM with built-in productivity capabilities—such as projects, milestones, and tasks—adds a new level of transparency and accountability that is not possible when each team is working in a vacuum. Automated follow-up tasks keep sales reps on track with important deals. Kanban-style project boards help marketers prioritize digital advertising campaigns and stay on budget. Converting booked deals to projects in your CRM helps operations teams streamline customer onboarding and reduces unnecessary confusion and delays.

4. Flexibility to preserve mission-critical integrations

Not every challenge can be solved natively by a unified CRM. To compete and grow business, you may need other mission-critical apps. Your bookkeeper will still need a third-party accounting system to track income and generate financial statements. If you’re an eCommerce shop, your shopping cart software is not going away. Be sure to check how your unified CRM handles app integrations. For example, Insightly recently introduced AppConnect, a no-code CRM integration tool that delivers 500+ prebuilt connectors to frequently used apps. You don’t have to be a coder to use it and it takes just moments to build each integration.

Remote teams thrive when unified

Remote team management is no small task. It takes a proactive strategy, commitment from leadership, and the right tools and technology. As you work toward greater alignment between your remote staff, be sure to at least consider how a unified CRM could alleviate your specific challenges.

Learn more about Insightly’s unified CRM here.

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Even though the marketing career path isn’t a straight one, there are a few steps you can take to advance your career.

1. Decide if you are ready for your next position

It’s not always easy to know when you are ‘finished’ with a current role. Marketing jobs are dynamic, and you may never feel like you’ve completed everything on your long ‘to-do’ list. It’s rare to feel like you’ve done all that you can do in your current position, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not time to move on.

An easy way to tell if you’re ready for a new position is to pay attention to how you feel about your current work. Do you feel challenged or do you feel bored? Are you excited about or dreading upcoming projects? If your work is not energizing you like it used to, you’ve likely outgrown it.

Another way to know if you’re ready to advance in your career path is by reading your original job description. Are you still working on the same primary tasks and projects? Or, have you moved on to more advanced work? If your role has already moved beyond what it was, you are likely due for a new position.

2. Set intentional career goals

It’s tempting to obsess over advancing to a new title—a little signifier of success that you can show off on LinkedIn. Stop to consider what exactly this advancement would mean. Have you mastered everything in your current role? Would a new title provide new opportunities? How would you use those opportunities to grow?

Make a list of your career goals outside of a certain job title or salary bracket. These goals shouldn’t be beholden to marketing career path titles, salaries and structures. Often, these are arbitrary and differ from company to company.

Here are questions to ask when thinking about your next marketing career goals.

Do I want to:

• Pursue a marketing specialty? (more on this below)
• Work in a certain industry?
• Be part of a large or a small team?
• Be on a founding team?
• Manage a large or small budget?
• Work with people I can learn from? If so, in what areas?
• Work remotely?

Not every position will meet all your goals. But it’s still helpful to have this list when you’re considering opportunities and planning career moves.

3. Determine an internal or external move

Oftentimes, this decision is made for you. Is there an open position at your company, or does your company have a dedicated career advancement path? In that case, pursuing your next move at your current company is often your best option. You get the benefit of learning and growing without the learning curve of a new industry, new co-workers, and a new office (or Zoom meeting code).

But, you may decide that you’re ready to move to another company. Or, as is often the case, your company may not have a clear next step for you. This is typical at startup companies or companies with small marketing teams. So you may have only one choice: spend more time in your current position or leave to pursue something new.

How do you know if you’re ready to move to a new company?

Learn a new skill

In my first marketing job out of college, I was a writer and content manager. I loved this work, but I felt like I had only seen one corner of the digital marketing career. It was important to me to gain more visibility and experience into other facets of marketing in my next job.

Try a new industry

One reason that I love being a marketer is because I not only learn a lot about the marketing world, but I also learn so much about every industry that I market to. If you’ve spent a few years marketing to healthcare, for example, you might want to try your hand at marketing to software developers. If you’ve spent your career in B2B, you may also want to try B2C, or vice versa.

Meet new people

We learn so much from every co-worker and manager. Advancing your career can sometimes mean shaking up your work environment. When you move to a new company, you can guarantee that you’ll grow by learning how to work with new and different people.

4. Understand your next step

Especially in the startup world, hiring for marketing can be fragmented. Some companies have a CMO or a VP of Marketing as one of their first five hires. Some companies wait until they have an entire sales division before they hire a marketer.

The typical marketing job titles hierarchy at a tech or software startup might look something like this:

Though it may seem like the hierarchy is well-established, it can vary. Each company is on its own marketing journey. They will make different hires at different times. Responsibilities and seniority can fluctuate from one company to another.

Because of this, your next title may be lateral, or sometimes a step back. In this case, it’s important to return to your career path intentions. If the position allows you to grow, it is a step forward regardless of the title.

Salary grade is often tied to job title. This also varies depending on exact job responsibilities, industry and geographic location.

Based on US national averages data from April 2021, Salary.com reports that average marketing salaries can range from around $38,000 to $297,000. Salary ranges vary based on industry, location, experience level, education, and other factors.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average raise for performance-based promotion is 3 percent. So, if you’re a junior-level marketer making $56,999 and get promoted to a marketing manager role, it’s unlikely you’ll make that big jump to six figures. This is a crucial decision when deciding whether to take a promotion at your current company, or fill a role at a new company.

5. Consider generalized and specific marketing paths

Marketers love to say that they wear many hats. One day they might be a designer, one day a journalist, and one day an analyst. When companies are beginning to invest in marketing, they are often looking for the type of marketer that can do it all, or a generalist.

Yet, at some point, too many generalists feels like too many cooks. When they start to grow, companies see the value of having a dedicated graphic designer, a content manager, a marketing analyst, a campaign manager, and/or social media manager, to name a few.

A full-stack marketing team might consist of 10+ specialists with concentrated experience. Marketing specialties include digital marketing, content, search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click management, graphic design, public relations, brand management, product marketing, analytics, campaign management, marketing operations, events, customer engagement programs, and sales enablement. In some industries, there may be even more.

Most marketers spend some time as a generalist, and some time as a specialist. Often, generalist skills apply if you’re managing a team or heading up a department. Otherwise, special skills can take marketers far.

If you’ve spent some time as a generalist, consider a role that will allow you to focus on a specialty. If you’ve been in a specialty for a long time, consider expanding your skill set by spending some time as a generalist. This will provide you with an opportunity to grow and become a more well-rounded marketer.

6. Decide on whether you want to work at an agency or in-house

Marketers typically work in one of two environments. Agency marketers are contracted consultants who work with different clients to achieve specific goals. In-house marketers are hired by a company to run marketing programs full-time.

Agency marketers and in-house marketers often call upon the same marketing management knowledge. Yet, each environment requires different soft skills to succeed.

If you work in an agency, you’ll find yourself interfacing with clients. You’ll become a pro at communicating your process and results. Oftentimes, these jobs are less flexible because you’re working on your client’s schedule. Ensuring client happiness is just as important as marketing your product.

If you’re a marketer working in-house, you have more flexibility. You have the ability to work on your own schedule to make sure your goals are met. You have the luxury of long-term thinking and making investments for the company’s future. Yet, in-house marketing also requires interfacing with your company’s senior leadership. It’s important to effectively communicate how your programs impact the bottom line.

Most marketers have a personality for either agency or in-house. It’s worth it to try both and see which is a better fit for you.

7. Identify your gaps in knowledge or experience

How do you know if you’re a good fit for a new job? Review listed job descriptions on Indeed.com and LinkedIn. If you notice a certain skill or experience that you lack, note it.

Some missing skills are deal-breakers. If you’ve never run a marketing campaign, you may not get a job as a marketing campaign manager.

But, many listed skills are nice-to-have. Depending on the company, they may be willing to teach and train you on some of the less-crucial items. This is especially true for junior-level positions.

To learn more about which skills are deal-breakers and which skills are nice-to-have, consider interviewing some people who are in similar roles. You can learn a lot from speaking to other people about their journey and the skills that they have found most crucial to do their jobs well.

Remember that skill gaps are typical. No marketer can do it all.

8. Consider options for filling a skills gap

If you’ve noticed that one of your skill gaps is something that you want to fill, you have a few options.

Do a project

Let’s say your company has never had a social media marketing presence, but you’re looking at jobs that require at least two years of social media marketing management. How can you simulate the lessons that other marketers would have learned over two years?

Consider an independent project that allows you to test this skill. Design a social media marketing campaign that you can execute from beginning to end. Take on all responsibilities that a social media manager would. This includes copywriting, design, scheduling, engagement, and measurement.

Doing an independent project has a slew of benefits. You’ll learn the ins and outs of the skill you’re trying to master. You’ll show a level of initiative and an ability to learn on your feet, which are great skills for marketers to have. Additionally, you may be able to show your passion for something you’re interested in outside of work. This can give the company a little insight into your personality and passions.

Take a class

For some skills, you may need more of a broad understanding rather than a specific experience. Let’s say you’re applying for a product marketing job that works with a product management team. The job may require some experience working with a product management team. This would be challenging to simulate with a project.

Consider taking a course in product management. Sites like Coursera, edX, LinkedIn Learning, and a number of universities offer free courses at varying levels. These courses will give you exposure to the basics of product management. They may give you the opportunity to test some basic product management skills. Though this does not represent a replacement of the work experience, it will give you a foundational knowledge. It also shows an initiative for learning another part of the business.

9. Use your network and build a new one

The marketing career path isn’t always a straight line, and neither is the marketing job application process. It’s rare to get a job going through the typical pipeline of sending a resume, getting an interview, and then getting a yes-or-no to the job. Because marketers are usually so embedded in their industry, there is an element of ‘who you know.’

Focus on connecting with other marketers. With the advent of remote work, we are lucky that many marketing networking groups have moved online to Slack, LinkedIn, or Facebook. This makes the process of networking a little less time-consuming and a lot less awkward.

Here are a few networking groups to meet others in the industry:

BigSEO – for search engine optimization

MKTG WMN – for women in marketing

Online Geniuses – for tech marketing

Product Marketing Alliance – for product marketing

Vidico – for video marketing

Content Marketing Institute – for content writers and managers

Join your college/university alumni networks and regional groups. Find mentors you can learn from, who can also help you make career decisions and introduce you to people in their networks.

10. Set up informational interviews

You can be the greatest marketer in the world, but if you don’t know anything about the product that you are marketing, you’re in big trouble. It’s even worse if you don’t know the industry or how your product fits into the market. Marketers need to invest time into learning about industries, products, and customers.

Before pursuing a job at a certain company, reach out to some people that already work there. They can be part of marketing management, but you can learn a lot by talking to sales, engineering, or product teams as well. These conversations are easier than ever with the wide adoption of Zoom. Your interviewee can give you insight into how the company operates. They can also give insider information before you enter a formal interview process.

11. Consider leaving your current position

Whenever I was unhappy with a position, my parents used to tell me “it’s easier to find a job when you have a job.”

This isn’t always true.

In my experience, finding a new full-time marketing job can be a full-time job of its own. Having networking conversations, doing research, scheduling interviews and doing sample projects are challenging and exhausting. Doing all this while you’re supposed to be committed to another job is doing everyone a disservice.

The benefits of leaving your current job to focus on finding a new job include:

• Avoiding burnout
• Getting recommendations and referrals from your most recent position
• Spending some time focusing on your mental health and career goals

An extra benefit is that your schedule may open you up to contract, freelance, or volunteer work that can enhance your resume for your next position.

It’s a financially privileged position to be able to leave a job to focus full-time on your job search and career planning, but I recommend it to those who can make it work. For me, there have been times when it was feasible and times when it was not. Review your financial situation carefully before making a decision to quit. You don’t want to feel the financial stress while looking for a new job.

12. Try something outside of the traditional career path

I am envious of the marketers who went from a coordinator to manager to director, and ultimately to a VP or CMO role. The linear career path always seemed like the best way to advance through an organization and career. You learn a little more each year, keep getting promoted, and grow confidence in your work.

Yet, that wasn’t the path for me. My career took twists and turns. This led me to learn more about myself, my interests, and what I wanted my journey to look like. As I met more and more marketers, I learned that the straight-and-narrow progression wasn’t for everyone.

Some of the strongest marketers I’ve met had spent time outside of marketing. They’ve taken hiatuses to work in sales, product, customer success, or even outside of corporate business altogether. By incorporating these experiences into their work, they were able to develop more nuanced perspectives on marketing. As sales and marketing continue to align, we are certain to see more overlap between the sales and marketing career paths.

If you’re feeling like your career has stagnated, it may be worth taking a leap into a different kind of role. It doesn’t mean the end of your career as a marketer. Instead, it might make you a better marketer and provide you with more diverse experiences and opportunities to meet people and discover new interests.

13. Make the move when it feels right

There’s no need to keep to a certain schedule of promotions, advancements, and raises. For one person, a single position could be dynamic and challenging enough to keep them interested for many years. For others, a few months in a position may be enough to know it is not the right fit.

I’ve felt a lot of competition from my peers in marketing for the ‘best’ title or the most money. In the face of this pressure, it is crucial to remember each of us is on our own journey. All companies are different and all jobs are different. The best way to be sure that I’m growing is by returning and reflecting on my own career goals.

Conclusion

Pursuing a marketing career is a rewarding and challenging journey. As you chart your marketing adventure, consider both following the established trails and finding a way to forge your own path.

Sources

What to Expect from an Average Promotion Raise. Indeed.com. February 22, 2021.

Salaries for Marketing Jobs. Salary.com

The 25 Best Marketing Job Titles [Ranked by Search Volume]. Rob Kelly. Ongig.com. January 24, 2020.

The post 13 Ways to Improve your Marketing Career appeared first on Insightly.

As marketers, we are the go-to people. If a sales team needs a new deck to present to an important client? Ask marketing. If an engineer needs to test new product copy? Ask marketing. If recruiting wants to improve the employer brand? You get the idea.

These tasks are on top of the marketing team’s actual responsibilities. Which are, of course, driving brand awareness, generating leads, graphic design, running campaigns, go-to-market initiatives, creating content, enabling sales, maintaining social media, internal communications, media relations, market research, working with vendors, and analyzing company performance.

Despite these many competing priorities, marketing teams rarely have dedicated project management and have to manage their own priorities.

As a marketer, how can you better manage your own projects? And, as a member of a marketing team, how can you help your colleagues be successful with project management and deliver great work and results every time?

Implement agile methodology for marketing project management

Modern development teams have been using the agile methodology for years. This project management system adheres to twelve principles that streamline software development. Some of these principles also apply to marketing.

Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer

Marketers are often trying to satisfy everyone, including internal stakeholders. It’s crucial to keep in mind that the ultimate goal is customer happiness.

Welcome changing requirements

‘We’ve always done it this way,’ is a death knell. The best marketers are flexible.

Deliver frequently, and maintain a constant pace indefinitely

Marketing projects can be on long or short timetables. Yet, showing consistent markers of success helps teams stay engaged and move projects along.

Manage capacity for solo-tasking

When I was starting out in marketing, I always made sure to mention in interviews that I was a ‘good multitasker.’ It was a sign that I was accommodating, would say yes to anything, and was happy to work with anyone.

It took me a few years to learn that these are not the traits of a good marketer. It took me even longer to learn that if your marketing team is multitasking, you have a prioritization problem.

Each member of your marketing team can only work on one thing at a time. If their effort is split among projects, the chances of success don’t double.

Marketing teams must realize and understand their true capacity. Consider the number of team members, their expertise, and their hours available. This will determine exactly how many projects your team can take on. The goal is not to do less work, it’s to stay focused on tasks and initiatives that matter the most and do them well.

Integrate and communicate

With competing priorities and interests, marketing teams can become siloed. A marketing analyst might never interact with a field events marketer, for example. Yet, their goals and objectives may align closely. The opportunities to align your team will ease the collaborative project management process.

Work with your colleagues to identify gaps in your marketing project process. With ongoing remote work, there may be some gaps that you aren’t able to see at first glance. Once these are identified, the team can find opportunities to align. This could mean weekly standups, or it could mean a centralized repository for marketing assets. If your team is struggling being apart, it might mean a weekly Zoom that has nothing to do with work at all.

Practice ruthless prioritization

Without multitasking, we force marketers to prioritize. We all know this means that something must come first, but it also means something must come last.

Here are some questions to ask yourself when deciding what not to work on:

If I don’t do this task, will it create a bottleneck?

Is someone relying on you to complete this task so they can begin their work? If so, prioritize it. If not, postpone it.

Will this task take a long time?

Can you accomplish two or more other tasks in the time it would take you to do this task? If so, prioritize the shorter tasks, and postpone the time-consuming task.

If I postpone this task now, will it snowball into something bigger?

Will postponing this task create more work for you in the future? If so, prioritize the task. If not, postpone the task.

Ruthless prioritization is often just that: ruthless. Marketing project managers may upset stakeholders when they deprioritize a project. Though it may be unpleasant, it’s a crucial part in being able to achieve marketing goals.

Learn to love the backlog

Many marketers are ‘type-A.’ We love a checklist. We love feeling a sense of accomplishment. We love the feeling of stepping back and saying ‘job well done.’

This is rarely the reality on a marketing team. Even if you’re celebrating a big launch or a historic sale, there’s never a true sense of completion. Marketing is continuous.

As the backlog grows, it can start to overwhelm. It feels like you’re staring into your refrigerator and every food item is going bad at once.

Accept that the backlog isn’t a refrigerator—it’s a deep freezer. It’s where ideas, tasks, and initiatives can live for months or years. You can store something in there while you’re working on something else. Or, you can let something fall to the bottom and dig it out to defrost when you absolutely need it.

Conclusion

Marketers must adopt a project management mindset. Once they understand how to operate with an agile mindset, within their capacity, and address priorities, the never-ending task list becomes more manageable.

The post How to become a better marketing project manager appeared first on Insightly.

Over the past year, marketing teams have become increasingly remote, asynchronous, and autonomous. But, it wasn’t just COVID-19 that set us on this path. As marketing functions have increased their scope of responsibility, teams have become fragmented.

Now, even a small startup marketing team might consist of:

• A marketing director
• A content marketer
• A social media marketer
• A paid advertising marketer
• A marketing analyst
• A special programs marketer
• An event marketer
• A marketing operations manager
• A graphic designer
• A public relations manager

Bridging the gaps between these marketing silos is crucial to success. Additionally, marketing teams collaborate cross-functionally with sales, engineering, and customer support.

Dynamic marketing teams can use project management software to better collaborate and communicate, and, ultimately, ensure business success.

How do you know if you need project management software?

Deciding to implement project management software can be a tough decision. Often, teams have momentum with how they have managed projects in the past. Moving to a tool for the first time requires getting your whole team to change their pattern of behavior.

Some signs that your team might be ready to implement a project management tool:

Your team is asynchronous

With the rise of remote work, teams now span time zones and even international borders. Many marketers have adjusted their schedules to take care of children or loved ones. If your team doesn’t work the same hours, a project management tool helps keep everyone on the same pulse.

Communication is splintered

How do you communicate project status with stakeholders? If it’s a combination of email, Slack, phone, Zoom and text, you may be ready to move to a centralized communication log.

Deadlines are missed

COVID-19 has made us all feel like we are living in a time loop. Yet, it’s no excuse for poor project or time management. Your team may need an automated reminder system to keep them on track.

Questions when choosing a project management tool

When deciding on your tool, here are a few questions to help you review your marketing project management process:

• What works well about our current project management process?
• What is missing from our current project management process?
• How many projects do we have, and how long are they expected to take?
• How will my team adopt a new software solution?
• Who are the project owners and decision-makers, and how can we get them on board?
• Who, outside of our team, will need access to this system?
• How important are deadlines to our team?
• How important is capacity management?
• How important is user interface for our team?

Types of project management tools

Don’t dig right into software reviews. It helps to have some clarity on the style of tool that might work well for your team.

Here are just a few examples of project management styles that you may want to consider:

Calendars

Why mess with a classic? Calendars have been around since at least 45 BC. For a good reason. If your team works on strict deadlines, your project management tool should incorporate a robust calendar.

Calendars help to provide structure to our workday, sync teams, plan, and keep us on track with deadlines and deliverables.

Kanban

Kanban is the digital equivalent of a bulletin board. In fact, Kanban is the Japanese word for bulletin board. This system is extremely popular with software developers. It mimics moving cards through a process. For example, a blog post might move from ‘idea development’ to ‘writing’ to ‘editing’ to ‘design’ to ‘publishing’.

If your team works on capacity rather than strict deadlines, or includes multiple stages to projects, Kanban is a good choice. Kanban is a popular choice for teams that use the agile method.

Gantt

Gantt incorporates many teams, stakeholders, and dependencies into a singular view. This Gantt chart is a series of bar charts that breaks down into a day-by-day view. It can visualize big projects and their path to completion. Gantt works well if your projects tend to ‘waterfall,’ or have many dependencies.

If your team has several dependencies with other teams on a long-term project, consider the Gantt method. Often, this method requires a dedicated project manager.

Marketing project management software tools

There are dozens of options for project management tools. Here are some examples of the most popular for startup marketing teams.

Insightly

Insightly’s built-in project management tool can help marketing, sales, and delivery teams stay on track by managing milestones and project pipelines. Insightly collects all of your project-related documentation, project plans, worksheets, and tasks into a centralized dashboard with real-time data and custom views. You can also Integrate Insightly with other tools and external systems to ensure on-time delivery and happy customers. Learn more about Insightly’s product and pricing structure.

Asana

Asana is a beloved project management software for marketing teams. Not only is it easy to use, it also has built-in features that allow each team member to use Asana in a way that best suits them. Asana has a calendar, Kanban, and Gantt-like views. Teams can customize it for any type of project. The basic version is free.

Trello

Trello is a favorite of software engineering teams. Based on the Kanban style, it has ‘add-ons’ that allow for better workload management. Its simple design is a great fit for teams concerned about onboarding. The basic version is free.

Basecamp

Basecamp is great for teams that have asynchronous collaboration. Each user has a dashboard that helps them focus on what needs the most attention. Basecamp is great if your team thrives on status updates and communicating often. Basecamp starts at $99/month for teams.

Monday

If your team has historically used Gantt or waterfall project management, consider Monday. Monday helps visualize projects with many dependencies and inter-team collaboration. Monday is easy to onboard and share across cross-functions. Monday starts at $8/person/month.

Google Sheets

If you want to design your own system from the bottom up, Google Sheets is a powerful tool for collaboration. Google Sheets requires very little user onboarding and is simple to share across teams. However, it contains no dedicated project management functionality and would require detailed upkeep.

Conclusion

Project management should make marketing success simpler. If your team has been struggling with remote work and meeting milestones, implementing a project management software will help. Consider your team’s specific needs, preferences and barriers when adopting a project management tool.

Don’t be afraid to get granular. But, also keep in mind your ultimate business goals to make sure the tool you choose improves your team’s productivity and amplifies its impact on business.

Sources:

What Is a Gantt Chart? TeamGantt

What is Kanban? Dan Radigan, Atlassian

The post How to choose the right project management tool appeared first on Insightly.

Project management is often the invisible hand guiding an organization forward. It exists on all levels, from your daily to-do list to your overarching business plan. Here, we discuss the basics of project planning and management, and how to implement these processes.

What is project management & why is it important

According to the Project Management Institute, project management is the application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to project activities to meet the requirements. But what does this mean exactly?

Simply put, project management is the process that makes sure that projects are done completely and on time. In the case that a project can’t get done, a project management system identifies and dismantles the project’s blockers.

Many of us manage our own projects on a day-to-day basis. We decide what to prioritize, how to communicate a project’s status, and when a project is complete. Yet, when a project contains multiple stakeholders and requires multiple resources, a project management process becomes a necessity.

Project management is radically candid communication. It is what allows teams to collaborate and propel the project forward.

Why do you need a project management plan?

The first step in project management is the project plan. This is an outline of what the project sets out to accomplish. Without a project plan, the project management process is rudderless.

When you begin a project, you’ll want to define a few key parts of your project management plan.

Scope

What you are going to do with your project is just as important as what you are not going to do. Defining the scope of your project means that you define the exact objective of the project—no more and no less.

Goals

How will you know if you complete the scope of your project? Goals—small and large—allow you to benchmark your success along the way to completing your project.

Budget

How much money do you have to invest to complete your project? How much of that comes from each team? And, how much is the time of team members valued at? These questions allow you to forecast a realistic cost of completing a project. This is crucial when determining your project’s ROI.

Timeline

When will you achieve each of your project’s goals? How will you manage the time? And when will your project be complete?

Deliverable

When the project is complete, what will you hand over to detail and explain the work done?

The steps of effective project management

Most projects can easily be broken into four phases:

Defining the Project

This includes the items above. Yet, it may also include preliminary staffing plans, sample deliverables, and notifications to senior leadership.

Planning the Project

The project plan is the next level of detail. Your project plan should contain checklists explaining how to reach each goal. It will detail the budget for each part of the project. It may also contain extra detail assessing risks and threats to the project. The project plan should be the roadmap that all stakeholders can refer to when completing the project.

Executing the Project

Once all the pieces are in the place, your teams can start to implement the project plan. This phase could take anywhere from a few days to a few years. With proper planning, the execution phase will have milestones throughout to benchmark progress.

Closing the Project

Once the goals have all been completed, the project can be closed. This means finalizing the deliverable and communicating the project’s success to all stakeholders.

What can go wrong & how to respond

Despite following best practices, project management is never an exact science. The process does its best to wrangle workplace conditions and personal motivations. Yet, project management will still be thwarted under less-than-perfect conditions.

Here are a few ways that the project management process can go wrong, and how you can respond and correct the process.

Under-resourcing your project

It has happened to everyone. A project requires more time or money than was originally budgeted for. How do you adjust when you’ve run out of resources? The answer is rugged prioritization. Project managers, senior leaders, and stakeholders must align. Then, they can determine where to allocate resources in order to complete the most crucial projects.

Scope creep

In the same vein, many projects suffer from bloat. Scope creep means someone adds an extra task, goal, or deliverable to your project. This impacts your timeline, budget, and entire plan. Good project managers fiercely block against scope creep in order to complete their projects on time.

Mismanaging team input

Delegating tasks can be a tough job, especially if a project is taking your team away from other work. It’s a balancing act to assign work to team members. It can often feel like a project might be done faster if you just do it yourself. However, clear communication throughout each detail can help. It’s also especially crucial for project managers to remain calm with their teams. This allows for a culture of honesty and accountability within a project.

How to manage projects during uncertain times

Over the past year, project management has certainly undergone some changes. With the transition to remote work, we’ve lost the ability to check in casually about a task’s status. We’ve also lost the ability to get all the stakeholders in the same room and hash out problems and solutions.

Yet, the project management process forges on, and is more important than ever. Here are a few dos and don’ts for managing projects remotely.

Do check in more than you think you should. Consider Slack, email, or hopping on the phone with your team on a near-daily basis. This isn’t babysitting or micromanaging. Checking in is a crucial step in the communication process for your project.

Don’t expect normal working hours. Many remote workers are dealing with unprecedented changes in our day-to-day lives. They may be working at night or early in the morning. This means they won’t be able to communicate on the same schedule as if they were in the office.

Do have flexibility with deadlines. Many teammates may feel the stress of competing priorities. Having flexibility with timelines is crucial to get projects completed.

Do rely on technology. You may have sidestepped using advanced project management tools when in the office. Having an in-person team can usually pick up most of the slack (no pun intended). But, technology can ease these burdens of miscommunication and dropped tasks.

Don’t take your eye off the prize. Even in a remote environment, we are forging forward. A project manager’s job is to lead the project to success and is encouraged to make adjustments along the way.

Conclusion

Project management is the way things get done. Both in-person and remote work requires people dedicated to this process. With these project management basics, you can start developing a clearer method for your team.

Sources:

How to Write a Comprehensive Project Management Plan [+ Examples]. Midori Nediger. Venngage. July 10, 2020.

What is Project Management? Project Management Institute.

The post How to plan and manage projects appeared first on Insightly.

This is part 3 of a sales process series based on conversations with Insightly VP of Sales Mark Ripley.

Even after you’ve developed your ideal sales process and aligned it with the buyer journey, there are still challenges to overcome—both now and in the future. Unexpected changes in market conditions, new product launches, and rapid expansion or contraction of the sales team are just a few examples.

Is your sales process built to last?

Let’s explore tips for future-proofing your sales process.

Why some sales processes fail & tips to avoid failure

Here are five reasons why sales processes fall short—and some best practices for avoiding failure.

1. Sales process is too complex

Breaking down your sales process into clearly defined stages and steps is necessary and logical. After all, your sales team needs a general roadmap to ensure deals get done in a way that aligns with your business goals.

However, according to Mark Ripley, VP of Sales at Insightly, developing an overly complex sales process is a recipe for failure.

“One of the ways that a sales process falls down is when reps don’t follow it,” says Mark. “When sales leaders overcomplicate the sales process with too many stages, steps, scripts, assets, and questions, reps abandon it.”

How to avoid: Focus on two things: simplicity and buy-in. Go back and revisit your customer buying process and look for opportunities to reduce complexity in your sales process. Partner with leaders throughout the organization to ensure alignment and confirm their buy-in. Once management is fully on board with the finalized sales process, it’s time to roll it out to the entire team. If sales reps know that their managers believe in the sales process, they’ll be more likely to believe in it, too—and follow it.

2. Sales process is too vague

On the other end of the spectrum is a sales process that lacks meaningful details. Much like overcomplicating things, being too vague leads to a similar outcome: abandonment by reps.

“Your sales process has significantly diminished value if it’s haphazard,” says Mark. “You can’t measure anything, and there’s no consistency for the reps.”

How to avoid: If your sales process is overly complex, don’t overcompensate and go too far in the opposite direction. Instead, strive for a balanced approach that combines structure with the freedom for your reps to do what they do best.

“A high-impact sales process sits in the middle,” says Mark. “It gives people a framework for consistency, but it also lets each individual personality flourish based on their own strengths.”

3. “Set and forget” mentality

A sales process is not like an automated workflow that you build once, enable, and then rarely think about. Rather, a good sales process is a work in process that must be constantly measured, reevaluated, tweaked, and, in some cases, overhauled.

“The sales process is not something that you can set and forget,” says Mark. “It’s something that you establish, and then you keep looking for ways to improve in a never-ending evolution.”

How to avoid: Take a proactive approach in developing and maintaining an ideal sales process for your business. Launch a cross-functional team that meets regularly (at least twice a year) to discuss bottlenecks and opportunities for improvement. Use data from your CRM to go beyond gut feelings and set data-driven goals. For example, by the end of this year, you might aim to fully understand your MQL to SQL ratio for each of your industries. Understanding key ratios makes it easier to identify issues, support ongoing coaching sessions with reps, and continuously refine your sales process.

4. Inability to adapt

The COVID-19 pandemic upended most aspects of our personal and professional lives—and sales is no exception. Virtually overnight, sales teams that were accustomed to working in shared physical offices had no choice but to go remote. Companies that had future-proofed their sales processes found themselves at a competitive advantage to those who had not.

According to Mark, “The pandemic absolutely compounded the importance and impact of having a sales process.”

How to avoid: If your organization has never developed a sales process or your current sales process isn’t well documented, now is the time to take action.

“Documentation is more important than ever for organizations as they move to a remote work world,” says Mark. “You need that master sales process document so that each sales rep, even in a remote world, is creating the ideal customer buying experience and maximizing revenue.”

5. Right process, wrong technology

Simply having a master sales process document or diagram is not enough. Sales reps need the right tools and technology to perform their day-to-day jobs in alignment with your ideal sales process. However, when your process document and sales tools are misaligned, the net result is sales process abandonment.

How to avoid: Seek out systems that best align with your ideal sales process. If it means making a change, so be it. Do your homework and research the capabilities of other sales systems. In particular, look for a CRM that can be easily customized to fit your sales process—without requiring complex development or expensive CRM consultants.

Request a free CRM needs assessment and Insightly CRM product demo to learn how sales automation can help your reach your sales goals.

Request a demo

Don’t get lost in the weeds

Over the course of this three-part series, we’ve talked a lot about the sales process—what it is, why it’s important, how to align it with your customer buying process, and how to overcome challenges. With so much to consider, it can be easy to get lost in the weeds at the expense of the big picture.

As you work on improving your sales process, remember that maximizing revenue is the whole point of a sales process.

The post How to future-proof your sales process & avoid failure appeared first on Insightly.