Learning How To Grow Your Business At Flight 2017

Flight is an annual conference presented by Launch League that gathers more than 200 founders, investors, and startup enthusiasts in Northeast, Ohio. Local start-ups are invited to share their work, network with investors, and increase their business success rate through educational speaker tracks about operations, growth hacking, and funding/investors.

We'll be exhibiting at Flight and dedicating our day to helping new businesses grow. So often we hear from local entrepreneurs struggling to grow their business through traditional marketing and sales avenues. When your business is new and very fragile, how are you supposed to dedicate an entire salary to sitting on the phones all day, sending emails, or drafting blogs all in the name of connecting with potential new prospects?

Of course, there's blood, sweat, and tears that go into launching any new business and plenty of founders spend their days in the trenches, but wouldn't that time be better spent running your business and providing value to your current clients?

That's where the InceptGrows methodology makes the most sense. Our Account Growth Specialists are available on a fractional basis - no fixed salary costs - to join your team, learn about your industry, become an expert regarding your product or service, and become just as passionate about growing your business. For just 2 hours per day and small monthly subscription cost that can be flexed up or down at any time, entrepreneurs are able to catapult their business in a way that wasn't possible before. 

If growth hacking with fractional sales and marketing help is something you're interested in learning more about, let's talk. 

10 Sales Team Badges That Help Drive Results

In my last post, I talked about how Fitbit inspired our sales team to launch a new badge program. It's helped motivate our Account Growth Specialist team and to create competition on a daily basis, thus improving our team comradery, competition, culture, and results!

Since that post, we've received a few questions about what the program looks like and specifically, what types of badges we use. Below you'll find an image of 10 badge and a description of how it's earned. 

Happy Camper Badge

This badge goes to the Account Growth Specialist who's received a perfect score on their client satisfaction survey. Among other things, this means the quality and quantity of leads they passed through exceeded the expectations of their client!

First Place Funnel Badge

The Account Growth Specialist that's earned the most sales funnel point throughout the last month is awarded this badge! Funnel points are made up of key performance indicators like right party contacts, emails collected, confirmed leads, etc.

List Expert Badge

Many of our clients come to us for help with sales list in hand, but others need our help generating one through online research and qualification calls. This badge goes to the Account Growth Specialist that has gained expertise in generating lists of prospects for Incept clients. 

Rally Warrior

When you're partnering with an organization to drive your sales activity, it's important to know that your team is going to be at work every day. This badge goes to Account Growth Specialists that have perfect attendance in a two month period.

Whale Hunter Badge

An Account Growth Specialist can earn this badge by setting up 10 whale-sized meetings for their client.  "Whale-sized" is somewhat subjective, so the Account Growth Specialist must document and submit proof of these 10 meeting to Incept management before earning this badge.

Lead Machine Badge

At the end of the day, our clients care about quality leads.  This badge goes to the Account Growth Specialist with the most confirmed leads in a given month.

Manufacturing Master Badge

We work very closely with the manufacturing industry, so and Account Growth Specialist is able to earn this badge after completing 100+ hours on industry sales activity. We also have several other industry-specific badges, including education, insurance, financial, and more.

Chef Badge

Some programs need line cooks, while others need chefs. For those Account Growth Specialists that have proved their abiltiy to create a successful program from scratch, this badge is awarded.  They have the creativity and problem-solving skills to make things without a recipe. 

Inside Sales Certified

This is be awarded to any Account Growth Specialist that has passed training and been awarded their first client!

Incept Longevity Badge

This badge can be earned at each yearly interval of employment with Incept – 6 months, 1 year, 5 years, 10 years, 15 years, 20 years.

How Fitbit Inspired Our Sales Team To Improve

I love my Fitbit. The live movement tracking on my wrist, the competition with my friends, and the ability to earn badges along the way keep me motivated to move more and pursue a healthier lifestyle. In fact, adding a Fitbit to my life helped me lose 25 pounds last year!

After so many failed fad diets and gym memberships, why was this simple tool so effective for me? In part, it was because of the competition within the Fitbit community - who could walk the most steps or climb the most stairs today? Even better was the competition with myself. Would I finally be able to surpass the Ferris Wheel badge and climb 100 flights of stairs? And what quickly became my main focus - how long would it take me to earn the -25 lb Weight Loss badge? That simple badge drove me to make healthier decisions for an entire year.

Using Badges To Motivate Our Sales Team

We took that idea and translated it to our Account Growth Specialist team. First, what kinds badges would help intrinsically motivate them or create competition within the team on a daily basis? Second, what kinds of badges will our clients care about? We brainstormed a large list of options, worked with our GrowU team to test the theory and then launched the InceptGrows Badge Program with the entire division soon after.

At first, the reaction seemed sub-par. No one was jumping up and down at the chance to start earning some paper badges. We took a slight pivot to our approach, and learned that there are a few key pieces that have led to this program being successful:

Public recognition

This is crucial. We have a town hall meeting every other Wednesday that covers an array of topics, but one of the most exciting portions of the meeting is the announcement of all new badges earned over the last period. Everyone celebrates each other's achievements and helps to motivate each other to keep reaching for more.

Online profiles

As the Account Growth Specialists earn new badges, they get added to their online profiles. This allows them to stand out to clients and prospective clients looking at their profiles. There's no better way for them to depict that they earned the most sales funnel points last month or have 100 hours of sales experience in the manufacturing industry. The more badges they earn, the more clients want to work with them.

Performance evaluation

Incept uses a dynamic performance evaluation program that allows for frequent meetings regarding goal setting and success. We asked each of the Account Growth Specialists to add at least 3 badges they would like to try to earn to their Success Description which allows for regular conversation with their manager about their progress. 

Agent involvement

If an Account Growth Specialist is passionate about a new badge being added to the lineup and presents the team with a convincing argument of why it would benefit our team and our clients, we add the badge! 

This new program has positively impacted to our team comradery, competition, culture and results!

Think this the badge system could help motivate your sales team too? Take a look at all of our sales badges for inspiration, here.

Acquiring a List for B2B Sales and Marketing

Thinking about kicking off a new sales and marketing campaign? Here's a quick-start guide to grabbing a list of prospects to start targeting. 

Who is your ideal customer? 

First things first - everyone is not a potential customer. Figure out what industries make the most sense to target and go after those first. Don't say, "We could work with any industry!" If sales is finding a needle in a haystack, figure out how to make the haystack smaller. 

Identify trends in your best customer companies and use these to build a profile for ideal customers. Look for things like employee count, annual revenue, industry, and geography. All of this information can be found using a quick web search or a free tool like ReferenceUSA. 

Do you need email addresses? 

Depending on what you're looking to accomplish, it may be necessary to invest in purchasing email addresses along with other prospect company information. These usually come at a premium and can be hit-or-miss in accuracy. Be sure you do your homework and investigate what sort of guarantees you can get before providing payment information. 

Provide the criteria you identified in Step 1 and acquire your list 

If you don't need email addresses, for instance if you are conducting a phone-based sales campaign or a mailer of some sort, you can actually acquire the same database that InfoUSA sells for free using a resource called ReferenceUSA. Check with your local library to see if a library card gets you access to this database. 

If you do need email addresses, shop around and find the best price. Some common list providers are Hoovers, InfoUSA, and DiscoverOrg. A web search will probably show you 20 more, but they're all working with more-or-less the same information. 

Scrub for internal contacts 

Before making any phone calls or sending any emails, be sure your do a once-over on the list you acquired to make sure there aren't any current customers or Do-Not-Call requesters in the list. If someone has previously asked you not to call them, you can get leveled a hefty fine if you call them again.

5 Reasons That Even The Best Inbound Marketing Fails

The last several years have given way to a monumental movement in the sales and marketing world called "Inbound Marketing." In short, this movement circles around creating excellent digital content, position yourself as thought-leaders in your industry, and establishing a broad enough internet presence that your prospective buyers find your name first when they're looking to buy, and then reach out to you. 

Inbound refers to the source of the leads. Inbound leads are prospective buyers reaching out to you, providing contact information, and requesting a follow-up of some kind (as opposed to outbound leads, which are sourced by reaching out to prospective buyers yourself and establishing a relationship with them). 

Companies of all sizes, across every industry, are boosting their marketing budgets in order to develop a strong inbound marketing strategy. Many of them do such a great job that it fails to create sales. Why? 

Inbound leads aren't followed up with quickly enough 

Oftentimes buyers who reach out through web forms and other inbound marketing tools are doing so with multiple companies at a time. For example, when a company is looking for a quote on a widget, they may open 5 different web pages and submit inquiries to 5 different companies all within a 2-minute period of time. The vast majority of these contracts are won by the company that reacts the quickest. 

Best Practice: Respond to inbound leads with 5-minutes, while your prospective buyer is still thinking about you.  

Inbound leads aren't followed up with often enough 

Let's use the example of leads that come in on any given week. The sales team arrives on Monday and is excited to have fresh new leads from the weekend to start off the week. They make a phone call and send an email to every lead on Monday. Then they come back in on Tuesday and send another email or leave another voicemail with everyone they haven't heard back from yet. By Wednesday, there are new leads in from Monday and Tuesday that are warmer, so the weekend / early-Monday leads stop getting followed up on, except for the occasional call to a particularly juicy looking lead. 

Best Practice: Reach out to inbound leads at least twice within the first 24 hours, and then twice a day (phone call or email) every day for at least the next two weeks. We've got an entire blog dedicated to the ideal lead follow-up cadence here. 

Inbound leads go dormant 

After two days of follow-up, sales teams have moved on to fresher leads, as mentioned above. Suddenly there are perfectly good leads that have gone dormant. You never know who submitted a form because their boss asked them to before they left on vacation. They just need a week and some R&R and they'll be back to the office and back in buying mode.  

Best Practice: Keep leads from going dormant by shooting them and email or leaving them a personal voicemail every week or so after the first two weeks.  

Sales gets spoiled and becomes lazy 

Maybe six months ago you had a team of wolves. They hunted like crazy, were competitive, and never missed their numbers.  Now you have a handful of whiners who are mad at marketing for not sending them better leads. What happened? Inbound marketing worked so well that the sales team sat at their desks and took orders, all the time enjoying a constant rain of commissions. They lost their edge, and now they get mad if a slow week comes around where the leads are fewer, smaller, or less-qualified. 

Best Practice: Move sales and marketing to the same room and hold joint sales-huddles every week where sales reports on progress-to-goal for both inbound and outbound sales goals. 

Marketing gets jealous of sales commissions 

Your rockstar Marketing Manager has built you an inbound marketing empire, and has sat patiently, graciously accepting the obligatory 8=10% annual raise while the sales team has cleaned up on commissions from sales that resulted from inbound leads. After all, that's the way the world works; Marketing is salary, Sales is commissioned. Now they may be seeking new opportunities, in which case everyone loses. 

Best Practice: Restructure commission for both sales and marketing, ensuring alignment between both departments and with established sales goals.