HubSpot
Proper contact management is essential to keep your business productive and organized. But while technology offers countless solutions to effectively manage contacts at scale, without good processes your contacts can get messy very quickly. Without proper planning, centralized administration, and automated syncing, contacts end up being spread across multiple email accounts and other databases. When your contact management processes break down, some team members may be tempted to go back to paper or DIY solutions, noting down contacts on sticky notes where they inevitably end up getting lost or mislaid. With the extra work required to find the right data and tidy things up, it’s not a recipe for productivity for anyone. Fortunately, with the optimal blend of process and technology, you can improve access to this mission-critical information across the board. Here are five tips to improve your organization’s contact management systems for the smoothest operations, productivity, and reliability.…
Over 59% of marketers say email is their biggest source of ROI. Email marketing is one of the most powerful ways to engage your contacts and nurture them to becoming long-term customers, one email at a time. But how can you get the best results from email marketing? Some of the best practices for effective email marketing include: Personalization and segmentation for the most tailored messages High-quality content that delivers value with every email A/B testing emails, especially workflows, to refine your messages Not sending emails too often, nor forget to send them for so long that your contacts forget who you are But to be in the best position to increase your email marketing conversions and get the highest ROI, there are many valuable tools worth adding to your marketing stack. We’ve compiled 10 of the best to get started with. 10 Tools to Get Better Results From Email…
So you’ve decided to grow your business. You might already be thinking about best practices to avoid common pitfalls when scaling. But this doesn’t mean that your business will be immune to challenges. The best strategy for growing businesses is to be aware of common problems so you can prevent them or fix them fast. Here are seven of the most common growth problems faced by small businesses and the best ways to prevent and solve them. 7 Challenges for Growing Businesses 1. Your earliest employees are unhappy. The Problem: While working for a growing business sounds good in theory, some of your earliest employees might start to show signs they’re unhappy. Why do things have to change? Why can’t we all sit around the same meeting table anymore? Why can’t I chat with the CEO whenever I need to? How to Avoid It: If your longest-standing employees are unhappy,…
“The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft a-gley,” wrote Scottish poet Robert Burns. Even the finest, most well-thought-out plans sometimes have to be set aside for reasons outside of your control. During times of uncertainty, one of the most important traits for any business to have is flexibility. With a willingness to adjust plans, divert from the original strategy, and make small or large pivots, your business can be more resilient during stormy weather. If your business is facing uncertainty and the road ahead is unclear, here’s how to add more flexibility to your plans, projects, and strategy to help you get through it. How to Make Your Business Flexible During Uncertainty Accept what you need to postpone or change. If the landscape your business exists in has suddenly changed, you will need to make changes inside your organization, too. That’s especially the case if you…
You’ve decided to become a freelancer. You’re the boss of your own time, your business, and the projects you choose to work on. There’s a lot going on, from finding new clients to managing your workload. The truth is… you kind of have to do everything, especially when you’re just starting out. To maximize your chances of success, one of your first decisions as a freelancer is how to manage your processes – especially your invoices, accounting, clients, and projects. To find, retain, and receive glowing reviews from clients, you need an efficient and scalable way to stay on top of invoicing, accounting, time tracking, and client management. Otherwise, it’s all too easy to neglect the billable tasks that build your business and always be playing catch-up. After a lot of testing, here’s our pick of the best freelancer apps to manage your business and prime your freelance career for…
Old email addresses, duplicate contacts, misspelled names… these are the bane of your marketing and sales efforts. After all, your CRM and marketing tools are only as strong as the data you’ve got in them. If you have poor-quality data in your databases, you’re setting up to fail in your sales and marketing initiatives. Your customer data is the most valuable asset your organization has, so it’s important to ensure it’s serving your business’ bottom line as much as possible. A solid data quality strategy will not only save you hours of janitorial work, but it makes sure your data is trustworthy – which means that any insights you gain from this data are much more accurate and useful for your business. So, to help you figure out how to have the best possible contact data in your business databases, we’ve put together four tips to clean up your data.…
With the technological developments of the Fourth Industrial Revolution impacting how we all live, work, and relate to one another, a rapid pace of change is happening across all businesses. This is doubly true in uncertain times, where organizations in every industry are faced with a sudden need to switch to working styles and make their business more resilient and flexible. It’s a good time to ask how your business can organize its key processes to deliver the best experience for both your employees and your customers. With the optimal blend of people, processes, and technology, you can make your organization adaptable to change and in the best position to grow and thrive. With that in mind, here are seven organization tips for businesses to help you continue on the right track. We’ve also included relevant goals for each tip, so you can measure your success over time. 7 Organization…
As a small business or startup, you’ve got a lot on your to-do list: increasing awareness of your brand, converting leads into customers, and supporting customers post-sale. And, of course, there’s all the admin behind the scenes. A big part of that is contact management. To enable your small business to grow successfully and sustainably, you need to have a strong contact management strategy in place. But what does this mean, and how can you get it right? What is contact management? Contact management is how you look after all of the contact data in your business, including contacts’ details, communication preferences, sales history, and customer interactions with your company. It enables every team in your organization to have the information they need to stay productive and have the context they need to deliver personalized interactions. Your contacts may include: Leads (or people who are in your pipeline but haven’t…
Despite huge investments in data, you might be surprised to learn that most executives don’t trust their company’s data. It might be that they’re skeptical of the data they’re using, or simply don’t know how to interpret the information at hand. In fact, Havard Business Review reported that 90% of business leaders believe data literacy is crucial for company success. However, only 25% of employees feel confident when working with their organization’s data. The stats shout loud and clear that if you struggle to trust your business data, you’re absolutely not alone. However, this doesn’t make it any less important to fix it. Untrustworthy data has repercussions across your entire organization. You run the risk of: Pivoting strategies based on incorrect assumptions Lacking a clear picture of business performance and ROI Delivering poor customer experiences Reducing job satisfaction for your team because of manual tasks and frustrations Being hesitant to…
Piecing together a project timeline template usually involves a Google Doc and mediocre formatting skills. Then comes assigning tasks to teammates and promising to hit the agreed-upon delivery date. But a few weeks go by, and the timeline falls apart. Higher priorities pop up, and deadlines slip past without much progress. Projects can fail for many reasons: a lack of support from leadership, unforeseen budget cuts, or overpromising outcomes. In fact, poor project management is more common than you think – only 55% of projects are completed on time. But creating a timeline where everyone involved knows what they’re working on and when it’s due can help ensure your project doesn’t creep past its original deadline. It’s essential for keeping projects (and the people completing them) on track. To make sure your next project stays on schedule, we’ll cover how to set up a project timeline, the best templates to…