Marketing has traditionally been viewed with a transaction perspective- where the sale ends the process. Sales are what keeps the company up and running, so it make complete sense on why the sale is the main focus of the marketing team, and even the entire company. With this perspective, once the sale is made, our team moves on to another customer- to another sale. Over time as customers have become more valued in the sales process, there has become a new perspective on marketing: relationship marketing. What is relationship marketing? Relationship marketing is where the company focuses on the consumer more than the sale. People who practice relationship marketing view the sale as the beginning of the process rather than the end of it. Even after the sale, it’s extremely important to still build relationships with your customers. If your company is looking for lifetime customers, relationship marketing is crucial to your business plan. When committing to and focusing on consumer relationships after the sale, it leads to customer loyalty to your company and repeat purchases. How to implement relationship marketing: Relationship marketing has been more prominent in the digital age, so when implementing this strategy, it’s very beneficial for your company to use the technology available so this process is easier and less time taken away from other tasks that your team needs to perform. One of the resources that’s used for relationship marketing is customer databases. You are able to keep track of information on their customers, whether it’s their addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, birthdays, etc. You can use all of this information to further develop your relationship with them. For example, you can keep track of your customers purchasing habits and recommend other products to them that would work well with their previous purchases. The internet in general is also very useful for relationship marketing. The internet allows the flow of information between a customer and a company to happen instantly. To use this to your advantage your company should have a place to answer frequently asked questions on your website, have a “thank you” email sent to customers who purchased products from your online website, and even send out discounts and product recommendations through the customers email every so often.

You’ve probably heard the term thrown around in the business industry, but what exactly is thought leadership? Thought leadership is a strategy for building up a reputable brand by sharing your industry expertise. In other words, you’re marketing your knowledge so you’ll be the first in mind when your customers are looking for a product or service. Take Apple for instance. There may be better tablets out there, but everyone recalls the iPad. Apple has built a brand on innovation and cutting-edge interface, so that when customers are considering an electronic device, they immediately think of Apple. Here are a few ways you can implement thought leadership in your company: Establish Reliability People often assume that thought leadership is directly correlated with innovation however, innovation simply plays a role in thought leadership. In reality, reliability is the selling point. Customers want to work with or purchase from, a business that thrives on excellent, consistent experiences. It’s better to have the knowledge in getting the job done right than churning out the “latest” product on the market. Thought leadership is about developing trust between customers and the brand. Build a Solid Reputation It’s one thing to aim for a reputation, it’s another to build one. What kind of company do you want to be known for? Whether it’s for customer service, company culture or consulting, thought leadership allows industry leaders to engage with potential customers. This, in turn, demonstrates the expertise and experience of your brand. Leverage the Social Landscape A great way for your business to practice thought leadership is by sharing insight through social media channels. First, create a strategy for which channels you’ll distribute through. Next, create valuable, meaningful content that presents a solution to a customer’s problem. Afterward, cross-promote this content and engage with your audience. Overall, as long as you’re being informative and genuine, you’ll find great success with thought leadership.

With the warmer weather approaching, it’s needed to start looking at how to remain successful and profitable during the summer months. For most organizations, the summer months are typically slower and quieter. While there will always be ‘stuff’ to do, summer usually has means fewer sales meetings, regular hours and a chance to take a breather. While these may not be the most historically profitable months, they can – if done right – be the most beneficial months in setting your company up for short and long term gains. Here are three strategies for making the most of quieter times: Create and Implement Processes: As the organization grows, both in terms of people and complexity, it will become increasingly difficult to maintain consistency. The way most businesses would train a new member is by having them shadow another employee for a few weeks, hoping that they will learn something in that short amount of time. This is a recipe for disaster. Apart from learning the other employee’s bad habits, there will almost definitely also be a drop in quality, and you can not risk that in a growing company. The only way to maintain quality is through implementing strong processes throughout the organization. When the pace slows, and there is some extra time, invest it in the creation of processes for every department. Have the department managers and teams to develop the wire-frame and steps, and have them train the rest of the departments on how their process works. This will make everyone aware of what this department does; the members within the department will get a chance to be recognized; and there will be a higher level of ownership of the outcome for the team members. The result is fewer errors, higher efficiency, and better teamwork. Give Your Marketing a Head-Start: If a business is a machine, marketing is the engine. It drives the success of the organization, creates the brand recognition in the market, and attracts opportunities. Content, then, is the fuel for the marketing: without it, the engine is running on fumes. The majority of buying decisions begin with online searches. This means that good content \ is the best way to attract online attention. Knowing this, why do so few companies generate content consistently? The culprit is often time. We get ‘busy’, everyone has other things to do, and the content is put on hold. But, with the summer months slowing down a bit, it’s the best opportunity to focus on marketing efforts. Have a goal where every week each department were to prepare one blog or article, marketing will have enough material for the rest of the year. Having blogs and articles already queued up will save your team in the long-run where there is no time left to write them. Invest in Effective Training: There is a complex dance between the various requirements of the business, and training (usually) gets stepped on the most. In terms of ROI, however, there is no better place to invest than in the people of the organization. Trainings are normally dismissed due to financial and time constraints. The first six months of the year should have allowed financial issues to reduce. Time-wise, people generally have less stress at this time of year – invest that extra time in getting them to learn and grow. The entire organization will benefit. What areas should you look to train? It definitely depends on the organization, but typical areas would include: Sales, Marketing, And The Cash-Generation Machine Accountability And Process Creation KPIs Setting And Reporting There are other, more niche, areas, such as leadership development, financial management and budgeting and business planning, but this may only be for certain members of the team.

Goal creation is a skill that everyone has. Every year people all over the world create resolutions about how they want to change in the next year; you see children and high school students having a goal to get into 3 of their top 5 colleges; business owners have short-term and long-term goals and benchmarks they want to reach. It’s ingrained in everyone to actively be creating and working toward goals. However, the skill that many people are lacking is how to implement their goals and actually achieve them. Here are 3 effective ways to set goals, work toward them, and accomplish them: SMART Goals A SMART goal is an acronym for used for goal setting to help guide objectives of a person or business. SMART goals are taught in many different locations, jobs, classes, etc. due to their effectiveness, however they are not applied nearly as much as they need to be. S- specific. Goals have to be specific. You see goals all the time get deserted after a few weeks and sometimes days because they weren’t specific enough. If you have a specific target in mind, write it down. This target, this goal, will set a bar in your mind, in your employees’ minds, in your sales team’s mind where they won’t stop pursuing that 30% increase until they reach it. M- measurable. Being able to measure a goal is a necessity to be able to know when you have reached your goal. If you don’t have a way of measuring a goal, how will you know when to create a new one? A measurable goal will allow you to know when you accomplished it, and it will allow you to move on to create and reach even more goals. A- attainable. You need to set a goal that you are capable of reaching. If you don’t have the ability to reach your goal, you will lose all motivation to work toward that goal. Creating an attainable goal will allow you to see yourself accomplishing it; it will allow you to see the results of the work you are currently putting in. R- relevant. In order for a goal to be motivating, it needs to be relevant to you and your team- it has to matter to you. Working toward something that you have no desire to accomplish will cause you not to exert your best effort to reach it. Having a goal matter, having it be relevant will create a new sense of motivation to push your team to reach your goal. T- time frame. A goal that is bounded by a time-frame is very important in goal accomplishment. If you don’t set a time to have to goal being accomplished, what is stopping you from pushing it off completely? A time-frame will cause you to actively think about pursuing that goal until the time-frame is up. It will put pressure on you and your team to set aside time and effort to work toward that specific, measurable, attainable, relevant goal. Implementation Intentions An implementation intention is a strategy that supports goal attainment. As you are probably well aware, a goal intention is specifying an endpoint, whereas an implementation intention is specifying the the “when”, “where”, and “how” of a goal. Peter Gollwitzer, a psychology professor at NYU, discovered the importance of implementation intentions. He created a framework for creating goals of “When ______ happens, I will do __________”. This framework is best used against challenging and hard to start goals, because it shows the simplicity and habitual aspects of goals. If you have a goal of increasing work productivity and decreasing time wasted on phones, social media, procrastination, you can use this framework to prepare for those instances. You would say “When I get on my phone and start scrolling on Facebook, I will put my phone out of reach and get back to work.” In Peter Gollwitzer’s study on implementation intentions, he found that people who set goals using this framework, 71% of his subjects achieved their goal. Implementation intentions are that easy and that effective. WOOP Similar to implementation intentions, the WOOP framework is an acronym that assists in goal attainment, however this framework focuses on overcoming obstacles. When setting a goal, looking at possible outcomes is needed so you can prepare for those obstacles, but plan to overcome them, which is where this framework comes in. W- wish. The wish is your goal- what you are trying to achieve. Whatever you are using this framework for, write it down. Specify what your goal is for this process. O- outcome. This step is where the optimists have a great time. Here you are supposed to think positive and write down the best possible outcome of your goal. Write down what you are trying to get out of your goal; why do you have this goal in the first place? O- obstacle. This step, you identify the obstacles in yourself and in the external world that will prevent you from reaching your goal. P-plan. The plan specifies how you are going to overcome the obstacles you mentioned before to reach and accomplish your goal. By the end of this framework, your plan should look something similar to this: “If (obstacle) , then I will (plan to overcome obstacle) .” This strategy is reworking the classic “If…Then” statements to motivate you to pursue your goals. Creating your WOOP strategy is simple, but it’s going to take effort to push through the obstacles that will get in your way.

We have all experienced failure at one time or another, whether it was losing a little league baseball game when you were 7, or getting a 40% on your final exam in college. Failure is a scary unknown factor in our lives, because we can’t control it. It alters the way we act, the way we respond to results, the way we treat others. A lot of times when people encounter failure, they go into a depressive state. They are angry all of their hard work didn’t pay off, they lament in the results of what could have been, they get in their head about how they messed up, how they could have done better. It’s a ruthless cycle because it doesn’t allow room for growth. Failure will always be a possible result in your life, however, in order to use failure to your benefit you have to accept it. You have to accept that everything you do, everything you strive for, you could fail at.It’s a challenging task, but once you accept this fact of life, you can grow from it. You shouldn’t be afraid to fail. There is an idea of “Failing Forward” where you learn from our mistakes. Look back at the steps that you took, that others took, and see what lead you to this place- see how you missed your mark. Use those instances where you messed up to grow. Start over with a new outlook on what you can do better, where you have better way of thinking. If you let your fear of failure take over every decision, you will never leave from your current place of operation. The fear of failure will inhibit you from reaching success. Failure is an avenue for success- if you learn from your past mistakes. Henry Ford once said, “Failure is the only opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.” It is normal to make mistakes, to fail, to not be successful in all decisions, but in order to reach your goals, you need to learn from your failures.

Risk is something that is almost unavoidable in the business world today. “Risk Management” programs have been implemented among all levels of an organization to recover the adverse affects of a risky decision. BUT, what if there were steps to take that would allow your team to reduce the adverse affects? Well, that’s where risk mitigation comes in. Risk mitigation prevents the affects of adverse decisions. It is a process that you and your key decision makers take before decisions are made that will save time, effort, and stress in the long-run. There are different ways to go through risk mitigation, however there are a few crucial steps that should be incorporated in your decision making process. Accepting Risk Similar to what was mentioned earlier, risk is almost unavoidable. Every decision that your team makes will have some level of risk involved, however the point of this entire process is to minimize that risk. Failing to accept risk in decisions could be detrimental to your business because you won’t be expecting the possibility of negative results. Accepting this potential will allow you and your team to prepare for the worst, while making steps to plan for the best. Looking at Possible Outcomes To be able to plan for the best, you need to look at the possible outcomes of the possible decisions you are evaluating. Even if you have picked out a decision, there are still many different outcomes that could happen, and knowing and preparing for those outcomes will really keep your team ahead of the game is things go haywire. Evaluating and Managing Results Once the decision has been made, your team still needs to follow the outcome of it. Evaluating the results of your decision will allow your team to asses the decisions that you made to get you to where you are, which you can use for future risk mitigation. If needed, your team should also manage the results if there was more risk than anticipated. Risk mitigation should not replace risk management completely, however, preparing for risk and trying to reduce it should be a major focus of organizations to be able to move on from it quickly, rather than waiting for it to occur to start taking actions to reduce it.

Everyone deals with conflict at one point in their workplace, but as a manager, the way you respond to it is crucial. Ignoring conflict and allowing it to fester can disrupt your team and can create a toxic work environment. However, addressing it in a healthy way will allow your team to move past it and continue working as a cohesive group. Here are some ways that you are able to address conflict that will keep your workplace healthy: Address the Conflict Head-on As a leader of your team you sometimes have to perform tasks that nobody likes to do, addressing conflict is one of those actions. Allowing conflict to sit and build up will set your team back when it finally bursts- which it will. You need to address the conflict before it causes more tension between your employees. Understand and Respect Differences Trying to assert your authority over your team before understanding the entire situation will never help the conflict be resolved. As a manager, you need to listen to the different perspectives and respect every individuals’ input when resolving the tension. The workplace is becoming more and more diverse, so the faster you are able to master this skill, the better your team will work together in the future when conflict arises again. Look at it Logically While Keeping Emotions in Mind When conflict arises, emotions are generally behind a lot of the tension between people. While you still need to respect the emotions of your team, you also need to look at the situation logically. You need to find practical ways to avoid this situation and similar ones in the future, that will also allow positive emotions and teamwork to be present. Having proactive steps to avoid similar situations in the future will allow your team to work in harmony again, while also not experiencing negative emotions toward each other.

Your team reflects what you do, daily. You are their coach, their leader, their trainer. Whatever mindset you put into your office, your team will take on that mindset and put it into their daily tasks. If you want your company to have an exciting culture where everyone is looking forward to coming back to everyday, then YOU need to project that excitement. As the CEO, you may realize that it’s your responsibility to shape your company culture, but you need to bring that off the back-burner- You need to make company culture your daily priority. Steve Jobs famously said ‘culture beats strategy,” but you need to take that one step further. Culture and strategy are codependent of one another. You can’t have a successful strategy without having a successful company culture, so your culture should be your strategy. You already have your culture, but did it just fall into place, or did you purposefully create this culture to be what you and your team want and need it to be? New CEOs make this conscious decision daily. If you want the freshness of a New CEO and to lead your team to success, you need to be this intentional, too. You need to reshape your company culture to an environment that attracts the right team members, but also keeps them, with your company’s values. You do this by Reinforcement, by example – by support. Find where your company is withholding the culture’s values and goals, and support your team in their actions there. Find where your company could improve their execution of the company culture, and show them – with grace – how they can become better in that area. Support them through one-on-one meetings, group events, and even just day-to-day conversations and activities. Be that example for your team – because your company culture won’t be where it needs to be if you aren’t helping it get there. You first have to make sure your outlook is where it needs to be. Your team will follow in your footsteps, not in your words. You can’t expect them to have enthusiasm for the company if you don’t. If you’re feeling burnt out, it will show. You need to stay focused on the goal so that your energy will come from your company’s goals – not just the work you have to get done throughout the day. Your team will see the newfound motivation you give, and they will reflect that same energy to you. Set the energy you want to see. People won’t change if you don’t.

Being a leader is about being inspiring, sharing the vision, the why and being the keeper of your company culture. It’s all important. But you cannot forget that management is equally important. Management is the bridge between a great vision, and the execution of it. My Monday mornings are filled with internal meetings from 8.30 am to noon. We start with a meeting that involves everyone on the team to celebrate wins, communicate updates and let everyone know what we are each focusing on for the week. Then we split into smaller department meetings and squeeze in a few one on ones. We discuss with the LION format: What was achieved LAST week? Any ISSUES? Any OPPORTUNITIES? What will be achieved NEXT WEEK? We use scoreboards to measure both activities and results. Every quarter we do 90-day planning to set the goals and determine the key activities to achieve the goals. Leadership is important, but that’s not all that makes a company work. Proper management of tasks, resources, and time will ensure your big picture actually gets done.