The training of employees in the use of tools is necessary when structuring Marketing teams, and it is necessary to increase the group’s productivity. There are some cases in which applications and/or software can help increase the performance of a computer. These are some cases:
Case 1: If Manual Work Is Done Frequently
Contents
- Case 1: If Manual Work Is Done Frequently
- Case 2: A Process Depends On People Outside The Team/Outsourcing
- If You Invest In Tools, Train Employees To Use Them
- Work Processes And Management Methods
- Align Marketing and Sales teams
- Execute Your Project
- Create Internal Training
- Offer Courses And Certifications Online
- Conclusion
When you have a small business, it is relatively simple for the Marketing team to perform daily tasks manually.
RD Station had this experience: until the second half of 2013, the company converted a small number of leads, so it was easy to analyze those who showed interest in the tool. Then, when it was considered qualified, the leads were sent to the team made up of 2 salespeople to get in touch with them.
But in about a year, the sales team grew from 2 to 21 salespeople, and the demand for ready-to-buy leads had grown as well. Therefore, analyzing them individually became much more complex.
However, hiring more people to do these sorting jobs was very expensive and not scalable. For this reason, some tools were adopted to eliminate manual and poorly scalable work.
Solutions such as Marketing Automation and Lead Scoring have become part of our Inbound Marketing process, ensuring that the maintenance of Leads data and takings of communication and relationship materials are done automatically.
These processes were very important, as they ensured that our team stopped worrying about simple tasks that required a lot of time and focused its attention on the executions that generate results and depend on the strategic capacity of the RDoers (as we are called the collaborators of RD Station).
Other tools that can help simplify recurring tasks include spreadsheets and templates. For example, if your team reports monthly, having a report template is an easy way to speed up this task. The employee will only have to fill in the template with the updated data and adapt certain information as necessary.
On the other hand, Spreadsheets can help with calculations, preventing the responsible person from doing everything manually and minimizing the possibility of errors.
Case 2: A Process Depends On People Outside The Team/Outsourcing
Another example in which the tools can be used is when part of the process depends on people outside the team: subcontracted work, assigned in another unit of the company or office. There are cases of companies that work that implement Digital Marketing strategy and outsource or remotely execute part of the projects, such as creating landing pages or email templates.
This comes at a financial cost to the business and can also create situations where performance and production agility are compromised. In addition, external forces can cause delays, rework due to misalignment with the proposal, change of partners, etc.
This comes at a financial cost to the business and can also create situations where performance and production agility are compromised. In addition, external forces can cause delays, rework due to misalignment with the proposal, change of partners, etc.
An example is RD Station Marketing, which has intuitive features to create capture pages and emails in a simple and agile way, and Marketing automation and qualification of potential customers.
If You Invest In Tools, Train Employees To Use Them
It is possible to adopt tools to gain agility in processes and reduce costs, but it is necessary to allow employees to use these tools. Fortunately, many of them offer ways to empower users. A clear case is RD Station Marketing, which has an implementation process and teaches how to use all the tool’s features.
Therefore, knowing how to deal with the platform will allow the user to perform tasks more quickly, requiring other professionals’ skills, more time and resources from the company.
Work Processes And Management Methods
The use of tools is a possibility to optimize processes, but this may not be enough to increase the productivity of Marketing teams with a digital focus. Therefore, it is sometimes necessary to invest in work processes and forms of management.
Here are two cases in which these strategies may be necessary:
Case 1: When Several People Are Involved In The Same Process
A larger team may have more than one person working on the same project. Therefore, to create uniformity and alignment in the execution of tasks, it is important to implement processes.
For example: when we are going to produce content for the generation of leads, it is necessary to produce this material. All the people who will be part of this process must follow steps that have a logical order with a beginning, middle, and end.
Each stage should be assigned to specific people and divided into activities. Therefore, each person understands what their functions are, and it becomes easier to detect possible errors.
This process also helps in the “interface” between the areas because sometimes a project may involve more than one team.
For lead generation content, the content production team (writing) and the creative team (layout) work together. Therefore, each team has a responsible person who receives the demand for tasks from the other teams and distributes it to his team members, organizing the process.
Align Marketing and Sales teams
The alignment between sales and marketing is essential in a well-structured team, but it is common to see sales and marketing teams in which there are several frictions.
This hurts the performance of the teams and impacts both objectives. Therefore, you should follow a few principles to ensure there is no misalignment:
- Understand the duties and problems of each area.
- Have the same goals in mind.
- Have an SLA (Service Level Agreement)) to formalize agreements.
Case 2: Don’t Overload The Team And Guarantee Deliveries
Work processes and management methods serve to avoid overloading the team and ensure that everyone delivers what is needed.
By organizing activities in this type of process, it becomes easier to understand the professionals needed to carry out each task. In addition, this avoids hiring people who will not be well aligned with the projects.
By dividing projects into stages and tasks, you can control who is carrying out which activity, increasing the chances of delivery. Each employee is responsible for their activities and is charged for them.
To structure these processes and forms of management, we recommend adopting agile methodologies, such as Kanban and Scrum. A practical example of how we apply this in the RD Station Marketing team is to define a weekly meeting, where we set priorities and use a tool called Trello to organize the sprint.
Thus we maintain control over deliveries and demands. We created an article with 9 tips for remote team management, where you can find more ideas.
Execute Your Project
It’s finally time for your team to execute the project, and this is where you keep track of the tasks you’ve assigned to complete.
The best way to begin is to choose a marketing management software that will help in:
- Managing the entire team while assigning specific tasks and responsibilities
- Assign and monitor specific deadlines for tasks
- Automatically notify your team member when you’ve assigned them a task
- Automatically notify when a deadline is approaching
Create Internal Training
Workouts are effective ways to increase performance and retain talent within your team. According to the 2019 edition of the Linkedin Learning Report, 94% of respondents say they would stay longer with companies that invest in training and development. In addition, 48% claim to have found purpose in the performance of their duties, and 47% felt less stressed.
These training appear to satisfy the team’s demand for knowledge and allow the learning to be applied quickly. The training topic must apply to several people on the team and not just one.
Offer Courses And Certifications Online
Certifications and online courses can be a good option for those who want to upgrade, align their knowledge within a team, and train professionals with potential but who need support. In addition, they can help in the hiring process.
In addition to ensuring that the chosen candidate has the basic knowledge stipulated for the performance of his function, the training also shows proactivity in the search for new knowledge.
Online courses can also be useful when a more specific division of tasks is needed within the team.
For example, one part of the team is responsible for the more SEO-centric processes; another, from social networks; another, producing content for certain sales funnel stages, etc.
According to the Great Place to Work Institute, 44% of employees stay in companies when they see opportunities for professional development and growth opportunities.
Conclusion
Achieving high productivity within a Marketing team can seem like a difficult task amid so many other challenges that companies face daily to position themselves and stay in the market.
In the first instance, achieving this objective will depend on how you, as a leader, manage to engage your team and direct it towards the fulfillment of a unique purpose. For that, we can use tools to our advantage and achieve good performance.
Fortunately, new technologies have emerged and have become popular to make digital Marketing processes simpler and more efficient and help all those teams that need:
- Prove the value of Marketing;
- Transform your strategy for the new reality;
- Bring results with an impact on sales.
Whatever the size of your team and whatever problems it faces, don’t be discouraged by difficulties: seek continuous improvement to increase team performance, either individually or collectively. It isn’t easy to test the results that Marketing can bring without a tool that supports you and allows you to automate your processes.
The implementation of technologies is key to transform yourself into a Results Marketing department, key in your organization. After all, the one who will benefit from this is your company and the new clients that will result.