Never did I believe I’d be sitting in a conference room in Boston being lectured on growth-focussed marketing by a man who once represented Australia in pole vaulting.
Adam Steinhardt is not only a ninja on the athletics field, he is also the founder of Australia’s first Apple re-selling company Next Byte and the inventor of start-up Campaign Warrior.
His professional pole vaulting days may be behind him but there is no doubt Adam has dedicated the same amount of time, energy and persistent drive to his entrepreneurship that he once did to athletics. Adam teaches the same principles we do here at Milk It Academy delivering, customer-centric, results-driven, proven growth marketing strategies.
Read on to learn Adam’s 5-Step process generating more leads and sales from the internet and get you inbound marketing and sales firing.
You can remember Adam’s 5 – Step program using the following acronym.
Let’s take a look at what the steps entail!
Step 1: Sales Training
“The capacity to learn is a gift; the ability to learn is a skill, the willingness to learn is a choice” – Brian Herbert.
You cannot expect growth is you’re not willing to grow yourself. Believing that you, and your team, always have something new to learn is the first step towards becoming kick-ass growth marketers. Allocating time each week, whether it’s an entire day or a couple hours, to growth-focussed training will pay dividends in the long-run.
In his talk, Adam noted that he provided his Next Byte sales team with training in different areas of expertise up to 4 times a week, and not just in marketing, in sales and other areas of business as well.
Your marketing team needs to understand sales just as much as your sales team needs to understand marketing. Skills such as conducting customer research, creating buying profiles and communicating product and service data will help your marketing team do a better job. Take the time to broaden your team’s knowledge sales and you will see a greater cohesion in your marketing efforts. We are in the business of sharing knowledge but that doesn’t mean we have nothing to learn. Here at Milk It Academy we are regularly training and upskilling our experts to ensure they stay on top of their game.
Step 2: Management Buy-in
It’s easy for a business to fall apart if a rift is created between upper management and the sales and marketing teams. No CEO or CFO should sit in their corner office sending orders to the sales/marketing teams without understanding the thought and strategy processes they are about to undertake. Adam emphasised the importance of de-segregating your business processes so that no campaign is run in isolation and you’re all working towards a common goal. Create an environment where everyone in your team has a basic understanding of marketing, sales and management practices so that you’re working with each other, rather than against each other.
For someone who doesn’t understand the value of a lead marketing can be seen are merely an unnecessary cost, rather than a strong generator of revenue. The effort of the sales team is easy to measure, in marketing it can be a little less obvious, albeit just as valuable. Allowing time to explain new marketing strategies and their implementation, to your management team will give them the opportunity to ‘buy-in’ and become far more engaged with the process.
Step 3: Application
One of the biggest pain points we hear from retailers who come to us is that they are sick of paying an agency to do work that could easily be done in-house. When you pay an agency to do you’re often giving up your seat at the table. Adam stresses the importance of hiring or re-skilling an in-house team so that your marketing projects can feed off other areas of business rather than being executed behind doors in an agency office. If you need to hire an agency you should at least have a team who has enough knowledge of basic marketing strategies that they can be on the same page and be working towards a common goal.
Step 4: Remove the Haters
Sadly, there will always be resistance to change in your organisation. You will have employees that drive your company forward with force and you will have employees who dig their heels in and prevent you from moving at all. Adam spoke about how you can combat this resistance by working with your haters to align them with your goal, or in the worst case scenario removing them completely.
If you have people in your business that just show up to get paid and have little, to no, interest in moving your business forward well I think you already know what you need to do. But you can also have ‘haters’ who are communicating a valid point, these are the ones you should work with. It’s easy for an employee to lose focus of your goals and go off on their own path. Spend time with these people so you can understand their concerns, confusions or criticisms and work to get back on the same page.
Step 5: Time
The way you organise your time will have a huge impact on the final result. If you give a project too short of a timeframe you might cut it short before it has a chance to gain traction. Just as, if you let a project run for long you may continue to pump money into something that clearly isn’t working.
Here at Milk It we work in 90-day cycles that consist of 6 stages – Emphasise, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test and Implement. We use these steps to break up the time effectively and make sure we stay on track for the project. Within these steps, we have what we call ‘Sprints’. Sprints run for 10 days and include a process broken into the steps of plan, brainstorm, mock, UI design, test, watch/wait and iterate/celebrate.
It takes time, roughly 12-18 months to really see statistically valid results come to fruition. Break your time down into stages and use it effectively so you don’t fall behind and disappoint your client.
Adam’s strategy is great for any marketing teams who are wanting to add more clarity to their processes and do more with the time and resources they have. Next time you head into the meeting room to brief or to be briefed on the next big marketing campaign take a minute to consider Adam’s S.M.A.R.T steps and use these to deliver a well-thought-out, punchy, innovative campaign.
What a better way to start the new year than with a freshly-trained, motivated and goal-orientated marketing team. Let us give you a helping hand by signing up to our Digital Sophmore Program to access weekly training in the areas that you need. Chose from modules in Content Marketing, Email Marketing, Automation, Social Media Marketing, Paid Advertising and Analytics Mastery.
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