ECI Sales & Marketing Event – June 2018
On 28th June we hosted a seminar for the Sales and Marketing professionals across our investment portfolio, providing an opportunity to network and share insights and lessons from building high growth businesses.
Digital: beating the PPC trap by using SEO in digital marketing
Thomas Stern from ZOG Digital presented to the group on digital marketing, and driving website traffic through SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and content marketing more broadly. He took us through various case studies to showcase what good looks like.
Key areas covered were:
- The buyer journey. What are customers clicking on before they visit your site and before they make a purchase, and where are they going to after they visit your site if they don’t make a purchase?
- The value of content creation. How to focus on creating content without an army of people writing it, and using Google to inform your content strategies.
- The importance of on page and off-page SEO (linking back to sites which drive conversions) and building connections with publishers to help that flow.
People: driving performance and alignment in a sales team
We heard from Chris Cole and Liam Tunney from Make it Cheaper (“MIC”) about their lessons in driving a high performance sales culture.
Top tips:
- Most Powerful Actions: the upstream leverage points that drive sales and EBITDA
- DNA: getting the right people on board, shedding the cool kids and the renegades
Companies with high engagement do better. MIC’s sales culture correlates with the company’s performance, and a results-driven strategy is at the core of the business.
People, Process, Execution – these are MIC’s three core strategies. One of these in isolation is good but all of them together is great.
At MIC reward and recognition is based on MPAs (“Most Powerful Actions”), with different MPAs per business function within the business. It’s about “controlling the controllable” and once employees MPA targets are met, the numbers will follow. If you hit your MPA targets you will be rewarded, if you don’t you won’t.
Execution – “we are passionate about being brilliantly boring” – repetition breeds success.
The event was a great opportunity for sales professional and marketeers within the portfolio to build up a network of people which they can use to help grow their businesses.