6 Impressive Ways To Follow Up After an Agency Pitch Posted on November 30, 2017November 30, 2017 by Jeanna Barrett You just finished a new business pitch you spent weeks preparing for. It features your most impressive team and work, the budget has been massaged to perfection, and you think it’s the perfect package that your client wants. On all accounts, you think you made a good impression. You also really want the business. But, after scanning the room and hoping for feedback from your prospects, you’re not getting a sense of which direction they might be leaning. Maybe they need time to think it through. You thank them for their time and wait to hear. Now what? It’s time to start planning your follow-up. You don’t want to appear too pushy or desperate. The way you choose to communicate with your prospects afterward will give them an idea of what it would be like working with you and your agency. Be patient, but proactive and prompt. Allow time for the prospect to respond, but stay on top of it. Each time you reach out, be sure to provide value (get familiar with their industry, likes/dislikes and include some of that information in your follow-up). No matter which follow-up strategy you decide to go with, remember it’s always good to recap the most important points that were discussed (keep it short!). Below are a few ideas you and your team and kick around to find out the best way to follow up post-pitch. 1. Standard There’s always the standard email follow up a few days after you pitched the business. The email needs to include a recap of the presentation, show your excitement for the potential to work together, and include next steps. Sometimes it takes months for a company to make a decision. I’ve had brands go silent on me for 2-3 months, then respond with the green light to get started. You never really know what discussions are going on behind the scenes so remember to be respectful of the prospect’s time. 2. Content Send the prospect a new or recent piece of content or article that pertains to their brand and your pitch. For example, if you’re a content-focused agency, send them updated statistics on how important content marketing is. Or send them a case study that either your business or a larger brand developed that proves the importance of signing on the strategy you pitched. Providing content examples is a way to show how important your marketing agency is to the customer’s success through published data, versus your agency just telling them that. Although you may be right, people are more likely to believe data. 3. ROI All companies value ROI because it speaks to their business balance sheet. For marketers and agencies, it can sometimes be hard to measure the success of your marketing initiatives, especially if it’s brand awareness. But, it’s important to understand where to highlight the ROI you’ve produced for your previous or current clients. Send your new prospective client ROI results from your agency from a similar campaign or initiative. I’ve used pitch follow-up emails to say, “If you’re having trouble contemplating the spend on content marketing, I want to send over some results I’ve achieved with another brand I’ve worked for to help you digest the initial investment.” This will show them that their dollars will prove beneficial, making their investments worthwhile. 4. Social media Don’t knock these channels! Try an @ message on Twitter, or a private message on LinkedIn or Facebook. Obviously, this would apply to specific prospects that would appreciate a follow-up on these channels — perhaps a very active social user. Or a company that is looking to hire your agency to produce great social media campaigns and communities. If your prospect seems more traditional in a business-sense, focus on the first three options, as they may view this route less professional. 5. Invite Take a little pressure away from the pitch by inviting them to coffee or the next industry-related networking event (bonus points if the event is at your office!). It’s a great opportunity to reconnect and form more of a relationship. If your agency is large and successful, having a reoccurring party to schmooze with your current and prospective clients is a smart approach. In my past career in San Francisco, I was invited to a monthly party that an agency threw in their swanky pitch room. It included a bar and outdoor space with a live band. This party was a way to create community and “cool factor” with their clients, prospective clients and even recruitment. I was sold. 6. Stop by Let the prospect know you’ll be in the area and would like to stop by. Bring something of value, for example, company swag, coffees, donuts, etc. Say the world’s quickest hello, and head on out. Although you aren’t discussing business, it keeps you top of mind. Plus, it’s a great personal approach to building a relationship with your potential new client. And, everyone loves swag or goodies now and then! Hopefully, these six tactics will win your pitch, and you’ll be celebrating all the way to the bank. But, if not a great piece of advice that I received when I lost my first couple pitches — don’t burn bridges. You never know if the work will come back around again. Maybe the winning agency isn’t delivering on their promises, or the prospective clients have connections and are willing to pass your information along. Ask why you didn’t get the business, hold on to that information for the future or improvements, and accept the fact gracefully. AUTHOR BIO Jeanna Barrett is the Founder & Chief Strategist of First Page, an award-winning online marketer and an expat entrepreneur. Through content, social media and SEO, Jeanna uses the power of words and data to drive growth in brand awareness, organic traffic, leads, revenue and customer loyalty. She has a combined 12 years of inbound marketing experience at venture-backed startups, digital agencies and Fortune 500 companies, with an expertise focus on small business and technology. She’s been named ‘Top 40 Under 40’ of brand marketers and ‘Best in the West’ for financial technology marketing. In 2016, Jeanna left the U.S. to lay roots and build her business in Belize.
3 Time Management Tools Specifically Made For Your Sales Team Posted on November 29, 2017December 19, 2022 by Tricia O'Donnell Salespeople have a restless energy for pitching products and closing deals. The more time they spend making calls and building relationships, the better. But this kind of environment only exists in a perfect world where salespeople focus solely on selling and administrative tasks handle themselves. You can’t completely eliminate time-sucking chores, but you can certainly limit their impact with the right tools. If you’d like to upgrade your current processes, consider offering a few of these time management tools to your sales team. Leadcrunch What do you do if you’ve got a wicked sales team but not enough leads that are worth their while? Do you let your sales team watch the minutes tick by until marketing produces leads worth pursuing? Do you direct them to do a little marketing work themselves and spend time prospecting? Both options are a waste of time. The first one is a bad idea for obvious reasons. The second choice is a no-no because you are not paying your sales team to generate leads. You’re paying them to convert leads. Leadcrunch helps B2B businesses generate quality leads using artificial intelligence. At the moment, Leadcrunch only helps businesses who wish to target U.S.-based businesses. You simply upload your best customers and Leadcrunch uses that info to find more like them. SMARTASSISTANT If you offer a wide range of products and numerous customizations, even your best rep will find it challenging to keep up. That said, if sales reps can quickly determine how to meet a customer’s needs, they can close a deal much more easily. SMARTASSISTANT helps make decision-making easier for consumers and for the sales reps selling to consumers. Their digital advice and guided selling platform understands a prospect’s needs, identifies specific benefits of a given product or service, promotes value over price, and more. This saves sales reps an enormous amount of time and lets them focus on building a rapport based on actionable info. Discern A big waste of time for sales reps is pitching the wrong product to the wrong customer. Taking advantage of upsell and cross-sell opportunities requires understanding a customer’s needs at a given point in time. Discern offers sales teams “an easy-to-use, step-by-step, behavior-driven questionnaire format” that makes the selling process smoother for reps. Using this tool helps produce accurate pricing, eliminate bottlenecks, and cut down the lengths of the quote-to-cash timeline. All of these activities help sales teams save time. Once you’ve put together a fantastic sales team, make sure you provide a quality environment within which reps can work their magic. Providing tools that streamline the sales process, make quote generation easy, and produce strong leads helps your sales team do what they do best: boost your bottom line with new and recurring business.
5 Tips for Beating End-Of-Year Customer Churn Posted on November 28, 2017June 13, 2018 by Jonathan Herrick It’s the end of the year, and your customers are busier than ever. They might not even remember signing up for your service—and if they do, it’s possible they don’t have the patience to figure out the system if they’re new, or your product very well may slip from their minds entirely if it’s not yet firmly part of their regular habits. And so, customer churn sets in. What is customer churn? It’s a complicated metric used to describe a simple act—people dropping off from your product. It’s most worrisome with SaaS products, for which returning users are critical for growth, but other small businesses can look at churn rates as well, including media companies, agencies, and other subscription-based companies. So, what if your churn rate is so high that it’s troublesome? There are steps you can take to mitigate customer loss. Read Jonathan’s full article on Fundera Ledger.
6 Strategies To Help You Brainstorm Better Posted on November 27, 2017June 13, 2018 by Allie Wolff Brainstorming has been a part of how businesses generate ideas for decades. With so much creative and technical talent within an organization, it only makes sense to throw a portion of that in the same room and see what happens. Disappointingly, brainstorming sessions often end with half-baked ideas, few action items, and team members who resent the interruption. This is not the outcome you want. How can your team change its methods to spur more successful brainstorming sessions? Be realistic about your organization’s limitations. More often than not, brainstorming sessions are the equivalent of throwing different colors of paint on a canvas and hoping the end result is something magnificent. Usually, it’s just an unhelpful mess. Resist the temptation to have an unbounded session and come in with a clear understanding of the session’s limitations to share with participants. In a 2011 McKinsey article, authors Kevin P. Coyne and Shawn T. Coyne used the example of a banking company that led a brainstorming session where ideas had to require no more than $5000 investment per branch. The ideas also could not require additional regulatory approvals. Once the participants knew their parameters, they generated useful ideas that they could act upon. The session was a success. Alternatively, another bank brainstormed with fewer limits and came up with a fantastic solution to a problem…a solution that would require a new IT system when the bank had already locked into one IT system for a year and a half. For actionable ideas, know what you want to achieve, what limitations you have, and what resources are at your disposal before diving into a brainstorming session. Eliminate the elements that make meetings inefficient. When executed poorly, brainstorming sessions are just glorified meetings. An agenda is rarely followed, a few people do the most talking while others sit in silence, and there’s rarely any follow up about what’s discussed. To avoid this, introduce a “special agenda.” This is a document circulated before the meeting that outlines what you’re trying to accomplish and what the limits of this brainstorming session are (much like we discussed earlier). Don’t invite more people than you need to the meeting, and encourage participation from everyone in the room to avoid the conversation being dominated by a handful of people. Set a proper start and end time for the session to avoid taking away time from important daily tasks or dragging the meeting out for longer than it needs to be. Finally, assign action items to each person present so that someone is directly responsible for following up during the next meeting or brainstorming session. Consider brainstorming separately. When everyone starts echoing what others say, a brainstorming session quickly loses its value. The point is to hear different ideas and bounce them around. The problem is that when one person confidently expresses their perspective, others wonder whether they’re wrong or they decide to hold-off until they’ve had a chance to think their idea through more clearly. In this way, great ideas remain unshared. When you, as the organizer, create that special agenda, include a section at the end that asks participants to send a short email with their proposed solutions to the problems you’ll discuss. You can evaluate these ideas before the meeting and encourage discussion about the most promising ones during it. Encourage team members to push each other to defend their ideas. Pose follow-up questions to each person who offers an idea, especially those who speak the most. Prompt silent members to build on another team member’s idea. There’s no need for aggressiveness or disrespect, but a forgiving, every-idea-goes mentality can be unproductive. Instead, good ideas often result from exhausting different ideas until bad ones are eliminated or better ones are discovered. Encourage inter-departmental interactions. Get people from tech to talk to people in sales and people in sales to talk to colleagues in marketing. Not only do these conversations produce solutions to everyday problems, they also prompt interesting conversations about innovating within the company. A salesperson’s view of a product will be tremendously different from a developer’s view of a product. Imagine a salesperson regularly telling customers that a feature they want doesn’t come with the product and leaving it there. In reality, it’s may be rather easy for the developer to include this feature – they just never thought to do so! Consider using a tech solution to brainstorm. Who says you need to physically be in the same room in order to brainstorm? While many of the methods above are for sessions where all parties are physically present, enterprise project management tools make it easy for several people to collaborate on a document or a project. Consider whether your team would work better with such a platform. Brilliant ideas crop up when you bring people together, but you’ve got to nourish the process. Before planning your next team brainstorming session, don’t forget to understand your objective, identify your limitations, and encourage alternative forms of creative thinking.
4 Small Business Websites That Get It Right – And How You Can, Too Posted on November 24, 2017April 17, 2024 by Jessica Lunk Making a website is easier than ever. Squarespace, WordPress, Wix and Weebly have empowered small businesses to create exceptional digital spaces for little to no money, an unthinkable advancement from the days when personal sites were restricted to Angelfire and Geocities. Now, even if you have no graphic or web design skills, you can buy a theme that’s basically ready-made out of the box. But therein lies the problem for small business owners. Even if you have free tools and awesome templates – you’re probably not a web designer. And you might not want to shell out the cash to hire one. So, with little to no experience, how do you create a unique digital presence that gets noticed in a sea of out-of-the-box design? We’ve combed the web and found four stellar small business websites you can learn from – along with some commentary on what makes them great and advice on how to create them (or something like them) with small business skills and a small business budget. Moving Waldo What is it? If you’re moving soon, you’re probably dreading having to change your address repeatedly: at the bank, at school, where you work, with the government, on invoice templates and credit cards and everywhere else. Moving Waldo is a brilliant Canadian service that’s partnered with thousands of institutions—you tell Waldo where you’re moving, and they alert the relevant places. Why is their website great? Just scroll through the simple three-step process outlined on their homepage and you’ll find yourself understanding the concept literally within seconds. It speaks to the entire philosophy behind the company: simplify life. How can you create something similar on a budget? Certain elements work because of aesthetic consistency. Every image is round and soothing—the button, form-entry fields, even the font and logo. There are no hard edges, no rectangles (not even the thought of moving boxes enters your mind), and that kind of design mindset doesn’t cost anything. The website’s simplicity, too, is its entire pitch. When designing your own small business website, consider what emotion you want to convey and how that might translate visually. SafeTrek What is it? SafeTrek is a mobile app that allows you to protect yourself in unsafe situations. Originally designed by college students for college campuses, the app is now widely used by companies concerned about the safety of their employees as well. Why is their website great? Mostly it’s the copywriting, since the site itself doesn’t actually allow you to test the app. But that in itself tells you something: good copywriting can elevate any web design, whether it be for a B2C SaaS product, agency or other B2B small business. The website speaks to the emotions people feel when imagining unsafe situations and makes a strong case for its worth. How can you create something similar on a budget? If you’re confident in your copywriting, you’re set. If not, depending on your business, you can get away with hiring an affordable copywriter for a bit of work and test out different templates until you find one that works. BitLocation What is it? The goal here is to help everyday companies transition to accepting Bitcoin alongside standard currencies. It geolocates your device, tells you how many Bitcoin-friendly locations there are near you, and pitches the idea of accepting them in this strikingly minimalist website. Why is their website great? Huge blue font on a white background? Totally mobile-friendly? All the information you need, without any obtrusive clicks? This thing is ageless web design. There are only three colors on the entire page—blue, white and orange—used in different ways, shapes and shades. If that’s not making something from nothing, I don’t know what is. How can you create something similar on a budget? This website is deceptively simple to make from scratch, but page-builders and platforms such as Wix would allow you to mimic the style in a few hours. If your small business can handle a boldly simplistic style, it’s worth considering. All About Aluminium What is it? This primarily Russian site, owned and operated by the Russian company UC RUSAL (which ironically has a brutal website), pitches aluminium as a concept rather than any particular service they offer. There’s no hard sell, but rather multitudes of evidence that push aluminium as a go-to material for making homes, bikes, phones and anything else. Why is their website great? The brand-agnostic attitude frees it up to be educational and informative without being boring. Essentially, this is a glossy digital magazine—all about aluminium. How can you create something similar on a budget? Look beyond the smooth scrolling and comprehensive chemical breakdowns, and on their homepage you’ll find a masonry-style blog of posts chronicling the latest aluminium success stories. Yes, the site is sleek and contemporary, but it’s the content that sells the product. The blog is inbound marketing 101, with genuinely interesting articles, full-width images, embedded videos and more information than you could digest in a single sitting. Adopt a great inbound strategy yourself, then all you have to do is find a beautiful blog template and fill it with catchy content.
4 Platforms You Can Use to Give Back Year Round Posted on November 23, 2017June 13, 2018 by Allie Wolff The season of thanks is here again, and your business probably has a lot to be grateful for. But the holidays are sure to mean that you’re short on time personally and professionally. The undue pressure of wanting to give back and balancing everything during this busy time of year is avoidable. With these four tools, you (and your employees) can make charitable giving a priority year round. 1. Givable Givable is a newer donation app on the scene. The app, which was created in our hometown (St. Louis, Missouri), “empowers individuals and businesses to fuel change by making giving easy, social, and interactive.” We participate in Givable here at Hatchbuck, and the team loves it. Because two of our company values are “Do the right thing” and “Make a difference,” Givable is a company-sponsored effort at Hatchbuck. It’s a phenomenal way for us Hatchbuckers to feel like we’re making some impact every day. Givable sends a daily email with two new charities that they’ve carefully vetted to be recipients of that day’s gift. Each team member gets to choose one of the two charities to donate to. It’s amazing to learn more about organizations in St. Louis (and across the country) and to see the daily impact (no matter how small) that we can make for so many deserving charities. 2. Charity Miles Tracking steps is all the rage these days. I’ve had a Garmin watch, a FitBit and have now settled on the Apple Watch, but what really comes from tracking all of these steps? At the moment, nothing other than the satisfaction of hitting my personal goals. Photo credit: Parkinson Association of Central Florida Enter: Charity Miles. The app allows you to use your phone’s GPS to track daily exercise. Whether walking, running or biking, Charity Miles corporate sponsors donate per mile (25 cents for walking/running, 10 cents for biking) to the charity of your choosing. They make it so easy to make a difference; who wouldn’t want to give back will getting some exercise? 3. Volunteer Match VolunteerMatch does exactly what its name says: matches willing volunteers with deserving nonprofits. They boast the largest nonprofit network of volunteers, causes and opportunities. The site allows you to choose your city, interests and availability and presents volunteer opportunities in your area. VolunteerMatch lets you know when the nonprofits need your help and what to do to sign up. It’s truly the easiest way to connect with causes that you feel strongly about in your community. 4. Good St. Similar to Givable’s model, Good St. offers the ability to make a daily donation to the charity of your choice. You have the option to donate between 25 cents and $1 per day to charities they’ve selected and sent you to review via email. So far, Good St. has over 500 users and over 1500 charities being impacted regularly.
5 Questions to Ask When Evaluating a CRM Posted on November 22, 2017June 13, 2018 by Tegan Arnold You may have already reached the realization that a CRM can benefit your business in a number of ways, but the decision to adopt new technology is only half the battle. The next and perhaps most important step is choosing what tool to use. All it takes is a simple Google search to see that when it comes to CRMs, the options are many. So, how can you know which is the right fit for your business? To help you maximize your investment, here are seven key things to consider. What features do you need? Deciding on any software usually entails two things: what you need and what you want. The most important step is identifying your specific business needs. To determine this, define what you’d like to accomplish with your CRM. Then figure out which features will help you achieve those goals. From there, you can then list out the extra features that aren’t necessary but would be a nice perk. Is it flexible and agile? Where your business is today is not necessarily where it will be fifteen, five or even three years from now. It’s wise to consider your growth plans whenever you’re evaluating a CRM solution. The last thing you want is to end up having to search for a new solution every time your business needs change. Even if you don’t have any specific plans to grow or expand, it’s still a good idea to choose a solution that offers flexibility and the ability to scale as needed. What else can it help you do? To maximize your CRM investment, you’ll want one that will be able to integrate seamlessly with other parts of your strategy including email and marketing automation. This is also important from an efficiency standpoint. The more connected your technology is, the easier it will be for your employees to do their jobs effectively. As you’re weighing your options, try to look for a solution that will complement your existing infrastructure. How easy is it to use? A CRM with a million bells and whistles may look nice on paper, but if it’s difficult to use and maintain, it’s not worth the investment. The goal is to find a balance between functionality and ease of use. Ideally, you’ll want to find a solution that can be implemented quickly and with as small a learning curve as possible. How are upgrades and enhancements handled? Over time, all CRMs reach a point when enhancements, new features and other upgrades are necessary. When you’re evaluating your various options, be sure to check with the vendor to find out how (and how often) these updates are handled. Do you have to wait for quarterly or bi-annual releases or do they occur more frequently? How much of disruption should you expect during these updates? Selecting the right CRM is an important business decision that should not be taken lightly. You want to make sure that the solution you end up with suits your specific business needs and is designed to grow as your business grows.
What Do People Really Think About Your Small Business Brand? Posted on November 21, 2017August 12, 2022 by Jeanna Barrett Your small business doesn’t need to be a worldwide name to have a strong brand. And there’s more to your brand than just a logo and catchy tagline. Your small business brand is everything your company does, your products or services and your customers’ experience. You should think of your brand as the total experience package from the moment your potential customers hear about and interact with your brand, all the way through purchase and post-purchase. And the way consumers perceive your brand can be the difference between make it and break it in the tough world of small business. But, how do you measure your small business brand to know what you need to change or improve on? There are many ways to understand where you stand in the market with your customers, and how you measure up to competitors. Net Promoter Score is a worldwide standard of measurement used to show how willing your customers are to recommend your business to their friends, family or colleagues. It uses an index ranging from -100 to 100, asking questions such as “How likely are you to recommend this product to your friend?” One being not likely and 10 being very likely. For more qualitative information, leave an open comment box for survey-users to expand on their rating of your business. You can get in front of a lot of customers with this approach. Focus groups are a great way to understand feedback regarding your brand and your competitors. Through a facilitator, participants are encouraged to share their perceptions of your brand, as well as similar brands. The focus group approach differs from a survey approach because it gives you the opportunity to seek clarification. However, focus groups deliver qualitative data that can be difficult to measure. Customer satisfaction surveys also help determine product/service performance through a list of predetermined questions. Surveys can be completed quickly and offer more quantitative data. Based on the quantitative and qualitative data you receive about your small business brand, you can start to put a plan in place on how to improve your brand, differentiate your business from your competition and grow your brand awareness. Below are some ideas on improving your small business brand that I’ve used and seen success with in my career of working with small businesses to improve their marketing: Generate valuable content. Know what types of content your audience wants, and develop original, relevant content. Original content goes a long way with Google and your visitors. Great content makes a better website, but also improves your website’s rankings. When your customers search for relevant topics, your content will rank higher, ultimately building up your reputation and trust with your customers. Also, think strong headlines when creating your content. According to Copyblogger, 80 percent of people will read your headlines, but only 20 percent will read your article content. Your headline determines the effectiveness of your content. One of my favorite tools that I use and recommend is CoSchedule’s infographic on creating catchy headlines. They also built a headline analyzer tool. Lastly, consider different types of content deliverables. It doesn’t always have to be readable content – think of something more interactive and engaging, such as videos or images. Develop your social media platforms. Content marketing is a big piece of this — what is the message you’re sharing on social media, and how are you getting this message across? Without great content, it’s hard to utilize your social media platforms to their fullest potential. Hop on Twitter or Facebook and allow your customers to interact with you there. Maybe when soliciting feedback, your customers alluded to poor customer service experiences. Be responsive and accommodating on your social media platforms — and don’t delete or hide negative comments. Every brand is going to have critics! It’s way better that you show your brand takes criticism in stride and works to improve your brand experience. Also, remember that you do not have to be on every social media platform to be successful! Join the platforms your audience is on, and you have time for, and that’s it. Having a dormant social media account can cause a negative view of your brand. It’s way better to have an active Facebook and Instagram than an inactive Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter and LinkedIn… Create a dialogue with your customers. Developing your social media platforms is a perfect segue into this since a lot of dialogue exists in social media. It’s what they were created for! But, creating a dialogue with your customers can happen on many platforms — not just social media. Remember to be responsive, and share valuable content. Here are four additional areas to consider: Videos: Make the content relevant, and enable the video to be easily shared throughout social media. You don’t have to have a big budget to create videos! Consider filming videos on an iPhone, building screencast videos using an online tool. Here’s a great guide I’ve written for Hatchbuck on how to create inexpensive small business branded videos using your iPhone. Product reviews: Engage your most loyal customers by asking them to review your product, and respond to both positive and negative online reviews. In the marketing world, we refer this to “online reputation management.” Make sure your online reputation is reflective of the great small business brand you want to be. Email newsletters: Provide educational and helpful content to your audience monthly. Testimonials: Nothing wrong with sharing customers’ positive experiences with your product/service! Build testimonials or case studies out and then feature them on your website for customers who are ready to purchase but are seeking some social proof. Customer services matters. I mentioned this a few times before, but I cannot emphasize it enough. A big piece of your brand is based on your customer’s’ experience throughout their journey with your organization! Your employees need to believe your organization’s values inside and out — it shows when customers interact with them. Great customer service leads to customer loyalty and can also set you apart from your competitors. Check out this example of excellent customer service by Southwest Airlines. The biggest takeaway that I want you to know is that your brand is more than just a logo and catchy slogan. When building a small business brand, keep this in mind at every turn and to-do you check off! A great brand starts with your organization’s values and how you can portray those values outward —through your product and service, through your customer service, and through your content. To have a rock-solid brand, it’s important to understand what your customers think of your organization and your product/service. And there’s no better way to receive that feedback than directly from your customers. AUTHOR BIO Jeanna Barrett is the Founder & Chief Strategist of First Page, an award-winning online marketer and an expat entrepreneur. Through content, social media and SEO, Jeanna uses the power of words and data to drive growth in brand awareness, organic traffic, leads, revenue and customer loyalty. She has a combined 12 years of inbound marketing experience at venture-backed startups, digital agencies and Fortune 500 companies, with an expertise focus on small business and technology. She’s been named ‘Top 40 Under 40’ of brand marketers and ‘Best in the West’ for financial technology marketing. In 2016, Jeanna left the U.S. to lay roots and build her business in Belize.
7 Tips for Giving Your Team Holiday Paid Time Off While Keeping the Ship Afloat Posted on November 20, 2017June 13, 2018 by Jonathan Herrick Tis’ the season for celebrating with your team, showing them you care–and juggling holiday vacation schedules. No one wants to be a Scrooge and tell team members they can’t take paid time off to enjoy their favorite holidays with family and friends, but in small businesses, especially the tiniest ones, it can get tricky. If you run a retail business or restaurant where customers expect you to stay open, you’ll need to figure out a creative solution. Even professional services firms may need to remain fully staffed. For instance, if you run an accounting or bookkeeping firm, it may be hard to shut down because of month-end closes. Here are some scheduling tips, so there are no hard feelings when the New Year rolls around. Look at demand. Not every business needs to be open during the holidays. If your business gets slow during the period from Christmas to New Year’s Day, for instance, consider shutting down for that time. That way you won’t have to worry about holiday scheduling at all. A decision like this can go a long way toward telling employees you run a family-friendly company. And it may give you a much-needed break, too. Ask for vacation requests early. If you do need to stay open, set a deadline for vacation requests for the December holidays ASAP so you can spot any staffing challenges early. The sooner you know there is a problem, the more time you will have to plan a solution. In a business that stays open during the holidays, employees may be willing to be flexible if they know too many people want to be out on the same days. For instance, perhaps one employee will be willing to work on Christmas Eve and the other on Christmas Day. If you let your team know there are overlapping requests, they may surprise you by suggesting some creative solutions themselves. Keep diversity in mind. If your team avoids talking about religion and politics at work, you may not know what holidays everyone celebrates—especially if you’ve recently added new employees. Don’t make assumptions about which days team members will want to take off. Wait until they have put in a request for them to make any staffing decisions. Respond to vacation requests quickly. Once you’ve received all of your vacation requests, make decisions quickly. Even if you can’t give every team member the days off that they want, they will appreciate your promptness. For anyone who has to buy plane tickets, delaying your verdict could cost them a lot of money in higher fares. Consider outside staffing. In fields like retail, sometimes bringing in a little extra help can go a long way toward ensuring team members can enjoy time off with their families. If, for instance, you run a retail store, consider bringing in some holiday temps. While you probably will need at least a few people who know your operations well to be available, adding a few temps will give you more flexibility in granting vacation requests. Set the right tone. If you do have to work on the holidays, do what you can to keep the tone in your workplace festive, not frenzied. In retail shops and eateries, the holidays can be hectic times, but if you stay upbeat, so will your team. Small gestures like stocking the break room with home made gingerbread cookies or giving out funny, inexpensive prizes to employees for things like “Goofiest Santa sweater” can make working on the holidays memorable, not miserable. Take pictures. If you do work on the holidays, show how dedicated your team is by sharing their photos on your Facebook page or other social media. Giving them a shout-out for showing up is a great way to show how much you appreciate them and start the New Year on a positive note.